By Syaa Liesch (they/them)
Disclaimer
I would like to acknowledge my positionality as a white, non-Muslim person, who is writing this blog to learn more about the homogenisation of the Muslim community from both Islamic and non-Islamic contexts. As a person committed to continuous learning and accountability, I acknowledge that I cannot understand from experience, and that the knowledge produced here comes from the work of many Muslim scholars around the world.
The idea that Muslims are the ‘enemy’ of the West and the subsequent demonisation of Islam has led some to believe that Muslims are ‘backwards, irrational, aggressive and incompatible with the West.’ This mainstream portrayal of Islam as part of a monolithic culture has resulted in the homogenisation of Muslims, pigeon-holing them into the stereotypical Western assumptions, largely regarding what a Muslim looks like and how a Muslim behaves. Despite these mainstream assumptions, Muslims are not a uniform group of people; Muslims come from different cultures, are linguistically diverse and are born and raised all over the world. The Islamic experience for all Muslims is shaped by their culture and traditions. The study of Islam is not possible without the study of race and ethnicity. Studying Islam without incorporating race and ethnicity would only continue to essentialise Muslims, instead of altering mainstream beliefs about people’s concept of Islam.
Race and ethnicity relate to the ancestry of different groups of humans. Race is usually associated with biology due to the emphasis on physical characteristics such as skin colour, while ethnicity is associated with culture and identity, with people classed according to commonalities within nationality, race, tribe, or religion. However, this is a social construct; categorisation according to genetics, physical or cultural characteristics does not give an accurate and holistic picture. Racial and ethnic identities can shift across time and space. While the genetics of racial identities can impact risks of diseases through the historical impact of colonisation, and cultural practices can impact genetics, Western beliefs about the ‘Other’ have expanded this to create social and political realities that denigrate those assigned the role of ‘Other’. Race and ethnicity are inherently tied to an individual’s experiences, as they are used to categorise and characterise populations, impacting self-perception and other’s perceptions. Ethnicity, in particular, is a product of a relationship, wherein cultural differences become relevant through processes of interaction. Ethnic differences are discerned through social markers of cultural difference, such as physical appearance or language, creating a social order through the division of certain groups of people, often creating power imbalances. This process of social classification often creates stereotypes that paint groups as monolithic, such as the phrase ‘never trust an Arab’. This ignores individual experiences and overly generalises the assumed cultural traits of a group, often expanding the difference between groups and strengthening power disparities.
In the West, the historical stereotyping of Muslims as second-class compared to non-Muslims and the ‘closed’ views of Islam as backwards, irrational and aggressive reflects the racialised logics surrounding Muslims and Islamophobia. Although Muslims do not belong to one particular race, they are still racialised through assumptions about a ‘cultural core’ that is seen to be lacking. Racialisation involves the “sociohistorical process whereby certain identities are socially constructed as ‘Other’; categorised hierarchically; and produced, managed and enforced by both state and society” (Dawes, 2021). Physical features are used as observable elements of culture, such as the anti-Islamic sentiment against Middle-Eastern people regardless of whether they identify as Muslim. By displaying markers of ‘Muslimness’, such as dress, a beard, or simply living in a Muslim-majority suburb, people are more likely to experience subtle forms of Islamophobia. This is exemplified by the experiences of ‘white’ converts of Islam; through re-racialisation, they are no longer able to access their previously inherent white privilege within the non-Muslim, white population. While colourist tendencies within certain Muslim communities allow them privilege over non-white adherents and converts, this privilege is not retained within white community, in particular if converts wear clothing associated with Islamic beliefs e.g. hijab or abaya. After converting, they are seen as ‘not-quite-white’, a process in which they are considered to be ‘Other’, when they were once ‘part of us’. Racialisation therefore reflects the inability to perceive a white person as Muslim, as Islam is largely understood to be a non-white religion. These stereotypes formed through the process of racialisation create an essentialised notion of Islam and Muslims, reproducing harmful Islamophobic practises and excluding experiences that stray from the normalised assumptions.
There is often an assumption of a ‘shared experience’ of Muslims. However, underlying this assumption is the idea that all Muslims look the same, act the same, and have the same cultural traditions, when in fact the experiences of Muslim’s differ around the world. Islam is intersectional and multicultural; a white Muslim would not have the same experience as an Asian Muslim or a Black Muslim. Muslims are not homogenous, with the diversity of nationalities, ethnicities, languages and traditions shaping an individual’s experience of religion. For instance, Indigenous Australians, when converting to Islam, become a double minority as they hold multiple racialised identities. This can be compared to white Australian Muslims who are not held back by attitudes towards their race. The same goes for gender, class, education and disability; each individual’s experience within society is shaped by the minority groups they belong to, and ignoring this diversity only acts to continue the marginalisation of groups of people. Furthermore, there is often a deep divide between white, European converts and immigrants, where the Europeans’ desire to disassociate themselves from what they see as ‘tainted’ Islamic cultures and traditions reproduces racist prejudices and stigmas against immigrants. The stigmatising of Turkish and Arab cultures by mainstream German society pushes white, German-born Muslims to distance themselves from immigrants after finding themselves marginalised – inadvertently continuing the marginalities of Muslim immigrants (Özyürek, 2014). They promote a ‘pure’ version of Islam influenced by European culture and compatible with the perceived ‘rationality and logic’ of the Enlightenment, all the while reproducing racist prejudices against Middle Eastern cultures and traditions. As such, the study of Islam without the study of ethnicity and race disregards the many diverse experiences of marginalisation that exist alongside Islamophobia, reproducing harmful ideas of homogeneity.
Even without the privileging of whiteness in Muslim culture, racial hierarchies still impose prejudices against those who are seen as not being ‘true’ Muslims, as the culturally Arabic interpreted version of Islam promotes their practices as ‘pure’. This can be seen through teachings of the Qur’an, particularly in South Asia, where many mosques teach Arabic characters and read the Qur’an in Arabic, despite the inability of the local Muslims to understand the meanings of the words. While Arabic has been present in South Asia since the first contact between the two in the 7th century, Arabic and Persian became the established languages of the Northern Indian Muslim rulers, with Arabic being reserved for religious inscriptions in the 13th century. Arabic continued to be seen as a religious symbol, and later, as a response to the British imperialism within South Asia, it was used as a way to preserve and defend Islam, maintaining the freedom of thought amid the domination of the military. Arabic, seen as the language of the original source of Islam, became more than just a language; it was a symbol of Islamic identity and Muslim resistance to the European oppressors (Rahman, 2000).
Throughout the following decades, as the West continued to assert pressure around the world and Arabic became a symbol of resistance, many Muslims began to adapt to a more exclusive idea of Islam that came from the Arab world. The proceeding conflicts, both Muslims debating correct interpretations, and Muslims within an increasingly West-dominated world, were in turn exacerbated by a fundamentalism homogenisation of Islam: Arabisation. Arabisation, stemming from a rigid branch of Saudi Arabian Islam, emphasises rituals and conduct over the universalism of Islam. Their possession of the ‘true’ version of Islam is premised on the idea that Islam’s expansion, with the adaption of other cultures and customs, had led to the corruption of Islam. In order to be a ‘true’ follower of Islam, Muslims have to be ‘othered’, as they believe there could be no middle ground between their depiction of Islam and any other religion or culture, following the ‘othering’ placed on them by the West. Through this process of Arabisation, a homogenised and uniform ideal of Islam has been emphasised in both Arab and non-Arab worlds (Ghoshal, 2008).
As religion merges with culture, members of ethnic groups often use their distinct lived experiences to help foster their own nation, often one that transcends national borders. Black Muslims, particularly those in the West, have created communities around their beliefs and their experience of double marginalisation as both a Muslim and a Black person. Despite experiencing racism on two fronts, the Global Hip Hop Nation has used their relationship between religion and culture to create a ‘verbal mujahidin’, representing their struggle against oppression through rap. These nationhoods highlight the diversity of Islam and the inability to essentialise Muslims into stereotypes without ignoring much of the population. An Arab, South Asian or Latino man, with no prayer beads or cap, only a beard as a marker of ‘Muslimness’, would be racially profiled as Muslim. On the other hand, a black man who also only has a beard would not be assumed to be Muslim. He would be seen as ‘different’, but the assumption would regard his Blackness, rather than Muslimness.
Mainstream concepts of Islam, essentialising individual’s experiences of their religion down to uneducated stereotypes, have continued to reproduce assumptions around Muslims as being one homogenous mass. These stereotypes overly generalise presumed cultural traits, leading to the racialisation of Muslims as Other through physical characteristics such as skin colour, clothes and hair. They are often assumed to have the same experiences, when in reality Islam is followed by an extremely diverse group of people from all over the world. The essentialisation of Muslims ignores the multiple layers of oppression that many face, much of which comes from racial marginalisation. As such, the study of race and ethnicity is essential to the study of Islam, as its exclusion continues the essentialisation of Muslims.
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