{"id":805,"date":"2019-12-03T23:46:08","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T03:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/imorgens-rel195a\/?p=805"},"modified":"2019-12-07T17:09:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-07T21:09:41","slug":"the-roots-of-racialized-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/imorgens-rel195a\/2019\/12\/03\/the-roots-of-racialized-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Roots of Racialized Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In January of 2017 President Trump issued Executive Order 13769 titled \u201cProtecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,\u201d popularly referred to as the \u201cMuslim Ban.\u201d<\/a> This executive order banned nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the United States for ninety days and banned Syrian nationals indefinitely. All seven of these countries have majority Muslim populations. One need not look farther than the title, which labels these countries’ citizens as terrorists, to understand the anti-Muslim nature of this executive order. Global non-Muslim discourses on Islam have long described the faith monolithically, grouping people who exist across thousands of miles as one, favoring their religious identity, and assigning them the label of \u201cterrorist.\u201d These discourses are prevalent today all over the globe but are rooted in centuries of academic scholarship and imperial relations. By interrogating the roots of today\u2019s xenophobia, we can better understand the breadth of its effect, work to dismantle its foundation in the world and in our own minds, and come to understand people and things for what they are rather than what we\u2019ve come to believe them to be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roots of our contemporary anti-Muslim attitudes can be traced to a variety of locations, but are most visible during the Age of Discovery<\/a> with the conflation of the unnatural categories of race or ethnicity with religion. As white Christian European colonizers raced to India, they deployed new language of civilizational and religious hierarchy to classify the religious actors they would come to rule. Buddhism was considered, like Christianity, \u201cuniversal,\u201d while Judaism and Islam were \u201cnational,\u201d \u201cethnic,\u201d or \u201cSemitic\u201d religions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scholarship of Abraham Kuenen<\/a> and Ernest Renan<\/a> understood Islam, due to its supposedly non-universal nature, as inherently lesser than Christianity, as \u201cvirulent,\u201d and as \u201ca sham\u201d (Masuzawa, 196). Kuenen believed Islam to be \u201cmade by an Arab and for Arabs,\u201d and attributed its trans-continental popularity to its shared Abrahamic roots with Christianity. Unlike Christianity, however, Kuenen claimed that the Prophet Muhammad had failed at \u201csifting of the national from the universal,\u201d a process that had allowed Christianity the top spot on the civilizational hierarchy. Kuenen\u2019s labeling of Islam as a \u201cnational\u201d religion \u201cadopted for Arabs\u201d is crucial in understanding how the Muslim monolith was formed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Kuenen, Ernest Renan fused Islam into Semitic category. He understood \u201cArabs, and other Semites as a race\u201d and \u201cthus introduced \u2018racial categories into theological discussion\u201d (Anidjar, 30). These assertions were made, much like Kuenen\u2019s, in relation to the superior universal Christianity, and created a \u201cpeculiarly religious race\u201d that Renan believed to be \u201can inferior configuration of human nature\u201d (Anidjar, 31). This amalgamation of the categories of race and religion, although conducted by academic \u201cexperts,\u201d was in no means scientific or accurate. The theories of Kuenen and Renan are rife with bigoted language and only serve to subjugate non-white non-Christian others. These theories might appear as merely theories, but the imagined religious hierarchy that they established provided \u201can important religious legitimation for the rise of racial anti-Semitism in the 1880s,\u201d and laid the foundation for the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim attitudes that exist today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By establishing all <\/em>Muslims as racially distinct, religiously inferior, and at a lower civilizational level in contrast to white Europeans, scholars like Kuenen and Renan created the bigoted cosmology that allows for an executive order that bans all Muslim refugees. We must remember that both these scholars exist within the context of imperialism. Imperial relations and governance were as influential, if not more, in fusing conceptions of Islam with conceptions of race, and creating the Muslim monolith that exists today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Idea of the Muslim World <\/em>Cemil Aydin describes how to the idea <\/em>of a cohesive Muslim global community was born. The racialization of Muslims was an essential component to this process and occurred \u201cbetween the 1820s and 1880s\u201d (Aydin, 38). This period was one of empire. The British, French, and Russians ruled over millions of Muslims across their territories while The Ottoman Empire, the leading Muslim world power at the time, controlled Christian citizens in modern day Eastern Europe. Before race and religion dominated cosmological understandings of identity and difference, these trans-religious imperial identities reigned supreme. As the theories of race and religion of Renan, Kuenen, and others were emerging, Christian imperial subjects under Ottoman rule were pushing for independence while \u201cmore Muslim societies fell under Christian rule\u201d (Aydin, 40). These imperial shifts coupled with Ottoman reform efforts that aimed at fostering Muslim unity advanced a distinct and marginalized status for Muslims across the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In British-ruled India, Muslims (who made up 40% of the world Muslim population) were governed by sharia <\/em>rather than civil law with regards to \u201cpersonal and family law,\u201d and in the Russian, French, and Dutch empires Muslims were legally defined as distinct from other citizens. Muslims under British imperial rule elsewhere had their loyalty questioned, and across the world \u201cfull equality was almost impossible for Muslims to achieve (Aydin, 63). Our modern stereotypical conceptions of Muslims were emerging under these circumstances. British-ruled India contained the world\u2019s largest Muslim population at the time, yet despite this Islam was considered \u201cinherently foreign\u201d to the subcontinent (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). Even slightly before the period that Aydin describes, the question of Muslim loyalty was beginning to surface. Muslims were considered \u201ceasily agitated, aggressive, and inherently disloyal\u201d to British imperial rule by political actors (Morgenstein Fuerst, 2017). Just as western empire stretched across the globe, so did these new conceptual frameworks that were built off of race and religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n