Please Don’t Let it Be Muslim!

first published October 2013

Boston and The Post 9/11 Era

by Yvonne Haddad and Nazir Harb Michel

It is too early to speculate about the consequences of the Boston bombings beyond the universal condemnations, the re-heightened anxiety about terrorism across the United States and the accompanying sharp increase in Islamophobic discourse and rhetoric by people who are anti-Muslim.¹ The media immediately depicted the suspects, two Chechen brothers, as “practicing Muslims” who probably acted on Islamist, terrorist motivation. Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte, Saxby Chambliss, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and Representative Peter King recommended trying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an unlawful enemy combatant, despite his U.S. citizenship, thereby revoking his right to legal counsel. However, the government decided to treat Tsarnaev as a criminal with his rights as a citizen. Citing the public-safety exception, however, investigators delayed reading Tsarnaev his Miranda rights by 16 hours. The question remains whether the information obtained before Tsarnaev was read his Miranda rights would be legally admissible as evidence. Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to all charges in his first court appearance July 10.²

For American Muslims, the Boston bombings were a horrendous turn of events they shared with other Americans; however, for them, fear of potential backlash that threatened their image and safety was of special concern. They found themselves once again imploring with Arsalan Iftikhar, “Oh God… Please don’t let it be a Muslim.”³ As Iftikhar noted, Muslims in America have held their breath after the news of the Dark Knight mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, whose perpetrators were not Muslim. Iftikhar notes, “the majority of American Muslims always seems anxiety-ridden that any future act of terror will be committed by a brown dude with a Muslim-sounding name and lead to another vicious chapter of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes around the country.”⁴ To an outsider, this constant worry that the next terror attack will be perpetrated by a Muslim or blamed on a Muslim may seem like an obsessive compulsive disorder or an “Islamophobia phobia.” For American Muslims, this fear is the consequence of evidence showing that with each news story about “Islamist terrorism,” or even non-Islamist terrorism, homegrown or otherwise, it becomes more challenging to realize a safe and equal space for the American Muslim identity in the complex fabric of American culture.

Several terrorist perpetrators and the media hoopla they generated have aggravated the feeling of apprehension among American Muslims. These include: December 2001—Richard Reid’s failed attempt to detonate a bomb planted in his shoe while a flight to Florida; May 2002—Jose Padilla’s arrest for attempting to build a dirty bomb; March 2003—Iyman Faris for allegedly helping al-Qaida in its attempt to detonate explosives on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York; August 2004—Dhiren Barot for plotting to set off bombs in buildings including the New York Stock Exchange; August 2004—Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay for trying to detonate a bomb in the New York City subway; September 2009—the highly sensationalized stories of Najibullah Zazi’s attempt to bomb the New York City subway; and May 2010—Faisal Shahzad’s attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square.

A Pakistani-American, Shahzad’s failed attack gave rise to a major swell of Islamophobic sentiment about the threat of “homegrown terrorism.”⁵ In September 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in a hearing that an “astoundingly high number” of Muslims who are American citizens “have attacked or planned to attack their own country.”⁶ Republican Representative Peter King of New York said the “radicalization of Muslim-Americans” was a “critical issue” that posed a “real and dangerous threat to the safety and security of the citizens of the United States.”⁷ King also alleged that there are “too many mosques in America” and that “85% of Muslim leadership in America are enemies among us.”⁸ He later convened a series of congressional hearings on the premise that American Muslims, because of their religion, had not proven their allegiance to the U.S. and have not done enough since 9/11 to help combat radical ideology and homegrown terrorism.

A study published by Princeton University in 2011 noted that of the plots involving alleged “Islamist terrorism” in the United States, 27 were attempted by U.S. citizens, and 15 of them involved undercover FBI agents or informants who used “entrapment” tactics, coaxing and coaching American Muslims to perpetrate these acts. Six plots were successfully carried out and led to the deaths of 17 Americans. Of the attempted plots, four were ordered or funded by foreign terrorist groups. One man—Nidal Hasan, who targeted American soldiers and killed 13 people—was responsible for most of the casualties. Many perpetrators were motivated by an anti-U.S. foreign policy agenda, including anger over U.S. support for Israel. The authors point out that “more than twenty times as many Americans have been killed by lightening … and nearly forty times as many Americans have been killed by bee stings since 9/11 … as have been killed in homegrown Islamist terrorist attacks.”⁹ The casualties of the Boston Marathon bombings bring the number of Americans killed by homegrown Islamist terrorist plots since 9/11 to 20.

As a consequence, American Muslims have suffered the collective punishment of having their loyalty to the United States constantly questioned. American Muslims critical of the war in Iraq were labeled “un-American,” at best and “enemies of freedom” or “terrorists” at worst. Qasim Rashid reports receiving a query, “Are Muslims even allowed to be loyal to the United States?” Rashid responded resoundingly: “For a Muslim, loyalty to the United States is not simply lip service but a fundamental requirement of faith” because “America has upheld its rule of law, recognizing the equality of its citizens regardless of background, and champions a universal freedom of religion.”¹⁰ However, the question of Muslim identity in the U.S. persists: Are Muslims free to shape their own identity or are there constraints dictated by the majority on what that identity entails?

Whereas before 9/11 many Muslims in America, particularly new immigrants and first-generation Americans, operated on the basis of “Islamic exceptionalism” that isolated them from non-Muslim Americans, the past decade reveals a re-thinking among Muslims in America of what it means to be both American and Muslim. If the decade prior to 9/11 can be categorized as one of seeking “Islamic exceptionalism,” the post-9/11 decade is one of seeking full integration into American exceptionalism. No longer do Muslims hyphenate their identities—today, rather than “Muslim-Americans,” the reference has shifted to “American Muslims.”

History of Muslims in America

While Arabs have been immigrating to the United States since at least 1875, a time when U.S. citizenship was restricted to white and African-American males. These early immigrants, mainly transient male laborers seeking to earn money with which to return home and enjoy their newfound wealth, did not feel they had to integrate or modify their traditions or customs because they believed they would return to their countries of origin relatively soon. Arab and Muslim immigrants who entered the U.S. before 1924 were not subject to the quota system that later limited the number of people who could immigrate from the Middle East each year to 100.

It was not until Arab and Muslim immigrants began settling that they faced the prospect of having to negotiate their identity. A judge in South Carolina, for example, argued that Arabs were not “that particular free white person to whom the act of Congress [1790] had donated the privilege of citizenship.”

In 1924, Christian and Muslim Arab immigrants were ruled to qualify as “white” and therefore could be eligible for U.S. citizenship.¹² Today, there are no accurate figures for the numbers of Muslims in the United States. Estimates range between 2 million and 11 million, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations consistently reporting 7 million Muslims.¹³

In 1965, the Asian Exclusion Act was repealed and a wave of Arab and Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia relocated to the United States to pursue advanced degrees in science, medicine and engineering. They remembered European imperialism and Christian missionary efforts to erase Muslim identity and Islam. Their children are American by birth and embody dual identities—raised to be wary of the ills of American culture and Westernization and inculcated about what is Islamically permissible (halal) and prohibited (haram). They are brought up in an American society questioning its own identity and attempting to redefine the parameters of “us” and “them.”

Two Americas: Finding Space for an American Muslim Identity

By the 1990s, American society appeared to be divided along two paradigmatic lines. One delineated the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation, which by implication excluded and marginalized members of other faith groups. For new immigrants, this definition required serious cultural and religious sacrifices as well as, not accidentally, adopting an unwavering support for the State of Israel. This practically kept Arabs on the fringes of acceptable American identity. Those outside the bounds of this paradigm operated on the assumptions of the second paradigm that promoted the United States as a nation that honors pluralism and celebrates its diversity. Over time, this conception of pluralism that created space for Muslims made some evangelicals and liberal supporters of Israel uncomfortable.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the once-eclipsed brand of American exceptionalism that was built on exclusivity and notions of American Anglo superiority resurfaced. The Project for the New American Century was launched in the 1990s and quickly became known for its emphasis on the unipolarity of American power and called for American exceptionalism.¹⁴ Both Bush presidents extolled the merits of American uniqueness in their speeches and policies and preached the Gospel of Democracy whereby the United States both led the world and transformed it into its own image.¹⁵ Muslims—who during the Cold War were considered the natural allies of the United States against atheist communism—were re-imagined and increasingly depicted by some as enemies of freedom unfit for citizenship in the new American world. The Obama administration, which inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has carried on the wars through increased use of drones. Yasmin Alibhai Brown has pointed out that the drones had become an instrument by which to kill Muslims, who in any way may have obstructed U.S. interests abroad.¹⁶

American Muslim Identity Before 9/11: The Muslim Student Association & American Islam

Islamic exceptionalism gained momentum in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, promoted by admirers of Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Abul A’la al-Maududi. In the U.S., Islamic exceptionalism was promoted by new Muslim immigrants who tended to be students seeking a haven from oppressive regimes. They developed an interpretation of Islam that laid the foundation for an American Muslim identity. The Muslim Student Association (MSA) was established on January 1, 1963 with the expressed purpose to “nurture true Islamic kinship and work becoming the nucleus that will bring about the revival of the Muslim world.”¹⁷

Its leadership looked down on Muslim immigrants who privileged integration and American exceptionalism over their Islamic identity. The earlier immigrants had Anglicized their names, joined the American military and local community organizations. The MSA leadership looked to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan to set a model for Islamic exceptionalism and condemned “American Islam.” By the 1970s, Muslims who engaged in American society were called “secular,” or inferior in faith and practice. Secularism was seen as a Western phenomenon intended to subvert and corrupt Islam.

The collapse of the Soviet Union turned the tide in favor of American Islam. By 1991, in response to the Gulf War, Arab Gulf states ended their financial support of Muslims in America, who began to settle and establish organizations aimed at integrating Muslims into American society after decades of self-imposed isolation. The need to “Americanize” was given impetus by Francis Fukuyama (1992) and Samuel Huntington (1996)¹⁸ who warned Muslims that neocons in the U.S. were now seeking a new global enemy and the target could be Muslims. In 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing, despite having been perpetrated by Evangelical Christians, led Congress to pass the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that empowered the government to try American Muslims using secret evidence.

As a consequence, American Muslims realized the need to engage in American politics and society. They initiated concerted efforts to encourage voting and civic engagement. Muslim scholars responded to the influx of inquiries about being Muslims in a non-Muslim country with the creation of Fiqh al-Aqalliyat (jurisprudence of minorities). The new jurisprudence emphasized the imperative of participation in local and national politics to play a role in shaping America by becoming fully American while maintaining a Muslim identity.

The transformation initiated a difficult process. Decades of alienation from American society had affected many Muslims who came to internalize a rejection of American identity that was perceived as somehow un-Islamic. Islamic exceptionalism had also butted heads with American exceptionalism on the question of Israel. While the American Republican ideal was that immigrants would shed their former identities and blossom into hardworking, independent-minded Americans without ties to other countries, Israel was a flagrant contradiction to that image. Americans were taught to love Israel and believe in its innate right to “protection” and to “defend herself,” which gave it what appeared to be a carte blanche to obliterate Palestinian society and kill Palestinians without restrictions. Islamic exceptionalists around the world had gained legitimacy by merely pointing to America’s hypocrisy with respect to Israel.

American Muslim Identity After 9/11 & The Production of Islamophobia

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush attempted to win the conservative Muslim vote. He criticized aspects of the anti-terrorism law that seemed to single out Muslims and violate their rights. Bush succeeded in winning about three-quarters of the Muslim vote, according to one exit poll.¹⁹ After September 11, he condemned attacks against Muslims and stressed that “Islam means peace.” While his administration used the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” it also repeated that on 9/11, terrorists hijacked Islam and that American Muslims do not share the sentiments of the perpetrators. Still, the Bush administration oversaw the passing of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act and decided to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. The Republican Party was recast as being at war with Islam; Muslims overwhelmingly shifted their allegiance to the Democratic Party by 2004 and remained staunchly behind Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008. President Obama, despite his early popularity among American Muslims and his appointment of several Muslims into low-level positions in his administration, lost his standing and was criticized for the overt measures he took to distance himself from the American Muslim community. As of this writing, Obama has toured mosques in Jakarta and Istanbul, but has yet to visit a mosque in the United States.

The attacks of 9/11 intensified the general American public’s pre-existing fear of Muslims. The run-up to the “war on terrorism,” with fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, invoked all-too-familiar imagery of barbaric Muslims who simply hate the American way of life and despise freedom. These arguments had traction in the immediate wake of 9/11 among many Americans and the Bush administration exploited that in its war propaganda. Certain media outlets—principally Fox News, the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal among others—also capitalized on the opportunity to invent and sensationalize a threat posed by all Arabs, Islam and Muslims, who were now seemingly typecast as the permanent “others” and “enemies of freedom.” While in the period after 9/11, it was commonplace to hear discussion of Islam and Muslims as being inherently inferior, violent, sexist, irrational and utterly reprehensible, it is currently still acceptable for politicians, pundits, educators and religious leaders to denigrate Muslim religious beliefs and traditions.

In the post-9/11 atmosphere, talk of the U.S. as a Judeo-Christian nation became more dominant as Muslims became aware of a project by the Department of Homeland Security to configure and propagate a mainstream, reformed, acceptable form of American Muslim identity. This effort was classified as a matter of national security. Aside from direct orders to Muslim governments to curb “inflammatory” speech against the U.S. and Israel, Bush issued an ultimatum to the world: “You are either with us or against us.” Muslims in America and abroad understood this as targeting them, a renunciation of an America that honors and celebrates diversity and pluralism. For Muslims, Bush’s ultimatum undermined the assumed feasibility of hyphenated identities such as “Arab-American” or “Muslim-American.” Many Muslims took offense to Bush’s coining of the neologism, “Islamofascism,” fearing that the space for an American Muslim identity had been closed to make way for a new singularly acceptable, unhyphenated, American identity.

To make matters worse, a veritable industry developed around the demonization of Islam promoted by Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz and Frank Gaffney among others who had no qualms about producing false information about Islam and Muslims to sell books, gain lucrative speaking engagements and elevate their standing among government neocons who were predisposed to believing these pundits’ outlandish prevarications regarding a Muslim plot to take over the United States or impose an imagined “medieval Islamic law” on America. They demanded that the U.S. government begin “religion building.” They invented and contributed to discussions of a “moderate” Islam, which conceived a religion devoid of elements of praxis or articles of faith, leading some to accuse them of positing that a Muslim who prays and fasts is either already a terrorist or a potential terrorist who cannot be trusted. The dispute over the Park51 Islamic Center in 2010 further alienated Muslims who viewed the protests to stop New York Muslims from constructing an Islamic community center several blocks from Ground Zero as a direct affront on their right to freedom of religion as American citizens.

The Movement to Legalize Islamophobia: “Shari’aphobia”

The growth of anti-Muslim sentiment is being perpetrated in the United States by right-wing politicians in nearly two-dozen states, who have called for the legal extradition of Islamic law, or a ban on Shariah. Missouri legislators, however, proved unable to explain why a ban on Shariah is necessary.²⁰ Donald Trump, who at the time was a potential Republican candidate for the 2012 presidential elections, stated that the Quran “teaches some very negative vibe.”²¹ Herman Cain, another potential Republican presidential candidate, remarked on his radio show: “I don’t want any inkling of anybody in my administration who would put Shariah law over American law. I have not found a Muslim that has said that they will denounce Shariah law, you know, in order to support the Constitution of the United States.”²² Then he attacked Representative Keith Ellison, a Muslim, for swearing his oath of allegiance on the Quran:

If you take an oath on the Quran, that means you support Shariah law. I support American law. Our laws were derived from principles that are biblically based. Maybe not said in the same words that are in the Bible, but our laws are derived from principles based upon the Bible. This is why I’m not going to back down or pander to anyone who wants to call me xenophobic or a bigot simply because I said so.²³

On June 13, 2007, the anti-Muslim Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), led by David Yerushalmi, unveiled the Mapping Shari’a in America Project that targeted some 2,300 Islamic institutions in the United States.²⁴ The project was slated to “collect information about America’s … mosques and associated day schools, provide information to both law enforcement officials and the public, and test the proposition that Shari’a amounts to a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government.”²⁵ SANE publications claim that Islamic centers in the United States have become a hotbed of extremist activity that “promote violence, terrorism and hatred against America, and violent jihad.”

SANE’s February 2007 policy paper stated: “Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the U.S. Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the U.S. Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People … It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”²⁶ Yerushalmi has been quoted as saying:

Shari’a is not merely speech, and it is certainly not religion as understood by the West … Rather, it is a political and ideological mandate to destroy the West. We believe that every act to teach, preach, and live according to traditional, historical, and authoritative Shari’a contributes to a criminal conspiracy to overthrow our government.²⁷

Yerushalmi has offered legislators in more than 20 states a template that claims to sidestep constitutional objections to singling out Islam by avoiding explicit mention of it (not all states have used his template).

Peter King’s congressional hearings and the SANE-inspired proposals in 22 states to legally ban Shariah law, six of which successfully passed laws that ban “foreign law,” worked to single out, scare and offend American Muslims. Banning Shariah could lead to making it impossible for Muslims to open shops where religiously lawful (halal) meat is sold, let alone to purchase and consume it. It also makes it exceedingly difficult to build mosques or community centers or start less-ambitious projects to merely restore or expand already-existing Islamic religious and civic centers. Proponents of banning Shariah are always unable to explain why such a ban is necessary²⁸ and few are likely to understand the actual repercussions of banning it,²⁹ thereby associating it exclusively with harsh corporal punishments and the oppression of women, ignoring the more than 97% of all Shariah texts that outline the principles and practices of Islam.

The Post-9/11 Generation

The attacks on 9/11 had a powerful impact on young American Muslims. One American Muslim youth was quoted as saying, “You wake up one day and realize that you are now considered as ‘not American’ or even potentially ‘anti-American’ but definitely non-American.”³⁰ However, rather than accept this feeling of being ostracized, young American Muslims have become engaged in their local communities to transform the dominant purview of what it means to be a Muslim in America and inform their fellow Americans as to the true nature of Muslim identity. Rather than a re-Islamization, or a return to a former level of religious adherence, Muslim identity in America after 9/11 became specifically redemptive, creative and assertive in its metamorphosis into an American religion. American Islam is increasingly civil rights oriented and concerned with egalitarianism and justice—the presence of Islamic literacy programs and Islam 101 sessions on college campuses has proliferated nationwide. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Islamic Relief, The Next Wave Muslim Initiative, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the MSA have government internship programs that focus on engaging and participating in mainstream American society through political, interfaith and cultural activities.

American Muslims today understand this newfound activism as an important way to secure the right of religious freedom in the name of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Their goal is to educate non-Muslims and Muslims about the uniquely democratic, pluralistic and modern nature of Islam, or at least American Islam. American Muslim youth have set out to integrate Islam into the American popular conception of religious pluralism and diversity through modern avenues of networking, the blogoverse, events on college campuses, and conferences and seminars open to the public that cater to non-Muslims around the country.³¹

The youth are increasingly interested in becoming lawyers, journalists, novelists, poets, social workers and peace advocates in an effort to engage with American society and participate in shaping a new America that has Muslims as legitimate constituent citizens with full rights and responsibilities. American Muslims for the most part have found creative ways to promote an inclusive environment based on the shared American and Islamic values of tolerating and celebrating difference. Part of their motivation is to protect themselves from the very real and dangerous threats to the American Muslim community posed by racist Islamophobes who incite hatred and violence toward Muslims. Still, American Muslims such as Tayseer Khaled insist, “We (Muslims) cannot just be 9/11 Americans—waving flags only when a catastrophe strikes and thrusts us in the public spotlight.”³²

^— 

Nazir Harb is a PhD candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University

Yvonne Haddad is a professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Georgetown University

This article appeared in the fall/winter 2013 The Islamic Monthly print issue.

NOTES

¹Emperor, “Bill O’Reilly Gives Voice to Fanatic EDL,” Loonwatch. June 8, 2013. Accessed: June 26, 2013. Available: www.loonwatch.com/2013/06/bill-oreilly-
gives-voice-to-fanatic-edl

²“Boston bomb accused Dzhokhar Tsarnaev denies charges,” BBC News. July 10, 2013. Accessed July 10, 2013. Available: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23264940

³Iftikhar, Arsalan. “A Muslim’s Prayer for the Boston Marathon,” The Islamic Monthly. April 15, 2013. Accessed July 11, 2013. Available: www.theislamicmonthly.com/a-muslims-prayer-for-the-boston-marathon

⁴Ibid

⁵Hays, Tom. “Ray Kelly: Faisal Shahzad ‘Homegrown’ Terrorist”, Huffington Post. May 11, 2010. Accessed July 12, 2013. Available: www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/ray-kelly-faisal-shahzad_n_572073.html.

⁶Heinkel, Wes and Alexandra Mace. “Homegrown Islamist Terrorism: Assessing the Threat,” Journal of Public And International Affairs (2011): 110

⁷Ibid

⁸“Peter King: ‘Walid Phares, as of Now not Testifying at ‘Muslim Hearings’,” Loonwatch.com. February 28, 2011. Accessed August 24, 2013. Available: www.loonwatch.com/2011/02/peter-king-walid-phares-as-of-now-not-testifying-at-muslim-hearings.

⁹Heinkel, Wes and Alexandra Mace. “Homegrown Islamist Terrorism: Assessing the Threat,” Journal of Public And International Affairs (2011): 123

¹⁰Rashid, Qasim. “Muslim American Loyalty—1 Year after Fort Hood,” Huffington Post. November 5, 2010. Accessed July 11, 2013. Available: www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/
post_1201_b_778968.html.

¹¹Suleiman, Michael W. 1999. “Islam, Muslims and Arabs in America: The Other of the Other of the Other..” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19 (1): 33-47. http://search.proquest.com/docview/215232799?accountid=11091.

¹²Lopez, Ian F. 2007. “A Nation of Minorities:” Race, Ethnicity, and Reactionary Colorblindness.” Stanford Law Review. Vol. 59 (4) pgs. 985-1063

¹³Haddad, Yvonne. Becoming American? The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011. Pg. 2-3.

¹⁴Spanos, William V. 2008. American exceptionalism in the age of globalization: the specter of Vietnam. Albany: State University of New York Press, pg 50

¹⁵Hietala, Thomas R. 1985. Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Lipset, Seymour M. 1996. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.; Streeby, Shelley. 2001. “American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War.” American Literary History. 12(1). Pgs. 1-40; Henry, Charles. 2003. “The Politics of Racial Reparation.” Journal of Black Studies. 34(2). Pgs. 131-152.

¹⁶Brown, Yasmin Alibhai. “Behind the use of drones is a complacent belief that murdering Muslims is always justifiable.” The Independent. April 28, 2013. Accessed June 30, 2013. Available: www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/behind-the-use-of-drones-is-a-complacent-belief-that-murdering-muslims-is-always-justifiable-8591521.html.

¹⁷Yousef, Ahmed. 2004. American Muslims: A Community Under Siege. VA: United Association for Studies and Research.

¹⁸Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press. | Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

¹⁹Durrani, Anayat. “Exit polls show Muslims voted in bloc for Bush,” Free Republic. November 20, 2000. Accessed July 13, 2013. Available: http://freerepublic.com/focus/fr/555882/posts.

²⁰Murphy, Tim. “Missouri Legislator Still Can’t Explain Why He wants to Ban Sharia,” Islamophobia Today. April 20, 2011. Accessed July 13, 2013. Available: www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/04/20/missouri-legislator-still-cant-explain-why-he-wants-to-ban-sharia.

²¹“Donald Trump Says Something in Koran Teaches a ‘Very Negative Vibe’,” Islamophobia Today. April 12, 2011. Accessed July 13, 2013. Available: www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/
04/12/donald-trump-says-something-in-koran-teaches-a-very-negative-vibe/>.

²²Birkey, Andy. “Herman Cain Blasts Keith Ellison on the radio, says he supports Sharia law”. The American Independent. April 6, 2011. Available: http://americanindependent.com/177659/herman-cain-blasts-keith-ellison-on-the-radio-says-he-supports-sharia-law.

²³Ibid

²⁴www.milligazette.com/dailyupdate/
2007/200706182_SANE_Islamophobic_group_banish_Islam_US.htm; Ghazali, Abdus Sattar. “SANE: An Islamophobic group attempts to banish Islam from the U.S.” Milli Gazette. June 17, 2007.

²⁵www.saneworks.us/indexnew.php

²⁶SANE homepage: www.saneworks.us/indexnew.php

²⁷Ibid

²⁸Murphy, Tim. “Missouri Legislator Still Can’t Explain Why He wants to Ban Sharia,” Islamophobia Today. April 20, 2011. Accessed July 13, 2013. Available: www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/04/20/missouri-legislator-still-cant-explain-why-he-wants-to-ban-sharia.

²⁹Herman Cain has been adamant in publicly stating that if he became president, he would not allow any Muslims to work in his administration or in any federal government offices: “I don’t want anybody in my administration that I’m going to have to be looking over my shoulder to figure out if they are going to try to do something against the principles that I believe in, which are also the principles that the majority, the overwhelming majority of the American people believe.”

³⁰Iftikhar, Arsalan. “A Muslim’s Prayer for the Boston Marathon,” The Islamic Monthly. April 15, 2013. Accessed July 11, 2013. Available: www.theislamicmonthly.com/a-muslims-prayer-for-the-boston-marathon

³¹Wuthnow, Robert. America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity, Princeton University Press, 2007

³²Friedman, Alexi, “Muslims hope bias ends with bin Laden’s death”, The Christian Century Online. May 09, 2011.