The Racialization of Religion: Christian Zionism, Islamophobia, and Imperial Peace Andrea Smith
[email protected] Part of JRER Volume 1, Issue 13 Resisting Imperial Peace by the US Ecumenical Association of Third-World Theologians edited by Michel Andraos and Andrea Smith Bitter hatred and animus are the very heartbeat of Islam. The Muslim approach is to scream ‘foul’ anytime something negative is said, but I’m here to say Islam is the most horrifying, dangerous thing on the horizon facing America. Islam will dominate America. You can go around the globe, there’s not a nation that Islam Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Volume 1, Issue 13.3 (December 2010) ©Sopher Press (contact
[email protected]) Page 1 of 59 has ever started in that it did not ultimately control. Ignorant, anemic, immature Christians don’t understand the threat because they haven’t studied the Word of God.1 As Nadine Naber notes in Arab Americans and Race Before and After 9/11, Arabs and Arab Americans are often racialized through religious discourse. Against those who would argue that Arab peoples are not racialized because they are categorized as “white” in the United States census, Naber contends that racializing logics take the form of cultural and religious determinacy. First, Islam is typically articulated as a religious/cultural system that is intent on the destruction of Western/Christian civilization (the two are conflated). Then, Arab and Muslim peoples are conflated such that Arabs are marked as inherently threatening regardless of their actual religious affiliation. In addition, because Islam becomes the marker of inherent difference, the geopolitical relationships between the United States and Arab and/or Muslim countries cannot be understood in the terms of western colonialism or imperialism.