CHAPTER ELEVEN

MUSLIMS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: RACISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA, AND MULTIRACIAL ORGANIZING IN CHICAGO

Junaid Rana

Introduction

Cities in the global economy have come to serve specific purposes. From economic and financial markets to cultural, political, and social patterns and processes, some urban spaces have come to be called quintessential global cities. In this essay, I argue for an understanding of Chicago, often referred to as the Second City, as a specific kind of global city that can potentially offer alternative models to understand the rapid changes taking place within these urban spaces. Here I refer to the challenges of racism and combating anti-immigrant rhetoric through the emergent social movements based in Chicago’s history of radical organizing, the consequence of which is an important model of multiracial organizing that is forging a new path to contest racism and other forms of systematic oppression through the platform of faith-based organizing and the recog- nition of immigrant rights. Central to this congruence is the complex migration history of domestic and immigrant people of color. And herein lay many of the contradictions, conflicts, and potential of organizing paralysis that is brought forth in contesting racism, particularly in its anti- immigrant form, while also dealing with an internalized racism that pits anti-black against anti-immigrant forms of racism. That is to say, compet- ing forms of racism and anti-racism have called for multiple organizing strategies and tactics in the effort to find common cause. Specifically, I refer to the formation of the Muslim American community that has often pitted African American Muslims against Arab and South Asian American Muslims. Through various efforts and historical circumstances, a new par- adigm of Muslim American organizing with the imperative of overcoming these divides has gained prominence. In an important intervention in Muslim American history and theo­ logical thought, Sherman A. Jackson has called for the crafting of a third resurrection in which those he refers to as Blackamericans must find their 226 junaid rana distinctive voice within the meta-tradition of historical Islam. This pro- vocative and somewhat convincing argument lays the ground for the dilemma of the crossed wires of religion and race in the larger Muslim American community. As he argues, for Blackamericans Islam is part of the pantheon of the “black religious tradition” that includes the church, mosque, and other spaces and forms of religious organization and redefi- nition of American blackness. Formed in protest and in resistance to long- standing forms of racism and the historical experience of American slavery, religion became a source of acting and coping against a racial formation that sought to dominate Blackamericans, making this history of anti-racism a central aspect of historical analysis within the black reli- gions. In contrast, for immigrant Muslims—mostly Arab and South Asian Americans—the nemesis of an American Islam is not white supremacy but a vague sense of “the West” that imagines this configuration in terms of a religious and civilizational threat (Jackson 2005: 151–152). For Jackson, then the problem is that the immigrant group that came to dominate the institutions of American Islam no longer viewed racism as one of the prevailing dividing lines of American society, but instead relied on a posi- tion that relegated religion to a cultural argument over competing value systems. This latter configuration of Islam versus the West is more in line with typical color-blind approaches that imagine a global civilizational conflict without regard for its racialized underpinnings. Such arguments are widespread with armchair and pop experts and media rhetoric that constantly make claims over “the battle of soul of Islam” and claims to “discovering moderate Islam” in confronting radical jihadism.1 While I agree with the general outlines of this argument, I think these communal claims are not as disparate as Jackson claims them to be. Rather than enclosed and separate spheres of theological and historical differ- ence, this stand-off appears to be a case of limited vocabularies. This sense of racism and religious persecution historically has more in common in the United States than Jackson is willing to acknowledge. As I have argued elsewhere, in the case of anti-Muslim racism, the concepts of race and religion have a far more intimate relationship than is often under- stood going back at least to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain and the encounter with the New World (Rana 2007). In the contemporary Muslim American context, these differing analytical contexts of the Blackamerican

1 An entire media industry has been constructed out of this thought that is largely the work of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis.