Conjuring the Caliphate: Race, Muslim Politics, and the Tribulation of Surveillance

Abstract

ABSTRACT In light of the recent visibility of police violence, the American public has increasingly called for law enforcement reforms. What remains missing from these conversations is how reformist or counterinsurgency policing in the United States as developed during the domestic War on Terror depends on anti-Muslim racism and invokes the specter of a so-called “Islamist Caliphate.” This essay troubles racialized notions of the caliphate and narratives about Muslim youth radicalization by considering the relevance of the caliphate concept to Muslim Americans in the surveillance age. It examines how youth of color in Greater Los Angeles, CA, targeted by surveillance infrastructures, invoke stories from the Islamic past to reckon with their own tribulation under emergent regimes of antiterror policing. As such, it probes into how the emergent grammar of a caliphate of care enables ethico-political projects to create the time and space for Islamic virtue to thrive in Southern California.