New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

Abstract

Beydoun, K. A. (2023). The new crusades: Islamophobia and the global war on Muslims.University of California Press. "How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?” wonders a voice in Wizard of the Crow, a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006, p. 681). One answer to this rhetorical question is addressed by the Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said’s (2003) statement: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” (as cited in Beydoun, 2023, p. 68). Much of the colonial telling happens in the realm of education, whose institutionalized tools of textbooks and policies have been responsible for reproducing the fake history of the imperial narrative, one that silences the oppressed and lets the oppressors shine with nobility. Said’s statement not only answers the above question but also points to the empire’s hegemonic aspirations of constituting the identity of the Other since the Other in colonial discourse is framed as the uneducated who needs to be educated, necessarily, in the logics of the empire. Instilling racism as a major colonial project against the Muslim Other has been the case with the United States of America’s foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a renewed imperialism in the name of fighting “terror.” Therefore, educating the U.S. Muslim youths about themselves as being anti-Western barbaric terrorists is as colonially imperative as educating white American generations about the latter being defenders of White “democratic” civilization against the “barbarity” of the former. Challenging the dominant stories of the empire demands devising tools that shake the grand narrative from within by making the missing narratives visible and heard