Academic literature on Islamophobia erases Muslims’ lived experience and flattens them into stereotypes

Evidence

The feeling that moved through me on that Tuesday in September twenty-one years ago, and countless days after that, is that unseen front of Islamophobia experienced by every Muslim. However, Islamophobia as a subject of academic study is, as it stands, bereft of that feeling and the firsthand experiences of Muslims on the ground. The human condition of Muslims, and the countless intersections they occupied in the world remade by the War on Terror, was absent from academic literatures. In turn, Muslims were essentialized as terrorists or targets, faceless culprits of violence or voiceless victims of state aggression, flattened on the pages of academic treatises and newspapers without the rich color of firsthand testimony we experienced off of them. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 41

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how disciplines essentialize the very populations they study by flattening testimony — a critique applicable beyond Islamophobia studies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 41