American Muslim diversity of ancestry and arrival pathways fragments unified anti-Islamophobia resistance

Evidence

While immigrant Muslims’ experiences mirror those of Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon communities a century earlier, they differ in important ways. The four million to six million Muslims in the United States possess an unprecedented diversity of ancestry, skin color, phenotypes, and pathways of arrival to the United States. Nearly a third of Muslims are African Americans, whose ancestors arrived on slave ships starting in the seventeenth century. The remaining 70 percent immigrated to the United States from over seventy-five different countries. Sixty percent of Muslims are born abroad, and another 20 percent are US-born children of immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1965. Their relatively recent arrival, coupled with their demographic diversity, poses challenges for a unified resistance to Islamophobia, as well as the internalization of anti-Black racism within immigrant Muslim communities. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 1070

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how immigrant-group demographic fragmentation shaped resistance strategies in other minority communities—parallels work on internalized racism and coalition fragility among immigrant groups. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”