American Muslim identity merges slavery-era and immigrant origins into one racialized type

Evidence

Muslims arrived in the United States not only by immigrating from more than one hundred different countries, many of which were targets of American imperial designs, but also on ships carrying enslaved Africans beginning in the seventeenth century. Islam’s association with categorically condemned heathens and savages from Africa merged with the importation of European Orientalism whose nemesis was the Mahometan Turk to produce a complex and fluid process of racialization. As a result, Muslim identity is socially constructed to merge immigrants and non-immigrants of various skin colors, ancestries, and phenotypes into an essentialized identity: the foreign, illiberal, and inherently violent Racial Muslim. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s core concept of the ‘Racial Muslim’ as a socially constructed, essentialized identity merging African and Eastern origins.
• XREF: Mirrors how other racialized identities collapse diverse origins into a single threatening type—parallels Orientalism as a system, and anti-Black tropes the reader has encountered. — connects to: Islam’s racialization dates to American slavery, not modern immigration debates — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148; Islam has been raced in America since the early slave era — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148