Arab Christians were denied US naturalization through conflation with Islamic racial otherness

Evidence

In Ex Parte Shahid (1913), Faras Shahid, an Arab Christian, was cast as polygamous, conflating Arab practice with Islamic practice and thus denying him the right to naturalization. In re Dow (1914) took the relationship between race and geography further. Dow, a Syrian, claimed to be of the Semitic race (thereby distancing himself from Islam), and thus ”white,” based on a precedent that included European Jews in that category. The court, however, ruled that Dow did not appear to be Caucasian or of the Semitic race because ”Caucasian” translated as having a European origin, and Syrian was defined, in an ethnological and geographic sense, as ”Asiatic,” ”whether [a person was] Chinese, Japanese, Hindoo, Parsee, Persian, Mongol, Malay, or Syrian” (Moore 1995, 53). Thus, Syrians, who were regarded as a racial group from West Asia, were properly ”Asiatic” and excluded from naturalization. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 206

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to how racialized citizenship categories in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ era were built on imagined religious-racial boundaries; also parallels class/identity signaling roots this chapter shares.
• XREF: connects to: Christians and Muslims from the same region received opposite citizenship outcomes; Arab ethnicity is defined by language and culture, not religion; Successful naturalization turned on concealing Islam and emphasizing Christianity — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 156