Asset freezes on overseas charities drove Detroit Muslims to localize religious giving

Evidence

The logic of disciplinary inclusion is pervasive in Detroit’s Arab and Muslim communities. The contradictory messages sent to them during the Jones affair were mild by the standards set during the War on Terror. When, after the 9/11 attacks, federal authorities began to freeze the assets of Muslim charities that sent money overseas, area Muslims localized their almsgiving, building new mosques, renovating old ones, and opening Islamic schools in Detroit, thereby enlarging the infrastructure of American Muslim identity. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 683

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s guiding frame of how surveillance fear reshapes rather than merely suppresses the targeted community—parallels arguments in the Beydoun and Grosfoguel chapters about disciplinary effects of securitization.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how coercive state surveillance can inadvertently build community infrastructure, the perverse productive effects of the War on Terror on American Muslim institutional life.