Assimilation demands on Muslims require abandoning Islam itself, not just privatizing it

Evidence

For Islamicized peoples who are not in fact Muslims, the ability to escape regulation may be as simple as disavowing Islam or as difficult as having to educate people about the difference between Sikhism and Islam. But what is required of Muslims upon whom demands for assimilation are made when the problem is Islam? That is to say, how can one become an assimilated Muslim when the very thing that makes one a Muslim is rendered the problem to be excised from the person? … At the other end, assimilation requires Muslims to shed Islam altogether. For those like the significant number of lawmakers who have made Islam the problem, nothing short of leaving Islam is acceptable. The space for a public role for non-Christian religions is vanishingly small, if there is one at all. Thus, hijabs and beards become examples of not just the failure to adequately assimilate, but a marker of a stubborn clinging to foreign-ness and a rejection of all that America stands for (in their view). — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 296

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: When Islam itself is deemed the problem, assimilation demands its excision. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 296; Full assimilation in antebellum America demanded converting away from Islam; Muslims cannot assimilate into a polity defined against Islam itself — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 311 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Muslims cannot assimilate into a polity defined against Islam itself #corroborates (0.95) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 311
• Secularization and Protestantization of practice is the price of Muslim assimilation into America #corroborates (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 979
• Full assimilation in antebellum America demanded converting away from Islam #corroborates (0.90)
• Once sharia is problematized the whole Muslim identity becomes delegitimized #expands (0.80)
• Islam is ideologically expelled from religion itself in its racialization #complicates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 872