Beydoun’s work fuses US racial justice with global Islamophobia analysis

Evidence

In this respect, Khaled stands apart because he deftly connects American racial justice crises with parallel global concerns. The son of a single mother, Khaled and his family fled war to land in one of the poorest, and most segregated cities in the United States. He experienced firsthand how American imperialism abroad delivered him into the belly of the beast, where systematic forms of discrimination faced by poor, Black, and Brown people are taken as natural facts of life. Khaled is Muslim, Egyptian, a Detroiter, and a son raised by a single mother during an era of citywide school shuttering, the crack epidemic, the undoing of affirmative action, and the dawn of the War on Terror. While the latter has made the most vital imprint on his writing and public voice, the other dimensions of life that shape his perspective are evident in the soul and spirit of his work. Acknowledging the salience of Intersectionality and structural inequality in his writing and worldview, he is deeply concerned about those living on the margins and the individuals often overlooked by commentators. As he notes, “This narrative of global Islamophobia is at the delta of crusades old and new.” Most fundamentally, this book centers on the voices of the very victims caught in the crucible of state-sponsored and prevalent Islamophobia. In the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, those perilous middles are where Muslims are forced to live and strive to “live free, or die like the trees, standing up.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 23

Categorization

• XREF: This framing of global Islamophobia as the intersection of old and new crusades echoes the reader’s reading purpose of synthesizing global Islamophobia alongside Iftikhar.
• ADDENDUM: The author’s stated frame connects American racial justice crises with global concerns, parallel to the comparativist global-synthesis view the reader seeks.