Early-twentieth-century US citizenship cases racialized Syrians as Muslim foreign threats.

Evidence

Arguments in cases regarding access to citizenship rights for Syrians in the early twentieth century depended on racial classification and ethnology to define religious di√erence based on an opposition between Muslim foreigners and white Christian citizens. The racial label ”Muslim,” for example, was assigned to Arab Christians who, paradoxically, were racialized as the religious other of white European Christianity. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 205

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the exact Dow v. United States (1915) case history where Syrian citizenship hinged on racial classification.
• DEFINE: Shows ‘Muslim’ functioning as a racial rather than merely religious label in US law.
• XREF: connects to: Cold War geopolitics made citizenship courts expand racial inclusion of Muslims; Operation Boulder redeployed COINTELPRO counterinsurgency methods to racialize Arab Americans — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 249