Framing Muslims as friends can be as coercive as framing them as enemies.

Evidence

How can we constructively oppose this essentializing impulse in ways that do not simply reinforce it by cultivating its opposite: namely, the image of the Muslim as “friend,” as a figure identified with the Self, characterized as familiar, and with whom legitimate conflict is not possible? This image, too, is impervious to nuance, and it can be coercive when applied to Muslims, who might have differences—with non-Muslims and fellow Muslims alike—they think are worth asserting and maintaining. When “friendship” is subordinated to the demands of sameness, whether conceived in national or human terms, it can be just as coercive, just as prone to misrecognition, as the sentiments of hostility it is meant to correct. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 701

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Turns the anti-Islamophobia project’s own reflex (countering enmity with friendship) into a new coercion — a genuinely destabilizing thought for progressive response.
• XREF: connects to: Denying that Muslims are enemies can itself construct them as threats — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 577