Inside-outside overlap from citizenship drives Islamophobia’s missionary zeal

Evidence

Not everyone agrees that Muslims are existentially alien, and Muslims who live as citizens in the United States or France or Canada are not, by strict legal reckoning, Others or strangers, even when their fellow nationals see them as outsiders. This overlap of inside and outside, an artifact of global immigration and modern regimes of citizenship, is what drives Islamophobia and imbues it with missionary zeal. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the critic’s project of pivoting from interrogating Islam to examining the frightened subject — here Ernst locates the engine of fear in the fearer’s regime of citizenship, not in Muslims.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the missionary zeal of misrecognition’ — a piece on how formal legal inclusion (citizenship) combined with social exclusion generates more aggressive othering than outright segregation would.