Islamophobia operates through racialized appearance, targeting anyone who looks Muslim-like.

Evidence

Fear, prejudicial attitudes, and discriminatory actions are not limited to Muslims, but due to the racialized nature of being Muslim, such experiences are also targeted towards individuals who appear Muslim-like, such as, Arabs, Turks, Moroccans, or other immigrants. As such, the anti-other group content area was developed to capture measures that examined attitudes and behaviors towards Muslim-like groups. Measures categorized in the anti-other group content area were not a measure of Islamophobia as they included items that assessed discrimination towards specific other groups instead of Muslims/Islam generally. … In addition, the most common Muslim-like group for which these measures were used included Arab populations. — Ummul-Kiram Kathawalla, Fei Bi Chan, Quratulain Gulamhussein, Amy Riegelman, and Moin Syed, Conceptualization and Measurement of…, 492

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that anti-Muslim bias is triggered by phenotype rather than belief — making ‘Muslim’ a racial category — unsettles both the religious-freedom framing of Islamophobia and the operationalization of it as attitude toward a faith.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Islamophobia-and-the-novel and New Crusades material on how Islamophobia functions as racial project rather than religious critique.