Muslims are denied the unmarked ordinariness that others enjoy

Evidence

This was the signal sent, bluntly, by the 2011 US congressional hearings on “the radicalization of American Muslims” sponsored by House Representative Peter King (R-NY), who argued that Muslims are not assisting law enforcement officials who are investigating their community; he also claimed that “80% of the mosques in American are controlled by radical imams.” 43 The inevitable response to these accusations is to reverse the claims: “Muslims are policing themselves. They are assisting in efforts to combat terrorism. They are loyal, hard-working, patriotic Americans, not radical extremists.” According to these counterclaims, Muslim Americans, any Muslims in fact, who embrace radical Islam (what is that?) and terrorism (whose terrorism?) are exceptions to the rule. One could say, and many Muslims do, that the “bad Muslims” are not really Muslims at all. Yet for Peter King, “good Muslims” are of little interest, although they are still suspect. When both bad Muslims and good Muslims are irrelevant and exceptional, something is clearly wrong with the terms of debate. The potential for being ordinary and unmarked disappears, as do the moral gray zones in which most of us are privileged to live, unburdened by the obligation of constantly proving our loyalty and constantly having that loyalty questioned. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 711

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the moral gray zones’ and ‘ordinary and unmarked’ status as the privilege that Muslims are excluded from — the structural core of the chapter’s anatomy.
• XREF: The ‘bad Muslims/good Muslims’ binary echoes the ‘good immigrant/bad immigrant’ framing in Naqvi’s Home Boy and the loyalty-questioning dynamic. — connects to: Civil society discourse is invoked selectively, denied to certain Muslim states — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 212
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that doublespeak normalizes suspicion by rendering both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims exceptional — the entire debate structure becomes the problem — is a dense analytical payoff central to the reader’s ‘frightened subject’ project.