Muslims are judged good or bad by loyalty to the US, not piety.

Evidence

This feature of post-9/11 representations is consistent with Mahmood Mamdani’s claim that the public debate since the terrorist attacks has involved a discourse about “good” and “bad” Muslims in which all Muslims are assumed to be bad until they perform and prove their allegiance to the U.S. nation. What makes a Muslim “good” or “bad” in this paradigm is not his or her relationship to Islam but rather to the United States. Though rare in U.S. history, after 9/11 this mode of representing “the enemy” became standard. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 110

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that ‘good Muslim’ status is about geopolitical allegiance rather than religiosity — reframes how loyalty is performed and evaluated, with broad implications beyond media studies.
• XREF: Connects to Mamdani’s ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ book; also resonates with The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s themes of allegiance-testing after 9/11. — connects to: The good versus bad Muslim label tracks support for US empire rather than facts. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 87; Good and bad Muslim designations follow support for US empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 87; US policy treated Islam as good or bad depending on imperial alignment — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 395
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 110