Neither denouncing bigotry nor privatizing Muslim difference achieves mutual respect.

Evidence

Denouncing the crude bigotry of Islamophobes will not produce a political culture of this kind; neither will polite acceptance of Muslims based on the privatization of their religious and cultural differences. Instead, a politics of mutual respect must be anchored in the realization that Muslims and non-Muslims do not live in separate worlds, in self-constituting and clashing civilizations. Increasingly, we all live in overlapping zones of interaction. This overlap will create new identities—secular, religious, national, regional, and ethnoracial—that are endlessly contested, and are worth contesting, because they are shared. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 719

Categorization

• XREF: Directly rebuts Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis; the ‘overlapping zones of interaction’ language parallels the reader’s own framing about investigating Islam vs. the frightened subject as a shared rather than separate field.