Orientalist ideology preceded material anti-Muslim oppression until post-WWII empire enabled it.

Evidence

Significantly, there were no systems of racist oppression that corresponded to this ideology until the imperial domination of the MENA region after World War II. To be sure, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Arab American and South Asian immigrants experienced racism through discriminatory naturalization laws, and black Muslims were targeted by the FBI in addition to suffering other forms of racism that non-Muslim black people experienced. However, this was the legacy of previous white supremacist laws and practices. Arab Americans who had been accepted into a proximity to whiteness were targeted as “potential terrorists” after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. This new project of terrorist racial formation evolved to incorporate Iranians after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the hostage crisis. In the 1980s, the rise of various movements and parties of political Islam both in the MENA region and in Central/South Asia prompted an expansion of the category of “terrorist” to include Iranians, South Asians, and other Muslims. The “Arab terrorist,” a creation of the late 1960s, evolved into the Arab, Iranian, and “Islamic terrorist” in the 1980s and then the Arab/Muslim/South Asian terrorist during the 1990s. The events of 9/11 served to crystallize this association. I name this process terrorcraft and refer the reader to my essay on this topic and my forthcoming book for a deeper analysis. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines the author’s term ‘terrorcraft’ — the project of terrorist racial formation.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar postcolonial critiques transformed Orientalism’s meaning from scholarship into ideology of empire; Orientalism’s meaning shifted after post-war deconolization critiques; Post-1945 critics transformed Orientalism from scholarship into a concept of imperial institution (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism began as discourse before hardening into material institutions and state policy. #corroborates (0.88) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 160
• Postwar postcolonial critiques transformed Orientalism’s meaning from scholarship into ideology of empire #corroborates (0.82)
• Post-1945 critics transformed Orientalism from scholarship into a concept of imperial institution #corroborates (0.80)
• Orientalism’s meaning shifted after post-war deconolization critiques #corroborates (0.78)
• Orientalism expanded from scholarly practice to signify imperialist ideology #corroborates (0.75)