Personal Muslim identity gives the researcher privileged access to global Muslim testimony

Evidence

As a Muslim American scholar known for his work on Islamophobia, I occupy that rare space between its rational and irrational axes. I have spent nearly a decade theorizing about the very meaning of Islamophobia and have published numerous academic articles on the subject, its relationship to the law, and intersecting areas of concern. Yet my faith and identity apart from my scholarly profile keep me tethered to the irrationality of it all when disaster strikes and during the turbulent aftermath that the War on Terror prolongs and even threatens to make permanent. I am, at once, the subject and object of the War on Terror, and that unenviable status carves a pathway into the intimate spaces of similarly situated peoples, all over the world, who stand at different points but feel what I feel. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 54

Categorization

• XREF: The author’s reflexive subject-object positioning parallels Said’s memoir and standpoint-theory approaches to marginalized knowledge.