Racialization lets a faith community’s religious freedoms be circumscribed or denied

Evidence

I proffer that the explanation lies in how racism intersects with religion to racialize a religion’s followers and consequently excludes them from the panoply of religious freedom protections. Put simply, racialization causes a faith community’s religious freedoms to be circumscribed or denied altogether. The ways in which particular religious communities are racialized depend on both domestic and international factors unique to that group. For this reason, I limit my analysis to the experiences of immigrant Muslims. That is because the domestic factors contributing to the racialization of African American Muslims is starkly different, though certainly overlapping, from the domestic factors racializing Muslims who immigrated primarily from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Similarly, relations between the United States and immigrant Muslims’ countries of origin influence their treatment legally and socially in the United States in ways that do not impact African American Muslims. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 66

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s core mechanism: racialization as the process by which religious freedoms get denied to a faith community.
• XREF: connects to: Minority religions exercising the same rights are routinely excluded from schools — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 870; A transnational religious right seeks to replace democracies with faith-based ethno-states — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 959