Racialized Muslim labels enable state social control over civil liberties

Evidence

It is the articulation of this fear through a homogeneous racial discourse that allows the racial state to comprehend Muslims as a terrorist threat. Hence, false terror threats and the moral panics surrounding Muslims emerge out of a climate that forebodes the possibility of terrorism. To delineate the terms of the crisis, the Muslim folk devil is defined using adjectives such as ”radical,” ”militant,” and ”fundamentalist,” which permits the state to take certain kinds of action aimed at social control instead of protecting civil liberties and human rights. Social anxieties that rely on a racist logic, then, become permissible to achieve more e√ective social control. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 237