Religion shaped whether courts classified Arab immigrants as White for citizenship

Evidence

These immigrants perplexed judges presiding over naturalization applications as US law permitted only White persons to become citizens. Did the litigants’ Christian religion from the eastern Mediterranean make them civilized and assimilable Whites such that they qualified for American citizenship, or did their status as subjects of the Muslim Ottoman Empire make them uncivilized and inassimilable non-White Turks? The courts’ inconsistent findings demonstrate the role that religion played in racing Arab immigrants in America, a phenomenon that informs the social construction of the Racial Muslim today. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 521

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which specific naturalization cases produced the inconsistent findings? Worth chasing the case law.
• XREF: Echoes colonial/legal-bureaucratic classification of race, reminiscent of how legal regimes construct racial categories. — connects to: Islamic identity rendered immigrants non-white in citizenship cases regardless of legal test — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 154; Islamic identity exceeded skin color in rendering Arabs non-white for citizenship; Same-ethnicity petitioners were declared white in one court but not another (+7 more)