Religiosity alone triggers US government scrutiny even without any dissident politics

Evidence

The government’s second priority is Religious Racial Muslims who are either apolitical or hold mainstream political views. Even if one refrains from expressing dissident views, religiosity alone is sufficient to attract government scrutiny in the form of FBI investigations, requests for voluntary interviews, and antiterrorism prosecutions. Although the Religious Racial Muslim does not engage in politics opposing American foreign policy or challenge American liberalism, their lifestyle as practicing Muslims poses a threat to the assimilationist, Anglo-Protestant underpinnings of Islamophobia. For example, any Muslim associated with or sympathetic to Salafism, Wahabism, or the Muslim Brotherhood, even if they are not politically engaged in the United States, is labeled a radical Muslim. As a result, the US government scrutinizes their lives, social media accounts, and personal associations for evidence of illegal activity. Indeed, the Trump administration went so far as to call for the criminalization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the pretext needed for shutting down Muslim organizations led by Religious Dissident and Religious Racial Muslims. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 887

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing material on the veil as active revolutionary instrument and on Islamophobia-shaped dress/practice scrutiny.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a private religious lifestyle itself constitutes a threat to ‘assimilationist, Anglo-Protestant’ underpinnings shows how the state’s anti-extremism framework and its assimilationist anxieties collapse into each other.