Religious beliefs are read as biological traits marking Muslims as racially inferior

Evidence

Islamic tenets, regardless of whether practiced or believed in fact, impute to Muslims inherent cultural traits that operate biologically to make them inferior in a White Judeo-Christian supremacist society. For example, believing in (nonviolent) jihad, polygamy, Sharia, hijab, fasting, hajj, and the Prophet Muhammad is associated with a Muslim’s purported innate sense of despotism, savagery, and illiberalism. For both religious conservatives and secular liberal elites, these religious beliefs and practices cast Muslims as outsiders to American national identity; more specifically, it casts Muslims as suspected terrorists. A purported “Muslim culture” is taken as fixed, deterministic, and essentialist such that Islamophobia collapses into scientific racism. A Muslim woman’s covering of her hair and body confirms Americans’ beliefs that Islam is misogynistic, which then prompts calls to “save Muslim women” by means of imperial projects. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how racialization of Muslims converts religious belief into fixed biological traits — the mechanism by which Islamophobia collapses into scientific racism.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘save Muslim women’ imperial trope, and parallels with orientalism and the white savior complex as analyzed in Said and other postcolonial theory. — connects to: Muslims get racialized via projected religious ancestry regardless of self-understanding — Mareike Riedel, Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination…, 64; Muslims were constituted as an inferior race via the figure of Homo islamicus.; Being negative toward either Islam or Muslims counts under family resemblance. — Erik Bleich, What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is…, 83
• ADDENDUM: Directly supplements the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece — hijab as a site where dress-based moral panic and imperial ‘saving’ projects intersect.