The Islamic threat emerged only after the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Evidence

The relationship of the United States to “Islam”—that is, Islam as a social construct rather than a reflection of the religion and its adherents—is contradictory and flows from its foreign policy. Readers unfamiliar with this history might be surprised to learn that movements and organizations that interpret Islam in various ways to advance political goals were not always seen as enemies. There was no “Islamic threat” in the form of non-state or state actors in the early Cold War era. Until the 1970s, the US political elite allied with some of the forces seeking to project various interpretations of Islam on the political stage, such as the Saudi monarchy. In the 1970s, this approach changed in response to various factors, including the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic Republican Party to power. After this, the US political class had it both ways: the parties and movements of political Islam were enemies in some cases, but not in others. Politics scholar Mahmood Mamdani coined the term “good Muslim, bad Muslim” to capture the duality of how those who support or oppose US imperial ambitions are understood. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 389

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Names Mahmood Mamdani as origin of the good Muslim, bad Muslim typology and fixes the 1979 shift point.
• XREF: Ties to book_so_far ch5 good-versus-bad Muslim label tracks support for US empire.
• ADDENDUM: relevant to the reader’s MOC thread: dates the Islamophobia crystallization after 9/11 back to a 1970s shift, giving a mechanism timeline.

Related

• Islam organizations were US allies before the 1979 Iranian Revolution (similarity 0.90)
• US policymakers treated Islamist movements as allies before the Iranian Revolution. (similarity 0.88)
• The 1979 Iranian Revolution shifted US policy from promoting Islam to denouncing it (similarity 0.87)
• US policy treated Islam as good or bad depending on imperial alignment (similarity 0.86)
• Iran’s 1979 revolution redirected US fear from secular nationalism to Islamism (similarity 0.84)
• US instrumental use of Islamists produced today’s negative Islam frame (similarity 0.82)
• US policy was always split between anti-Soviet and anti-Islamist interests (similarity 0.82)
• The American public first linked Islam with terrorism only after the Iranian Revolution. (similarity 0.82)
• The Arab and Islamic terrorist archetype originated from the neocon-Likud alliance after 1979 (similarity 0.82)
• Iran’s 1979 revolution shifted the frame from Arabs to Islamism (similarity 0.81)
• US Islamophobia has liberal and conservative wings, both imperial (similarity 0.81)
• The US held contradictory Islamist allies and enemies simultaneously (similarity 0.81)
• During the early Cold War, Islam was coded positively in US discourse (similarity 0.80)
• US-weakened leftists let Khomeini seize leadership of Iran’s revolution (similarity 0.80)
• Early Cold War discourse coded Islam positively when anti-communist (similarity 0.80)