The Muslim is a unitary racial category despite enormous internal diversity.

Evidence

Despite this ambiguity, the racialized Muslim is mobilized as a unitary figure. To frame my analysis, I evoke ”the Muslim” as a category that encompasses many nationalities, social and cultural practices, religious a≈liations (from Muslim Sunni and Shia to Christian, Sikh, and Hindu), and social realities that, through the process of state and popular racialization, is generalized.Ω The system of policing that targets Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants for detention and deportation, as exemplified by the placement of ”the Muslim” in the U.S. racial formation under the Bush administration’s War on Terror, is crafted through a broad logic of antiimmigrant racism. What is particularly telling is the disproportionately high number of Pakistanis deported either through forced or voluntary means in the sweeps that followed 9/11.∞≠ Not only does Pakistan as a country represent terror, danger, and Islamic militancy, but Pakistanis in the U.S. are cast as perilous racial figures of indeterminate standing. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the Muslim’ as a racialized unitary figure that collapses Sunni, Shia, Christian, Sikh, and Hindu communities under one policing category.
• SEED: An article angle: how a single immigration-enforcement label erases internal religious and ethnic diversity — the Sikh and Hindu men detained as ‘Muslims’ after 9/11.
• XREF: connects to: The global Muslim population of 1.8 billion is internally diverse and geographically dispersed; The racialized Muslim category flexibly absorbs perceived Muslims across ethnicity, nationality, and religion. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 630