US immigrant Muslim status fluctuated with international crises involving their home countries

Evidence

Over the course of the twentieth century, Arabs in the United States went from being an obscure minority advocating for legal Whiteness, with varying success, to a growing perceived foreign threat. Incorrectly presumed to all be Muslim and mistakenly including Persian Iranians, the Arab in the second half of the twentieth century was raced as the quintessential terrorist in media, films, and policy making. Immigrant Muslims’ treatment in the United States, thus, was precariously dependent on events in their countries of origin. Each time an international political crisis occurred, Muslims in the US experienced varying levels of temporal backlashes, after which they could return to being a relatively invisible religious minority in their daily lives. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 711

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s pattern of cross-cultural moral panics being triggered by political identity signaling rather than the practice itself.