Western surveillance of Muslims worsens the very patriarchal violence it claims to fight.

Evidence

Principally, European culturalist responses have depended on the idea that Muslims come to the West drawn to its superior wealth. They bring with them a hopelessly feudal culture and must either be stopped altogether or be forcibly ‘deculturalized’ before they multiply and contaminate the superior civilization into which they have migrated. Recognizably racist, the figure of the unassimilable and diseased migrant masks the material relations that structure this encounter between the West and non-West, obscuring in particular the West’s complicity in placing those populations under siege both before they leave their homelands and once within Europe’s borders. Acknowledging little or no responsibility for the conditions in which Muslim migrants in the West live, and indulging in the fantasy of a culturally superior nation who must discipline and instruct culturally inferior peoples, Western states pursue policies of surveillance and control that heighten the level of racism those communities experience and that exacerbate the conditions under which Muslim communities become even more patriarchal and violent towards women. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 253

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s own earlier chapters on Orientalism/Orientalist fantasy and the ‘war on terror’ logic of collective responsibility (Razack 2004, 2008).
• QUESTION: The claim that Western control policies make Muslim communities ‘more patriarchal and violent towards women’ is a strong causal thesis — worth verifying against empirical work on migration, policing, and domestic violence.