What Are Muslim Stereotypes?

On September 11th, 2001, a militant, Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda, hijacked four airliners on a mission to commit the most massive terrorist attack on United States soil. Two of the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the third plane crashed into the
Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C. and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
These attacks prompted the start of the Global War on Terrorism as the destruction caused the deaths of over three thousand people including more than four hundred police officers and firefighters. As a result of the 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia gained in frequency and notoriety.
Violent hatred towards members of the Islamic community rose substantially.
Many Muslim-
Americans were shunned, violated, and disrespected for their religion especially those who dressed in the traditional garb. After 9/11, tolerance was running low in all parts of the world as analyst Carroll Dougherty said American attitudes towards Islam were not out of step with
Europe and adding that there was more tolerance in the US towards the use of headscarves than in countries such as Germany or France, where there is strong support for a ban. However, more than half of Americans believe there are more violent extremists within Islam than in any other religion and that the faith encourages violence against non-Muslims. Thus, the rise and intensity of religious intolerance towards Muslims and Islam has created a power structure where opportunities of religious freedom have become scarce. Islamophobia first defined by the Runnymede Trust Report in 1991 is, “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” In Western society, most
Muslim men do not wear the religious clothing unlike Muslim women thus it is much easier to spot and harass a Muslim women because of her hijab. Attacks against Muslim women has risen drastically which Professor Sahar Aziz notes in her essay “Time to Address Violence against
Muslim Women.” She states, “Muslim women in America wearing a headscarf have become both visible and vulnerable targets. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest threat to Muslin women is no longer limited to domestic violence in the home but rather unprovoked attacks in public places by bigoted strangers. To many, the Muslim woman's headscarf marks her as a terrorist or co-conspirator to terrorism. Meanwhile, her gender marks her as easy prey to cowardly acts by those who seek to violate her body and personal dignity.” The hate generated by fear often leads to violence. To portray her views Aziz uses a variety of examples such as a headscarved Muslim women in Columbus, Ohio was stalked, verbally harassed and then pepper- sprayed by a man shouting religious and ethnic slurs such as “Tell all of your Muslims that this is not your country,” and threatening to kill her. Growing anti-Muslim bias in America is very much prevalent as numerous reports have documented anti-Muslim campaigns that mobilize people to hate their Muslim compatriots. The victims of violence by their fellow Americans determined to violently expel Muslims from the country has become so severe that many women are choosing to not follow their ethnic practices and remove the hijab from their attire when they leave the comforts of their home. Islamophobia has extended to involve both the discrimination of Muslims religious belonging as well as their ethnic belongings and Aziz believes that to declare the United States a nation of tolerance and freedom, men and women alike should be able to practice their faiths without fear of physical violence. Similarly, Inderpal Grewal in Transnational America, believes that anti-Muslim bigotry should be included more often in human rights discourse to prevent the view of all Muslims being extremists. In her final chapter, she discusses the reasoning and beliefs people held towards Muslim-Americans after 9/11. In it she speaks about the day of 9/11 and how when the mug shots of the terrorists were shown, it created the representation of what a terrorist looks like
(Muslim, male, trained and barbaric). From that she states, “What resulted was a racial formation of all Muslim males, whether rich or poor, as terrorists, made barbaric by allegiance to religion and thus as different as possible from the civilized, cosmopolitan Westerner and the secular
American nation.” Many Americans are looking through the painful prism of the aftermath of
9/11 which causes the bias that terrorism is a perversion of Islam and its values. Grewal does a successful job in conveying her ideas of American multicultural nationalism by proving these were not just moments in history but a continuation of movements with capitalist roots. Aziz and
Grewal show the common forms of religiously and racially motivated violence against those whom are perceived to be Muslim as a result of their style of dress, skin color, or other features. Aziz and Grewal provide gender bias through religion, whereas Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel
Greenberg construct an argument of general discrimination against Muslims in their work,
Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Gottschalk’s and Greenberg’s argument lies in portraying America’s view of Muslims after 9/11 by using specific cartoons targeted to prompt religious bias. The cartoons show violent, oversexed males, oppressed females and deceptive foreigners. They state, “As many Muslim women who wear head scarves in public have attested, non-Muslim Westerners often assume that they cover themselves under the coercive command of their fathers or husbands whereas many-though certainly not all- have chosen to do so over the protests of these men.” One cartoon shows the so-called terrorist in Arab headdresses where the underlying presumption is that Muslims dress as all Muslims dress which is not true.
The authors suggest that the media plays a big role in providing distorted views of Muslims which causes
Americans to see Muslims as extremists and jihadists. The authors argue that Muslims seldom appear in the media other than to perpetrate them as violent through the name of Islam. The term
Islam and Muslim have come to inherently evoke suspicion and fear in the hearts of many and that is the stereotype portrayed in Gottschalk’s and Greenberg’s book. As estimated by them, one in five people identify themselves as Muslim but the majority of these Muslims do not participate in political violence and few wish to establish an Islamic state in their own country let alone force their beliefs upon others. Anti-Muslim sentiment as grown so large in the Western world that in many places, people are harassed if they are not dressed as “Americans,”
a stereotype largely enforced by the minds of ignorant and uninformed people. Political professionals have slammed support of the Islamic community with rhetoric so flawed that it conveys not the worst of Islam but the worst of Westerners who claim that American society is accepting in all forms. Violence towards the Islamic community stems from irrational hatred. I know this because as a Muslim, I have dealt with the hatred and discrimination from fellow compatriots. I was born in
Ethiopia in a Muslim dominated area where my father who is also Muslim taught us the ways of his faith. My father joined the military and because of that we moved around a lot which led us to come to the United States. For the first ten years of my life, I wore the hijab which is the traditional head scarf worn by Muslim women. My family and I (which includes two other sisters) always received suspicious and scared looks from many people as we walked down the streets but I never knew it was because of my faith. I have not worn the hijab my entire life because of incidents where my faith made people view me as an enemy and not a fellow
American. One particular incident made my father suggest that my sisters and I do not wear the hijab anymore. Upon moving to the states, we decided to visit family in Atlanta, Georgia through the mains of air transportation. We did not carry any extra items but a purse held by my mother and we did nothing to prompt suspicion yet my family and I were singled out and taken to a hidden room to be questioned about our whereabouts and why we were traveling. We were finally discharged from being questioned when my father pulled out his U.S. military id card and showed them that he was in the Army. The emotional outrage we felt by being targeted because of our dress was plenty and after that day, I stopped wearing the hijab. These types of incidents are experienced by many Muslim-Americans on an everyday basis. Carl Ernst in his book,
Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, suggests that intolerance inflicts hegemony where majority’s norms against minorities are prominent features.
He provides insight into how America portrays Islam thus allowing everyone to believe that Muslims are not human beings but barbaric terrorists. Similarly, Todd Green in his book, The Fear of Islam: An
Introduction to Islamophobia in the West traces the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media.
He talks about how talks of religious discourse only portray Islam in a negative light allowing those who have never had a personal experience of Muslims as human beings to be intolerant and discriminative. Ernst and Green show that the War on Terror is not just in the east but also has roots domestically. Debates ranging from building new mosques, the Muslim place of worship, to burning the Qur’an, the holy scripture of Islam, has led people to view Islam as a violent religion rather than one of peace. The Ground Zero Mosque debate is the most popular because many
Americans felt it was outrageous to build a mosque on the grounds where Muslim terrorists killed thousands of people. However, the mosque was being built near not on ground zero but the media was quick to elicit emotional appeal from citizens by saying remember 9/11. These
types of incidents have led to destructions of mosques along with the burnings of the Qur’an. These are just big examples felt by people who follow Islam faith but smaller everyday experiences are what make Muslim-Americans fear dressing in their religious clothing and expressing their faith.
An article by Huma Qureshi titled, “Let us speak for ourselves: five women's experiences of
Islamophobic attacks” provides insight into the everyday abuse felt by people who are perceived to follow the Muslim faith. These women as described by Qureshi have been verbally abused, harassed and physically harmed because of their religion. One woman had her hijab yanked off her head by a man shouting profanities at her, an experience I have been through myself. Being abused for your religion is a frightening experience and makes one question whether they should practice their faith or not. Wearing a hijab should not subject one to be violently persecuted. This rise of ethnic and religious intolerance must be recognized in human rights discourse to provide strategies to prevent and eliminate Islamophobia from all societies otherwise the violence will continue to be a part of society which does not allow for a multicultural nation that America wishes to be.