k atharina M otyl No Longer a Promised Land - The Arab and Muslim Experience in the U�S� after 9/ 11 1 September 11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” catapulted the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States into a state of crisis� President George W� Bush on September 20, 2001, famously said before Congress: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make� Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” (Bush 2001)� Adopting this “us vs� them” rhetoric, the Bush administration and the corporate media constructed the image of an Arab, Muslim enemy which threatened the freedom of the West and thus deserved to be disciplined and punished (cf� Merskin)� Not only did this discourse serve to justify U�S�-led war in two Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), as well as torture and other violations of human rights of Arabs and Muslims in Guantánamo and in the cases of extraordinary rendition� Domestically, those who traced their origins to Muslim-majority countries in the Greater Middle East were disciplined, as well� As the following statement of attorney general John Ashcroft from October 25, 2001 illustrates, the Bush administration raised the specter of an internal Arab, Muslim enemy who was to be fought - both by the government and the American public: On September 11, the wheel of history turned and the world will never be the same� […] The attacks of September 11 were acts of terrorism against America orchestrated and carried out by individuals living within our borders� Today’s terrorists enjoy the benefits of our free society even as they commit themselves to our destruction� They live in our communities - plotting, planning, and waiting to kill Americans again. […] The federal government cannot fight this reign of terror alone� Every American must help us defend our nation against this enemy (Ashcroft)� And indeed, in the months following 9/ 11, the punitive nexus of government and the American people Ashcroft conjured up operated at full throttle; the government enacted security policies which specifically targeted Arabs and Muslims; private individuals subjected them to harassment and hate crimes� In addition, the news media’s coverage was overwhelmingly tainted with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias (cf� Joseph and D’Harlingue), and the entertainment media exploited the Arab-as-terrorist plot and discursively supported the suspension of Arabs’ and Muslims’ rights (cf� Alsultany; Shaheen)� In a perverse logic of kin liability, Arab American citizens and Arab immigrants, many of whom had been living in the U�S� for a long time and/ or had children who were U�S� citizens, were punished for acts they abhorred, carried 1 I would like to thank my colleague Christoph Raetzsch for his sharp eye and poignant criticism, which have enriched this essay� 218 k atharina M otyl out by extremists from Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries who were affiliated with the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda. In short, the “War on Terror” transformed the average person of Arab descent into a “potential terrorist,” 2 creating a sense of “homeland insecurity” (Cainkar) for Arab and Muslim Americans� This dimension of the “War on Terror,” i�e� its effects on the lives of Arabs and Muslims in the U�S�, is the central concern of my paper� First, I will discuss the U�S� government’s targeting of Arabs and Muslims, focusing on the “special registration” program, which ascribed a malicious essence to persons descending from Muslim-majority countries, and outline the kinds of harassment and hate crimes Arabs and Muslims faced in everyday life� I will briefly address the American news and entertainment media’s complicity in the anti-Arab backlash, which for decades have been invested in portraying Arabs and Muslims in negative ways� I will then provide demographic data on the Arab and Muslim communities in the U�S�, which exposes the popular perception that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are Arab as an illusion� After theorizing contemporary anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia, which, I argue, constitute what Etienne Balibar calls cultural racism , I will discuss a literary negotiation of the situation of Arab and Muslim Americans in the “War on Terror�” I read the novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) by Jordanian American author Laila Halaby as a counter-narrative to post-9/ 11 dominant discourses� Halaby’s central criticism of post-9/ 11 American society, I argue, is its essentialist thinking - a thinking which is manifest, inter alia, in the Bush administration’s draconic security policies� Anti-Arab Backlash after September 11 While the U�S� government passed some legislation that curtailed the civil liberties of all Americans, twenty-five of the thirty-seven known government security initiatives implemented between September 12, 2001, and mid-2003 either explicitly or implicitly targeted Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� (Tsao and Gutierrez)� As Louise Cainkar documents in her comprehensive sociological study Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/ 11 , these security initiatives included mass arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, prolonged detention of ‘material witnesses,’ closed hearings and the use of secret evidence, government eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, FBI home and work visits, wiretapping, seizures of property, removals of aliens with technical visa violations, freezing the assets of charities, and mandatory special registration (119)� Conservative estimates put the number of Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� who personally experienced at least one of these measures at 100,000 (ibid�), 2 I borrow this notion from Kent Ono, who argues that Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims are interpellated as “potential terrorists” in the post-9/ 11 American polity� No Longer a Promised Land 219 though other sources point to much higher numbers� 3 While many of these measures run counter to the legal standards of the liberal-democratic tradition, inverting the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” for Arabs and Muslims, 4 I want to focus on special registration at this point, because it is the measure which most clearly expresses the Bush administration’s association of Arabs and Muslims with terrorism� Special registration, the term commonly used for the National Security Entry-Exist Registration System (NSEERS) implemented on September 11, 2002, required male nonimmigrant aliens over the age of sixteen who are citizens and nationals from select countries to be interviewed under oath, fingerprinted, and photographed by an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) official (cf. Cainkar 128; Bayoumi 271). 5 The countries selected for special registration were almost exclusively Muslim-majority countries, as we shall see� Those who entered the U�S� from another country had to register at the point of entry� Those already in the country, until December 2003, had to undergo call-in registration, i.e. report to designated INS offices. 6 Registrants had to provide proof of their legal status to remain in the U�S�, proof of residence, and proof of study or employment� Some also had to supply their credit card numbers, the names and addresses of two U�S� citizens 3 A higher number seems plausible considering the following facts: nearly 83,000 persons tracing their heritage to Muslim-majority countries had to undergo domestic callin registration (Cainkar 288); Michael E. Rolince, former FBI special agent in charge of counterterrorism and Section Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section, said that his agency had conducted about half a million interviews, overwhelmingly with Arab and Muslim Americans (Rolince 2005)� 4 To mention just a couple of striking examples, in the mass arrests made shortly after September 11, men who matched an Arab/ Muslim phenotype and were deemed for any reason to be suspicious, were locked up; thereafter, the government searched for violations with which to charge them� Some of these men were detained for months, which constitutes a due process violation (Cole 2003)� Moreover, section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which has been principally used on Arabs and Muslims, permits the FBI to obtain in total secrecy objects pertaining to a person not suspected of criminal activity (! ) such as books, records, papers, and documents, whether they are in the person’s home or in the possession of a third party� The section does not require the government to show probable cause for its actions and imposes a gag order on the parties served with a section 215 order, prohibiting them from informing anyone of the government’s actions or the gag order (Cainkar 123f�)� 5 To be more specific, this group encompasses all those who are not U.S. citizens, permanent residents, applicants for permanent residency, or applicants for asylum (cf� Cainkar 288). 6 Domestic call-in registration was suspended on December 2, 2003� On December 5, 2003, NSEERS was subsumed under US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology)� US-VISIT requires all visa-holding visitors to be electronically photographed and fingerprinted upon entry. Since it does not focus on Muslim male visitors alone, it is an improvement over the NSEERS program� However, US-VISIT did not suspend special registration� For many years, those matching the criteria still had to undergo port-of-entry registration (cf. Bayoumi: 289f.). On April 27, 2011, the Department of Homeland Security finally announced the elimination of port-of-entry registration (cf� Seyfarth Shaw Attorneys)� 220 k atharina M otyl who could authenticate their identity, and to answer questions regarding their political and religious beliefs (Bayoumi 271)� Registrants had to report changes of address within ten days (Cainkar 133), and, if they remained in the country for more than thirty days, to check in with an INS official within forty days of their arrival� Moreover, registrants could only enter and exit the U.S. from specific ports designated by the INS. Every time he entered and left the U�S�, the nonimmigrant male had to undergo the strenuous registration process again (Bayoumi 271f�)� Special registration applied to citizens and nationals of the following countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Indonesia� Regarding call-in registration, those matching the criteria were ordered to register with specified INS offices in four rounds between November 15, 2002 and March 28, 2003. To publicize the call-in program, the INS distributed flyers with “THIS NOTICE IS FOR YOU” splayed across the top (Cainkar 133), which were reminiscent of the notices announcing the rounding up of Japanese Americans in the Western states during World War II. During the first round of call-in registration, almost 1,200 registrants nationwide were arrested and detained for visa violations - despite the fact that they had voluntarily complied with the program (“US Detains nearly 1,200 during Registry”)� Many of the men detained had been living in the U�S� for over a decade and had children who were U�S� citizens (Bayoumi 272); quite a few had pending applications for permanent residency (Serjeant)� Moreover, it became known that many whose status was, in fact, legal were arrested because of INS backlogs (Lee)� Most of the detained were eventually released on bail, with deportation proceedings started by the INS (Cainkar 134)� Overall, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 7 deportation orders were issued for 13,434 of the roughly 83,000 men who underwent call-in registration, based on visa irregularities (qtd� in Cainkar 128). 8 Thousands of families with a member whose immigration status was irregular left the country permanently to evade registration, which would, they were right to fear, lead to deportation (ibid� 130)� Surveillance, arrest, detainment, deportation - special registration disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of families in the U�S� But this is only one of the grounds on which the program has been criticized� Special regis- 7 The INS, a division of the Department of Justice, ceased to exist on March 1, 2003, when its responsibilities were assumed by the newly created Department of Homeland Security� 8 While there was a sharp increase in removals of nationals from countries selected for special registration beginning in fiscal year 2002, it is unknown what number of those ordered deported as a result of special registration were, in fact, eventually deported� However, the potential deportation of almost 13,500 persons from Muslim-majority countries is to be interpreted as ethnic profiling, given that there are 3.2 million to 3.6 million persons living in the U�S� while “out of status” (e�g� overstay a tourist/ student visa, work without authorization, etc.) and an additional 8 million to 12 million undocumented persons (cf. Cainkar 128f.). No Longer a Promised Land 221 tration was also inefficient. Although the government advertised it as an essential tool in the fight against terrorism, the program did not lead to a single charge of terrorism (Bayoumi 272)� This is not surprising, however, since the program was logically flawed. As Moustafa Bayoumi poignantly puts it, this blunt program … was unlikely to result in the capture of a terrorist, who, if he or she were in the country already, would logically not bother to register before carrying out any nefarious activity. Since the mechanism (i.e., the profile) of the program was known, it was also highly unlikely to catch an incoming terrorist, who would again logically search for ways to circumvent special registration’s categories (273)� Not least, special registration was discriminatory; it discriminated by age, gender, and, most significantly, religion - thus being a legal reification of the assumption that Muslims are potential terrorists. Of the twenty-five countries on the registration list, six are listed by the State Department as state-sponsors of terrorism (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea)� Cuba, the seventh state-sponsor of terrorism, is - tellingly - not on the list� Two of the countries on the list (Afghanistan and Iraq) have recently been invaded by the U�S� The vast majority of the rest of the listed countries, however, are U�S� allies (Bayoumi 273)� Thus, one can conclude that the program was driven by a logic other than enemy nationality. Government officials stated that the countries on the list were selected because of al Qaeda presence (cf� Cainkar 129)� However, some selected countries had no proven al Qaeda presence, while other countries with known al Qaeda presence, such as Germany and England, were excluded from the list� What unites the countries subjected to registration, in fact, is that they are Muslim-majority countries� 9 The Department of Homeland Security justified special registration as a “pilot project focusing on a smaller segment of the nonimmigrant alien population deemed to be of risk to national security” (qtd� in Cainkar 129)� What can be inferred from this statement, then, is that the U�S� government considered males born into Islamicate 10 cultures in the Middle East, North Africa or Asia to pose a security threat to the U�S� 11 In the words of Bayoumi, special registration “reinscribed, through a legal mechanism, the cultural assumption that a terrorist is foreign-born, an alien in the United States, and a Muslim, and that all Muslim men who fit this profile are potential terrorists” (275)� The assumption that Muslims are more prone to terrorism than non-Muslims is as flawed as the assumption that a citizen of a given country is unlikely to inflict harm on his/ her own country and compatriots. To illustrate, the Red Army Faction, which terrorized West German society in the 1970s, 9 Except for Eritrea and North Korea� However, Eritrea is heavily Muslim, and North Korea is essentially a null category, since the number of visitors from North Korea to the U�S� must be close to zero (cf� Bayoumi: 290)� 10 Cultures which have been shaped by Islam� 11 Since the program operated on a country-basis, Iranian and Arab Jews, Iranian Baha’is, Arab Christians and other non-Muslims had to register, as well� 222 k atharina M otyl overwhelmingly consisted of citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany� To return to the U�S� context, Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, was neither Muslim nor a nonimmigrant alien� To put things bluntly, imagine the outrage if those matching the religious affiliation and citizenship status of McVeigh had had to register after the Oklahoma City bombing - Catholic males with U�S� citizenship� Many human rights advocacy groups decried special registration as racial profiling, the proliferation of which has been one of the most troubling consequences of the “War on Terror” for Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. Profiling of persons who are (or “look”) Arab is, for instance, extensively practiced at airport security checks, a phenomenon known in the affected communities as “flying while Arab.” According to Cainkar, enough Arab and Muslim men were removed from airplanes in the three years following 9/ 11 to foster a widespread fear of flying - a fear of humiliation more than of arrest (182). 12 Special registration, racial profiling and the other post-9/ 11 domestic security measures, which Georgetown Law professor David Cole characterized as the “most aggressive national campaign of ethnic profiling since World War II” (2006: 17), did not achieve what government officials had stated as their goal: after five thousand preventive detentions, some eighty-three thousand call-in registrations, and hundreds of thousands of FBI interviews, etc�, not a single individual was convicted of a terrorist crime (ibid�) The Bush administration’s rhetorical association of Arab Americans with terrorism not only served to justify the anti-Arab policies outlined above, it also aimed to silence Arab American protest against these policies� In times of national crisis, Steven Salaita states, there reigns a climate of “imperative patriotism,” which “assumes (or demands) that dissent in matters of governance and foreign affairs is unpatriotic and therefore unsavory” (154)� In post-9/ 11 America, Arab American dissent was perceived as “against us,” and thus as support (or at least sympathy) for terrorism� Moreover, the government’s message that Arab and Muslim Americans were enemies of the nation who deserved punishment encouraged some Americans to engage in harassment and hate crimes against members of these communities� Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� surged after 9/ 11� The FBI reported a 1,600 (sic) percent increase in hate-based incidents against persons perceived to be Muslim between 2000 and 2001� 13 Throughout the country, Arabs and Muslims faced slurs such as “f***ing terrorist” or “camel jockey, go home,” and gestures of contempt, such as being spat at� Some had eggs or feces thrown at their homes, and mosques were desecrated (cf� Cain- 12 See David Harris’ article “Flying While Arab: Lessons from the Racial Profiling Controversy” (2002) for an in-depth discussion of the issue� 13 Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur said in a press release: “The FBI reports that the number of anti-Muslim incidents rose 1600% from 2000 to 2001, largely due to post-9/ 11 backlash” (Kaptur)� As a May 2002 report issued by Chris Allen and Jørgen S� Nielsen on behalf of the European Union’s European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia showed, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased in Europe after September 11, as well� No Longer a Promised Land 223 kar; Naber 2008b). Others were even assaulted physically; at least four individuals were killed for being Arab or Muslim - or mistaken to be such (cf� Naber 2008b: 289). For non-Muslim Middle Easterners and South Asians also fell victim to hate crimes because they were presumed to be Muslim� On September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, an Indian Sikh, was gunned down outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, because he was wearing the traditional Sikh head covering� His assassin had previously bragged of his intention to “kill the ragheads responsible for September 11” (cf� Hanania)� But while only a fraction of Americans expressed anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment as violently as in the cases of harassment and hate crimes outlined above - in fact, a wave of outrage swept through the country after Sodhi’s murder - a significant amount of Americans had such sentiments, as many polls documented� For instance, the Detroit Arab American Study, conducted under the egis of the University of Michigan in 2003, inquired about post-9/ 11 attitudes towards security and civil liberties among the general and the Arab American population, procuring the following findings: 49 percent of the general population would support increased surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans; 23 percent of the general population would support increased police powers to stop and search Muslim and Arab Americans; 41 percent of the general population would uphold the detention of suspicious Arabs and Muslims even without sufficient evidence to prosecute (Baker et al� 20)� 14 To sum up, the government’s policies and rhetoric, whose tenets many Americans adopted, interpellated Arabs and Muslims as “potential terrorists,” a notion introduced by Kent Ono� According to Ono, “Hate crimes, surveillance by the repressive apparatus of the state, and surveillance and disciplining technologies have erected a powerful discursive barrier to full participation in society by those marked as ‘potential terrorists’” (443)� This exclusion of Arabs and Muslims was only possible because they had been structurally weakened by decades of Orientalist media representations� Media Images of Arab and Muslim Americans The American news and entertainment media have traditionally represented the Arab world in two fashions: 1) as an uncivilized place in which violent male despots oppress subdued women (barbarization), and 2) as a mysterious and exotic place in which desires repressed in the West can be acted out (exoticization)� Both strategies are Orientalist in that they represent “the Orient” as essentially different from, and inferior to, the West� While Arabs are driven by instincts (sex drive, power drive, etc�) and lack self-control, the West, endowed with the faculty of reason, has left these instincts behind in 14 See the complete study online http: / / www�ns�umich�edu/ Releases/ 2004/ Jul04/ daas� pdf� 224 k atharina M otyl favor of civilization� 15 Until mid-twentieth century, the figures of the sheik lusting after Western virgins, the mysterious veiled woman, and the seductive bellydancer dominated representations of Arabs in U�S� popular culture� However, while these discourses represented Arabs in monolithic, inferiorizing ways, Arabs were not yet portrayed as a threat� Only when U�S� interests in the Middle East and Arab interests grew increasingly apart since the 1960s, epitomized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War (Six-Day War) and the oil embargo of the early 1970s, did the U�S� entertainment media start to portray Arabs as enemies threatening America/ the West� 16 In Hollywood Blockbusters such as True Lies (1994), in which a Palestinian terrorist group named “Crimson Jihad” infiltrates the U.S. and plants a nuclear bomb in the Florida Keys that threatens to kill two million Americans, which is, of course, averted when a special agent (Arnold Schwarzenegger) kills the jihadis and warns the Floridians so that, very plausibly, no one is hurt by the nuclear bomb’s detonation, Arabs have been featured as villains and/ or the Arab world has been vilified. At the same time, very few Hollywood movies have depicted Arabs in humane terms, let alone portrayed Arab/ Islamic culture in a positive light (cf� Shaheen 2009)� Thus, negative representations have not been balanced out by positive representations, damaging the image of Arabs with Americans at large� As for the news media, events in the Arab/ Muslim world (as I will discuss, media discourses often conflate the two categories) only receive coverage when they are relevant to U�S� interests, e�g� involve oil or terrorism, while “real life” in the area is never reported on, and thus veiled - a phenomenon Edward Said termed “covering Islam” in his eponymous study of 1981. What the representations of Arabs in the corporate news and entertainment media since the 1960s have in common, is to portray Arabs as inferior to, less civilized than and posing a threat to Americans� By portraying Arabs in this fashion, the media have effected two things. First, they have justified U.S. intervention in the Middle East� For if Arabs are in need of civilization and pose a threat to America, the U�S�, the logic goes, clearly has a right to intervene in the Middle East� Thus, the corporate media’s portrayal of Arabs has effectively served a neocolonialist agenda� Second, the byproduct of the media’s vilification of Arabs in the Middle East has been the racialization of Arabs in the U�S� While the racialization of other groups served a domestic agenda - e�g� the appropriation of aboriginal land in the case of Native Americans or the consolidation of chattel slavery in the case of African Americans - scholars agree that the racialization of Arab Americans has been tied to events in the Middle East� For instance, Baha Abu-Laban and Michael Suleiman observe 15 While Orientalism started out as a European discourse on “the Orient” in the Enlightenment era, it was later “exported” to the Americas by European colonialists (cf� Said 2003 [1978]). 16 For an in-depth discussion of the representation of Arabs in Hollywood films since the early twentieth century, see Jack Shaheen’s comprehensive study Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2009), or Tim Jon Semmerling’s analysis “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear (2006) . No Longer a Promised Land 225 that the source of bias against Arabs in the U�S� relates “more to the original homeland and peoples than to the Arab-American community” (5)� Before I explain in detail why it is appropriate to conceive of Arab Americans’ marginalization as racialization, let me contrast the media image of Arabs I have previously outlined with demographic data� As I mentioned before, the entertainment media already vilified Arabs before September 11� What changed after 9/ 11 is that representations of Arabs as terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists have largely replaced all other Orientalist tropes, such as the rich oil sheik or the cunning despot lusting after Western women� 17 Moreover, a novelty of post-9/ 11 film and TV productions is the depiction of American Arabs and American Muslims as “perfidious and traitorous citizens” (Shaheen 2008: 46). TV dramas have been especially prolific in propagating the stereotype of the “Arab American neighbor as terrorist�” According to communications scholar Jack Shaheen, more than 50 programs, including audience hits like The Practice and Sleeper Cell , have portrayed Arab and Muslim Americans as threats to national security, as “backward religious radicals who merit profiling, imprisonment, torture, and death” (ibid� 47)� Fox’s hit series 24 has been particularly damaging: super agent Jack Bauer frequently uses torturing methods on Muslim and Arab (American) characters that real U�S� government agents have used on terror suspects, e�g� waterboarding� Some programs, especially courtroom dramas like Law & Order , discuss the alleged trade-off between Arabs’ and Muslims’ civil liberties and national security in more nuanced ways - a common strategy is to have the prosecutor point out the threat of Arab and Muslim Americans to national security while the defense lawyer cites the universality of civil liberties� However, these programs ultimately advocate that racist practices against Arab and Muslim Americans are wrong, but necessary in the “War on Terror�” According to media scholar Evelyn Alsultany, [Some] TV dramas … on the surface appear to contest the dominant positioning of Arabs as terrorists, Islam as a violent extremist ideology, and Arabs and Islam as antithetical to U�S� citizenship and the U�S� nation� These TV programs are regarded as ‘liberal’ or socially conscious as they take the stance that racism toward Arab and Muslim Americans post-9/ 11 is wrong […] Nonetheless, despite somewhat sympathetic portrayals of Arab and Muslim Americans, they narrate the logic of ambivalence - that racism is wrong but essential - and thus participate in serving the U�S� government narratives … [U]ltimately, discourses of the nation in crisis not only trump the Arab American plight, but also inadvertently support U.S. government initiatives in the ‘war on terror’ (208). The news media - which unlike the entertainment media cannot claim fictitiousness - proceed in a similar vein� While it comes as no surprise that Fox News and such right-wing pundits as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter eye Arab and Muslim Americans with suspicion, even news media with a liberal 17 However, one should bear in mind that a number of successful post-9/ 11 films have portrayed Arabs and Muslims in human terms, or even thematized the psychological toll U�S� imperialist policies in the Middle East take on the local populations� Examples include Rendition (2007), Babel (2006), and The Situation (2006)� 226 k atharina M otyl reputation report on Arab and Muslim Americans in biased ways� According to Suad Joseph and Benjamin D’Harlingue, The New York Times, which is generally known for its advocacy of civil and human rights, “narrates Arab Americans and Muslims Americans in ways that result from and enable racial policing by associating them with terrorism and a demonized, globalized Islam” (229)� Demographic Reality The media images outlined above not only portray Arabs and Muslims in negative, but also in monolithic ways, by conflating the categories Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim� Whereas the region known as the Middle East (itself a concept invented by the West) is highly heterogeneous in national, ethnic, religious and linguistic terms, U�S� discourses create the image of a Middle Eastern monolith, erasing the Other’s internal differences and thus creating the perception of a “people without history” who are only to profit from Westernization or even Western intervention� This procedure is a classic manifestation of Orientalism and underlines Edward Said’s claim that the U�S� adopted the discourses of the former colonial powers in the Arab region, Great Britain and France, after 1945� These discourses erase the differences between Arab and non-Arab Middle Easterners, such as Iranians, Turks and Armenians� Moreover, they obscure the fact that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab� Indeed, the Arab region comprises a wide range of religious denominations, including Catholics, Jews, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Maronites, to name but a few� The majority of the world’s 1�2 billion Muslims, on the other hand, does not reside in the Arab region, where 300 million Muslims live, but in South and Southeast Asia; the six countries with the largest Muslim population worldwide are Indonesia (170 million), Pakistan (136 million), Bangladesh (106 million), India (103 million), Turkey (62 million), and Iran (61 million) (Naber 2008a: 5f.). With regard to the U.S., the perception that all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arab is particularly absurd� Of the estimated 4 million Arab Americans, about 63 percent are Christian and 24 percent are Muslim, while the rest follows other religions (such as Judaism) or no religion� While it is true that Arab immigration to the U�S� since 1965 has overwhelmingly been Muslim, the majority of all Arab Americans today is still Christian� And the majority of American Muslims is not Arab� Of the 6 to 7 million Muslims living in the U�S�, Arabs make up about 25 percent� One of the largest Muslim groups in the U�S� are actually African Americans (30 percent), while 33 percent are South Asian, 4 percent each sub-Saharan African, other Asian, and converts, and 3 percent European (cf� Haddad)� 18 18 It is important to bear in mind that these are extrapolations, which explains why one research team cites the number of Muslim Arab Americans with 24 percent of 4 million (which is roughly 1 million) and another cites the number of Muslim Arab Americans No Longer a Promised Land 227 Despite this demographic reality, most Americans conceive of Arab Americans as Muslim (not least due to the media’s reductionism outlined above)� Hence, the discourse of Islamophobia is an important factor to bear in mind when theorizing the marginalization Arab Americans have experienced� Cultural Racism Classical frameworks on racialization in the U�S�, such as Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s seminal Racial Formation in the United States , have focused on the racialization of groups based on biological differences� Arab Americans have primarily not been discriminated against on grounds of biology, but rather based on the assumption that they pose a security and/ or civilizational threat to the U�S� Still, I argue, the marginalization of Arab Americans constitutes racialization, since they are constructed as essentially different� But this alleged difference is cultural, not biological� Building on Etienne Balibar, I argue that the logic operative in the racialization of Arab Americans is cultural racism. Developing his notion of cultural racism around the animus directed against immigrants in France, Balibar says: The new racism is a racism of the era of ‘decolonization’, of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space� Ideologically, current racism, which in France centres upon the immigration complex, fits into a framework of ‘racism without races’ which is already widely developed in other countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones� It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological or heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions (21)� Cultural racism, then, constructs perceived cultural (e�g� Arab), religious (e�g� Muslim), and civilizational (e�g� “the Orient”) differences as natural and insurmountable� The behavior of individuals is not explained by blood or genes, but seen as the result of their belonging to historical “cultures” (ibid�)� The differences between cultures, however, are in turn regarded as natural� Balibar explains: [B]iological or genetic naturalism is not the only means of naturalizing human behavior and social affinities. … [C]ulture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin (22)� Discourses of cultural racism may still instrumentalize biological features� Contemporary Arabophobia utilizes biological features in the racialization process; for instance, Arabs are frequently imagined as having hooked noses� with 25 percent of 6 to 7 million (which is between 1�25 and 1�75 million)� Still, these figures convey an approximate impression of the religious makeup of the Arab and Muslim communities in the U�S� 228 k atharina M otyl However, these bodily stigmata are employed as signifiers of a spiritual inheritance rather than a biological heredity (ibid� 24)� Thus, Balibar summarizes, “the return of the biological theme is permitted … within the framework of a cultural racism” (26)� The discourse of Islamophobia is especially relevant to the racialization of Arab and Muslim Americans� Structurally similar to anti-Semitism, contemporary Islamophobic discourses impute an intrinsic, malicious nature to Islam� Consider George Frederickson’s observation that anti-Judaism became anti-Semitism, and hence racism, “when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions” (19)� As I have shown, U�S� discourses since 9/ 11 present Arabs, who are constructed as all-Muslim, as malicious, rather than criticizing them for holding “false” (i.e. Muslim) beliefs. Balibar’s reflections on European Arabophobia in the early 1990s bear relevance to the racialization of Arab Americans today: [C]ontemporary Arabophobia, … carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘conception of the world’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and an enterprise of universal ideological domination, and therefore a systematic confusion of ‘Arabness’ and ‘Islamicism’ (24)� Substituting “Europeanness” with “Americanness,” one gets an adequate description of contemporary anti-Arab discourses in the U�S� The racialization of Arabs according to the logic of cultural racism is especially evident in special registration, which collapsed citizenship, ethnicity and religion into race� Consider the provision that special registration extend to “a nonimmigrant alien who is a dual national and is applying for admission as a national of a country that is not subject to special registration, but the alien’s other nationality would subject him or her to special registration” (qtd� in Bayoumi 277)� The implication that every national of a Muslimmajority country was required to register meant that if one happened to hold dual citizenship with, for instance, Sweden and Morocco, or if one was born in Morocco but was not its citizen, or if one was born out of Morocco but to parents who were Moroccan, one qualified for special registration. Citizenship of a country not listed for special registration, even if it was one’s only citizenship, did not protect one from special registration if one was born or one’s parents were born in a Muslim-majority country (ibid. 278). Thus, special registration posited that Islam was inheritable, turning a religious category into a racial one� Moustafa Bayoumi elaborates: [C]onsidering the broad geography of special registration, it makes descent or inheritability of Islam the defining criterion. And that inheritability has nothing to do with enemy nationality … Nor has it anything to do with belief or political affiliation … Rather, it is only about one’s blood relationship to Islam. Through that blood relationship, legal barriers have been established to exclude as many Muslims as possible, and that fact consequently turns Islam into a racial category (ibid�)� No Longer a Promised Land 229 Having outlined and theorized the anti-Arab climate in post-9/ 11 America, I will now turn to Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land , which powerfully imagines the toll the “War on Terror” has taken on the psyche of Arab Americans� Being Arab in the U.S. after 9/ 11 in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land Once in a Promised Land traces the trajectory of a Muslim Arab American couple from a relatively assimilated, and content - if not quite happy - life into chaos and despair in the wake of September 11� Jassim and Salwa Haddad are a couple of Jordanian and Palestinian background, respectively, who immigrated to the U�S� in their early twenties� Both are university-educated professionals� Jassim, who holds a PhD in hydrology, works as an expert on water quality control with a consulting firm, and Salwa works at a bank, supplementing her income with a second job as a realtor� The childless couple leads what could be termed a comfortable Yuppie lifestyle in Tucson, Arizona� They speak immaculate English and have a couple of friends outside the Arab American community� While both of them are Muslim by denomination, Jassim is not religious� Salwa is a secular Muslim (for example, she celebrates Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting), but neither practices the Muslim prayer rituals nor wears hijab , as the head covering of Muslimas is called� In short, neither of them conforms to the stereotypical image of “the Muslim” projected by the U�S� media, i�e� the bearded, patriarchal male and the veiled, subdued female� Although they speak Arabic at home and have their grievances with American society - Salwa, for instance, bemoans what she considers most Americans’ lack of education - both of them have embraced American culture in certain ways� Most noticeably, both have succumbed to the seductive lure of American consumerism; Jassim’s lavish salary enables him to wear designer clothes and drive a $ 50,000 Mercedes sedan, while Salwa’s predilection for silk nightwear has earned her the nickname “queen of silk pajamas�” All in all, one could say that they have integrated well into American society and live by its rules� We first meet the two protagonists on the morning of September 11, 2001, hours prior to the terrorist attacks which are to change their lives forever� While Jassim has risen early and gone for a swim, as he does every morning, Salwa allows herself to sleep a little longer: “Nestled there under cool covers … Salwa found peace, a peace she would remember for years, as it would be scratched away within the hour by men whose culture was a first cousin to her culture, whose religion was her religion” (11)� Meanwhile, Jassim is chatted up by a middle-aged man, Jack Franks, in the gym’s locker room� When Jack learns that Jassim is from Jordan, he reveals that his daughter moved there years ago: “‘She married a Jordanian� Not one like you, though� This one was from the sticks - or the sand, as the case was� […] She converted� She’s an Arab now� Probably still lives there� […] Haven’t talked to her for 230 k atharina M otyl years’” (6)� Jack proceeds to interrogate Jassim, who would prefer not to be part of this conversation, about his wife� Having learned that she is Arab, Jack first asks, “She veiled? ” (7), and, when Jassim negates this, whether she is beautiful: “This question went too far, and Jack Franks seemed to sense it� ‘No offense intended� I’m just amazed by the beauty of the women there� Incredible� The hair, the eyes� No wonder you fellas cover them up’” (7)� First of all, this episode draws attention to the fact that stereotypes about Arabs were already in place before 9/ 11� Jack can be read as an allegory of Orientalist thinking, which the media have distributed for decades with their representations of Arabs and Muslims� Jack uses “Arab” and “Muslim” interchangeably, conflating religious and ethno-cultural categories - but while one can either convert to Islam or become an Arab (by becoming a naturalized citizen of a country of the Arab League), or both, one cannot become an Arab by conversion� While Jack’s daughter most likely adopted Jordanian citizenship by marrying a Jordanian man and, assuming that he is Muslim, converted to Islam for this marriage to be possible, she certainly could not have “converted” to “Arabness�” Moreover, Jack’s primary associations with Arab women are hijab and exotic looks enticing male desire, two seemingly contradictory tropes which are, however, connected by the underlying logic that the “Orient” is lacking the civilization the West has attained, as women are oppressed and sexual desires have not (yet) been restrained� Jack explicitly denies Muslim women’s agency by asserting that men force them to wear hijab - that a woman would choose to wear hijab is unconceivable to Jack - as it is to many Westerners, I would argue� But while a Westerner may think that covering one’s hair limits one’s freedom, a Muslima who wears hijab may argue that hijab enlarges her freedom as it shields her from the male gaze� At any rate, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country in which hijab is mandatory, and there are women in Arab countries (and the U�S�) who identify as Muslim, but do not wear hijab. The use of stereotypes about Arabs, exemplified in Jack’s remarks, only intensifies after 9/ 11. Although both Salwa and Jassim abhor the terrorist acts - Jassim thinks, “What entered into someone’s mind to make him (them! ) want to do such a thing? It was incomprehensible”(20), and “Salwa had talked to her friend Randa several times … about how horrible it was” (21) - they are rendered dangerous and disloyal to the U�S� in the eyes of the American mainstream, based solely on the fact that they share the same religion and regional origins with the perpetrators of the attacks� For instance, a few days after the attacks, a shop assistant in a mall, Amber, calls security on Jassim� Enraged, Salwa confronts Amber, demanding to know why she did this: ‘Why did you call that security guard on my husband? ’ […] ‘He just scared me� […] He just stood there and stared for a really long time, like he was high or something� And then I remembered all the stuff that’s been going on�’ Here the girl stopped and looked at her as though she were checking to make sure her reference was understood� The words slid into Salwa’s understanding, narrowing and sharpening her anger� ‘I see� You thought he might want to blow up the mall in his Ferragamo shoes�’ […] No Longer a Promised Land 231 Amber’s face changed in blotches� Something seemed to be building up in her, and she blurted, ‘My uncle died in the Twin Towers�’ Salwa knew something like this was coming, had been waiting for the moment when it became spoken� ‘I am sorry to hear that� Are you planning to have every Arab arrested now? ’ (29f�)� This episode vividly illuminates the dangerous effects of the post-9/ 11 surveillance culture which followed the Bush administration’s admonition of the American public to be vigilant and report suspicious activities� Persons who seemed of “Arab phenotype” and displayed “suspicious behavior” were transformed into potential terrorists� As Amber’s actions make clear, however, any behavior, even if it was as harmless as staring, could be perceived as “suspicious behavior” if its agent seemed of “Arab phenotype�” At bottom, then, any person who seemed of “Arab phenotype” could be transformed into a potential terrorist� But another phenomenon is problematized in this episode� By invoking Jassim’s designer shoes, Salwa is clearly trying to trump her husband’s racial background with his class position� While her question “Are you planning to have every Arab arrested now? ”, criticizes the interpellation of Arabs as potential terrorists in general, she seems to think that her husband’s upper middle class background should have “bought him out” of being perceived as a potential terrorist in the first place. Rather than opposing the profiling of all Arab men, Salwa in effect critiques the profiling of Arab men who are clean-shaven and wear designer-gear� Anti-Arab racism in post-9/ 11 American society has more severe consequences for the protagonists, though, than mere unpleasant social situations such as these. Both characters eventually find themselves in precarious situations, Jassim by being at the wrong place at the wrong time, Salwa by a bad choice� Jassim accidentally hits a boy on a skateboard with his car, resulting in the teenager’s death� Salwa starts an affair with a younger WASP co-worker� To err is human� This principle does not hold for Arabs in the U�S� after September 11 - to err as an Arab, the novel posits, has devastating consequences� Since the boy Jassim hit had strong anti-Arab feelings - his skateboard is adorned with a sticker that reads “Terrorist Hunting License” (77) and he “had no hair except for a tiny tuft at the base of his neck” (119), which suggests he might have been a skinhead - the FBI starts investigating Jassim although the officer on the scene cleared him of any wrongdoing, insinuating Jassim might have killed the boy intentionally� Jassim is sucked into a Kafkaesque vortex as the FBI investigates ever more ways in which he may be connected to terrorism� While the FBI agents initially investigate him in the context of the car accident, their main concern soon becomes the fact that Jassim “oversee[s] the testing and quality control of the water supply” (229) of the city of Tucson� When asked to describe his daily routine, Jassim says: “I swim, I work, I go home� Not unlike the rest of America I suspect,” to which one of the agents tellingly replies: “That may be, but the rest of America does not have access to the entire city’s water supply with the means to tamper with it” (232)� The FBI visits Jassim at his workplace, raising suspicion with 232 k atharina M otyl some of his conservative co-workers, and contacts his clients to ask questions about him� As a consequence, various clients cancel their contracts with Jassim’s consulting firm, to Jassim’s infinite incredulity: Jassim had done nothing wrong and this was America and there should have to be proof of negligence on his part for his job to be affected� People, companies, the city, shouldn’t be able to pull accounts on the basis of his being an Arab. Yes, finally he saw what had been sitting at the back of his consciousness for some time in a not-so-whispered voice: with or against � But was he not with? I understand American society , he wanted to scream� I speak your language. I pay taxes to your government. I play your game. I have a right to be here. How could this be happening? (234) Ultimately, Jassim loses his job as a result of the FBI investigation� Jassim’s boss and friend Marcus, the prototypical liberal - “‘Are you pissing off the conservative right again, Jassim? ’” (107) - used to defend Jassim against hyperpatriotic co-workers and the FBI for a long time. He even fired a receptionist for spying and keeping a notebook on Jassim. However, when he finally learns from the FBI that Jassim killed a boy in a car accident, Marcus feels Jassim has betrayed his trust by not confiding in him, and decides to lay him off: It was no longer a matter of defending a friend, of standing up for what he believed was right� He was only a partner in the business, and it was out of his hands� […] In the lifetime of his company, Marcus had fired seven people, all administrative and technical. He had never fired someone he considered to be his equal, nor had he let someone go for such ambiguous reasons as with Jassim� He hated doing it, having to be so decisive about another person’s life� Even when things were clear-cut, he liked to give his employees a chance to redeem themselves� If they didn’t, if they continued the behavior, he always questioned himself over and over, before, during, and after the firing. If only people had a better sense and could excuse themselves when they were no longer appropriate� In this case there was no behavior to change� Jassim could not change who he was, and Marcus recognized consciously that in part he was firing him for that reason , though it would be the lost contracts and unreliability on which he would focus (295f�; emphasis added)� While Marcus has a right to be offended as a friend by Jassim’s failure to tell him about the accident, he sees Jassim not only as an untrustworthy friend, but an untrustworthy Arab friend� And if the untrustworthy Arab friend kept such crucial information from him, who knows what else Jassim may be involved in that Marcus does not know about? Though Marcus recognizes the perverse logic of firing Jassim because the latter cannot change who he is, he accepts acting on the basis of an essentialist logic, because it is no longer “profitable” for him to employ an Arab. Economic considerations, in Marcus’ thinking, ultimately trump political ones� Marcus’ liberal political thought and his profit-orientation suggest that we read Marcus as an allegory for liberal capitalism� Such a reading suggests that, like Marcus, liberal capitalism accepts minorities as long as they generate surplus value� As soon as their protection costs the system, they are on their own� Marcus’ transformation, I suggest, is the novel’s actual tragedy� If anti-Arab discourses and government practices (exemplified by the FBI’s sketchy investigation) are so perva- No Longer a Promised Land 233 sive that even liberal individuals who believe in the upholding of civil and human rights, are ultimately influenced by them, Arabs and Muslims are left with precious few allies to oppose their marginalization� Salwa even viscerally suffers as a consequence of the Orientalist discourses disseminated by the Bush administration and the corporate media� She starts an affair with Jake, the son of affluent diplomats, who, unbeknownst to Salwa, is also a white-collar drug dealer� Working at Salwa’s bank during the day, he also deals and uses hard drugs: “It was as though he were two people: one who went through the day doing what was expected of him, going to class, going to work, and one who was entirely focused on maintaining his high and having sex�” Jake, who thinks of his colleague as “the gorgeous Arab” and “[e]xotic,” uses his snippets of Arabic, which he studies in order “to learn the language of opium,” to lure Salwa, whom “he desperately wanted to make love to” (170f). Salwa, mistaking Jake’s flattery for genuine interest in her culture, finally succumbs to his courting. After a couple of exhilarating encounters, which are, however, always followed by feelings of guilt - “[A]t night, during those hours she lay awake … she was trapped by her thoughts, pinned down by the ugliness of what she had done while her clean husband lay next to her�” (191) - Salwa decides to end this affair and spend some time in Jordan to sort out her life� When she visits Jake in his apartment to break up with him, he has a rage attack and repeatedly smashes a heavy silver picture frame on her head, the broken glass and metal cutting her face, while he screams: “Bitch! Goddam fucking Arab bitch! You ruined everything! ” (322)� The post-9/ 11 vilification of Arabs figures in two ways in this act. A troubled young man unable to meet his parents’ expectations and dealing with drugs, Jake’s self-esteem is deeply shattered by this Arab Muslim woman’s breaking up with him� In the days following 9/ 11, narratives of the oppression of women in Afghanistan abounded� These narratives reinforced the image of the powerless, subdued Muslim female� Jake perceives the fact that he cannot even control a “powerless Muslim woman” as a crisis in his masculinity and self-conception� He seeks to restore his superiority by exercising the one realm in which he is superior to Salwa, i�e� physical strength� Hence, Jake’s masculinity is restored by physically punishing Salwa for her agency� On a second level, Jake’s humiliation coincides with the sense of crisis and humiliation that September 11 instilled in the American self-image� Salwa’s violent punishment for violating Jake’s sense of masculinity, then, can be read as a symbolic punishment of Arab Muslims for destroying the Twin Towers (which were, after all, phallic symbols signifying American might) and thus shattering the American self-image of being almighty, invulnerable and in control� Halaby has chosen an ambiguous ending for her novel� It is left unclear whether Salwa will survive this onslaught or die� This can, of course, be read as an ambiguous outlook on the future of Arabs in the U�S� 234 k atharina M otyl Works Cited Abu-Laban, Baha, and Michael Suleiman, eds� Arab Americans: Continuity and Change � Monograph Series no� 24� Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), 1989. 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