A Virtual Muslim is Something to Be

A Virtual Muslim Is Something to Be

Melani McAlister

American Quarterly, Volume 62, Number 2, June 2010, pp. 221-231 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0129

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| 221A Virtual Muslim Is Something to Be

©2010 The American Studies Association

A Virtual Muslim Is Something to Be

Melani McAlister

K evin Gaines’s presidential address offers us a rich genealogy of race and power in the last thirty years. It is both a tour de force survey of politically committed historical writing and a sober assessment of the

ongoing power of a deeply conservative racial politics in the United States. Gaines’s analysis begins from a strange twenty-first-century conjuncture. On the one hand, President Barack Obama’s election stands as an auspicious mo-ment of possibility for racial liberalism. Yet, on the other, it comes at a time when incarceration rather than education has become the signal apparatus of U.S. politics. As Gaines points out, for three decades our political system has massively funded prisons, warehousing African American and Latino men at astounding rates, even as it has defunded schools at every level, all but abandoning, for example, the college loan system that made higher education accessible to many middle- and lower middle-class students.

Gaines highlights the vicious continuities belying talk of a “postracial” America: not only the history of slavery and the ongoing realities of segrega-tion, but also the “racial wealth gap,” which continues to structure the lives of people of color in the United States. He also highlights the links between racial realities and recent anti-immigrant activism, and between both of these and the post-9/11 “supercarceral” state, in which Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are part of a much longer U.S. story of war and torture enacted on racialized bodies, often in the name of empire. Tracing those histories, and the more recent right-wing obsessions over immigration, race, and crime, Gaines shows us the ways in which, whatever one feels about Obama, his election was not only a triumph of civil rights, but also an unprecedented opportunity for the right wing to promote a deeply conservative racial retrenchment.

If, however, we read the election of 2008 through the lens of 9/11, we can arrive at another genealogy of the Obama moment. What I offer here is not a counterhistory, but rather an expanded set of questions about the politics and the stakes of the 2008 election. With these questions, I posit three things. First, looking carefully at the various rumors during the campaign that Obama was a Muslim, I argue that religion, as well as race, was central to the right-wing

| 222 American Quarterly

reaction against Obama. Granted, ideas about Islam have been a significant part of post-9/11 practices of political exclusion within the United States, and a kind of populist anti-Islamic sentiment has also cut a broad swath across Europe and Africa and parts of Asia. Going beyond the observation that such fear and hatred are “like” racism, I suggest that, if we are to understand their impact on the U.S. elections globally, we must unpack how anti-Muslim senti-ment acts both within and across vectors of race. Second, I propose that, if we are to understand the complex intersection of race, religion, and U.S. global power that structure our current moment, we must put the media—traditional or new, Hollywood, international, or parochial—at the center of the story. And, finally, I posit that Obama’s global popularity may be counterposed by the changing status of African Americans in the international figurations of U.S. empire. This set of questions about the contemporary operations of race, religion, and power opens up other questions, as now—more than a year into the Obama presidency—we ponder what futures may still be possible.

In February of 2008, the Republican Party of Tennessee put out a press release with the provocative headline “Anti-Semites for Obama.” Supposedly an analysis of the candidate’s Middle East policy views, the release argued that Israel’s security would be endangered if “Barack Hussein Obama” were elected president. The none-too-subtle use of the candidate’s middle name, along with a photo of Obama on a visit to Somalia, wearing what the release described as “Muslim garb” (it was in fact traditional Somali clothing), clearly insinuated that Obama had dangerous ties to Islam and was therefore opposed to Israel. But insinuation was not enough. The article also insisted that, if elected, Obama planned to hold a “Muslim summit” that would “determine [U.S.] Middle East policy.” The document was so outrageous that it was immediately disavowed by the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign.1

But if the Tennessee Republican leaders were unscrupulous, they were not stupid; their aim was clearly to build on the viral (and virulent) e-mail campaign from late 2007 that claimed that Obama was in fact a Muslim, that he refused to swear allegiance to the flag, and that, in the words of one widely circulated e-mail, when he had been sworn in as a senator, “he DID NOT use the Holy Bible but instead the Koran.” After all, the e-mail argued, “the Muslims have said they want to destroy America from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level.”2 The e-mails were obviously a compilation of misinformation and ridiculousness, and they were quickly denounced by several evangelicals, by the Republican leadership, and by prominent leaders in the Jewish community, where the campaign had also made inroads. But the rumors had a fairly profound and lasting impact, one that neither Obama’s denials


nor mainstream media debunking could undo. In September 2008, a Pew poll showed that only 46 percent of people in the United States could identify Obama as a Christian. Although most of the other 54 percent were uncertain about his religion, 13 percent of respondents declared him to be a Muslim, a misperception held almost equally by Democrats and Republicans.3

The Internet worked in a very particular and powerful way to propagate this viral “rumor-truth.” (A friend of mine, herself quite conservative and no Obama fan, told me that she was constantly arguing with her co-workers in North Carolina on this point, like the one who insisted that she knew Obama was a Muslim because she had gotten the same e-mail about it three times.) The old enthusiasms about Internet interactivity as democracy functioned not so much as reality as an enabling fiction. The e-mails gave the illusion of grassroots exposé, truth-telling by the little people against the machine, otherwise known as the “liberal media.” In fact, the e-mails were so effective in part because they worked synergistically with a conservative news media network that, though it could not itself reproduce the fictions, could nonetheless “report” on the rumors as events, and then debate their facticity, thus reproducing them again via the “old media,” which themselves have been transformed by their own desperate need to seem something other than traditional news organizations.4

I will return below to the travesty that was the Obama campaign’s response: that Obama was not now and had never been a Muslim.5 My point here is simply to highlight one obvious fact: if, as Gaines points out, it has become unseemly for any but the radical Right to admit to being racist, it is still not uncommon for people to presume that being a Muslim in the United States is tantamount to treason. Tellingly, even mainstream media outlets that debunked the misconceptions often unself-consciously referred to the Obama-as-Muslim claims as “smears,” rather than “errors.”6 So it was that, however much overt and direct antiblack racism there was in the campaign, when the birthers and their ilk really wanted to go after Obama, they circulated the dirtiest and most dangerous rumor they could think of—that he was a Muslim.7

Or, sometimes, that he was an Arab. These distinct but overlapping cat-egories are often blurred in U.S. discussions, and many people in the United States would have assumed that Muslims were Arabs and vice versa. And the name “Hussein” so nicely evoked Saddam, the mad, evil Arab dictator. So a few conservative commentators doubled down: Obama was not only Muslim; he was also an Arab—a “charge” that carried its own weird invocation of racial quantification. “Barack Hussein Obama is not half black!” argued another mis-sive from e-mail fantasyland. He “is 50 percent Caucasian from his mother’s side and 43.75 percent Arabic and 6.25 percent African Negro from his father’s


side.” When a John McCain supporter pronounced Obama an Arab, McCain “defended” him by responding, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen.”8 Whatever the census says about Arabs being “white,” their explosion into hypervisibility and presumed indecency combined with the perverse logic of the blood quantum make clear their embodiment as racialized subjects. Certainly, these various evocations show us again how much the U.S. political imaginary has wrapped the two categories of Arab and Muslim around each other, in a messy, twined embrace.9

But there is another use of Obama’s name, one equally relevant to contem-porary contours of global power. As the U.S. election neared, people in the Middle East also referred to the candidate by his full name: “Barack Hussein Obama.” In that context, the repetition became a hope-against-hope inference that perhaps Obama was influenced by the fact that he has Muslim family members, that part of his family history lies in modern Africa, that his first two names are Arab names as well—“Barack” (blessed) and “Hussein” (the diminu-tive for one who is suitable, good, handsome). This repetition also intended to claim linkage, but with very different affects.10 From what I understand, the name is still sometimes used quietly in places like Egypt to suggest that, even with the stalemate on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the escalation in Afghanistan, it may yet be possible to believe that Obama is something other than “just” an (African) American.

After all, for more than a decade, media images have taught a clear lesson to millions of people in the United States and around the world: being African American does not necessarily mean that one is at the margins of the American empire. Rather, as Moustafa Bayoumi has argued, U.S. film and television not infrequently present African Americans as the benevolent face of U.S. power—as those who are both able to connect more easily with the brown peoples of the world and to represent Americanness most thoroughly. Movies from The Siege to The Kingdom and TV shows such as Sleeper Cell offer a media universe in which African Americans, connecting on a human level with Arab characters, challenge the racism and ignorance of others around them.11 In The Siege, for example, the army general played by Bruce Willis faces off against Denzel Washington’s FBI agent over whether the United States will become a militarized police state, rounding up Arabs (the view of the Willis character), or a law-bound society that can distinguish between “good Arabs” and bad terrorists (the view of Washington’s FBI agent). Similarly, the Muslim African American FBI agent in Sleeper Cell constantly insists that the terrorists are an abomination to his religion.


These Hollywood images ignore or revise the long history of African American opposition to U.S. global expansionism.12 They also elide domestic racism. Although the African American characters often do speak certain truths about race—they discuss racism or perhaps just mention that “America is not perfect”—this nod to racial injustice is both inoculation (the acknowledgment acts as protection against further critique of the state) and proof of exemplary righteousness (the African American characters forgive America for its sins). In this model, Hollywood offers African Americans who articulate a firm sense of the rightness of U.S. power when it is wielded rightly. And it provides viewers in the United States (African American and non–African American alike), as well as audiences across the globe, a vision of U.S. power “softened” by its articulation through black bodies.13

Of course such media images are fictional. They are part of that distinc-tive, delusional Hollywood universe in which (according to TV cop shows at least) African American women are at least 25 percent of the judges in the U.S. court system. Without this universe, and its impressive number of filmic black presidents, brigadier generals, and company presidents in the last twenty years, Morgan Freeman would have hardly worked at all. In Hollywood’s vi-sion, then, African Americans are cast not only in traditionally stereotyped roles as criminals, victims, or “buddies”; they are just as visible as enforcers of state and corporate power.

To take these facts of representation seriously does not at all mean that we step back and simply celebrate this staged empowerment of African Americans. Far from it. As Gaines has made clear, our task is to insistently remember the politics of incarceration, impoverishment, and right-wing retrenchment, as well as the importance of social movements for justice, the fight for education, and even the social power of something as simple as Robert Moses’s insistence on the right to learn math. The media’s fantasies of equality-in-empire are just that. But they do remind us of a reality that we ignore at our peril: African Americans can and do represent America—to Americans, and to the world. And they do this, not just as leaders in U.S. popular culture globally (Michaels Jordan and Jackson) or as participants in public diplomacy efforts (musicians on cold war jazz tours or contemporary writers invited to read at U.S. embas-sies abroad), but also as holders of real power.14

Before Obama, after all, came Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. And Powell, for one, was there long before most of the African American–Arab buddy films imagined such a figure. The man who led the U.S. military to vic-tory in the first war against Iraq in 1991, and who at one time pundits thought


might have become the first African American president, who then lost a power struggle as secretary of state to none other than Condoleezza Rice—it was this man who finally said what the Obama campaign would not say, that being a Muslim did not disqualify someone from being president of the United States. Busy establishing the candidate’s Christian credentials, the Obama campaign left it to Powell to point out that Muslim children should also be able to dream the American dream.15 In doing so, Powell took quiet ownership of one of the central tenets of U.S. patriotic mythology. Rice had done this in a very dif-ferent way when, as national security advisor, she bested Powell in a political struggle about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, proving that she was far more than a feminist symbol. She was a powerful, effective, and sometimes ruthless global spokesperson for post–cold war U.S. global hegemony. And yet, in the very act of occupying their positions as unabashed global Americans, both Powell and Rice implicitly played roles that Hollywood also assigned many of its black characters: black leaders as righteousness insurance.

To highlight the role of the media, then, is not only to analyze their construc-tion of images or their misrepresentation of reality; it is also to question the kind of thinking that has become “common sense” in our time. We need to look as much for the transformations as the continuities in U.S. racial formation, and to ask hard questions about how religion, migration, and international relations are remapping race in a global frame.

One of the most powerful aspects of Gaines’s argument is his linking of the Right’s hatred of Obama and the virulence of the anti-immigrant movement in recent years. That movement is often focused on Latinos, of course, but Arabs, among others, also feel its force. In the attacks on Obama as a non-American, we see how he is produced not only as black but as “brown”—as one of the discursively brown people for whom citizenship is presumed to be an honor rather than a right, no matter what their legal status. At the same time, Obama’s blackness—his African father and his self-identification as African American—also made him more susceptible to the accusation of be-ing a crypto-Muslim. The discursive link between “black” and “Muslim” has multiple roots, including the religious identities of some enslaved Africans. In the mid-twentieth century, Islam served as a religious and political resource for a range of African American activists and intellectuals.16 Today, although that political history is often submerged, African Americans constitute some 20 percent of the U.S. Muslim population. (African American converts to Islam represent only about 1 percent of the African American population; the relative size of that community means they are a significant proportion, nevertheless, of the Muslim population overall.) Thus, African Americans of


any religion are more likely than most other Americans to be kept in place by their “Muslimization.”17

Keeping in mind these messy forms of racialization, we nonetheless need to be clear that anti-Muslim sentiment exists independently. It is not a stand-in for race as much as it is a willingness to hate across lines of race. Whether Muslims are presumed to be brown or black or white (Arabs and Iranians are counted as white in the U.S. census), they are consistently singled out as immoral. We have seen it in the outrageous sermons by the likes of televangelist Rod Parsley and statements by Southern Baptist leader Jerry Vines that denounced Mo-hammed as “demon-possessed.”18 Perhaps this seems overly obvious. Certainly many Christians and Jews understand it fully, and the rise of dialogue groups, ecumenical prayer groups, conferences on “Abrahamic religions,” and the like is one indication of the well-intended attempts to construct a post-9/11 version of the “Judeo-Christian” civil religion of the cold war era. However, the fear of Islam is often subtler; it lies in the presumptions about gender, modernity, or theological rigidity that travel in secular as well as religious culture. Indeed, since 9/11, secular pundits who likely never gave a moment’s thought to religion as a category of analysis, or who focused only on the social beliefs of religious people (Catholics’ views on abortion, for example), have spawned a media industry devoted to unpacking the theological tenets of Islam and examining whether these are inherently “violent” or “intolerant” or “sexist.”19

This is not just about the religious Right, then, or about religious activists per se. It is about the ways in which Americans of all sorts deal with secular-ization, religious diversity, and transnational identifications. There has been a significant decline in the proportion of Christians in the United States over the last forty years (down from 89 percent in 1969 to 76 percent in 2008). This is partly due to increased numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, but it is also due to the rise in the numbers of people who say they have “no religion”—by far the fastest growing group in religious identification surveys.20 Anxiety about this increasing secularization is apparent; in public opinion polls, atheists are still viewed far more negatively than any other group.21 And the populist disgust over liberal chardonnay is surely linked with a suspicion that wine bars do not mix with church socials.

At the same time, the general unease about faith is also about the trans-national politics of religion. The global competition between Islam and Christianity for adherents and influence is intense, especially in Africa and in much of Europe. U.S. Christians who are paying attention now understand that they are part of a religious community whose numerical center is moving rapidly southward—to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.22 For many, black or


white or Latino, identification as “Christian” now includes a normative call for a transnational (and postnationalist) identity. “I can’t help but pay atten-tion to global issues,” a white U.S. evangelical once told me. “I’m part of a third-world religion.”

Thinking about religion, then, almost always requires us to think both across and about the boundaries of the nation. Gaines shows us the links between anti-immigrant and antiblack politics, exploring the creative rebranding of a racism that dares not speak its name, but which has continued to reinvent itself throughout what Gaines calls the “Reagan-Cheney-Bush era.” But it is increasingly clear that the history of the Right in the last decades—indeed, the history of the United States overall—is not only a history of race and class and region and gender. It is, and has been, a history of religion as well.

When Obama was elected, people around the world, including the Middle East, celebrated joyfully. News outlets everywhere captured photos of school-children happily holding up images of Obama. After eight years of the Bush administration, the very notion that a U.S. president would be celebrated on the streets of Ramallah and Cairo (not to mention Lagos and London) seemed impossibly, wonderfully strange.

Arabs (Christian and Muslim) and Muslims around the world recognized the world-historic importance of the election of an African American as president. And when, quoting the Qur’an in Cairo in 2009, Obama promised a “new dawn,” this was clearly more significant than President Bush’s half-hearted gestures of embrace.23 We now have an administration that takes diplomacy more seriously, and that approaches the world with a greater commitment to shared power. It matters, too, that Obama wants to close Guantanamo. But he has not, and perhaps will not do so. Knowing that the place is both a moral travesty and a public relations disaster, the administration finds itself at a po-litical impasse with a Congress that, having supported the mass warehousing of people of color in U.S. prisons and INS detention centers, now balks at imprisoning the “radical Muslims” from Guantanamo on home turf. By now, the world also well knows that Barack Hussein Obama is not a Muslim, and that, fine speeches and middle names aside, he now leads the most expansive military and political power in history. A little more than a year into the Obama presidency, it is clear that the war in Iraq is far from over, and that the war in Afghanistan may have only just begun. U.S. military spending is now the highest it has been since World War II.24 As we face the realities of predator drones and the security state, what matters is not so much whether Obama is a Muslim or a Christian, or whether he is black or white or other. What matters, in the end, is that he is an American, and a president, in an age of empire.


Notes I would like to thank Stephanie Batiste, Ruth Feldstein, and Curtis Marez for their valuable, detailed

comments on a draft of this essay. I owe a special debt to Evelyn Alsultany, who not only commented on the essay but also forwarded me documents from her current research on images of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 and shared insights from her manuscript in progress.

1. Jonathan Martin, “GOP Warns Tenn. GOP on ‘Hussein,’” Politico, February 27, 2008, online at http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0208/RNC_warns_Tenn_GOP_on_Hussein.html/. The press release was pulled from the Tennessee RNC Web site, but is available at http://www.talking-pointsmemo.com/images/2008-02-27-tn_gop_obama.jpg/. This and other Internet addresses cited in the notes were accessed in December 2009.

2. Jess Henig and Emi Kolawole, “Sliming Obama: Dueling Chain E-Mails Claim He’s a Radical Muslim or a ‘Racist’ Christian. Both Can’t Be Right. We Find Both Are False,” January 11, 2008, Newsweek.com, http://www.newsweek.com/id/91424/page/1/, discusses the e-mail at some length.

3. “McCain Gains on Issues, but Stalls as Candidate of Change,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, September 18, 2008, at http://people-press.org/report/450/presidential-race-remains-even/.

4. See Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004).

5. “Obama Has Never Been a Muslim, and Is a Committed Christian,” Organizing for America (Obama campaign Web site), November 12, 2007, at http://www.barackobama; com/factcheck/2007/11/12/obama_has_never_been_a_muslim_1.php#pbs-on-emails/.

6. “Smears 2.0,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2007, at http://articles.latimes.com/2007/dec/03/opinion/ed-obama3/.

7. The scholarly work on representations of and about Muslims in the United States has increased dra-matically in recent years. I won’t attempt a survey of that material here. Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004), Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Thomas Kidd’s American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) are important recent books. Evelyn Alsultany has done groundbreaking work on media images of Muslims, including “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Non-Profit Advertising Post-9/11,” in Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States, ed. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister, 593–622 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

8. The exchange between McCain and the supporter took place at a campaign rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, on October 10, 2008. A clip is available on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnRU3ocIH4/. See also James Zogby, “John McCain, I Am an Arab and a ‘Decent Man’,” Huffington Post, October 11, 2008, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/john-mccain-i-am-an-arab_b_133884.html/.

9. There has been a good deal of important work on Arabs and race, including the valuable collection Race and Arab Americans before and after September 11th: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. Nadine Naber and Amaney Jamal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), in which see particularly Naber’s “Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations” (1–45) and Alsultany’s “The Primetime Plight of Arab-Muslim-Americans after 9/11: Configurations of Race and Nation in TV Dramas” (204–28). Moustafa Bayoumi has written an excellent analysis of the ways in which religion (Islam) has been used as a legal criterion for determining the race of Arabs in “Racing Religion,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 267–93.

10. Mushtak Parker, “All Eyes on Barack Hussein Obama,” Arab News, January 20, 2009 (Jidda, Saudi Arabia). See also an article in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Watan, which argued that Obama’s openness and “diverse social upbringing” gave observers hope for the White House. Editorial, “Nawaya Obama l’al-masalha ma` al-`Alam al-Islami ̀ ala al-mahak” (At Stake: Obama’s Intention for Reconciling with the Muslim World), Al Watan, January 22, 2009, online at http://www.alwatan.com.sa/news/alwa-tanop2.asp?id=4309&issueno=3037#commit/. At the same time, political commentators in the Arab world sometimes criticized this reasoning as naive. As Gamal Al-Ghitany of Cairo’s Al-Adab weekly commented: “My feelings are not influenced by his African roots or his middle name (Hussein), as I do not form my opinions on the basis of anyone’s religion, whatever it may be.” See also “The Social


Significance of Obama’s Election,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Web commentary, December 8, 2008, at http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=22510&prog=zgp&proj=zme/. Thanks to Julie Haimann for help with Arabic translation.

11. Moustafa Bayoumi, “The Race Is On,” presentation at the American Studies Association Conference, November 6, 2008. I made a similar argument in my review of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, published on the now defunct Libertas blog, November 21, 2007, reposted now on the Enduring America Web site, at http://enduringamerica.com/2010/01/16/from-the-archives-iraq-on-the-us-big-screen-november-2007/.

12. Here Kevin Gaines’s work has been crucial. See especially his American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). See also Penny von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–57 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

13. Stephanie Batiste was extremely helpful in sharpening this argument. Her own work argues that the most powerful anti-imperialist gesture of black popular culture and performances of race, which historically included both complicity in and resistance to U.S. imperialisms, was a sincere recogni-tion of the humanity of the colonized “other.” See Batiste, “Epaulettes and Leaf Skirts, Warriors and Subversives: Black National Subjectivity in Macbeth and Haiti,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23.2 (April 2003): 154–85.

14. I don’t mean to suggest that cultural power is not real, but only that African Americans have played roles at a variety of levels, including and beyond their significant status as global cultural representa-tives. Recent scholarship on this cultural/political role includes Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Walter Lefeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 2002).

15. Meet the Press, October 19, 2008. See also Seth Colter Walls and Nico Pitney, “Colin Powell Endorses Obama,” Huffington Post, October 19, 2008, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-endorses-oba_n_135895.html/; and “Q&A: Barack Obama,” Christianity Today, January 2008, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/januaryweb-only/104-32.0.html.

16. See Edward Curtis, “Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics: Black Muslims in the Era of the Arab Cold War,” in Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister, 683–709 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2001; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 84–124.

17. Marie Griffith and I discuss the demographics of U.S. religious adherents in some detail in “Intro-duction: Is the Public Square Still Naked?” in Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States. The estimates on African American Muslims vary widely. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life did a 2007 survey of African Americans that estimated that 1 percent of African Americans are Muslim. “A Religious Portrait of African Americans,” January 30, 2009, at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=389/. On the percentage of U.S. citizens who are Muslim, see Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008, Survey Report, March 2009, at http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/. The Muslim American community is about 65 percent foreign born, equally divided between immigrants from Arab countries and those from South Asia (India and Pakistan). Of the approximately one-third who are native born, about one-half are African American. See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” May 22, 2007, at http://pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf/.

18. Rod Parsley, a major figure in the Pentecostal community, leads a church in Cincinnati and has a large TV and Internet following. See http://www.rodparsley.com/. See also Rod Parsley, “Islam: Deception of Allah,” in Silent No More (Lake Mary, Fla.: Charisma House / Frontline, 2006), 89–118. Jerry Vines is a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. See “Muslims Angered by Baptist Criticism,” CNN.com, June 13, 2002, at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/ 06/13/cf.crossfire/. See also Melani McAlister, “What Would Jesus Do? Evangelicals, the Iraq War, and the Struggle for Position,” in America and Iraq: Policy-Making, Intervention, and Regional Politics, ed. David Ryan and Patrick Kiely (New York: Routledge, 2009), 123–53.

19. The books produced by this media industry are too numerous to list, let alone survey. See, for example, one by the nuclear physicist Moorthy S. Muthuswamy, Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).


20. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) identifies this trend since 1990, and highlights the near doubling of those who say they have “no religion” in that period. See http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/reports/p1a_belong.html/. Gallup describes a similar decline, from 91 percent in 1948 to 76 percent today, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/117409/easter-smaller-percentage-americans-christian.aspx/.

21. A 2006 University of Minnesota study found that Americans saw atheists as the group least likely to share their vision of social good, and nearly half said they would disapprove of one of their children wanting to marry an atheist, whereas 33 percent said they would not want their child to marry a Muslim. Penny Edgell, the study’s lead researcher, described attitudes toward atheists as “a glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years.” See John Allen Paulos, “Who’s Counting: Distrusting Atheists,” ABC.com, April 2, 2006, at http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1786422&page=1/.

22. See Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Robert Wuthnow takes issue with this position, pointing out that the argument that Christianity is now centered in the “global south” does not take into account the disparities of wealth and power between U.S. churches and the rest of the world. Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

23. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning,” speech at Cairo University, June 4, 2009, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/remarks-by-the-president-at-cairo-universi-ty-6-04-09/.

24. See Carl Conetta, An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in U.S. Defense Spending (Cambridge, Mass.: Project on Defense Alternatives, 2010), available at http://www.comw.org/pda/budgetreview2010.html/.

A Virtual Muslim is Something to Be

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