The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom

by Sahar F. Aziz

Why does a country with religious liberty enmeshed in its legal and social structures produce such overt prejudice and discrimination against Muslims? Sahar Aziz’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how race and religion intersect to create what she calls the Racial Muslim. Comparing discrimination against immigrant Muslims with the prejudicial treatment of Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and African American Muslims during the twentieth century, Aziz explores the gap between America’s aspiration for and fulfillment of religious freedom. With America’s demographics rapidly changing from a majority white Protestant nation to a multiracial, multireligious society, this book is an in dispensable read for understanding how our past continues to shape our present—to the detriment of our nation’s future.

Genres: Islam

357 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 30, 2021

Reviews

[Sofia Ali-Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant. It's extremely readable, deeply cited, and builds a cohesive argument on how Muslims have come to be racialized as Muslim in America. This book offers tremendous historical insight on the evolution of American racism and how it has previously been applied to ethnic and religious groups, and how those groups have or have not overcome the exclusion from whiteness. Ultimately, Aziz asks the most pressing questions: can Muslim Americans win freedom and equality without making a claim to whiteness, in alliance with all of those Americans who have been relegated to the other side of whiteness?