can create false assumptions about theological similarity among faiths because they are associated with a particular racial group, such as the association of Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Sikhism with South Asian Americans. Aggravated by most Americans’ lack of knowledge about these faiths, this conflation of geographic identity and religious theology generates assumptions that religions with divergent practices, beliefs, and scriptures, are theologically similar due to the racial commonality of their adherents. Sikhism, for example, has been treated as theologically similar to Islam or Hinduism—words such as “offshoot” and “sect” are often used—when it is in fact a revealed religion with its own scripture and historic line of gurus (religious authorities).
The racialization of religion can also produce situations of “mistaken identity,” in which membership in a racial group causes members of one religion to be assumed to be members of another. When this occurs, social trends like Islamophobia can have effects not just on Muslim Americans but also on those mistaken for them because of race. South Asians and others, regardless of their actual religious affiliation, have faced attacks because their race connotes a religious identity that the American public imagines to be disloyal and unpatriotic.46 Sometimes even a “foreign” name is enough to create a target. In the 1970s and 1980s, some Indian Americans with the last name Shah faced harassment as a result of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Shah is a common family name in parts of India. Daily news reporting had made the phase “the Shah of Iran” ubiquitous in US culture; even though the Shah was a US ally, and “Shah” was a title and not a name, the phrase and the name became associated with Iran as a foreign enemy of the US. I have a friend whose family—the Shahs of Shaker Heights, Ohio—received so many telephone calls with death threats that they decided to change and delist their telephone number.
In the months after 9/11, media images of Osama Bin Laden and Afghan Taliban leaders, Muslims who wear a type of turban, customary in parts of Afghan culture, produced the belief that Sikh men were followers of an Islamic sect. Balbar Singh Sodhi, a gas station attendant killed in a “9/11 backlash” attack in Arizona, was a victim of “mistaken identity”—murdered not for being Sikh, but for being mistaken as Muslim.47 In the years since 9/11, Sikh Americans continue to be profiled and targeted for violence as a result of the erroneous association of turbans with Islam. Sikh American scholar Jaideep Singh has identified a new American racial classification, “Apparently Muslim,”48 which involves state action like humiliating searches of turbans performed by airport security and private discrimination in restaurants and other accommodations.49 Whether we diagnose these incidents as symptoms of a lack of information or a disregard for accuracy, the experiences that Sikhs and others, including myself, have had during police stops and airport searches arise from a theological misunderstanding of our brown skin.
The racialization of religion reinforces and exacerbates the marginalization and devaluation of minority religious groups.50 When a belief system is rendered illegitimate, the ideas, images, and items associated with that religion may no longer appear to hold religious value in the eyes of those in power and can be appropriated for a variety of uses. Western appropriation of Hindu terms such as karma and guru can reflect distortions and decontextualizations of the theological meaning of those terms.51 The commodification of religious images and ideas allows the sale of Native American “dream catchers,” statues of the Buddha as home decor, and the replication of religious imagery for secular use—such as placing Hindu god and goddess images on candles, perfume, and clothing. Reducing Hinduism’s vibrant anthropomorphic representation of gods and goddesses to a consumer product permits them to be seen as cartoonish and theologically invalid—“false gods,” in the words of some government officials.52 Scholar Jane Naomi Iwamura reminds us that the “the change in Americans’ perceptions of Asian religions from ‘heathen’ cultures to romanticized traditions should not necessarily be taken as a sign of social progress.… These viewpoints are also shaped by how we have come to know the spiritual East—namely, through mass media representations and channels of consumption. There is much at work in our pursuit of Asian religions, far beyond the noble desire for universal understanding and world peace.”53
One irony in the treatment of these faiths as new and foreign is that some, such as Asian American faith traditions, are of more ancient origin than Christianity. Yet they are perceived as new—even grouped with “new age” beliefs—in mainstream American society. This perception exists precisely because for centuries federal law excluded Asians by favoring Protestant Christianity and Whiteness (and thus immigrants of northern European origins) and by expressly barring Asians from immigration and citizenship.54
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 gave renewed sanction to the White Christian supremacist movement. Even before then, but more so since, virtually every national discussion involving Islam has been framed around questions of national security. Faced with a particular set of political movements around the world, which invoke Islam to rally support for or opposition to various regimes and ideas, the US response has been to reimagine the entire religion as a foreign enemy. The Global War on Terror was also being waged within our borders. In the decade after 9/11, perhaps one of the biggest concerns of Muslim Americans was their experience of large-scale arrests across the nation. Hundreds of immigrants were rounded up in the months after the terrorist attacks, often on flimsy evidence or simply on the basis of national origin. It is estimated that more than 5,000 individuals were arrested, the vast majority of them non-citizens who were deported after spending months in detention.55
During the same time period, an entire “War on Terror” public relations industry and culture developed, fueled and funded by a few charitable organizations. A network of organizations, right-wing think tanks, “scholars,” and activists generated and circulated propaganda to rally support for the detention and surveillance of American Muslims and for military actions abroad. These “disinformation experts” produced and disseminated books, policy reports, blogs, websites, and lectures designed to stoke fears of Islam and Muslims. Between 2001 and 2009, a small number of charitable organizations provided $42.6 million to produce information spreading hate and fear.56 The culture of the War on Terror means that Muslims and Islam are only seen through a post-9/11 lens, never on their own terms.57
In 2010, this anti-Muslim complex seized on a proposed expansion of the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center in lower Manhattan to imagine and popularize what became known as the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy. The Park 51 expansion project was designed as a community center that was to include far more elements than an Islamic prayer space alone. Two blocks away from the World Trade Center site, it was designed to include a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Its opponents, however, peddled the idea that Park 51 was a mosque to be built on Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. They raged that “the Muslims” were trying to take over the site and Park 51 would be their “victory mosque” in celebration of the Twin Towers’ destruction. The controversy reached its zenith that summer, and became a talking point for Republican elected officials and candidates up and down the ballot in advance of the 2010 federal midterm elections. To hear the media report on it, a mosque in lower Manhattan sounded like a new, unprecedented development. In fact, Muslim American communities had been present in Lower Manhattan long before 2010. At least two mosques existed near the World Trade Center, and several designated Muslim prayer rooms had existed within the World Trade Center buildings themselves before 2001.58
The Park 51 mosque controversy roiled the nation. CNN and FOX News polls showed about two-thirds59 of Americans opposed the building of the mosque. 9/11 survivors and victims’ families could be found on both sides of the debate, with some calling the plan offensive or insensitive because the perpetrators of the attacks had acted in the name of Islam. A number said that it was not an issue of freedom of religion, property rights, or racism, but rather that locating the center so close to Ground Zero was insensitive to the families of those killed.60 Commentators invoked a combination of American nationalism and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich declared: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”61
Voices like Gingrich’s, particularly among