Fear in Our Hearts. Caleb Iyer Elfenbein
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is my attempt to share with you some of what I’ve learned in search of answers. It’s one of my main hopes that reading this book will offer an opportunity for you to learn about a significant part of Muslim experiences in the United States and, at the same time, to reflect on where we find ourselves as a country today. Anti-Muslim activity tells us as much about the state of core American values in general as it does about the particular experiences of American Muslims.
Fear plays a big role in this book. Fear is a significant part of our public life in general, and fear of Muslims has become more and more common over the past twenty years. It’s worth considering whether we’re better off as a country for letting fear of Muslims contribute to the normalization of what I call “public hate.” The experiences of vulnerable people in our midst are a very good measure of where we are as a society in relation to our stated core values of equality.
If you are reading this book and you are Muslim, I hope that it helps you to feel seen by allies and to know that your experiences matter to people who aren’t Muslim.
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Before we get much further, I’d like to tell you just a little bit about the sources I use and the decisions I made about that data that we will discuss throughout this book.
Like anyone who has questions, I started out just trying to find whatever was already out there that could help me answer them. In my case that meant reading work being done by scholars and journalists on Muslim experiences in the United States. I did have a head start on the search because back in 2011 I had put together a course at Grinnell College called Being Muslim in America. Coming just after a big controversy in late 2010 involving a proposed mosque and community center in lower Manhattan, I had wanted to learn more about people’s experiences of being Muslim in the United States from the country’s beginning through today. The reading I did back then provided me with an excellent foundation for a renewed exploration in 2015.
I quickly realized that lots more people had been writing on this subject since I had first started looking years earlier. I build upon the work of other people throughout this book.1
As I continued my research, I also began reading as many news reports about anti-Muslim activity as I could get my hands on. I wanted to learn about what Muslims across the country were experiencing in their lives as anti-Muslim sentiment seemed to be growing into a larger presence in public life. Soon, I had students working with me collecting articles. We began adding each news report to a dataset of anti-Muslim incidents, which we used to start a website called Mapping Islamophobia.2 This original dataset, the first of its kind, has over fifteen hundred news reports and allows us to identify trends in anti-Muslim activity. I’ve learned so much from reading all of these articles.
I’ve tried to be very careful about the sources I’ve used. My general rule has been to use information from newspapers that have a clear editorial policy and chain of command. Whenever possible I use articles from local newspapers. I want to be sure that you, as my reader, can trust the information I’m giving you.3 Establishing that trust is how you and I become a “we” as we move together through this book.
Introduction
Late in 2018, I was part of a team at Grinnell College that put together a national poll asking Americans a set of questions relating to national identity.1 Among them was a question about being a “real” American. We asked respondents to rank twelve different traits on a scale from not important to very important.
Topping the list of traits, over 90 percent of respondents reported that believing in treating people equally was essential to being a real American. Approximately 80 percent said that accepting people of different racial and religious backgrounds was also very important.
At the same time, nearly a quarter of people who responded said that having been born in America was very important to being a “real” American. Just as many said that it was very important to be Christian. Approximately 20 percent said that accepting people of different religious and racial backgrounds was not very important to being a real American. I’ll call these respondents “nativist.”
Based on these numbers, it would be tempting to dismiss nativist American respondents as exceptions to a more general rule of tolerance and acceptance. In a way, that might be the case. But the reality of American life is a lot messier than a poll can capture.
Take, for example, attitudes about American Muslims. About half of the general public has doubts about the extent to which Muslims really want to be part of life in this country and whether they can truly dedicate themselves to American values. These numbers show that it’s not just nativist Americans who question whether Muslims can be real Americans.
A good number of people who report believing wholeheartedly in treating all people equally and accepting people from different backgrounds also think that Muslims could be an exception to that rule. I’m not doubting people’s sincerity when they report a deep belief in equality and acceptance. But I’ve been asking myself why so many people see Muslims as a possible exception—and the answer I’ve come to might not be what you expect.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, traumatized the country. They left us feeling vulnerable and fearful in ways that many Americans had never experienced. Crimes targeting Muslims (and others assumed to be Muslim) skyrocketed once the identities of the attackers became clear. People from across the political and ideological spectrum argued that law enforcement and other security officials should profile Muslims to prevent further attacks. In general, Muslims in the United States entered the national spotlight as never before, often with harmful effects.
It would be easy to draw a straight line from the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, to the doubts that many Americans report having about the place of Muslims in the fabric of the country today. In fact, it’s too easy for us to draw this line. Explaining contemporary anti-Muslim hostility simply as an extension of the fear that many Americans felt after September 11 makes it too easy to avoid asking hard questions about the state of public life in our country.
Anti-Muslim sentiment today is certainly connected to the aftermaths of September 11 and to the fears that reappear every time there is some kind of attack in which someone who is Muslim is involved. But if we take a step back and look at anti-Muslim sentiment as part of a bigger picture, then we can begin to see that the doubts many Americans harbor about whether Muslims can ever be truly American result from something else—something that we must confront together.
The discrepancy between a general commitment to equality and tolerance and specific views regarding where Muslims fit into the fabric of American life comes from fear. Fear is certainly a normal part of being human. It’s a rational response to immediate threats, or at least threats we are likely to encounter in our everyday lives. But when our feelings about other people begin to reflect threats that are not part of our everyday experiences, we need to consider where that fear comes from—what’s producing it and what makes it stick.2
A foundational premise of this book is that widespread fear or suspicion of Muslims results from the corrosive effects of hate—and, more precisely, public hate. Public hate is public speech or activity that draws on and/or perpetuates negative stereotypes about a particular group of people and that encourages others to fear or suspect all members of that group.3
In some ways, it might be more appropriate to say that public hate encourages fear of the idea of a particular group of people because of what they represent. The stereotypes that are a central part of public hate often have little connection to actual individual people themselves. Yet the effects of fear that results from public hate are very real for the people experiencing them.
When directed toward a particular group—in this case, Muslims—public hate can lead people who think of themselves as tolerant and accepting to adopt attitudes that don’t match how they describe their values. And public hate can push people to fear, or at least be suspicious of, people and things in ways that don’t match what they’re most likely to encounter in their own lives.
Public hate may not lead people to say or do terrible things themselves—though this is certainly