A key component of Middle East Studies methodology is to identify and deconstruct the relationship between knowledge about the region and the power structures that give knowledge meaning (Said 1978). Typically, that methodology is applied to Middle East Studies at the post-secondary level (Lockman 2010, Lockman 2016). This paper applies that methodology to public schools in Washington, D.C. Through discursive analysis, I will tease out the “epistemological commitments” (Abu El Haj 2001) of what the government of Washington, D.C. calls “social studies learning standards” -- short sentences which “detail the knowledge [about the Middle East that] students are expected to acquire at a particular grade level.” (Office of the Superintendent of Education [OSSE] 2011). Based on my experience teaching the Middle East in a Washington, D.C. public high school, I also raise questions about the relationship between the content standards and teachers’ work conditions, and whether such conditions support or inhibit the development of a praxis (Freire 2016) which could deconstruct US colonialism inside American public schools -- in other words, whether the Middle East Studies specialist can do their work inside this system. One goal of this paper is to bring Middle East Studies into conversation with American Studies, broadly defined, and in particular ethnographic studies of DC that consider the colonial relationship between the US Government and Washingtonians (Williams 1988; Price 1998). Highlighting those connections, I argue, productively provincializes the Middle East scholar by drawing attention to colonial dynamics inside the US. I conclude by calling for a deeper engagement with the American public school system by Middle East Studies scholars at both a theoretical and practical level.

To protect the security of all, we must curtail the liberty of Muslims. That is the narrative the United States government has peddled to the American public since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As a result, national security has effectively served as the pretext for myriad forms of discrimination against Muslims by public and private actors. Government countering violent extremism programs and anti-terrorism prosecutions that make no secret their focus is Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities signal to Americans it is acceptable to suspect these communities in their workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. This overt targeting of a religious minority reveals a glaring contradiction: Muslims are being treated with open hostility by government and private actors alike despite America’s foundational embrace of religious freedom. The reason for this, I argue, lies in the social construction of Muslims as a racial minority, rather than or in addition to being a religious minority. I call this social construction The Racial Muslim. Four factors converge to produce The Racial Muslim: 1) White Protestant Supremacy, 2) xenophobia arising from coercive assimilationism, 3) Orientalism, and 4) American empire. Each of these factors discursively defines the characteristics attributed to Racial Muslims that in turn legitimize their systematic subordination. In this chapter, I will focus on the role of Orientalism (European and American) and American imperialism in the Middle East. While the racial hierarchy paradigm is salient, it fails to take into account the role religion has always played in racializing immigrants in the US When religion is combined with phenotype, the individual’s religious beliefs and practices become proxies for biological traits. The more similar a particular religion is to the majority religion, Protestantism in the case of the US, the more likely superior cultural traits are imputed to that religious group, and vice versa. Hence, I argue America’s racial system, at least when it comes to Muslims, is more accurately described as a racio-religious hierarchy. The result is a racialization of a religious identity.

In April 2018, Alek Minassian, plowed a van through a crowd on Toronto’s Yonge St., killing ten and injuring more. In his police interview, Minassian expressed sympathies for an “incel revolution,” saying “he drew inspiration from other men who used violence as a form of retribution for being unable to get laid.” In broad strokes, Incels, shortened for “involuntary celibate,” are an online community of men who are unable to find sexual partners despite their desire to do so. This paper will consider the media commentary in the aftermath of the incident, which underscored the presumed relationship between the radical misogyny of Incel members and Islamist ideology, arguing that both share similar patterns of “exaggerated concern with masculinity” and hateful rhetoric about women and sex. Specifically, I will look at how and why both mainstream news outlets, as well as social media commentary have drawn parallels between the two, despite having no explicit association between its members. I will explore how the grip of contemporary Orientalism in our post post-colonial world, where Islamism appears to be the de facto global threshold by which one measures misogyny, violence and aggression, continues to remain firmly entrenched in public consciousness, and further ask why is it particularly difficult to disrupt this discursive narrative which continues to affirm false universalities about Muslimness.

Muslim women face unique obstacles in American electoral and political arenas. The politicization of Muslim women has regained momentum after the 2016 election. Our study examines attributes of Rep. Ilhan Omar in legacy and social media. Muslim women are portrayed as submissive, oppressed and exotic in Western media. Ilhan Omar has challenged this narrative by becoming the first veiled, Muslim women in the the U.S. House of Representatives. We focus on Twitter because it is the platform that President Trump uses to communicate with his conservative base. Also, the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) editorial stance tends to be conservative as well. The current study examines the interaction between the conservative newspaper and Twitter hashtags that both support and oppose Omar. President Trump has targeted Omar’ national origin, religion and immigration status. For this examination, three hashtags were gathered from Twitter including #IlhanOmar, #GoBack and #WelcomeHome. The tone of all three hashtags differ (neutral, negative and positive) and we expect congruence in the results of the content analysis. Across the time frame of May 1, 2019 to February 2, 2020 tweets including the phrases “Ilhan” “Omar” and “Go Back” and tweets including the phrases “Ilhan” “Omar” and “Welcome Home” were collected. This resulted in 8,769 tweets for the “Go Back” phrase and 5,122 tweets for the phrase “Welcome Home.” Articles from the WSJ that contained “Ilhan Omar” were obtained for the same time period which resulted in 78 articles. To narrow down the tweets, they were then compared to a list of words widely associated with Ilhan Omar which resulted in the terms “Hate”, “Muslim”, “Terrorist” and “Women” having high frequency. The tweets and WSJ articles then were aggregated and counted at the month level to examine frequency and prevalence of the four aforementioned high frequency words. The tweets and WSJ articles were then content analyzed in terms of source, tone and sentiment. This work presents the interesting dynamic between a conservative news outlet and the social media platform by considering the tone and occurrences of high frequency words. The content analysis of each of the platforms considers the congruences and biases across platforms. The results shed light on media representations of Muslim women as a whole and Ilhan Omar specifically.

In the American academic context “Jewish,” “Muslim,” “Arab,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” are becoming overdetermined to the point of being inextricable, or at least inevitably discursively constellated. Given an intellectual environment in which anti-Zionism and even just criticism of the Israeli occupation are increasingly coded as antisemitic, in which “Arab” and “Jewish” are ideologically opposed, and in which “Muslim” reads as un-American, this paper uses the categories of “Jewish American” and “Palestinian American” to critically illuminate an discursive space of meaning production. Jewish American literature is mostly impossible to understand outside the exceptionalist cliché of “breakthrough”—the legitimizing post-war eruption of Jewish American writers into the heart of the American cultural scene. Paradoxically, though it has served to set Jewish literary history apart from other ethnic literatures, “breakthrough” has also served as the historiographic model for many identity-based literary renaissances to follow. How does this paradigm influence institutional understanding of the writing of Palestinian Americans, who have not enjoyed the same benefits of social and cultural legitimation? Inasmuch as Jewish American identity is now (in an array of high-prestige spaces) increasingly indexed to the legitimacy and prerogatives of the Israeli state, and in terms of a predominating identitarianism (which might promiscuously be called “Zionist”) that effectively links the discursive fate of “Jewish” to “Palestinian,” “Muslim,” and/or “Arab,” this paper analyzes the institutional legibility of Palestinian American literature since 1967. I claim that it is probably impossible in the American context to understand the concept of “Palestinian”—including in the usage “Palestinian literature”—without also thinking of the concept “Jewish” in its increasingly hegemonic link to “Israel”; a critical literary study therefore needs to expose how this identification works in reverse, contesting the ability of “Jewish American literature” to stand in self-sufficient, exceptionalist isolation. In particular, I examine sites of interaction between Jewish American literature and Palestinian literature, particularly in the academy, on the way toward examining both the field-legibility of Palestinian American literature and the institutional interdependence of Jewish American and Palestinian.