The “social life,” as Arjun Appadurai terms it, of the Quran as an American cultural/political/racial object reveals how it is linked to competing narratives of American democracy and American empire. In this paper, I use the Quran as a trace in the twin American debates today about how much “we” should tolerate Muslims and how “we” should make tolerant Muslims abroad. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 made the Quran one of the most iconic objects in contemporary American debates about tolerance and its limits. In 2004, a U.S. military sniper’s use of the Quran for target practice in Iraq led a high-ranking U.S. general to make a public apology to Iraqi tribal elders and deferentially kiss the Quran. The two starkly opposed images, of a Quran pierced by an American soldier’s bullets and a uniform-clad, decorated U.S. general kissing the Quran, circulated on American television together; American pundits debated whether the general’s conciliatory gesture was evidence of Americans’ characteristic tolerance of all faiths, merely a pragmatic military tactic intended to stave off a violent backlash from Iraqi insurgents, or an acquiescence to the pressures of liberal political correctness. More recently, a viral tweet conjured the image of Vice President Pence squirming as two new Muslim Congresswomen would be sworn in on Qurans (the Vice President only officiates Senators’ swearing in ceremonies). A number of unresolved, recurring questions tied to pervasive American anxieties about Muslims as a minority in the U.S. as well as about the liberal doctrine of tolerance generally animated the media coverage. What kind of a book do American publics understand the Quran to be? Is it comparable to the Bible, or is the Quran fundamentally very different from Judeo-Christian scriptures accepted as American by the general public? What are the appropriate ways U.S. officials should engage the Islamic religious text — and by extension Muslims — at home and abroad? By analyzing debates about tolerance and its limits, I chart the production of American discourses about the Quran, and the production of an American “common-sense” view of Islam intimately entangled in Americans’ ideas of democratic national identity, belonging and American global ascendancy. Through the case studies of U.S. government-sponsored deradicalization programs in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US, I analyze the anxieties, policies, and practices designed to police how Muslims read the Quran.

What does the word “Palestine” mean today as both a product of struggle and a term in state-centric geopolitics? How does the difference in its meaning shift according to contexts? Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are geographically separated by the Green Line of 1949. This boundary has legitimized 1948 Israel as a democracy, thereby masking, for some, a violent settler colonial project, and it has also contained aspirations for Palestinian Authority statehood, a project once legitimized through the PA’s claims to democratic institutions such as a free press. This paper proposes looking at Palestinian expressive practices in the West Bank and in Israel with the approach of what Shu-Mei Shih (2013) calls comparison as relation, in which units are not held apart from each other as separate but rather analyzed in their distinctiveness through historical connection, in a manner that challenges colonial logics of fragmentation. Here the Green Line itself, as a border-like structure upheld by the coloniality of international law (Anghie 2006), shapes expression. Specifically, the paper examines how “local news” and “Palestine” are defined in Palestinian news websites in the West Bank and in Israel. Despite many Palestinians’ conceptions of a shared national identity, despite their geographic proximity, and despite all being under Israeli sovereignty, these news websites identify “local” and “Palestine” in ways that undermine these shared ideologies and circumstances. This is due to a number of factors. Central among these is the still dominant (among Palestinians) Palestinian state-making project and its related politics of international recognition, a politics that has an imperial register here as elsewhere (Kauanui 2018; Rutherford 2012). Second, news organizations that claim objectivity are pressed to use terminology in ways that mirror such dominant political projects. Third, the lived Palestinian experiences of fragmentation mean that Palestinians experience locality in the day-to-day as primarily existing on one side or another of the Green Line. In contrast, as I demonstrate ethnographically, outside of news discourses, Palesitnians may define “Palestine” somewhat differently, as a metaphorical site or prize of struggle. Methodologically, this paper argues for interrogating definitions of what counts as foreign, domestic, and local guided by a lens of colonialism studies. This paper also argues for an examination of how borders and geopolitical markers that appear like borders can restrict and shape expression, even in the digital age.

A free and critical press is often trumpeted as a bastion of democratic practice, especially under liberal ideals of governance. Under these ideals, as in Jürgen Habermas’ theories of the public sphere, public opinion should form in a highly agonistic contest of rational arguments. These ideals have been rightly critiqued at length, as they do not describe how public opinion forms in practice, and they especially do not reflect how many subaltern populations are excluded. However, one point has yet to be made: how public opinion forms in relation to violent imperial adventures and interventions, and thus how public debates become sites for producing subjects who believe they can weigh the merits of imperial and colonial policy. Since the mid-19th century, public opinion in powerful North Atlantic countries has deliberated and debated at length the reasoning, legitimacy, and results of imperial intervention and colonial governance in the Middle East and North Africa. In this paper, I suggest calling the knowing subjects which form in these debates “imperial publics,” and I explore this form of democratic imperialism through the contemporary example of the US presidential campaign and debates about foreign—or better, imperial—policy on Palestine/Israel. In particular, I consider how US presidential elections heightens attention to different subject positions with respect to US policy on Palestine/Israel, where news reporting and media coverage becomes central to addressing American audiences as knowing subjects that can debate various topics, like one- vs two-states solutions and now of course the Trump plan. Furthermore, I examine the formation of US imperial publics through my research on the Israeli English online press. In the late 1990s, the Israeli press went online and also began to experiment with English versions. Today English news outlets like Haaretz.com, Jpost.com, and TimesofIsrael.com are among the most important sources of news on Palestine/Israel for North Atlantic audiences, and further they have become vital sources for other journalists, including US news companies. I have done 8 months of ethnographic research with the journalists who run such news sites, and I will work alongside them during the summer while they cover the US election debates about Palestine/Israel. This paper describes how their reporting feeds into the contest for the US presidency. It will thus contribute to studies of imperialism and colonialism in Palestine/Israel—which have focused on legal, military, and bureaucratic institutions—by discussing the under-examined aspect of public opinion.

Scholars have increasingly attended to the ambivalent effects of citizen-incorporation of minoritized subjects in liberal-democracies (Scott 2007, Fernando 2014; Partridge 2010, 2012). With the shift to wage war on terrorism and by exporting liberal forms of governance (Mahmood and Hirschkind 2002), citizen-incorporation within Western democracies has gradually come under purview of security concerns (Puar 2007). This paper takes Germany as a case to discuss the dark side of democracy as it governs Middle Easterners as Muslims in and through tolerance education. Since the early 2000s pedagogies of citizenship have flourished across Germany targeting a newly defined population: Muslims. Muslims, a racial term for migrants from the Middle East regardless of legal and political status are considered coming from undemocratic countries where hatred of minorities reigns. According to political discourse a particular problem among Muslims is their relationship to Jews stemming from ‘unsecularized’ sentiments, dangerously feeding the violent capacity to radicalize. De-Radicalization projects combatting Islamic extremism in particular have deployed the memory of the Holocaust. Beyond the task of training tolerant speech and practices, these sites enable forms of scrutiny, surveillance and the exposition of migrant youth as potential radicals. In centering the case of a German-Palestinian civic educator in Berlin, who was ousted for comparing the Holocaust to the Nakba this paper seeks to complicate the notion of democratic incorporation in several ways. First, by discussing what forms of public speech count as tolerant and how Holocaust education is key for a liberal-democratic subjectivity in Germany, I will point out how Holocaust education is enabling and limiting in thinking about human and minority rights violations. Second, by showing how the civic educator became a transnational case of “Muslim Antisemitism” for her comparison, I will point out how her public right to political speech was curbed by a circuit of power prioritizing other states and state interests rather than one’s own citizens. This circuit of power is further based on historical and racial hierarchies, depoliticizing the political present by enabling Muslims to emerge as docile subjects, yet disabling them to point out a range of concerns in the political present. Taken these points together, the paper will argue that Middle Easterners exist in a twilight zone of social death in which their emergence as Muslims, good or bad, enables the state to craft itself and the Christian ethnic majority as a liberal-democracy.

This paper examines freedom of expression trials in Turkish courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to discuss how ‘democratic rule of law’ can operate in both fast and slow ways, and how the rule of law enables forms of governance that restrict freedom of speech and critical-democratic expression. In May 2004, as part of European Union (EU) accession process, Turkey accepted the priority of international agreements over the domestic law regarding fundamental rights and freedoms. As a member of European Council and a candidate to the EU, Turkey promised to implement ECHR rulings. However, several events have led Turkish authorities to increasingly restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, and to bypass the ECHR. The Gezi protests in 2013, the end of the peace process with Kurdish rebels in 2015, and the failed military coup attempt in July 2016 have all led to lengthy legal procedures that ultimately undermine Turkey’s adherence to the ECHR. Indeed, authorities have used allegations of terrorist propaganda and related criminal charges to target dissident politicians, journalists, academics, civil society activists, and social media users. In the meantime, the ECHR has largely eschewed using its legitimate and binding legal authority. It has avoided judging these cases as systematic rights violations, and instead it prefers to wait for the exhaustion of all available domestic appeal procedures for each individual case. In the few cases where the ECHR ruled against the arrest decisions, the local legal authorities avoided implementing these rulings immediately and hastened the pace of the prosecution to deliver final verdicts—all requiring further appeals at the ECHR. In doing so, the local legal authorities have bypassed and rendered the ECHR ineffective. This ineffectiveness facilitates a de facto exclusion of Turkey from European liberal democratic jurisdiction. Equally important, I argue, it positions Turkey alongside the rest of the Middle East as a region for imperial interventions to contain refugees and keep them away from Europe. This paper will ultimately show the ways in which liberal democratic institutions not only fail in protecting democratic means of expression, but they also facilitate the very restriction of fundamental rights and freedoms. I also discuss the temporality of law as a new analytic to examine authoritarian politics.