Islamophobia and the politics of empire: 20 years after 9/11

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Kumar argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism and that Islamophobia in turn sustains empire.

This book, now brought up to the end of the Trump presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take different forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. What Kumar calls the “matrix of anti-Muslim racism” charts how various institutions—the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere—produce and circulate Islamophobia. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who are the targets of the endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who “look Muslim” in the West as well.