In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 Introduction T HE TITLE for this book emerged from research data showing that during the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, a majority of Arab Muslim Americans reported feeling unsafe and insecure in the United States.1 This sense of insecurity, which was not only articulated in narratives but was palpable, was an outcome of their treatment by the American government and some members of the American public and by portrayals of them in the mainstream American media, which proffered constructions of reality that repeatedly supported notions of the collective culpability of Arab and Muslim Americans for the attacks. Throughout the two-year period of interviews for this study— 2003 to 2004—a majority of the persons interviewed said in various ways that they were not confident about their personal safety, that they felt vulnerable , and that they were uncertain about their ability to live freely in the United States, fearing that they might face expulsion from the country or incarceration en masse in camps. These fears of collective quarantine or banishment weakened as time passed, perhaps because Bush administration policies had shifted from the incarceration and expulsion of Arabs and Muslims to their registration and monitoring. But many remained fearful of their fate should another attack occur in the United States for which, while not of their doing and not under their control, they might be held responsible.2 This book provides an analysis of Arab Muslim American experiences after 9/11 as documented by a sociological and ethnographic study of Arab Muslim Americans in metropolitan Chicago. Its account of that critical period of American history is perhaps not as positive as some might wish, but also not as negative as others might expect. It is compiled neither from the observation of encouraging and heartening events nor from an inventory of discouraging and shocking incidents, but rather from the detailed accounts of a wide range of immigrant and native-born Arab Muslim Americans, who overwhelmingly felt that their experiences could only be understood in the larger context of Arab and Muslim American 1 history, a perspective shared by the author. Indeed, a principal argument of this book is that the negative treatment of Arabs and Muslims in the United States after 9/11 was caused not by the 9/11 attacks themselves, but by preexisting social constructions that configured them as people who would readily conduct and approve of such attacks. These social constructions did not emerge on 9/11 but were the culmination of processes of labeling and interpretation transmitted by interested actors through major American social institutions over the latter decades of the twentieth century. These interpretations, which sought to explain the reasons for violence and turmoil in the “Middle East” (itself a social construction) through the use of essentialized notions of human difference, set the stage for Arab and Muslim American communities to be held collectively culpable for the 9/11 attacks by the government, the media, and the citizenry . As I show in chapter 3, for decades prior to the attacks Arabs and Muslims had been represented in American culture as monolithic groups that had an inherent proclivity to violence, with “pathological cultures” (Abu-Lughod 2007) and a morally deviant religion that sanctions killing. They were socially constructed as “others,” as people not like “us,” an interpretation shown to be widely accepted in public opinion polls long before 9/11. Notions of inherent human differences imply something akin to biology in American culture, and are often interpreted and acted upon as race. Sociologically and anthropologically speaking, Arab Americans had been racialized in American society—set off from the body of mainstream Americans as “others”—through social processes that bore many similarities to those experienced by other racialized groups, but also with significant differences (see chapter 3). The most important difference was that the racialization of Arab Americans inhered not from domestic interests but from the global political and economic interests of a rising American superpower. This difference explains not only the distinct timing of the racializing processes for Arab Americans (coming much later than for African, Native, Latino, and Asian Americans) but also the unusual circumstance that Arabs were once positioned in a structurally more favorable status in the United States as whites (and they are still officially considered white). With the end of the Cold War, and during a time of massive immigration to the United States, Arab Americans could easily be reinvented and reimagined as...

Share