Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora by Junaid Rana (review)

In Terrifying Muslims, Junaid Rana helps us to see how the political and socio-economic processes of neoliberalism have constructed a racialized figure out of the religious category of Muslims. Rana contends that such processes of racialization draw from a “global racial system” (25) that thrives on demonizing the Muslim migrant as illegal, criminal, and as perpetrator of terrorism. The resulting Islamophobia creates a rhetorical universe which ignores all complexities and heterogeneity in the Islamic world, and proceeds to create a racial image of Islamic peril – the alleged quintessential “other” of modern democratic society. In Rana’s views, the racial system has been nurtured and strengthened in the post 9/11 world, but importantly, it has discernible earlier roots and continuities. Innovative, complex, and ambitious, the book is an important intervention in a neglected area of diaspora studies, namely the world of Pakistani labour migrants within the rubric of contemporary global economic system.

It is hard to pin the book down to any disciplinary focus. Rather it touches on or responds to several inter-related disciplines, including anthropology, history, migration, transnational studies, race theory, and theories of globalization. Some may find such disciplinary promiscuity to be undesirable, but to me, this is one of the strongest elements of the book. The subject matter lends itself well to disciplinary transgressions, and reveals the limits of conventional disciplinary routes. Equally enterprising is Rana’s use of sources. Drawing mainly from ethnographic work carried out both before and after 9/11 in a variety of locations, including New York, Lahore, and Dubai, the book also delves into historical sources of Indian labour migrations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Alongside, Rana examines film and media resources to understand the process of racialization and the creation of cultural tropes of alienation. Theoretically, the work engages with ideas about neoliberalism, feminism, gender, and critical race theory, and stresses the intersectionality of theoretical currents. Geographically, the book is primarily on Pakistani migrants dispersed in the Persian Gulf, but the central focus on Islamophobia helps us to locate a coherent global process. Temporally, the book responds mainly to contemporary issues, but hinges on histories of indentured labour migration stretching back to the 1830s, and even earlier racial formations in Catholic Spain.

The introduction to the book, “Migrants in a Neoliberal World” lays out the conceptual, theoretical and empirical framework of the work. In Part I, “Racializing Muslims,” Rana attempts to unravel the intersection of race and migration by engaging in an interdisciplinary analysis of both recent and distant history of Islamophobia under the sign of race and racialization. In Chapter 1, “Islam and Racism,” the author traces the logic that converts the Muslim into a category of race. Rather than a recent phenomenon, Rana contends that Islamophobia has deep roots in European imagination that saw “religion not just as a belief but as a level of human evolution.” (32) Citing evidence of exclusionary thinking in Catholic Spain, Rana offers the thought that a combination of physiognomic and cultural difference cast the figure of the Muslim as the ultimate other – a construction that was later on transferred and transposed across the Atlantic during Spanish colonization and afterwards. Based on ethnographic work done in Lahore and New York, the following chapter, “Racial Panic, Islamic Peril, and Terror,” seeks to expose the strategies that use the rhetoric of terror and peril to cast the Muslim as dangerous and as a racial category. Through the use of two examples of panic events, Rana goes on to argue that the “role of the racial panic is to intensify the categories of racialization within the racial formation.” (53) In one of the more creative chapters of the book, “Imperial Targets,” the third in the first part, Rana uses the miniseries Sleeper Cell, and the film Syriana to reveal how visual culture contributes to stoking fear against multiculturalism through the use of “racial semiotics.” (77) Rana argues that “covert cultural...