Tolerance and Risk (Muslim International) by Mitra Rastegar

Author:Mitra Rastegar [Rastegar, Mitra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL084000 Religion / Religion, Politics & State, SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, SOC048000 Social Science / Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9781517904852
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2021-09-06T18:30:00+00:00

The right claimed to express an authentic emotional response of horror and outrage to an existential threat, while liberals were represented as stymied by political correctness and unable to defend their own interests. These attacks were successful in building on and eventually transforming ambivalence, as expressed in many liberal critiques and defenses of the school, into a moral panic based on the accumulation of highly suggestive associations with the school. These associations resonated with variables of assessment particular to Muslims as a population, especially the question of connections to Muslims abroad. Early attacks created a general feeling of unease and suspicion that provided the context in which Almontaser could quickly be transformed into an unacceptable figure when she was represented as deviating from the script and role of a “moderate Muslim.” The swiftness of this transformation points to the precarity of the position of all Muslim American public figures who seek to claim their roles within the liberal parameters of acceptability.

The remaining sections of this chapter address the media construction and framing of the KGIA controversy from a number of angles to examine population racism as a shared liberal-conservative terrain, as a media resource to gain audience attention, and as a political tool to close off Muslim American civic participation. The first section examines the arguments made by defenders and critics of the school plan to uncover their shared assumptions and highlight the most relevant variables of assessment. The second section explores the temporalities of New York press engagements with the story to demonstrate an interaction between the goal of garnering audience attention and political ends. The third section demonstrates how the right-wing media produced confusion, incredulity, and fear about Almontaser and KGIA, in part through the efficient circulation of Arabic-language words, which I argue functioned as what Terranova has termed “bioweapons” that infect everything with which they come into contact.14 My final section further elucidates the role of the figure of the moderate Muslim in the center-left media, not so much as a figure to be defended from attack, but rather as a victim of shameful right-wing racism that allows liberals to establish their own tolerance. Rather than meaningfully countering the right-wing attack, the center-left media represented itself as an arena of civil and reasonable debate about the “substantive” issues of the controversy, while at the same time pointedly ignoring the central conflict that led to Almontaser’s resignation. It also reinforced, rather than challenged, the population racism that informed attacks on Almontaser, even if it did challenge specific assessments of Almontaser. Therefore the moderate Muslim as an object of tolerance served to establish the center-left media as an essential component of a pluralist public sphere of civil discourse and debate, key to the functioning of democracy, even as this case demonstrates the effective closure of such an arena, particularly for Muslim Americans.

The analysis is based on a survey of a broad range of media, especially widely accessible press sources. In particular, I focused on the key local and city

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.