Terrifying Muslims

Terrifying Muslims highlights how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced, constructed, and represented in the context of American empire and the recent global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research that compares Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States before and after 9/11, Junaid Rana combines cultural and material analyses to chronicle the worldviews of Pakistani labor migrants as they become part of a larger global racial system. At the same time, he explains how these migrants’ mobility and opportunities are limited by colonial, postcolonial, and new imperial structures of control and domination. He argues that the contemporary South Asian labor diaspora builds on and replicates the global racial system consolidated during the period of colonial indenture. Rana maintains that a negative moral judgment attaches to migrants who enter the global labor pool through the informal economy. This taint of the illicit intensifies the post-9/11 Islamophobia that collapses varied religions, nationalities, and ethnicities into the threatening racial figure of “the Muslim.” It is in this context that the racialized Muslim is controlled by a process that beckons workers to enter the global economy, and stipulates when, where, and how laborers can migrate. The demonization of Muslim migrants in times of crisis, such as the War on Terror, is then used to justify arbitrary policing, deportation, and criminalization.

“Terrifying Muslims will be of great interest for those interested in a better understanding of the cultural and historical roots of the Pakistani diaspora. It will also appeal to those seeking to explore potential intersections between the fields of critical race studies and anthropology.” - Roberto J. González, Journal of Anthropological Research, “Terrifying Muslims is a timely and necessary project, one that makes important interventions into both U.S. ethnic studies and South Asian studies. Junaid Rana persuasively shows that the current War on Terror and the Islamophobia that buttresses it can only be understood through a long historical view that situates current migrations in relation to colonial forms of labor exploitation such as slavery and indentureship.”—Gayatri Gopinath, author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, “Junaid Rana’s Terrifying Muslims is a road map against Islamophobia. Muslim migrants do not travel to erect minarets alone. They come because their homelands are wrecked by transnational capital, they come in search of work and dignity; their presence signals only this, and not some cataclysmic story of the clash of civilizations. Rana rehabilitates the ordinariness of migration in the context of forces that insist on making the migrant extraordinary. Crucial reading for terrible times.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, “This book is an important, innovative, and much-needed intervention into current debates about migration, globalization, the War on Terror, Muslim identities, racialization, and labor. It offers a transnational analysis connecting South Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, as well as an astute framework linking questions of religion, race, class, sovereignty, and gender. In addition, it fills a glaring gap in Asian American and South Asian studies, where there has been little research on the Pakistani diaspora.”—Sunaina Marr Maira, author of Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11, “Terrifying Muslims will be of great interest for those interested in a better understanding of the cultural and historical roots of the Pakistani diaspora. It will also appeal to those seeking to explore potential intersections between the fields of critical race studies and anthropology.”

Junaid Rana is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.