Introduction
September 11th, 2026 fell on a Friday, Jummah, Islam’s holy day. The scenes of worshippers walking in traditional clothes across Monroe Street in Detroit, Michigan, a thoroughfare named after an American founding father who championed religious pluralism, conveyed a core constitutional narrative. “Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith,” James Monroe stated in 1788, “it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny” (169).
The meaning of those words, which inspired the First Amendment and its guarantee of Free Exercise of Religion, finds representation in Dearborn, Michigan—home to one of the most visible Muslim communities in the country. Yet another history, which was also present on that very same day and imposed in that same moment, disrupted that promising founding story of religious autonomy from government tyranny. This was Dearborn, Michigan, after all, one of the past quarter-century’s primary sites of constitutional contestation. This is a place where the right of religious freedom reckoned with the opposable forces of religious suspicion, occurring most fiercely in the immediate wake of 9/11, but which is still ongoing in the present. That fateful day spawned the system of “Islamophobia” that situated Muslim identity writ large in contention with American Identity. From then on Muslims found themselves locked into a system which combined the increased scrutiny of national security policy and the thinning protections of the First Amendment.
Islam stopped being just a religion after 9/11. After that day, it also became the sociolegal enemy of the state that shapeshifted in form, scale, and threat during the arc of the “War on Terror’s” twenty-five-year march. The architecture of War on Terror law that began to take form with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the enactment of the U.S. PATRIOT Act, and a network of other policies that followed, was built upon the fundamental tenet that Islam signified security, societal, and “civilizational” threat.[1] The War on Terror produced a securitized framing of Islam that survives even when Muslims exercise the constitutional rights that the First Amendment protects. That securitization was operationalized by surveillance dragnets, deportations, and investigatory dossiers on Muslim life that descended upon places like Dearborn, Michigan—a longstanding company town that the counterterror law remade into a “terror town.” In the past, it was the fear of “external” threats that led to this infringement on First Amendment rights. Today, however, the threat is perceived as “internal,” and is embodied in the Muslim politician. Political participation transforms Muslims from a group of people that the security state presides over into a group whose members can preside over state power. The target is therefore no longer the Muslim who might threaten the state from outside its institutions, but the Muslim who might enter those institutions and exercise power over them. Islamophobia has adapted itself to the Muslim politician who campaigns not only in base communities like Dearborn, but also in cities distant in geography and religious identity. This two-part essay unpacks this transformation from 9/11 into the present, arguing that Islamophobia remains a salient current in American politics as its policies and rhetoric adapt.
On Moving Traps and Tropes
Dearborn, Michigan may be one of Muslim America’s starkest representations of Muslim life in the US since 9/11, but it is only one in a constellation of many more. A trek across Michigan Avenue, the town’s main commercial drag, after Friday prayer illuminates the War on Terror’s travels during the past quarter-century. The very same businesses that waved American flags in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to fend off Islamophobic violence now showcase “Vote for Abdul” signs in their windows. If you walk into one of those shops, its Muslim owner may have Anglicized his Arab name (Ali becomes “Al”), and in the past he or she might have suspected that a customer making political small-talk was a government spy. Seeding paranoia in the mind of the Muslim subject, which Wendy Hui Kyong Chun dubs the “paranoia machine,” was a central part of the War on Terror’s psychological project. Twenty-five years later, the keepers of Lebanese restaurants and Yemeni cafes, brimming with young and diverse crowds, are keen to discuss everything from ethnic cleansing abroad to midterm elections at home. This is indicative of a rise in Muslims’ political courage—and societal positionality—that did not exist during the early years after 9/11.
This pivot in community parallels a shift in Islamophobia, which has moved its target from Muslims who are perceived to be “presumptive terrorists” to Muslims who are politicians vying for high-stakes government offices. This shift marks Dearborn, and Muslim communities that have graduated from being politically marginalized to politically empowered during the War on Terror’s lifespan, both as a cautionary tale and an allegory. While scholars, including myself, have written extensively about political marginalization, Islamophobia’s travel from terror scapegoating to electoral candidate character assassination is an unexamined and still unfolding chapter of the War on Terror. A new chapter is being written on the campaign stages of New York City’s 2025 mayoral campaign, in the thick of Michigan’s 2026 Senate race, and in a myriad of other contests where Muslims reared by the “9/11 generation” are running for offices now and in the near future.[2]
Islamophobia, if anything, is resilient and dynamic. Like critical theorists who frame race as “socially constructed” and “transformed socio-historically through competing social projects” (105–12), those who study Islamophobia have noted that it too is a fluid discourse that enables those who deploy it to adjust and adapt to meet their shifting political ends. As I have argued elsewhere, “Islamophobia is an ongoing dialectic” rooted in law, presenting state and societal actors with a discourse of othering that is rubberstamped and then practically enforced in counterterror policy (1089). But unlike race, Islamophobia is coded equally as a racial and religious project, which caricatures its adherents in the mold of a myriad of menaces while distorting the faith as a locus of that menace. This dialectic of othering is where the War on Terror, and its traveling legacy of Islamophobia, pits the First Amendment Establishment Clause against Free Exercise. This tension is manifested in the security state’s establishment of Islam as a counterterror threat against the Free Exercise guarantee that Muslims may profess their faith in line with the dictates of their convictions instead of counterterror commands.[3] As law scholar Samuel P. Rascoff and I argue, War on Terror policy, such as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and the Travel Ban, produced state formations of “official Islam” through the lens of counterterror law and logics.
During the War on Terror’s twenty-five-year lifespan, Muslims have been interlocked between a faith securitized by the state and diminishing Free Exercise liberties. This “Muslim Identity Bind” is produced by the nebulous space between the two Religion Clauses, one which pulls the Muslim subject toward complying with state formations of “American Islam” and reshapes the religion in line with counterterror policy, and the other which pushes them to exercise freedom of religion by abiding by their religious convictions and, in turn, defying the state. The traps and tropes that Muslim persons, particularly politicians, are tasked with navigating reveal the legal throughline that undergirds Islamophobia. Here we find a liminality that, during the past quarter-century, has seemed endless and impossible to escape.
Before Abdul and Zohran, Malcolm X drew the ire of “intersecting” American anxieties on account of his faith, race, and unapologetic Black Muslim masculinity. In the days leading up to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, another flashpoint moment in American history, Malcolm X delivered the “Ballot or the Bullet” address inside the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, only 6.3 miles from Dearborn. He stated,
So we’re trapped, trapped, double-trapped, triple-trapped. Any way we go, we find that we’re trapped. And every kind of solution that someone comes up with is just another trap.
Those words traveled across six decades and across Michigan Avenue, connecting two distinct struggles and different chapters of a kindred history. This was a “counter-story,” in the words of Critical Race Theorist Richard Delgado, spoken from the mouth of a Black Muslim revolutionary who addressed the racial crisis of his time, one who also provided insight into how tropes and traps led Muslim politicians working within the system and its stated rules to be accused of being “Trojan Horses” that would tear down the American governmental system.
The Muslim politician, as the principal target of the moment’s most potent tropes and traps, must endure the perpetual scrutiny, must negotiate the piercing suspicion, that she or he is a “Trojan Horse” campaigning to undo American democracy instead of participating in it. The suggestion peddled to Muslims at the onset of the War on Terror, to “buy into democracy, and be part of it” to prove their belonging was no “solution,” as the current moment makes clearly plain, but “just another trap” of a new name.
Part 2 of this blog essay will be published on Monday, October 19.
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[1] See Homeland Security Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107-296, §§ 101–103, 116 Stat. 2135, 2135, 2142–47 (2002) (establishing the Department of Homeland Security as a new executive department and assigning it primary responsibility for preventing terrorist attacks, reducing the nation’s vulnerability to terrorism, and coordinating homeland-security functions); see also 6 U.S.C. § 111(a)–(b)(1) (2024) (codifying DHS’s establishment and primary mission).
[2] For a legal treatise examining the public forms of patriotic expression produced by the pressures of counterterror policy, see Karen Engle, “Constructing Good Aliens and Good Citizens: Legitimizing the War on Terror(ism),”; See also Sunaina Maira Marra, The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (2016), which documents how 9/11 and the War on Terror molded an entire generation of Muslim activists, advocates, and politicians).
[3] Khaled A. Beydoun, “Establishing American Islam: The War on Terror at Twenty-Five” (work-in-progress, forthcoming 2027).
