ISLAMOPHOBIA
Islamophobia: It’s Worse than you Think! Nazita Lajevardi explores the political status of Muslim Americans BY SANDRA WHITEHEAD
citizens in the U.S. (American’s Human Rights Challenge, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/), the pervasive anti-Muslim rhetoric of candidates in the 2016 and 2018 campaign seasons and President Donald Trump’s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, she writes. In a recent interview, the Michigan State University assistant professor explains how her research validates the anxieties she felt growing up Muslim American. “The totality of the evidence suggests that the exclusion I was sensing is, in fact, real and that it is far more pervasive than I had thought.”
GROWING UP MUSLIM AMERICAN
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At 14 years old, I learned membership in the United States is not permanent,” Nazita Lajevardi, Ph.D., J.D., wrote in “Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia” (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In the aftermath of 9/11, this daughter of Iranian immigrants saw Muslimas remove their hijabs and Muslim families put American flag stickers on their cars. “My community immediately camouflaged as they waited for the heightened scrutiny on us to dissipate,” she says. In the months and years that followed, the spotlight on Muslim Americans intensified with the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and President George W. Bush’s declaration of the “Axis of Evil.” While Lajevardi and her friends worried about prom and college applications, they overheard their parents whisper about buying property abroad and moving to escape “the rising tide of harassment and discrimination. We heard … and we understood that despite having felt ‘at home,’ we were never really welcome.” Since then, the stigmatism of Muslims has grown in the U.S. with the implementation 36
of numerous surveillance programs targeting Muslim communities, the rise of ISIS, the prolonged detention of Middle Eastern
MANY OF US HAVE FELT THAT EVERY TIME YOU TURNED ON THE NEWS, IT WAS ABOUT MUSLIMS. BY PUTTING NUMBERS TO IT, WE SEE THAT, IN FACT, THE MEDIA IS PORTRAYING MUSLIMS AT HIGH RATES. AND WHEN IT DOES, THAT COVERAGE IS NEGATIVE AND IS IMPACTING AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD MUSLIMS.
ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2022
Lajevardi was raised in a “somewhat religious” household in Orange County, Calif. “I went to Sunday school where nobody wore a hijab. It was more about spirituality, Sufism and mysticism,” she said. Most of her high school friends were Christian, Hindu or Catholic. As the children of immigrants, Lajevardi and her friends navigated issues like “my friends are drinking and wearing short skirts, and my mom says I can’t do that and I can’t have a boyfriend,” she says. “They had to ask themselves, ‘Do I feel that faith, or is that my parents’ faith? How do I adapt?’ “Now a researcher, I understand. We, the non-Black children of immigrants, were a subset (about 25%) of the small Muslim population in America.” And there are only eight states in which Muslims compose more than 100,000 residents. When Lajevardi went to Boston College, “for the first time in my life, all my friends were Muslims. During Ramadan, the university had iftars for us every night. I went to jumaa prayer with my friends. When I had to figure out what it means to go to frat parties and practice Islam, I could navigate it with my Muslim friends. I felt so uniquely supported in a way I never had before,” she says. After one year of college, Lajevardi’s parents couldn’t afford to send her back. She transferred to a local community college. But a decision she made in Boston — to fast every Friday and go to jumaa prayer – “grounded me in my faith,” she says. Then “God opened a door I didn’t see coming,” Lajevardi says about her acceptance to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a full scholarship. “God had equipped me that first year of school with all the tools of my faith, and then He had this path for me.”
