Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism

Sherene Razack's latest work is an essential contribution to contemporary scholarship concerning the “war on terror.” There is a formidable amount of research dedicated to Islamophobia's function in relation to imperialism and empire-building. And yet, Razack's analysis manages to capture powerfully the contemporary configurations of anti-Muslim racism within a domestic and transnational context. As Razack explains, anti-Muslim racism—which she consciously uses in place of the more popular term “Islamophobia,” given that Islamophobia “is a term that often leaves white supremacy outside the frame of analysis” (p. 15)—is not merely exclusive; it is also productive, allowing for the consolidation and fortification of (white supremacist) collective identities that find common purpose and emotional enrichment in the violent expulsion of the haunting figure of the Muslim.Razack argues that race is central to understanding anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, in large part because anti-Muslim discourses and systematic structures of exclusion are preserved through the inability to confront what is at root an inherently racial set of logics. For example, Razack criticizes how white Christian antipathy to Muslims is frequently associated with religious belief alone, a position that “serves to naturalize white aggrievement as something that surfaces only when whites have lost ground or are confronted by non-Christian or non-religious peoples. These presumptions fundamentally miss how a population comes to understand white entitlement through religion and, crucially, obscures the basket of fears, aggrievement, and desires, the stuff of which hegemonies are made and that collect in and operate to power white supremacy” (p. 15) Overlooking these connections “produces denial that Muslims are constituted as a race and consequently that anti-Muslim feelings and emotions and the practices they underwrite amount to race making” (p. 17).In her first chapter, “‘A New Phase of a Very Old War:’ Islam and White Conservative Christian Aggrievement,” Razack examines conservative white Christian outrage about public school programming dedicated to promoting awareness about Islam. Here, Razack analyzes conservative Christian opposition to Islamic-focused educational programming, which she describes as “part of a longer-term strategy” adopted by right-wing Islamophobic organizations such as ACT for America (p. 64).But Nothing Has to Make Sense refuses to relegate anti-Muslim racism to particular communities or sets of politics. Merely associating educational challenges to programming about Islam in public schools to a fringe, conservative Christian right-wing politic ignores how the rhetorical conventions that structure the expression of such a politic also converge with “a broad white settler politics involving gun rights, immigration control, and settler rights over Indigenous peoples” (p. 65). Such a limitation also ignores the powerful affective labor that anti-Muslim animus performs in providing a vehicle for “a white settler affect in which Muslims are seen as racial threats who undermine white settler entitlement in America and Israel” (p. 82).Razack's second chapter is dedicated to the psychic rationales and Orientalized logics underpinning bans on Muslim women's clothing in Europe (“Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey”) and North America (Quebec) (p. 87). Such bans, Razack argues, rely on alternating narratives of imperial desire for the veiled Muslim woman as well as fear of the inherent threat that such a figure poses to so-called secular modernity, so that “desire and repugnance form an anti-Muslim affect that travels through society” (p. 86). Dehumanized and denuded of agency, the covered Muslim woman is presumed to be coerced by patriarchal, “terroristic” Muslim men, or ungrateful and unappreciative of an automatically erotic construction of femininity available to the enlightened Western subject due to cultural deficiency (p. 87).The legal context in which such bans are introduced are interlinked and fortified by instances of anti-Muslim vigilante violence. Put more urgently, as Razack argues, “Shooters take bans to their logical conclusion” (p. 88). This is because both liberal and conservative narratives about Islam take Muslim Otherness for granted. “It is not political principles that dominate,” Razack reflects, “but rather the phantom figures of the foreign woman who will not love us and the fragile nation whose culture cannot withstand the intrusion of foreign values” (p. 99). Conditional (and often discriminatory) inclusion validates more extreme and lethal forms of exclusion, as both processes are fueled by an anti-Muslim affect that consolidates cultural and national cohesion.Anti-Muslim racism is why, as Razack's oft-repeated title proclaims, “nothing has to make sense.” It reveals why there is no need for consistency or accuracy within legal challenges to Muslim women's clothing, or in psychiatric testimony that reproduces race science in justifying the arrest and incarceration of a young Canadian man (Omar Khadr, who was fifteen at the time of arrest) in Guantánamo Bay (discussed in chapter 3). In asking us to consider the psychic fortification that comes from anti-Muslim sentiment and to put the dynamics of racism front and center, Razack's book provides a provocative and necessary contribution to contemporary scholarship on Islamophobia.

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