Tolerance and Risk

Reviewed by: Tolerance and Risk: How US Liberalism Racializes Muslims by Mitra Rastegar Tazeen M. Ali Mitra Rastegar, Tolerance and Risk: How US Liberalism Racializes Muslims (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021) How do liberal discourses of tolerance and sympathy for religious and racial others operate to reify Muslim difference in the US and contribute to the exclusion of Muslims? This is the central question underpinning Mitra Rastegar's Tolerance and Risk, which employs the concept of "population racism" as a theoretical frame to illustrate how Muslims, in the US and abroad, are racialized as a population of risk. Population racism "situates racism in relation to the rise of demography, statistics, and risk management in governance and the economy" and "manifests through the uncritical delineation of one population from another" (18). In other words, population racism attributes particular negative characteristics to an entire group even as it accounts for diversity within that group. As a result, Rastegar argues that even Muslims toward whom Americans feel sympathetic—that is, Muslims who espouse liberal values and do not engage in critiques of US imperialism—are nevertheless associated with the threat that Muslims-as-terrorists pose to national security as a global population. Rastegar's analysis focuses on mainstream media perceptions of Muslims within the context of the long War on Terror. It is grounded in a range of sources, from news stories and popular memoirs to the photo-journalism blog Humans of New York. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific set of media sources. [End Page 192] The first chapter examines New York Times human-interest pieces and opinion polls circulating in the months immediately after 9/11 and after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Here, Rastegar shows how positive portrayals of Muslims perpetually situate individuals within a broader population of global Muslims, highlighting gendered markers that render them tolerable or sympathetic but, in the process, simultaneously affirm the racialization of Muslims and the inherent threat they pose to US society. Chapter two provides a comparative analysis of two New York Times bestselling memoirs: Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala (2013). This chapter draws out the common themes between the two works and shows how each author achieves her status as a sympathetic Muslim at the expense of any critique of US imperialism or engagement with how Muslims writ large are racialized as a threatening population. The third chapter considers the 2005 hangings of two gay teenagers in Iran, which drew public outrage and sympathy in the US after the widespread media circulation of the graphic images of their killings. Rastegar's analysis attends to the mechanisms by which this incident of fatal punishment for homosexuality is incorporated into a narrative about the incompatibility of LGBTQ rights and Islam, as opposed to considering the relationship between state violence and laws of oppression, which are neither unique to Iran or Muslim-majority contexts (138). Chapter four focuses on two national controversies based in New York City surrounding plans to open an Arabic-English dual language public school in 2007 and an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan in 2010, dubbed by its critics as the "Ground Zero Mosque." Through her analysis of the national uproar surrounding these two projects, Rastegar shows how Muslims were deemed as threatening populations by the political right and left alike, demonstrated by the demonization of the two public figures spearheading these respective projects: Debbie Almontaser (NYC public school) and Feisal Abdul Rauf (Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan). Notably, both Almontaser and Rauf previously resided comfortably within the parameters of acceptable, "moderate" Muslims. These cases demonstrate the precarity of Muslim acceptance in the eyes of the mainstream media and broader public as the same variables that confer the moniker moderate on certain Muslims are predicated on comparisons to traits that would characterize them as violent and unmodern. The fifth chapter examines the Syrian refugee crisis and analyzes for readers the terms by which refugees can be rendered sympathetic to a mainstream American public, looking at photojournalist Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York series in Muslim-majority countries like Jordan, Turkey, and Iran. Rastegar calls our

Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence