With Stones in Our Hands

Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire

2018

Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, Editors

Bringing together scholars and activists, With Stones in Our Hands confronts the rampant anti-Muslim racism and imperialism across the globe today

With Stones in Our Hands compiles writings by scholars and activists who are leading the struggle to understand and combat anti-Muslim racism. Through a bold call for a politics of the Muslim Left and the poetics of the Muslim International, this book offers a glimpse into the possibilities of social justice, decolonial struggle, and political solidarity.

Innovative and ambitious, this book will undoubtedly become a key reference when debating the issue of anti-Muslim racism. Offering a range of analysis—linking anti-Muslim racism to the global phenomenon of imperialism—With Stones in Our Hands is a crucial work in the building of a true decolonial theory.

Houria Bouteldja, author of Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love*

After September 11, 2001, the global War on Terror has made clear that Islam and Muslims are central to an imperial system of racism. Prior to 9/11, white supremacy had a violent relationship of dominance with Islam and Muslims. Racism against Muslims today borrows from centuries of white supremacy and is a powerful and effective tool to maintain the status quo.

With Stones in Our Hands compiles writings by scholars and activists who are leading the struggle to understand and combat anti-Muslim racism. Through a bold call for a politics of the Muslim Left and the poetics of the Muslim International, this book offers a glimpse into the possibilities of social justice, decolonial struggle, and political solidarity. The essays in this anthology reflect a range of concerns such as the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, surveillance and policing, blackness and radical protest traditions, militarism and empire building, social movements, and political repression. With Stones in Our Hands offers new ideas to achieve decolonization and global solidarity.

Contributors: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Abdullah Al-Arian, Arshad Imtiaz Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Vivek Bald, Abbas Barzegar, Hatem Bazian, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Arash Davari, Fatima El-Tayeb, Hafsa Kanjwal, Ronak K. Kapadia, Maryam Kashani, Robin D. G. Kelley, Su‘ad Abdul Khabeer, Nadine Naber, Selim Nadi, Sherene H. Razack, Atef Said, Steven Salaita, Stephen Sheehi.

Sohail Daulatzai is associate professor of film and media studies and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minnesota, 2012).

Junaid Rana is associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is author of Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora.

Innovative and ambitious, this book will undoubtedly become a key reference when debating the issue of anti-Muslim racism. Offering a range of analysis—linking anti-Muslim racism to the global phenomenon of imperialism—With Stones in Our Hands is a crucial work in the building of a true decolonial theory.

Houria Bouteldja, author of Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love*

A timely updating of critical interventions and debates—of stone throwing in the best of anticolonizing traditions—from, about, and in conversation with the ‘Muslim Left,’ the ‘Muslim International.’ In the spirit of Third World studies, this is a crucial contribution for our times, a necessary read for all.

David Theo Goldberg, University of California Humanities Research Institute

With Stones in our Hands offers theoretical application to historical and contemporary examples of anti-Muslim racisms, primarily in the US. Like any edited volume, the quality and character of the essays vary, but as a whole, this is a solid and distinctive collection well deserving of a wide readership.

Reading Religion

Writing the Muslim Left: An Introduction to Throwing Stones
Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana

I. Imperial Racism
1. A Palestinian Exception to the First Amendment? The Pain and Pleasure of Palestine in the Public Sphere
Steven Salaita
2. The Perils of American Muslim Politics
Abdullah Al-Arian and Hafsa Kanjwal
3. Duplicity and Fear: Toward a Race and Class Critique of Islamophobia
Stephen Sheehi
4. Palestinian Resistance and the Indivisibility of Justice
Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi
5. “From Here to Our Homelands”: An Interview with Lara Kiswani on Radical Organizing and Internationalism in the Post-9/11 Era
Sohail Daulatzai

II. Decolonizing Geographies
6. Oppressed Majority: Violence and Muslim Communities in Multicultural Europe
Fatima El-Tayeb
7. Atlanta, Civil Rights, and Blackamerican Islam
Abbas Barzegar
8. Like 1979 All Over Again: Resisting Left Liberalism among Iranian Émigrés
Arash Davari
9. The Only Good Muslim: Immigration Law, Popular Culture and the Structures of Acceptability
Vivek Bald
10. Charlie, National Unity, and Colonial-Subjects
Selim Nadi
11. “Nuts and Bolts Organizing, They Work Everywhere:” An Interview with Fahd Ahmed on Mass-Based Organizing and the National Security State
Junaid Rana

III. Technologies of Surveillance and Control
12. “A Catastrophically Damaged Gene Pool”: Law, White Supremacy, and the Muslim Psyche
Sherene H. Razack
13. Death by Double-Tap: (Undoing) Racial Logics in the Age of Drone Warfare
Ronak Kapadia
14. The Cry for Human Rights: Violence, Transition, and the Egyptian Revolution
Nadine Naber and Atef Said
15. Learning in the Shadow of the War on Terror: Toward a Pedagogy of Muslim Indignation
Arshad Imtiaz Ali
16. How Stereotypes Persist Despite Innovations in Media Representations
Evelyn Alsultany
17. “Grounded on the Battlefront”: An Interview with Hamid Khan on the Police State in the War on Terror
Sohail Daulatzai

IV. Possible Futures: Dissent and the Protest Tradition
18. To Be a (Young) Black Muslim Woman Intellectual
Su‘ad Abdul Khabeer
19. Letter from a West Bank Refugee Camp
Robin D.G. Kelley
20. Sami Al-Arian and Silencing Palestine
Hatem Bazian
21. Raising Muslim Girls: Women-of-Color Legacies in U.S. American Islam
Sylvia Chan-Malik
22. The Audience Is Still Present: Invocations of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz by Muslims in the United States
Maryam Kashani
23. “Make a Way out of No Way:” An Interview with Ustadh Ubaydullah Evans on the Islamic Tradition and Social Justice Activism
Junaid Rana

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index