Risk and danger for labor migrants have intensified under the regimes of terror control in the post-9/11 period, one expert said Monday.
Junaid Rana, associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, addressed the issues of Islamophobia and connected society’s irrational fears with racism, arguing that the intersection between the two enacts the global war on terror in everyday life.
“A revitalized Islamic identity is, in many ways, a response to the pressures of diasporic living and the challenges of racial discrimination and social prejudice,” Rana said. “Through transnational revivalist movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat, migrants are reclaiming Islam as they construct identities through pedagogics that emphasize ethical and moral reasoning.”
Rana also introduced his recently published book, “Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora, ”to an audience of Asian and Middle Eastern studies students and affiliated professors in the lectured titled “Migrant Islam Confront Racism: Revivalist Movements and Islamophobia.” The Duke Islamic Studies Center sponsored the event.
During the speech, Rana showed a scene from the 2005 film “Syriana” to demonstrate the complexity of a Muslim world divided by religious sects, ethnicity, nationality and economic standing. He noted that transnational migration connects those relationships to their global context, which is indiscriminatingly hostile against Muslims.
“His argument fits with the Marxist analysis of religions... operating at the level where people are not quite an opiate of the masses, but [are] accepting the structural inequality,” said Frances Hasso, director of the international comparative studies program and associate professor in international comparative studies, women’s studies and sociology.
In addition to Islamophobia, a binary mentality that poses Muslims in terms of democracy and freedom versus radicalism and militancy often makes it more difficult to come to a mutual understanding about the culture, Rana said.
“This dichotomy results from competing notions of humanism in which ‘humanity...’ is stripped from the Islamic militant,” he said.
In his book, Rana investigates the construction of transnational working classes from Pakistan and how they are represented in the context of the American empire and recent war of terrorism.
In addition to their identity as transnational workers, he said, society racializes middle and south Asian foreign workers—creating new social relationships in the face of a global capitalistic structure that depends upon mass migration. Rana noted that some of the challenges that Muslim migrants and transnationals have to overcome are in situating their social and religious identities and better understanding their own culture—what it means to be a global Muslim—in a Western context during the transnational working process.
“[The question is] how to deal legitimately with a materialistic world as a practicing Muslim,” Rana said.
Rana has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan and the United States. He chronicled the world views of Paskistani labor migrants as they became part of a larger global racial system—in the process discovering the prevailing experiences with racism felt by migrant workers across Europe.
He noted that his research also emphasizes the importance of a revitalized Islamic identity to Muslim participants—reaffirming their faith but also providing them with a framework for religious action.
Claudia Koonz, professor and Peabody Family chair of history, said the book was a wonderful study that gave her a larger framework in which to analyze contemporary Islamophobic attitudes following globalization and transnational migration. She added that Rana’s speech left her with a strong sense of the transnational capitalistic structure.
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