UC San Diego

"Secular Islam and the Rhetoric of Humanity" examines competing notions of humanity in representations of Islam in the United States from the Civil Rights period to the present. In post-9/11 representations, Islam is rhetorically "humanized" by the dominant culture in attempts to determine Islam's role in the United States. This humanizing framework not only presumes an inherent lack of humanity in Islam; it establishes the ideal of the human as white, rational, and secular. To critique this Enlightenment-based notion of humanity in representations of Islam, I look to the pre-9/11 period, where mid-twentieth century manifestations of Islam, exemplified by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, consisted primarily of domestic and secular practices that empowered Black communities who found the Civil Rights Movement insufficient. I use James Baldwin to illustrate Islam's capacity in this sense, arguing that Baldwin had an especially keen understanding of the work of Malcolm and the Nation of Islam as a secular practice of racializing Islam. Conceiving of Islam as a set of racial and secular practices advances the notion of an Islam that resists the dehumanizing narratives of the dominant culture; Islam in this context was humanizing rather than in need of being humanized. Rather than proceeding chronologically, I begin with the post-9/11 landscape and then turn to the twentieth century in order to unpack the ways in which Islam has shaped American culture. A retrospective narrative illuminates the ties between Muslim and American cultures and resists the rhetorical humanization of Islam that has become widespread after 9/11. Theorizing Islam as a radical force in its empowerment of communities of color in the U.S. resists the humanizing framework's attempts to include Islam into an established purview of humanity. Instead, I situate conceptions of Islam in the culture and history of American civil and human rights, examining the work of intellectuals who saw opportunities in Islam to establish their own standards for humanity. The various sites of cultural representation that I examine, ranging from literature, museum practices, and hip hop culture, chart Islam's role in the development of modern American culture.