Terrified

How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream

Chris Bail

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400852628
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. In Terrified, Christopher Bail demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expanding network of anti-Muslim organizations that exert profound influence on American understanding of Islam.Bail traces how the anti-Muslim narrative of the political fringe has captivated large segments of the American media, government, and general public, validating the views of extremists who argue that the United States is at war with Islam and marginalizing mainstream Muslim-Americans who are uniquely positioned to discredit such claims. Drawing on cultural sociology, social network theory, and social psychology, he shows how anti-Muslim organizations gained visibility in the public sphere, commandeered a sense of legitimacy, and redefined the contours of contemporary debate, shifting it ever outward toward the fringe. Bail illustrates his pioneering theoretical argument through a big-data analysis of more than one hundred organizations struggling to shape public discourse about Islam, tracing their impact on hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, television transcripts, legislative debates, and social media messages produced since the September 11 attacks. The book also features in-depth interviews with the leaders of these organizations, providing a rare look at how anti-Muslim organizations entered the American mainstream.

CHAPTER 1

THE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR

IT IS EARLY FRIDAY EVENING IN FAYZABAD, AFGHANISTAN, ON September 13, 2010. As worshippers file out of their mosques, angry young men stir the crowd into a protest and lead a march toward the German military base at the outskirts of the city. As they approach, the protesters become increasingly belligerent—furious about the news they heard earlier that day. Young men throw rocks at the gate. Guards respond with warning shots, but the crowd topples the gate and pours into the base. Moments later, five protestors and two military policemen lay critically injured. The wave of protesters subsides, but the damage to the fragile relationship between the foreign military installation and the townspeople is dour. Though violence in Fayzabad is temporarily abated, riots spread across Afghanistan in the next forty-eight hours. In Jalabad, protesters burn a U.S. flag and chant “Death to Obama.” In Logar province, crowds yell “Death to America” and “Death to Christians.”

More than seven thousand miles away, Terry Jones prepares to confront the gaggle of journalists camped outside his diminutive congregation in Gainesville, Florida. Jones joined the Dove Outreach Center as a part-time pastor in early 2001. Unbeknownst to his new parishioners, Jones was dismissed from his previous congregation in Germany amid accusations of fraud. While the church once attracted hundreds of parishioners, Jones’s caustic sermons about homosexuality and liberal media conspiracies estranged all but several dozen of them. Those who remained were unfazed by the pistol Jones wore on his hip while he preached—often launching into spastic motions and speaking in tongues. Indeed, several of Jones’s remaining supporters followed him to joint protests with the Westboro Baptist Church—a Kansas congregation that became infamous for protesting military funerals, which they believed were God’s punishment for America’s acceptance of homosexuality.

Yet these stunts were but an overture. The September 11th attacks gave Terry Jones new cause. He read websites and books that warned these horrific attacks signaled an existentialist threat to the West, or a looming clash of civilizations. Muslims may present themselves as peaceful moderates, these sources claimed, but they are secretly a “fifth column” plotting to subvert the U.S. Constitution and establish a supranational Islamic empire under the guise of political correctness. Thoroughly indoctrinated, Jones panicked when President George W. Bush announced the United States was not at war with Islam but rather the apocryphal extremists who hijacked this religion to legitimate their violent political agenda. Jones took to his computer and churned out a polemic titled Islam Is of the Devil. He published the book and posted its title on a paper sign in the front yard of his church. In August 2009, Jones instructed two children from his congregation to wear tee shirts emblazoned with the slogan to their local public high school.

When the students were sent home for violating the school’s dress code, Jones became even more incensed. He saw his opportunity to retaliate when plans were announced to construct an Islamic Community Center near the site of the World Trade Center attacks. Jones produced a YouTube video to announce the creation of “International Burn a Koran Day”—an event designed to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. This video soon reached a group of researchers monitoring anti-Muslim discrimination worldwide. The group alerted the Council on American Islamic Relations, a prominent Muslim advocacy organization that promptly announced plans to hold “Share the Qurʾan” parties to rebuke Jones. But this response only emboldened him; Jones boasted that more than seven hundred people joined the Facebook group he created to publicize the event.

As the controversy escalated online, CNN elected to interview Jones. Other television stations and newspapers followed suit. By the end of the week, nearly every major American media outlet picked up the story. Jones became the focus of twenty-four-hour criticism on cable news networks, daily editorial pages, and a range of popular websites. A chorus of advocacy organizations denounced Jones, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the Anti-Defamation League. Jones even inspired the ire of President Barack Obama, ten other world leaders, and four supranational organizations. Yet it was the religious leader who proposed the construction of an Islamic center near Ground Zero who ultimately convinced Jones not to burn any Qurʾans that week.

Tragically, most of this criticism did not reach Afghanistan. Instead, many Afghans watched in horror as Iranian satellite news inaccurately reported that hundreds of Qurʾans were burning across the United States. This misinformation quickly spread across Afghanistan and other Muslim-majority countries via text messages, word of mouth, and social media. Bloody riots erupted from Palestine to Indonesia. By the end of the week, at least twenty people lay dead and hundreds more were critically injured. While no Qurʾans were burned in the United States that week, an untold number were accidentally incinerated during riots on the other side of the globe.

• • •

The Qurʾan burning affair was an opportunistic move by a marginal pastor who seized his moment for media celebrity. Yet this radical stunt was inspired by a rapidly expanding network of civil society organizations whose influence runs much deeper. These think tanks, religious groups, and social movement organizations not only captivate the media. They also raise hundreds of millions of dollars, testify before the Senate and House, train federal counterterrorism agents, and coordinate grassroots campaigns to shift American public opinion against Islam. Meanwhile, the much larger group of civil society organizations who believe Muslims are a peaceful group fighting against apocryphal extremists exerts only modest influence upon the representation of Islam within the American public sphere. Several of the most prominent Muslim American organizations now face pervasive allegations that they tacitly condone—or even endorse—terrorism.

How did a small group of anti-Muslim organizations commandeer the collective identity of Islam across so much of the American public sphere?¹ To answer this question, this book does not explore theological debates about the “true nature” of Islam. The cacophony of competing messages about Islam that have emerged since the September 11th attacks is truly overwhelming. They range from venerable Muslim theologians who insist Islam unequivocally condemns violence against civilians to groups such as Al-Shabaab—a Somali terrorist organization that believes all Muslims must engage in violent struggle against non-Muslims. Parallel debates about gender and Islam continue to unfurl across the globe as well. When France banned religious headdresses within public spaces, for example, many applauded the move as an attempt to reduce gender inequality within Islam. Yet many Muslim feminists countered that hiding their faces enables them to avoid being judged based upon their beauty alone.

Instead of entertaining such theological and normative debates, this book examines how collective actors compete to shape shared understandings of Islam within the American media, the policy process, and everyday life. In so doing, it provides a new theory of how collective actors create cultural change after major historical ruptures such as the September 11th attacks. The concept of culture is notoriously vague within the social sciences. Though culture often refers to a fixed set of beliefs or traditions transmitted across multiple generations of people, cultural sociologists use the term to refer to the more malleable mental scripts people use to understand the world around them on a day-to-day basis.² In this tradition, this book analyzes shared understandings of the values, beliefs, and allegiances of Muslims within the American public sphere since the September 11th attacks.³ These shared understandings are manifest within newspapers and television programs, legislative debates, social media sites, and public opinion at large.

More than one hundred religious groups, social movement organizations, nonprofit entities, and other civil society organizations are currently struggling to shape shared understandings of Islam within the United States. This diverse set of civil society organizations is drawn to the issue because of the considerable stakes involved. Whether Muslims are understood as part of an inclusive “us” or a restrictive “them” not only shapes cardinal debates about American identity. Shared understandings of Islam also drive critical policy decisions about the use of violence and the sacrifice of civil liberties. Ontological and physical security are also tightly linked within urgent public discussions about immigration, foreign policy, and the prevention of future terrorist activity. As the Qurʾan burning affair illustrates, shared understandings of Islam are also avid travelers. While positive representations of Islam within the American media reinforce America’s reputation as a paragon of religious freedom abroad, the far more numerous negative representations of Muslims within the public sphere validate the narrative of extremists who claim the United States is at war with Islam.

HOW CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS CREATE CULTURAL CHANGE

Large-scale shifts in shared understandings are rare. As sociologist Ann Swidler writes, most historical periods can be described as “settled times,” when culture is relatively fixed—reproducing shared understandings according to the status quo.⁴ Yet social scientists have long observed that major crises or unprecedented events such as the September 11th attacks disrupt this equilibrium.⁵ These “unsettled periods” entail bursts of cultural change that give new meaning to social categories such as “us” and “them.” This is because crises—by their very nature—challenge the legitimacy of dominant groups responsible for the reproduction of the status quo and embolden others who wish to redefine it. When an unruly mob stormed the most heavily fortified prison in Paris in 1789, as sociologist William Sewell Jr. describes, this unprecedented act was a catalyst for both the French Revolution and the emergence of the modern nation-state itself.⁶ Though Sewell and others have documented the disruptive power of crises, very little is known about the mechanisms of cultural evolution—or how societies settle into a new status quo after major crises such as the September 11th attacks.

This book provides the first comprehensive theory of how civil society organizations create cultural change after such major crises. While a vast literature explains how civil society organizations recruit new members or mobilize financial resources during such periods, the cultural consequences of collective behavior remain largely unexplored.⁷ One exception is the concept of resonance, or the notion that civil society organizations create cultural change by developing discourses that resonate or “fit” with mainstream discourse.⁸ This concept was developed via in-depth case studies of civil society organizations that succeeded in creating broadscale cultural change. Yet for every successful civil society organization, there are far more that fail to achieve even a modicum of public recognition.⁹ Inattention to these negative cases is not simply a methodological faux pas. Rather, it highlights the circular reasoning of the concept of resonance: Do civil society organizations succeed in shaping shared understandings because their messages resonate with mainstream discourses? Or do civil society organizations become mainstream precisely because of their success? Put differently, do civil society organizations shape the trajectory of shared understandings by building upon existing beliefs, or by gaining the power to produce a wholly new conventional wisdom?

To address this puzzle, this book introduces an evolutionary theory of collective behavior and cultural change. One of the chief advantages of this theory is that it recognizes the heterogeneity of organizations that compete to shape culture after major crises. These include social movement organizations, advocacy groups, think tanks, religious organizations, interest groups, voluntary organizations, political action committees, philanthropic foundations, and academic institutes—to name but a few. Failure to examine the entire spectrum of such organizations, it will soon become clear, results in a myopic perspective of collective behavior and cultural change. No single organization can shape the evolution of a cultural environment—rather the process of cultural change requires complex interaction between the entire population of collective actors competing to shape shared understandings. Therefore, this book analyzes all civil society organizations—or nonstate and nonprofit organizations—competing to shape shared understandings of Islam.¹⁰

The notion that civil society organizations compete within broader environments is certainly not a new one. For example, classic studies analyze how collective actors compete for limited resources such as financial contributions.¹¹ While such structural features of organizational environments are well understood, the “cultural environment” they inhabit has not yet been charted. The cultural environment is a new concept employed throughout this book to map the range of cultural messages collective actors produce about a topic such as Islam. For example, one corner of the cultural environment described in this book is occupied by civil society organizations that believe all Muslims are secretly plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. At the other extreme are civil society organizations that believe Islam is inherently less violent than the Judeo-Christian tradition. As later chapters describe, the majority of civil society organizations fell somewhere in between after the September 11th attacks—arguing that most Muslims are peaceful but a small minority are violent extremists.

Most important, the concept of a cultural environment enables differentiation of “mainstream” and “fringe” civil society organizations. While many studies use the term “mainstream” to describe organizations that regularly receive public attention, this book employs the term to refer to the representativeness of a civil society organization’s message vis-à-vis the broader cultural environment, or the entire population of civil society organizations competing to shape shared understandings of Islam—both within and outside the public sphere. Fringe organizations, by contrast, are characterized by peripheral messages about Muslims that are shared by few other organizations within the cultural environment. Distinguishing mainstream and fringe organizations using the entire spectrum of civil society organizations competing to shape shared understandings of Islam is critical because it enables analysis of whether civil society organizations succeed because their discourses are popular or mainstream, or if they become mainstream throughout the struggle to create cultural change after major crises.

In this way, the metaphor of a cultural environment captures the dynamism of cultural change. Because civil society organizations routinely enter or exit cultural environments—or shift their messages over time—an organization that is at the fringe during one period may become part of the mainstream at another, and vice versa. Hence, the process of cultural change is not unlike a powerful stream that runs through the cultural environment. This cultural mainstream gains momentum as smaller tributaries feed it. Yet this same momentum also creates powerful currents, rip tides, and eddies that redirect the mainstream as it cascades down an irreversible path through history.¹²

Though it is defined by the range and distribution of cultural messages, the metaphor of a cultural environment does not assume the primacy of cultural processes over social structure. To the contrary, this evolutionary perspective illuminates the interpenetration of cultural and structural processes. The emergence of a cultural mainstream may result from long-standing social networks between civil society organizations, or vice versa.¹³ Mainstream civil society organizations with popular messages often succeed in shaping shared understandings precisely because their cultural messages reflect the interests or concerns of broad constituencies. Or, civil society organizations that share similar cultural messages may develop social networks with each other in order to promote their shared interests. Regardless of the direction of causality, the interpenetration of cultural and structural processes consoli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Chapter 1 The Cultural Environment of Collective Behavior
• Chapter 2 From the Slave Trade to the September 11th Attacks
• Chapter 3 The September 11th Attacks and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations
• Chapter 4 The Rip Tide: Mainstream Muslim Organizations Respond
• Chapter 5 Fringe Benefits: How Anti-Muslim Organizations Became Mainstream
• Chapter 6 The Return of the Repressed in the Policy Process
• Chapter 7 Civil Society Organizations and Public Understandings of Islam
• Chapter 8 The Evolution of Cultural Environments
• Methodological Appendix: Sampling Civil Society Organizations and Press Releases
• Notes
• References
• Index