Is Islamophobia fading in the US?

Detailed summary

While plenty of Americans remain fearful and suspicious of Islam and its followers, plenty more are happy to accept a politician of any religion who actively seeks to benefit them.

Growing up in the United States, Islamophobia was in the very air I breathed. It was a casual part of conversations, a ubiquitous othering. No one I knew was Muslim; the Arab world was distant and exotic. It was generally understood that Muslims were incapable of adjusting peacefully to Western society. Only when I left the country at 21 for my first overseas stint did I realise how much latent Islamophobia I had absorbed.

Things only got worse after 9/11, when every Muslim suddenly became suspect. The more enlightened commented that many attacks have been carried out by White Christian men, yet people don’t fear them. But the anti-Muslim sentiment was virulent.

When Barack Obama ran for US president, many people did not believe that Americans were ready for a Black president. Donald Trump claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the US and referred to him by his full name: Barack Hussein Obama. Rumours that Obama is Muslim surfaced during his first Senate run in 2004. The false claims notably failed to stop his ascendancy and his two elections to the presidency.

It would seem that Mamdani has helped usher in a sea change, and Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has risen on the tide. El-Sayed was asked to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood, and was labelled a jihadist who would bring Sharia to the US. The primary race was close. His opponent, Haley Stevens, after initially endorsing him, shifted her endorsement at the last minute to the Republican candidate. Most of Stevens’ staff quit in protest, and the Democratic Party disowned her; high-level Democratic politicians who had been wary of El-Sayed’s candidacy finally threw their weight behind him. He won by seven percentage points, making him the first Muslim senator in the US.

The fact that El-Sayed won is somewhat surprising, even in an election that many referred to as the “Bluenami”; the fact that he is from Michigan is not. Hamtramck, Michigan, is majority-Muslim, with residents being mostly from Yemen and Bangladesh.

People…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Daily Star. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.