Abstract Muslim Americans fall into a strange nether-zone in the American political and legal landscape. On one hand, many legal scholars have argued that the racial lens is the best way to understand the group post-9/11, thereby fitting neatly into the larger narrative of post-Civil Rights Movement struggles. On the other hand, the Muslim American community also has particular interests in the religious freedom framework that sometimes put it at odds with racial justice goals. This article challenges and builds on the current literature by redefining Muslim Americans as occupying a ‘third role’ in American legal society—where they can neither be fully understood as a religious community nor as a completely racialized one, but something in between—and then analysing the broader repercussions that ripple out.
Adnan Perwez (Tue,) studied this question.