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Islamophobia is widely known as the fear of Muslims and Islam. However, there is more to this terminology than just its literal translation. The term Islamophobia itself has been widely debated by scholars over its definitions and use. While many scholars agree that Islamophobia refers to the negative treatment of Muslims and the misrepresentation of Islam, notions of anti-Muslimness are debated. Islamophobia also effects non-Muslim communities and individuals who are perceived to resemble Muslims, such as non-Muslim Arabs, Sikhs, Latine, and other minority religious and ethnic groups. So, what exactly constitutes Islamophobia? Is Islamophobia different than anti-Muslimness or anti-Muslim bigotry? Does Islamophobia refer to the fear/hate of Muslims as people or is it directed toward Islam as a religion? Where does Islamophobia stem from? Understanding Islamophobia, along with its roots and causes, is significant to further explore its impacts on Muslim communities where research is lacking in North America such as in Latin America or the Caribbean. Studying Islamophobia also benefits those who aim to combat the discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry that Muslim communities and individuals face whether they are challenging anti-Muslim laws or campaigning for anti-Islamophobia education. Factors that contribute to advocacy of anti-Muslim hate and fear include politicians with anti-Muslim rhetoric such as in the 2016 American elections, media that depict Muslims as evil and oppressed like the film True Lies, and/or bills and policies that aim to restrict Muslim women like Bill 21 in Quebec, Canada. Islamophobic sentiments and actions often increase after events such as 9/11 when Muslims have to defend themselves to disassociate with allegations of terrorism and are directly affected by mass shootings like in Quebec, Canada, in 2017 and in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Muslims around the world suffer from Islamophobia be it through genocide, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Uyghurs in China, or being restricted from practicing their religious beliefs like wearing the hijab or niqab in France.

Americans have utilized Islam as a rhetorical device for articulating various understandings of American identity from the time of the earliest Anglo-American settlers. In every period, many rejected Islam and Muslims as oppositional to American identity, accusing Islam of inherent despotism that conflicted with American liberty. Others, though, used perceived traits of Islam to critique American behaviors or focused on similarities between Islam and Christianity. Many citizens of the early American republic assumed their country was essentially Protestant, but founding figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison indicated their support for a more inclusive polity by listing Muslims among the varieties of people they believed could be good citizens. These men meant this abstractly, as they believed there were no Muslims in the United States at the time and did not know some African slaves were Muslim. American Protestant organizations sent missionaries around the world starting in the early 19th century, including to areas of the Middle East where the Muslim majority was legally protected from proselytization. Therefore, missionaries tended to work with native Christian populations. American missionaries, travelers, and explorers had a great interest in the Holy Land. A frequent theme in their writings was a desire to see this area reclaimed from Islamic rule. They believed the Holy Land could be regenerated through Protestant influence and often suggested Jews could be relocated there. Over time, liberal Protestants moved away from seeking conversions and became more interested in educational and medical aspects of missions. American discussions about Islam intensified again after September 11, 2001. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis argued that Western civilization and Islamic civilization were inherently incompatible. Others, like John L. Esposito and Feisal Abdul Rauf, focused on the historical and theological similarities between Christianity and Islam to suggest common ground.

With the dramatic increase of post–9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment, researchers are grappling with studying the impact of Islamophobia on Muslims within and outside Muslim-majority contexts. While diasporic Muslim public experiences have been documented extensively in extant research, the ways in which Islamophobia relates to private family life have received little attention. In addition to the lack of scholarship on diasporic Muslim family life, there is a need to better theorize engagement with Islamic beliefs and practices. Although researchers document the occurrence of Muslim “reflexivity,” or the critical engagement with religious identities, beliefs, and practices, they nevertheless unintentionally reify a uniform Muslim reflexivity. Using the diasporic Muslim household as a site of investigation, this study is the first to theorize and empirically demonstrate the social patterns of multiple forms of Muslim reflexivity. In this article, two patterns of reflexivities are highlighted that relate to different religious approaches: exclusivist and inclusivist. The analysis draws on theories of racialization and gender and utilizes a sample of Pakistani Canadian Muslims to parse differences between exclusivist and inclusivist reflexivities to explore how divergent approaches to religion coincide with contrary patterns in family life. In order to understand these divergent patterns, the concept of Muslim reflexivity is extended by incorporating religious approach. Exclusivist reflexive Muslim participants, who view only one approach as correct, are preoccupied with authority given their identification with a marginalized minority group. Thus, they perceive ethnic boundaries as bright and gender boundaries as rigid. The focus of their reflexivity is dawat, or teaching others about the “true” Islam. This contrasts with inclusivist reflexive Muslim participants, who view multiple approaches as correct. They do not perceive their minority group as being threatened and thus do not seek out authority to legitimize their identity. In turn, they perceive ethnic boundaries as blurred and maintain gender-fluid attitudes and practices. The focus of their reflexivity is akhlaq, or having polite manners and ensuring mutually satisfying intimate relations. By highlighting multiple forms of reflexivity, this article serves to remedy the ways in which researchers reify assumptions about Muslim engagement with Islam: rather than enacting reflexivity in a uniform way, diasporic Muslims engage in a plurality of reflexivities.

Park51 is the name of a nonprofit organization that was initially founded to create an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. The organization’s leaders had hoped that the community center would serve three core purposes: providing local Muslims with a much-needed space to pray and take pride in their identity, uniting the diverse Muslim communities of New York under one roof, and offering services such as child care, educational programs, fitness facilities, and more to the wider city. Originally known as Cordoba House, the project later changed its name to reflect the address of the site that was purchased to create this community center: 51 Park Place. The community center was first conceptualized in 2006 and, over the next few years, elicited support from local city council members, state senators, and others. However, the plans eventually drew the attention of conservative pundits, who condemned the proposal as a potential “victory mosque.” These critics claimed the site was located too close to the sacred space of Ground Zero, where thousands of people were killed on September 11, 2001. Consequently, the project came to be known in mainstream media as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The damaging rhetoric against Park51 became increasingly severe throughout 2010 as the project became a point of debate in congressional races across the nation. Vitriol, fueled largely by Islamophobia, led to a series of challenges for the organization that effectively stalled progress on their project. After stepping back from the national spotlight for two and a half years to reevaluate their mission, the leaders of Park51 reemerged in 2014 to announce new plans for their site, which now included a residential skyscraper, a prayer space, and a three-story museum dedicated to the faith of Islam and its arts and cultures. Scholarly literature about Islam in America reveals that Islam has a long and complex history in the United States. However, the September 11 attacks created new circumstances and questions with which American Muslims have had to grapple. First, many Muslim Americans faced widespread Islamophobia and hate crimes in the wake of 9/11, creating lasting emotional and psychological distress. The social vulnerability and sense of isolation that many American Muslims experienced was further amplified by other pressures from both inside and outside of their communities. Throughout the early 21st century, Muslims have faced ongoing pressure to foreground their identity as Americans and to show that they are civically engaged citizens. Some scholars have posited that there must be more solidarity among Muslims of different racial, ethnic, national, and other backgrounds to foster mutual support and face these challenges together. Park51 is an organization that spent more than a decade attempting to navigate these complex realities. The inclusion of a museum in the revised plans for its site is particularly noteworthy given the persisting need to shift public perceptions of and misunderstandings about Islam.

Nativism describes an ideology that favors the rights and privileges of the “native born” population over and against those of “foreign” status, however these categories might be defined and ascribed. In the United States, the term has usually been employed to designate hostility against foreign immigration, although nativist arguments have been used against various internal minority groups as well. Although the term is often used as a synonym for the anti-Catholicism of the antebellum era, nativism has usually focused its apprehensions on ethnic and racial differences rather than religious diversity; since religious identity is often interdependent with racial or ethnic heritage, however, any religious divergence from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture likewise falls under suspicion. While not all forms of religious intolerance in the United States have been grounded in nativist attitudes and activities, the relationship between antipathy toward immigration and antagonism toward certain religions has been a recurrent and resilient theme in American culture. From the various forms of political and social enmity directed against Catholic immigrants during the antebellum era to the passage of Asian “exclusion acts” and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and from attitudes toward the civilizing “mission” of the United States to contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, antagonism toward the foreign Other has often been inseparable from expressions of religious chauvinism and xenophobia. Such chauvinism represents an appropriation of the idea of American exceptionalism by participating in the cultural mythology of the American civil religion, which posits both a divine origin of and special destiny for the United States. Scholars of American religion have long traced this theme of American exceptionalism, particularly as it has been expressed through the way in which Americans have read themselves into the biblical narrative as God’s “new Israel,” as a “shining city on a hill,” or as the location for the realization of the Christian millennial hope of a “new heaven and a new earth.” In less biblical but no less religious terms, the United States has been presented as the reification of a “new world order” (novus ordo seclorum, one of the three Latin mottos included on the Great Seal of the United States) or as offering humanity “the last best hope of earth.” By thus conceptualizing “America” as a type of utopian sacred space, these metaphors have simultaneously created the need for establishing the restrictions that mark one’s inclusion or exclusion in this redemptive process. Through identifying the foreign Other—by ethnicity, race, or religion—nativism has been one way to provide this religious function of defining the symbolic boundaries that keep this new “promised land” pure.

“Islamophobia” is a modern word for a prejudice that dates back to the Middle Ages and that permeates Western societies in the 21st century. It refers to the fear of and hostility toward Muslims and Islam, as well as the discriminatory, exclusionary, and violent practices arising from these attitudes that target Muslims and those perceived as Muslims. Islamophobia is best understood as a form of cultural racism that instigates animosity based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and ethnicity. The historical roots of Islamophobia are found in the political rivalries between Islamic empires and European Christian kingdoms and empires dating back to the Middle Ages. During this period, both Christians and Muslims depicted one another in unflattering terms, conceiving of the other religion as inferior and a distortion of God’s true revelation. By the 19th century, European empires gained the upper hand in this rivalry and imposed some form of colonial rule across vast swaths of the Muslim-majority world. To justify imperial expansion, Europeans developed Orientalist narratives that frequently cast Islam as a backward, uncivilized, and barbaric religion, at odds with European civilization. This narrative found new life as a “clash of civilizations” framework was deployed after the Cold War and particularly after the 9/11 attacks to explain both the rise in Islamist terrorism and to justify ongoing Western military intervention in Muslim-majority regions under the guise of the War on Terror. Islamophobia is exacerbated by the fact that Muslims often lack the power to control the narrative of Islam in the modern West. What most non-Muslims “know” about Islam often comes from one of two sources: the mass media, which frames Muslims primarily through the lens of terrorism and violence; and a professional Islamophobia network, a cadre of right-wing bloggers, activists, authors, and politicians who make a living demonizing and dehumanizing Muslims. Decades if not centuries of Islamophobia have had a devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of Muslims living in the West. Since 9/11, Muslims have been subject to intrusive government surveillance and profiling programs, detentions and deportations, registration systems, hate crimes, and infringements on freedom of religion in the form of antisharia laws, hijab and full-face veil bans, and localized and political resistance to the building of mosques and minarets.

Diverse Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya, Sufi, and other Muslims have lived in Canada since before its Confederation in 1867. The first were likely slaves being moved along the country's Atlantic coast, but there is little historical record to date. Settlers to Alberta have been examined to a greater extent, in part because there are more records of their presence. The first Canadian census in 1871 documented eight Muslims in Northern Alberta who likely worked as merchants and fur traders. There were, however, surely more than eight; Canadian Muslim minorities have long had reason to not be counted. The first officially recognized mosque followed, also in Alberta, in 1938. Immigration policies have long shaped Canadian Muslim life. War Measures Acts in 1914 and 1939 and policies that overtly preferred British Protestant subjects (until 1952) sharply limited Canadian religious diversity, including for Muslims. Initially, most of the early Muslim community were of Middle Eastern origin, but post–World War II immigration policy shifts meant that, beginning in 1968, Muslim Canadians became the country’s most ethnically, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse religious group. The largest Muslim population growth to date in Canada came in the 1990s, with a 130-percent increase, the same period in which there was greater institutionalization of Muslim organizations across the country. In 2021, Canadian Muslims made up approximately 4.8 percent of the national population. Most Muslim Canadians have settled in Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban regions in and surrounding Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. While statistical data show a growth in population, data on the different sectarian branches among the traditions of Islam have been largely inferred based on individual Muslims’ countries of origin. The largest group are Sunnis. Notable Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism have been charted since 2001; the number of reported Islamophobic incidents escalated sharply beginning in 2015, when federal-level anti-niqab policies were introduced. In 2019, anti-niqab laws were established in the province of Quebec.

The so-called “Global War on Terror” shows the tense relationships between mainstream media and Muslims around the world. Islam and Arab culture serve as a contrasting otherness in the construction of Western identity. Orientalism allowed first Europe and then the United States to carry on their civilizing missions and expand their culture through the Arab and Muslim world. Since the 19th century, an Orientalist narrative was built to describe an “oriental other” that justifies domination. This tense relationship can be seen in the way mainstream media reproduces an Orientalist narrative that has “migrated” from the global North to the global South. Here, “mainstream media” refers to the most prominent European and American media, including newspapers, TV broadcasting, and news agencies with global reach such as: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Le Monde, Figaro, CNN, the BBC, France 24, DW, the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and Agence France Press (AFP). Since the beginning of the 21st century the Orientalist narrative in mainstream media changed from being discriminatory speech into hate speech or Islamophobia. Peripheral media sources reproduce this narrative, as is the case with Mexico’s leading newspapers El Universal, Reforma, and La Jornada. Analysis of the treatment that these newspapers have offered of specific events such as the Second Intifada, 9/11, and the American invasion of Iraq illustrates how the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative from mainstream media is reproduced to a large degree in the global South. Findings from a current postdoctoral research study involving interviews of Arabs and Muslims living in Mexico make it possible to establish how and to what extent the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative spread by the mainstream media from the global North affects Arabs and Muslims in the global South.

Applications of the Shari’a in Western societies where Muslim minority populations are increasing must deal with growing Islamophobia in those societies. The history of the Shari’a reveals much misunderstanding and confusion about what it is and how it is viewed by Muslims. This has led to controversy concerning Islamic arbitration tribunals in the United States, Canada, and other Western nations where the consequences of increasing legal pluralism are being felt. A theoretical discussion of “legal centralism” taken from the work of major sociology-of-law theorists aids an understanding of this complicated situation of the Shari’a in the West.

Islam and popular culture constitute an area of scholarship that explores how Muslims are represented in popular culture. Historically, in the European and North American contexts, products attached to Islam and Muslims have often reflected Orientalist and Islamophobic themes. The study of these items has often focused on negative imagery and pejorative themes attached to Islam and Muslims. In the 21st century, scholars have shifted their attention to more nuanced portrayals of Islam, including those produced by Muslim writers, artists, and musicians engaged with forms of popular culture, such as music, literature, television, and film, through their own creative expressions. In North America, Islamic popular culture features a rich mosaic of music, art, literature, and other forms of expression that challenge the negative portrayals associated with Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse.

Throughout the nearly fifteen centuries of Muslim-Christian encounter, individual adherents of both traditions often have lived peaceably with each other. At the same time, Muslim expansion into Christian territories and Christian imperialism in Muslims lands have fostered fear and ill-will on both sides. Repercussions from the Crusades continue to resound in the contemporary rhetoric employed by defenders of both faiths. In recent years relations between Muslims and Christians across the globe have become increasingly polarized, fanned by anti-Islamic rhetoric and fearmongering. While a number of verses in the Qur’an call for treating Christians and Jews with respect as recipients of God’s divine message, in reality many Muslims have found it difficult not to see Christians as polytheists because of their doctrine of the Trinity. Christians, for their part, traditionally have viewed the Qur’an as fraudulent and Muhammad as an imposter. Old sectarian rivalries play out with serious consequences for minority groups, both Christian and Muslim. Conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere for much of the 20th century were often labeled as ethnic, political, or ideological perpetuations of long-standing struggles over land, power, and influence. These conflicts now tend to be labeled in accord with the specifically religious affiliation of their participants. Understanding the history of Muslim-Christian relations, as well as current political realities such as the dismantling of the political order created by European colonialism, helps give context to current “hot spots” of Muslim-Christian conflict in the world. It is difficult to imagine a time in history at which there is greater need for serious interfaith engagement than now. We need to understand better the history of Muslim-Christian relations so as to give context to current “hot spots” of Muslim-Christian conflict in the world. It is also important to understand the ways in which members of the two communities experience each other in specific areas of the world today, including the United States, taking note of efforts currently underway to advance interfaith understanding and cooperation. The events of September 11, 2001, and the resulting American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, have led to ugly commentary reminiscent of medieval hyperbole. Right-wing evangelical rhetoric in the United States against Islam has been fueled by incidents of international terrorism involving Muslims, while the well-funded Islamophobia industry in the United States has been producing and distributing large amounts of anti-Muslim material. Since the events of September 2011, American Muslims, caught in a painful position, have decried the acts of the 9/11 terrorists and defended Islam as a religion of peace. American Muslims want to exercise their constitutional rights to free speech in expressing their objection to certain American foreign policies, at the same time that they fear the consequences of the Patriot Act and other acts they view as assaults on their civil liberties. Meanwhile other Americans are struggling to understand that the Muslims with whom they interact in businesses, schools, and neighborhoods are different from the Muslim extremists who are calling for ever more dire measures against the United States. This is the general context in which Christian-Muslim dialogue is now taking place and to which it must address itself if it is to be effective.

Pioneers bring new, distinctive, and transformative elements to the cultural matrix, building upon trends, perceptions, and situations. The concept of a pioneer as it has developed is itself problematic, since it presupposes a fixed cultural phenomenon applicable in a variety of instances and without attention to pre-existing groups, institutions, or cultural expressions that may have played a role in the “new” formation. Unfortunately, much of the treatment usually found under the term “pioneer” assumes a tabula rasa environment, but this is not the case in North America, as Dunbar-Ortiz eloquently indicates. Those pertinent to being designated “pioneers” focus attention on individuals and movements that established identifiable Islamic organized entities in North America. They built upon Islamic linguistic, cultural, and social orientations they either brought with them as immigrants or were present on the North American continent. “Pioneer,” thus, is understood to be flexible with regard to time frames, as well as the designation of “new.” Furthermore, since the geographic region of North America is itself diverse, separate analyses of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean are made here. This, despite arguments by some scholars on the vagaries of such hermetically defined entities, appears to be the most adequate format for this summary review. Indeed, there is ample evidence of crossovers between these countries. Because of Islam’s long interaction with Christianity, and European countries that crossed the Atlantic, it follows, then, that perspectives and biases from European Christianity would affect the religion’s growth in North America. In fact, Islamic influences, and Christian antagonism to them, were known in North America’s early European expansion on the continent; indeed, some played a role in North American cultural development. All the so-called world religions have adopted incorporative and encompassing strategies vis-à-vis older, traditional religious patterns; some have been aggressively missionary-oriented, while others have generally expanded by a process of osmosis. Apart from its early years, Islam has tended toward the latter pattern. It should not surprise us, then, that conflicts between Christianity and Islam should have been a subtext of Islamic growth throughout the world. With the widespread influence of Christianity in the conquests of the Americas and their subsequent occupation, it is reasonable to look for competitive factors of cultural influence as they interacted. Interreligious conflict played a role in the migrations of groups such as the pilgrims to the United States. Undoubtedly, the mixed relationship between European Christendom and the Muslim world played a role in early attitudes within the North American context, with Europe welcoming and expanding on Islamic scholarship in many areas of knowledge, while the Church was vigorously opposing Islam as a religion. Among other features of this history, there were, then, pre-existing conceptual understandings and trends open to pioneers for their usage and reaction. A cultural attitude of positive reinforcement of Muslim presence has been operational within Muslims themselves toward settling in new environments. It derives from Muslim cultural contexts and predisposes them to work positively within any new situation. Consider the concept of rihla, an old Arab literary trope often associated with Ibn Battuta (d. 1369) and religious journeys such as the hajj, a motif fully embraced by Islam from its early days. Believers espoused it as a way of relating to new realities—viewing their role as one of appropriating God’s world regardless of where they traveled. In effect, the whole world was God’s, and Muslims were welcome in it. Hence Islam also had the potential to be in North American because they to feel at home wherever God would lead. In contrast, Western scholarship has tended to emphasize the philosophical, legal and theological constructions of Islam in comparing it with Christian or secular realities; this may have skewed studies away from other realities in the development of this religion outside its original home. In this regard, most Muslim believers find solace in sociocultural dimensions, such as eid celebrations, Islamic rituals, food protocols, Qur’anic recitations, and popular religious symbols. The interaction of Islam in North America requires examining wider focus in determining its successes. From that perspective, the examination of Islam on the continent is in its beginnings. It should also be noted that those foundational to building new American institutions utilized various models of Islam available in different countries of the Islamic world. This has resulted in a multidimensional religious reality on the continent. Finally, various changing social attitudes are evident in North America’s history in relation to Islam and these have played a role in the religion’s ongoing development, such as the attractiveness of Sufism’s apparent passivism and, perhaps more, the role of conversion and antipathies like Islamophobia. These elements are all ongoing in the understanding of the way in which pioneer activities have taken place on the continent.

Islam in North America is an incredibly diverse phenomenon with a long history and a range of different perspectives on what “American/Canadian Islam” is or should be. While the presence of Islam in the United States dates back to the transatlantic slave trade, Muslim identity in the region is often linked to an immigrant presence and became synonymous with a sense of violent foreignness after the 9/11 attacks. Mainstream Western media has played a fundamental role in the configuration of Islam as the ultimate cultural “other,” leaving Muslims who strongly identify as Muslim and American or Canadian in a precarious position. Representation and debates around Muslim identity have recently shifted to online platforms. Social media has not only impacted how Islam is practiced in the United States and Canada but has also influenced self-presentation, community building, and activism among Muslims across ethnicity, race, generation, and class. From Quranic websites and Muslim dating apps to blogs, Instagram influencers, and Snapchat fatwas, North American Islam has developed a burgeoning presence across the digital landscape. Furthermore, social media provides a central space through which national politics and policies play out, and Muslims in particular have faced challenges ranging from Islamophobia and religious persecution to digital surveillance and censorship. Such phenomena have impacted the online activities of Muslims and deeply inform the day-to-day lives of Muslim communities across the region. Through exploring the various ways in which Muslims in these minority contexts experience the growing interrelationship between their on- and offline lives, we approach the digital as a space where culture is continually produced, performed, and contested.