Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream

TERRIFIED

TERRIFIED

How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream

CHRISTOPHER BAIL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-15942-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947502

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Franklin Gothic and Charis

Printed on acid-free paper ∞

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.  Civil society organizations vying to influence shared understandings of Islam in the U.S. media, 2001–3    44

2.  Media influence of mainstream Muslim organizations, 2001–3    59

3.  Evolution of the cultural environment inhabited by civil society organizations competing to shape shared understandings of Islam, in the U.S. media, 2001–8    71

4.  Contributions (in millions of U.S. dollars) to seven fringe organizations, 2001–11    75

5.  Percentage of Americans expressing unfavorable views of Islam in twenty-five polls conducted between 2001 and 2011    113

6.  Percentage of tweets about civil society organizations with positive sentiment, 2010–12    121

7.  Anti-mosque activity in the United States, 2005–12    123

8.  Number of Muslim American terrorism suspects or perpetrators, in U.S. court cases, 2001–12    129

9.  Cultural environment inhabited by civil society organizations competing to shape shared understandings of Islam, 2001–3    147

TABLES

1.  Anti-Shariʾah Bills Introduced in State Legislatures, 2010–12    103

2.  Characteristics of Facebook Audiences of Twelve Civil Society Organizations    117

3.  Regression Models That Assess Alternative Explanations of Cultural Change    152–153

4.  Sampling Strategy for In-Depth Qualitative Interviews    157

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT HOW CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS shape the evolution of public discourse about social problems after major crises such as the September 11th attacks. One of my principal arguments is that civil society organizations achieve most influence upon public discourse when the evolutionary forces that made them powerful become invisible. If this book influences how people think about the evolution of public discourse, it will be thanks to the many colleagues, universities, funding agencies, family, and friends who helped make this work possible.

This book was first conceived underground—between the labyrinthine walls of Harvard’s Pusey Library. My self-imposed exile was part of an artless attempt to impress my mentor, Michèle Lamont, by reading every social science manuscript within sight. With characteristic brilliance and good charm, Michèle soon convinced me that the most important discoveries are made above ground, in the wondrously messy world of empirical observation and—perish the thought—interaction with other social scientists. I soon found myself enjoying eclectic conversations with Orlando Patterson, whose encyclopedic wit nurtured my burgeoning interest in public discourse about Islam. William Julius Wilson’s legendary enthusiasm emboldened me to attempt a wholly unreasonable dissertation—in both scope and substance. I was therefore fortunate to convince Jocelyn Viterna to serve on my dissertation committee; she helped me focus my broad interests within the literature on collective behavior with generous enthusiasm and acumen. Yet it was Mary Waters who helped me realize the metamorphosis of my dissertation into this book, and the near total transformation that such efforts require.

As is perhaps common, my education in graduate school stretched far beyond my dissertation committee—and so too the family of people who inspired this book. I was particularly fortunate to learn from Jason Beckfield, Neil Gross, and the inimitable Stan Lieberson. I also enjoyed the wisdom and collegiality of Mary Brinton, Frank Dobbin, Peter Hall, Sandy Jencks, Tamara Kay, Gary King, Peter Marsden, Rob Sampson, and Chris Winship. I am likewise very grateful that Andreas Wimmer’s sojourn within Harvard’s sociology department coincided with my time there, since he remains one of my most trusted critics to this day. This book also benefitted from conversations with many other graduate students at Harvard: among many others, Cybelle Fox, Marco Gonzalez, David Harding, Simone Ispa-Landa, Kevin Lewis, Mark Pachucki, Lauren Rivera, Wendy Roth, Pat Sharkey, Graziella Silva, Cat Turco, and Natasha Warikoo.

Though this book was born in Cambridge, it came of age in Ann Arbor, where I spent two blissful years at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar. At Michigan I enjoyed many long conversations about this book with Elizabeth Armstrong, Sarah Burgard, Christian Davenport, Jerry Davis, Müge Göçek, David Harding, Vince Hutchings, Rob Jansen, Victoria Johnson, Greta Krippner, Karyn Lacy, Sandy Levitsky, Mark Mizruchi, Jeff Morenoff, Jason Owen-Smith, Norbert Schwartz, Peggy Somers, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, and Fred Wherry. I was also particularly fortunate to benefit from the generous and cheerful mentorship of Mayer Zald during the last year of his life. I spent most of my time, however, enjoying interdisciplinary cross-pollination with my colleagues in the Robert Wood Johnson Program: Jane Banaszak-Holl, Rachel Best, Graeme Boushey, Seth Freeman, Alice Goffman, Rick Hall, Daniel Lee, Jamila Michener, Sarah Miller, Dan Myers, Edward Norton, Brendan Nyhan, and Francisco Pedraza.

I completed this book during my first year as a junior faculty member in the sociology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This was an ideal locale to finish this manuscript—not only because of the unparalleled strength of my colleagues within cultural and political sociology such as Andy Andrews, Neal Caren, Daniel Kriess, Charlie Kurzman, and Andy Perrin, but also because of the tremendous warmth and inspiration of my colleagues from other subfields. Though I would eagerly acknowledge the support and encouragement of each one if space allowed, I must at least thank the following people for conversations that helped improve this book: Howard Aldrich, Jackie Hagan, Kathie Harris, Arne Kalleberg, and Laura Lopez-Sanders.

Numerous colleagues offered written criticism of this work in its early, intermediate, and advanced stages. I am most indebted to Randall Collins, Heather Haveman, Daniel Kriess, Charlie Kurzman, Terry McDonnell, Francesca Polletta, Iddo Tavory, and Haj Yazdiha for reading the entire manuscript. Andy Andrews, Elizabeth Armstrong, Avi Astor, Rachel Best, Mehdi Bozorghmehr, Michaela De-Soucey, Neil Gross, Rob Jansen, Brayden King, and Andy Perrin offered generous comments upon individual chapters as well. Yet this book also benefitted from dozens of conversations with the following colleagues from an invisible college: Mabel Berezin, Amy Binder, Gérard Bouchard, Karen Cook, Paul DiMaggio, Jennifer Earl, John Evans, Roberto Franzosi, Jen’nan Ghazal Read, Amin Ghaziani, Ron Jacobs, James Jasper, Colin Jerolmack, Riva Kastoryano, Paul Lichterman, Omar Lizardo, Doug McAdam, Ashley Mears, John Mohr, Charles Ragin, Gabriel Rossman, Patrick Simon, Chris Smith, Phil Smith, Brian Steensland, Ed Walker, and Patrick Weil.

Several organizations provided financial support for this book. The National Science Foundation, the Harvard Divinity School, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy generously supported my fieldwork. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation freed me from teaching and committee responsibilities for two years, providing me with the time and space necessary to collect new data and hone my argument. The foundation also enabled me to hire two outstanding research assistants, David Jones and Nate Carroll, who assisted me in data collection, analysis, and editing of this book. I am also indebted to Taylor Whitten Brown and Matt Mathias, who assisted me in the analysis and writing of this book at various stages. Jenny Wolkowicki, Ryan Mulligan, and Joseph Dahm ushered the manuscript through the final stages of production at Princeton University Press.

Finally, I owe a deep debt to my incomparable editor, Eric Schwartz. His vision, patience, and steady hand helped me navigate the odyssey of writing one’s first book. Yet my greatest debt is to my wonderful partner, family, and friends. Whenever I was frustrated by obstacles—often self-created—they reminded me that I would enjoy their love and respect, no matter what the outcome of my work.

ACRONYMS

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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