March 29, 2018 Statement by Duke Muslim Students Association We are outraged, disappointed, but unsurprised by the Duke College Republicans, Young Americans for Liberty, Alexander Hamilton Society, and
Duke Political Union’s
decision to
sponsor an event originally titled “The American Muslim Identity: Patriot or Insurgent” on Duke’s
campus. While the Alexander Hamilton Society has revoked their sponsorship in light of our protest, the fact that they originally felt that this was an appropriate event remains disturbing. The sponsored speaker, Zuhdi Jasser, treats all Muslims as potential would-be terrorists when he supports discriminatory surveillance against American Muslim communities by the American government. Jasser has c
laimed that “President Trump’s travel ban will prevent Islamic extremism from entering the U.S.”. He has a history of attacking those Muslims who disagree with him as being “supporters of violence”, including our own
Professor Omid Safi. Not only are his claims morally disgusting, but his policy positions have been proven harmful over and over again. While Zuhdi Jasser may claim to speak for us, his words only harm us. He does NOT speak for us.
Defaulting to the tired binary of “patriot/citizen” versus “insurgent/terrorist” presents a false
dichotomy of Muslim identity, whereby Muslims must always be actively and outwardly expressing their patriotism and loyalty to the United States or risk being viewed as a security
threat and perpetually “Other”. Other religious actors in the U.S. are never asked to “prove”
themselves in similar fashion - indeed, even white nationalist groups who form militias targeting and killing citizens and residents of the US are not treated similarly. This rhetoric is not only blatantly racist, Orientalist, and woefully ignorant - it also reproduces structural violence against Muslim communities. Due to this discourse, American Muslim students on campus find themselves unable to access care services, freely traverse their religious identities, or speak about problems in their communities for fear of having their words weaponized against their families. (See:
t of Duke’s “Diversity and Inclusion” initiative. The College
Republicans and the co-sponsors of this event made no attempt to consult or include the Duke Muslim community or Duke MSA in their decision to invite Jasser, informing us only when the event went live. If they had consulted us, we would have told them that spreading thinly veiled racist messages about us will not help make Duke a more inclusive community. We are fully aware of the shallow understanding of Muslims and Islam possessed by a cohort of our fellow peers and professors at Duke, as seen by how the Duke Political Science department advertised this event without a second thought. We hold responsible the professors who sponsored and approved this event to their student groups under the guis
e of “having difficult conversations”. The real “difficult conversation” here is how Islamophobic and racist political
speech supported by professors makes students on this campus unsafe. We have all painfully watched and felt in our communities the effect
s of Trump’s hate speech: the rise in hate crimes,
the bullying in our schools, and the heightened fear we all feel everyday. And our campus is certainly no exception. Every one of us has stories about how we have been marginalized time and time again by faculty, friends, and administrators. Less than a year ago, a Duke Muslim student was nearly hit by a car for being a so-
called “dirty Arab” on Swift Avenue. Three years
ago, Muslim students were shot to death down the road from Duke at Chapel Hill. In the early 2000s, a Muslim student at Duke endured being smeared as a terrorist in the Chronicle Op-Ed section. When we uplift Islamophobic speech, we encourage and provide the groundwork for violence and discrimination against Muslims on this campus and Muslims more generally.
Teach-In Against Islamophobia and Racism in order to un-learn these harmful ideas which are unfortunately widespread across the political spectrum and frequently taught in classrooms. We also encourage departments and administration to educate themselves by reading the Islamophobia is Racism syllabus, in particular the section on Policing, Security, Surveillance,
and Anti-Muslim Racism. We end by calling all Duke students, faculty, and administrators to push themselves to actually learn about and work with the Muslim community rather than tokenizing us for their events.