The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood

Part of the “Forerunners: Ideas First” project, described as a “thought-in-process series,” The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood by Shenila Khoja-Moolji probes the intersection of gender- and race-making in the United States. Khoja-Moolji offers a deep investigation into a singular subject, Muslim boys, at a snapshot in time, post-War on Terror America.

Throughout the book, Khoja-Moolji develops the concept of “Muslim boyhood,” arguing that if “boyhood” is a proto-stage in the development from childhood to adult citizenhood, then “Muslim boyhood” is proto-stage in the development of terrorist figures. In this developmental track, Muslim boys are denied the universal marker of childhood: innocence. Instead, “Muslim boyhood” transports the specter of future crime into the present and onto the not-yet-but-soon-to-be terrorist. Their subject-position, she argues, is used as a heuristic device in the American ideological project of modern racial capitalism, with the aim to strengthen the War on Terror, the national security regime, and the carceral state. She contends that foreign wars have created their own economies central to national landscape. Just as the figure of the laborer is the central figure in the economy, the figure of the terrorist is the driving force of the war economy. For without the figure of the terrorist, there is no justification for war production, from surveillance and weaponry all the way to newspapers and magazines.

In this volume, Khoja-Moolji draws on an impressive array of textual and visual sources—caches of documents from the White House and the FBI, among other institutions of national security; posters and magazine covers from popular media; five focus group interviews with twenty-six non-white Muslim high school boys that she conducted in 2017; among other sources—to make her argument that the figure of the proto-terrorist is created, or in her words “made visible,” in depictions of Muslim boys.

In chapter 2, Khoja-Moolji builds on the extensive academic literature on stereotypical productions of Islam and Muslims throughout history to show how the production of proto-terrorists is yet another iteration of  “monstrosity,” drawing on pre-existing racist scripts that portray nonwhite men as hyper-sexual yet repressed, and strengthens patriarchal norms both inside and outside whiteness (35). She uniquely combines this with additional theories on “abnormal figures” to show how Muslim boys as proto-terrorists are rendered as threats to the social order—but as manageable threats whose source of deviance is in their individual pathology. This construction, the author argues, obscures its political reality.

In chapter 3, Khoja-Moolji explores how Muslim boys are commercialized. She strongly shows how the proto-terrorist figure drives American racial capitalist logic and industry inside the US, beyond the usual national security discourse. Her exploration of how the figure of the terrorist is a central driver of economics and industry is indeed novel. On the one hand, they can be the subjects of “commodity antiracism” used to “buy elites goodwill” (63). On the other hand, they can be celebrated for acts of terror that the public demands from them. By comparing the media coverage of Ahmed Mohamed’s 2015 arrest at his high school in Irving, Texas, over his homemade clock to the Rolling Stones cover of one of the perpetrators of the bombing at the Boston Marathon, the author shows how positive portrayals of Muslim boys are instrumentalized, abstracted, and “exceptionalized,” and negative portrayals are both demanded and supplied.

In the fourth and final chapter, Khoja-Moolji explores the impact of the forces of war capitalism and whiteness on Muslim boys themselves, citing five focus group interviews with twenty-six non-white Muslim high school boys that she conducted in 2017. She argues that the racialization they describe is “how whiteness (that which is pure or not-raced) (re)makes the world and limits nonwhite Muslim bodies to specific, often enclosed spaces and constrained behaviors” (82). The young Muslim boys she describes “carry . . . memories (personal and collective) of differential treatment” that shapes their self-regulation (82).

Khoja-Moolji then shifts her field of analysis to India. She shows how Muslim boys in India are similarly imbued with “impurity” to strengthen the Hindu nationalist regime—akin to how Muslim boys are rendered guilty in the US to uphold the regime of whiteness in the American context—using a March 2021 video depicting a Hindu temple caretaker abusing a teenage Muslim boy in Ghaziabad, India as her case study. Comparing it to the 2017 arrest of a five-year-old boy at Dulles airport, the author asks: “Why beat or detain a boy who obviously poses no threat” (91)? In both contexts, Muslim boyhood is linked to the “domains of purity/impurity, innocence/threat” (93) and the specter of future transgressions—in the case of the United States, terrorism, and in that of India, love jihad. As Khoja-Moolji herself mentions, the comparison between the US and India is only to “gesture” toward commonalities. The comparative study between the US and India was insightful and greater exploration of the material linkages across divergent political contexts that use Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device could indeed yield fresh avenues of inquiry.

Touching upon themes of contemporary religion, masculinities, race, and capitalism, The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood adds much-needed nuance to the literature on the gender dimensions of representations of Muslims in 21^st-century America. The book’s main audience is scholars and students interested in race in modern American society. Secondary audiences of interest are broad and include scholars and students of gender, religion, sociology, Islam, the Middle East, and South Asia. It might also be of special interest to those in policy. Even though it offers a “thought-in-progress,” this book already adds to the field through its exceptional exploration of an understudied identity at the intersection of race, religion, gender, and capitalism.  

Faria Nasruddin is associate, Middle East Program and project lead, Middle East Women’s Initiative, Wilson Center.

Faria Nasruddin

Date Of Review:

September 23, 2024