Muslim American Identity

The counterarguments against the poster brought forward by these Muslim women raise important issues facing Muslim American identity today. Thus, the complex tradition of othering in the creation of American identity must be expanded upon. As explained by Jan Radway, “American national identity is… constructed in and through relations of difference” and that “American [is] always relationally defined and therefore intricately dependent on ‘others’ that are used both materially and conceptually to mark its boundaries.”6 In the current post-9/11 political milieu, the ‘other’ is Muslim, which created the need for a strongly defined American identity that stands in opposition to the ‘dangerous radical’ Muslim. This is evident in the recent proposed

Furthermore, the existence of such proposals and their supporters suggest a societal recognition that being Muslim and being American are often contradictory identities.
Despite the seemingly progressive nature of this representation within the current Islamophobic national environment, Fairey’s poster of the Muslim American woman also suggests a more regressive view of the Muslim-American identity that has long been a tradition in the media. In her work, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, Evelyn Alsultany suggests that the strategy of “inserting Patriotic Arab or Muslim Americans,”8 in

Again, this functions in accordance with the post-9/11era tendency in which the, “conception of the American citizen… [is] centered on opposition to Arabs and Muslims”10 based on the assumption that those identities are antithetical to American identity. As such, the American flag hijab is employed to explicitly place the Muslim woman at the United States, and thus, American end of the spectrum. Though many saw this imagery as a progressive a denunciation of the tendency to see Muslim Americans as inherently terrorist, the full title of the poster, “We the People are greater than fear,” acknowledges the ‘bad’ Muslim identity by suggesting that Muslims are not to be feared. This places the Muslim American directly within this good/bad tendency, which is problematic in various ways. Firstly, this paradigm also functions as a system of othering, in which the Muslim American may be othered from the American community and, thus positioned as a terrorist or terrorist adjacent; however, this does not always work in reverse, because, while denouncing terrorism is a requirement for the hyphenated Muslim American