Preface to my 2014 AAG paper

I heard the news the afternoon of April 3; a shooter rampaging at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. No details were available yet, but it seemed there would be multiple injuries and deaths. “Not again” the announcer said.  I also thought “not again” and I remembered spring of 1995, when I lived in Lexington, Kentucky and my friends there reported things they heard from their friends across the country: a nasty word here, a hijab pull there, some spitting. It took a few days for the announcement that it was a Christian veteran of the US military—not acting in the name of any international movement or with assistance from anyone– to take effect and for my friends to feel safe again. At the time, I was preparing to go to the archives to research a dissertation on German colonialism in Africa, and how it was guided by an “anti-Islamic animus” that was laid out clearly in the documents, but that did not have a name. That was before September 11, 2001, of course, and in the intervening years, that animus has come to be known as Islamophobia. The news on Ft Hood reports “no connection to terrorism” and we know what that means; the person was not a Muslim, and did not claim to act in the name of Islam. By now there is nothing new in that term, in the connection of a religion to the extremists who have hijacked it, nor to the casual threats to Muslims whenever there are mass killings in our country. The common refrain is “Muslim, go home!”. It ignores the fact that many Muslims are at home across the USA. My friends tell me that Lexington was a good place to grow up. In this article, I survey the history of Americans who are Muslim at three nested scales: national, state (Florida) and local (the Tampa Bay region).