The Uncommitted: The Implications of American Muslim Political Unmooring

Regardless of the effects of the US presidential election, the 2024 election has revealed at least one political fact in stark detail: the liminal political position of American Muslims caught in a secular, imperial, political order. As the genocide in Gaza ravages everything in its path, the American Muslim population would find that in 2024, its imams, masjids, and community spaces would break from their post-9/11 alliance with the Democratic Party for the first time in over 20 years. I attempt to analyze the implications of this rupture, and what it might reveal about both the framework of a “culture war” as both a domesticated concept, as well as one too neatly divided along secular and religious lines.

I argue that the unmooring of American Muslims from the dual political structure helps clarify how overlapping antagonisms with secularism, imperialism, and White supremacy structure American Muslim political engagement, and how these intersecting and competing forms have all been mobilized in order to suppress Muslim political agency, as well as to kill, displace, incarcerate, and maim innumerable Muslims both domestically and internationally. As American Muslims have wrestled with an international faith-based solidarity with an ummah, their own political position at the heart of empire, as well as the fundamental limitations of the Democratic party as an agent of US hegemony with a repressive secular frame for gaining Muslim "rights", their political engagement has become even more fraught. This is counterposed with increasing levels of securitization of Muslim communities, new forms of anti-terrorism law against anti-war protestors, and heightened repression of speech disproportionately effecting Muslims. I aim to explore the possibilities in this new political rupture: for a reinvigorated, internationalist understanding of political engagement that can help complicate the framework of culture wars along simple religious lines.