Using Law and Social Control to Improve Islam's Image in America

-- By KhurramDara - 15 Feb 2012

When the Park51 project, formerly known as the Cordoba House, and commonly referred to as the "Ground Zero Mosque" was being protested just a couple of years ago, there was a sign that I saw a protestor holding. Initially, it had caught my eye because of how many words had been scrunched onto this little piece of cardboard. The sign said "All I Need to Know About Islam I Learned on 9/11." All he "needed" to know about Islam, he had learned on 9/11.

For that man holding the sign, and for the many others who admire the likes of Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, and Frank Gaffney, 9/11 was a natural consequence of Muslims carrying out Islam. For them, Islam is inherently promotes violence. There are organizations, like Jihad Watch and Stop the Islamization of America who perpetuate nonsense about American Muslims: they want to impose Shariah on all, convert America into an Islamic state, and destroy Western society.

While the rhetoric can appear extreme to some, the combination of organization and money, in conjunction with the fact that there are terrorists carrying out heinous acts supposedly in the name of Islam, can have an actual impact on our politics. It could explain why Congressman Peter King held hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. Or why 22 state legislatures considered passing anti-Sharia legislation. Or why the NYPD has been surveilling college students across the country. Or why Lowe's Home Improvement pulled ads from the TV show "All American Muslim" (after complaints that the show was not an accurate representation of Muslims, given that no radicals were on the show).

American Muslims have employed two primary ways of combating this anti-Muslim sentiment. One is cooperative, the other adversarial. First, we want to educate other Americans about Islam. The argument goes, if people truly understood Islam, they would see that terrorism is incompatible with Islam. The second approach is organized protest and litigation.

My father is a doctor. When he recaps his day at work, nearly all of his stories begin with some variant of "so I asked the patient, what hurts? When you want to fix something, it helps to know what hurts.

So we have a problem. Education is one form of coalition building, the use of inter-faith panels, for example, can bring your allies together so that an organized support structure is in place. But what about the gentlemen holding the sign in the streets? Education will not touch him. It's effectiveness hinges, in part, on each participant's willingness to learn. The protestor with the sign is not going to the local community center for the next inter-faith meeting. In fact, he told us where he learned--it was what he saw on 9/11. And what about the average American? If they have no real interest in Islam or religion generally, it will probably be a tough sell to get them to join in the educational process.

What about the second approach? A protest or a counter protest can be a sign of strength. But again, there is a targeting issue. Typically, you aren't protesting with the expectation of persuading the opposition; your target is the independent and uncommitted. So here you lose the man with sign again. Similarly, it's unclear how we would convince an average American to be interested in the subject.

And litigation? We are entitled to practice our faith freely in the United States. A lawsuit to prevent a local government from preventing the building of a place of worship could work at achieving the short term objective: building a mosque. But a court order, for example, is unlikely to persuade naysayers that the result is the right one.

What hurts? For those who have negative perceptions of Muslims, what hurts is Islam. Islam to them is what they saw on 9/11, what they see on TV, what they hear from "experts." Islam is abstract in some cases, and general in others. It is never specific. It is never a person. It's always an "ideology." For social control to succeed, it must be able to appeal to the non-rational, unconscious motives of humans. Our existing approaches do not do that.

That is not to say they are not important or useful (for example, litigation is often necessary, especially in the scope of hate crimes or discrimination). The approach needs to be one that combines, not replaces existing approaches with other forms of social control. In fact, our need for the legal system may actually be indicative of the sparse use of other forms of social control by American Muslims. Donald Black proposes that there is an inverse relationship between law (government social control) and other forms of social control. With this model, if we increase our use of other forms of social control, it follows that we should have less of a need for litigation, as an example).

This is plausible. Consider human relationships, whether they are personal or professional. They build a level of comfort and connection between people. Having a Muslim coworker or a Muslim neighbor, can make Islam more than some "ideology," or some abstract thing. It can make it a person. It can make it specific. A Jewish or Christian American's perception of Islam, can be shaped by his relationship with an individual Muslim. This is because the relationship can serve as an educational tool. Spending time and getting to know an individual results in experiential learning. A person who is friends with a Muslim won't come to understand Islam by reading a book or taking a class about it. And if someone is attacking or discriminating their friend because of his faith, their defense won't be rooted in a technical understanding of Islam and won't include a rhetorical assault on the discriminating parties misguided or poorly constructed argument for why Islam is evil. The defense won't be rational, it will be emotional--he's my friend, or he's my coworker, or he's my neighbor.

So, in addition to using the law when necessary, American Muslims should develop ties and roots to their communities to build these personal connections. Again, it is plausible that the more known and engaged American Muslims are in a particular community, the less likely it is that there will be issues of discrimination or protest regarding Muslims. Subsequently, the need for litigation in this context would go down.

Of course, there is the point to be made that Muslims make up only a small portion of the United States population, and therefore, this approach is limited in its scope. This is true. However, we aren't limited to merely using personal connections as a form of social control. We can also use popular culture. The likes of Fareed Zakaria, Muhammed Ali, and Lupe Fiasco, all have the potential to "normalize" and humanize Islam, with their fame. While every American Muslim can't be a famous news commentator or musician, an attitude that embraces, rather than blindly rejects, American culture will increase the likelihood that more American Muslims grow up to become highly successful in a number of fields.

*****you need to cut about 180 words********

end of revised paper, comments and notes below

**use this section to explain how other forms of social control are more powerful than law. **general comment: what's my point? the combination of law (government social control, according to D.Black) AND other forms of social control (like social interaction, friendship, etc.) would benefit American Muslims. So this is about combining short term benefits that the law may be able to provide (lawsuits for immediate relief, community organizing, etc.), and long-term effects that can be derived from basic social interaction in communities, is a way to maximize the level of social control for one particular group in America (American Muslims). Expand on D.Black's proposition that law and other social control are inversely related. Perhaps this not simply a temporal argument (short term and long term), maybe it's that if we (American Muslims) ratchet up other forms of social control, we would have less litigation!

I don't know how you come to the historical conclusion that you come to. You don't show us: you merely tell the story leaving out the parts that might have resulted in a different conclusion. A summary of the history of the civil rights struggle that leaves out the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the 1876 election, the Civil Rights Cases, Plessy, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, the Second World War, Brown, Rosa Parks, Martin King, the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots, Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," and so on and so on is probably not going to be complete enough to judge from.

White supremacy in America from about 1650 about 1968 was supported by de jure racial segregation. That makes the role of the law in maintaining and then weakening its grip a different question than the general one of whether law is a weak form of social control or (more pertinently) whether legal remedies are generally useful in abating social tensions across ethnic, class or religious divisions.

First Amendment Protections and Behavior

**use this section to outline the overarching challenges Muslims face (irrational suspicion, anti-Sharia legislation, Spencer/Geller/Gaffney type group, mosque protests)

I don't think the measurement of "severity," is the most useful one. Social situations have historical and psychological contexts, as well as sociological and legal ones. What is happening to Muslims in the US is tied more deeply to what has happened, is happening and internally tends to happen within Christian and Islamic societies and people than to what has happened or is happening or internally tends to happen between black and white people in the Unites State.

He was accused of both. The opposing candidate publicly rejected efforts by voters to describe Obama as a Muslim in his hearing. But he made no effort to stop his running mate from repeatedly saying that Obama "palled around with terrorists." I'm not sure why this matters, but if it does we should be accurate about it.

We could find many more examples of this form of criminal violence directed against Muslims, qua Muslims. But burnings and other criminal desecrations of churches and synagogues also occur in the US, every year. And, unfortunately, there are very few ways, in a large, highly-armed and rather violent society to determine the social meaning of isolated acts of murder. So interpreting these facts as presented is not a particularly promising line of persuasion for any proposition.

**change this section to explain how this is a short term strategy, it is to be "that" AND "this." Law can be a good form of attaining short term goals (if one has the resources and ability to use the judicial process).

This would make sense as a strategy in the event of the passage of state laws that impeded Muslim freedom of worship or religious practice for non-secular reasons. But it isn't the legal response appropriate to mosque burnings or hate crimes. I think you're probably imprecisely characterizing the precise legal positions taken and actions brought in the specific situations described. That will confuse a reader with some legal knowledge but no specific knowledge about these matters.

**this needs to be an "American exceptionalism" argument. An American Muslim is not the same as a Syrian Muslim, Saudi Muslim, or Eyptian one. There is something about the way American society works that makes what I am saying better suited for American Muslims, than any other type of Muslim. Think about what those unique qualities are. Then write them down here.

Is this actually the historical and social lesson concerning the treatment of Muslims living in non-Islamic society? Is it how Indian society works? How Yugoslavia worked? How Russians and Caucasian Muslims or Turks and Greeks have interacted over centuries? Or is this a point about American society that draws an exception from the usual condition of Muslims in the Dar al-Harb?

Which is all of us. Because our rational processes are the secondary rather than primary forces in our minds. Secular people who have absorbed the ideas we call "Freud" know this. But the very idea of submission to the law of an external all-powerful God is another recognition of the same proposition, whether the God so described exists or not. No accurate psychology, religious or secular, would lead us to expect secondary processes to be all we need to concern ourselves with on such an inquiry, or to affect such a change in society as your description implies.

Social control succeeds by appealing to the non-rational, unconscious motives of the human animal. Law is weak because it does so weakly. The creation of fear of Muslims in American society was deliberate, careful, rational and purposive, intended to manipulate people to create irresistible power. It is slowly and intentionally turning the US from a free society into a technologically-enabled despotism. But it was also an unconscious process, spreading outward from hidden roots in an increasingly ill-educated Christian society losing its faith.

Utility of the Law as a Form of Social Control

If law is not a powerful form of social control, than why do we spend so much time and energy drafting penal codes, writing legislation, and interpreting the Constitution? Wouldn’t we be better off using some other form social control?

Not if the weakness of the form of control is part of its utility and importance.

Is the reason we don’t murder children or use crystal meth because of laws the tell us not to? If not, then why have laws at all? Some would probably say that the reason we have laws is for the few people that do engage in activities like murder and drug use. Deterrence is often argued, yet many felons, for example, are repeat offenders. A report from the Bureau of Justice statistics found that 61% of felony defendants had at least one prior conviction.

So it would make sense to ask the same question without limiting yourself to a view of human psychology that ignores everything below the surface.

While laws don’t appear to be a strong form of social control (in that it is unclear whether laws actually prevent crimes from being committed) it may have some utility. If one has the resources, short term relief can be granted. An injunction or a court order will meet an objective in the short term. But it must be met with other forms of social control. With a Muslim woman who wears a hijab (headscarf), for example, winning an employment discrimination lawsuit will help the individual who was discriminated against. But does it actually change the perceptions the employer has of Muslims? Social pressures (a friend who is Muslim, a neighbor who is Muslim) are likely to result in more lasting change.

This last point, I recognize, is for you—in the world of present politics—the reason all the rest of the analysis has been written. Because politics is about appealing to non-rational elements in the human mind, this is—as we have discussed before—an approach that it makes sense for you to take. But considered as a form of rational argument, as you present it here, it's completely unestablished. Events in Toulouse over the past several weeks, and their effects on French society at large, would give a different turn to the analysis. And the much more serious and complex laboratory constructed in India over the last quarter-millennium would yield different, more uncertain, more appalling and more fascinating propositions. Once again, it makes a good deal of difference whether this is an argument based on another form of "American exceptionalism," or a general social claim.