Islamophobia and 'Muslim boyhood'

In Episode 16 of “Unpacking Islamophobia,” our guest is Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji. She is the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Chair of Muslim Societies and an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She is an award-winning author of three award winning books including her most recent book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford University Press, 2023). In her latest book, The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), Professor Khoja-Moolji asks: How do we understand an incident where a five-year-old Muslim boy arrives at Dulles airport and is preemptively detained as a “threat”? To answer that question, she examines American public culture, arguing that Muslim boyhood has been invented as a threat within an ideology that seeks to predict future terrorism. Muslim boyhood bridges actual past terrorism and possible future events, justifying preemptive enclosure, surveillance, and punishment. Even in the occasional reframing of individual Muslim boys as innocent, Professor Khoja-Moolji identifies a pattern of commodity antiracism, through which elites buy public goodwill but leave intact the collective anti-Muslim notion that fuels an expanding carceral and security state. Framing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device, she turns to a discussion of Hindutva ideology in India to show how Muslim boyhood may be re-situated in global contexts. The book is freely available on University of Minnesota's manifold platform: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-impossibility-of-muslim-boyhood To purchase a copy of the book click here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917197/the-impossibility-of-muslim-boyhood/