Islamophobia has a complicated genealogy—one that’s entangled with religious discrimination and racism—but this one, small example is a display of how Orientalism and the cultural allegiance to Christianity bred by secularism persists.

Orientalism helps us understand how the West—with its academy, its museums, its media—came to categorize the world. Other nations, peoples, and customs became subjects of the West, and that “knowledge” then became normative.

What kinds of power did we relinquish when we assumed that religion could be relegated to the private sector? How did our belief in this universalist claim—that there’s a separation of church and state—lead us to our current moment of religious resurgence?

Our orientation in the West also has infiltrated how we view religions (and, by proxy, religious people) across the globe, even though our assumptions about religion may not be universally true. And because of the West’s powerful role in academia, the media, and global affairs, we also may hold certain assumptions about other faiths and traditions... See more

The binary of the Eastern World and the Western World is particularly fraught; these very terms imply a separation of identities, borders, and ideologies. It implies that we in the West all believe in one set of values, while the others in the East believe in a different value system. The West assumes that our view of the world and its many diverse... See more

Secularism is an important cornerstone of America and the West more broadly. It’s how we distinguish ourselves from other nations, and how we assert ourselves as modern and others as backwards. This has led us to believe that Western nations are more progressive (in part, because of their ability to diminish the role of religion in politics) while... See more

Muslim women in the mainstream media are constantly forced to show their credentials as “good Muslims” in order to be taken seriously by Western audiences who have no real conception of Islam.

Our position in the world influences how we view religion, society, and other people in the world—and thus, our version of justice.

Secularism Is Complicated: the most crucial challenge to the promise of secularism—ie, that by separating church and state, religion became restricted only to the private sector. While it is true that secularization did happen at a specific point in European history (thus resulting in the Church being formally removed from political rule in... See more