ABSTRACT
More Muslims live in Asia than anywhere else in the world, and yet when we discuss Islam, we imagine a Muslim homeland, identity, ethnicity, and race tied to the Middle East. How that happened – how ideas about who is Muslim, who is not, where are “Muslim lands,” and what constitutes a “Muslim World” – are related to processes of minoritization and racialization. In this chapter, I discuss how, together, racialization and minoritization create a narrative that forms modern understandings of Muslims. Where minoritization collapses a group into a singularity with both identifiable and marginal traits, racialization marks individuals as having immutable traits because of their membership to a particular group. Muslims in Asia are often defined as a demographic minority within particular nation-states, but minoritization refers to the experience of power; Muslims in Asia are minoritized. Religions are not races – Islam is not a race – but Islam and its practitioners are racialized. Racialization and minoritization do not function solely as external labels thrust upon Europe’s Others. Indeed, they often demand and require the participation of those who have been racialized and minoritized. These are pernicious systems of power, definition, and classification that have specific implications, histories, and effects for Muslims in Asia.
