ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an ethnographic study, conducted in Silicon Valley in northern California between 2007 and 2011, in the South Bay Area and in the nearby cities of Fremont/Hayward that have a large Afghan population. A key element of many interfaith projects, especially those that attempt to perform a “good” Muslim citizenship, is volunteerism and community engagement compatible with neoliberal democracy. The growing interfaith movement has significant implications for cross-racial and cross-class alliances as well as fissures in Silicon Valley. The heightened Islamophobia that has been stoked in the US by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and election, as well as his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, intensified the Islamophobia that was consolidated after 11 September 2001. Liberal, religious multiculturalism has been presented as a solution to the problem of Islamophobia, racial violence, and military occupation, obfuscating or containing a critique of the geopolitical imperatives of warfare and structural issues of race and racism.
