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Arun Kundnani. The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. London and new York: Verso, 2014. 322 pages. Hardcover
The post-9/11 world witnessed a discernible change in the West's perception of and relation to the Muslims' culture, identity, ethnicity, and ideology, perceived as an alien to and incompatible with ill-defined Western culture by the people with anti-Islamic prejudice. The West began to grapple with all increasing and recognized immigrants and own national Muslims through various formulations vis-à-vis anti-Muslim theories, ideologies, and projects. Recent years account for a rising trend in what is known as "domestic war on terror" in the USA and its ally's countries. Arun Kundnani-New York-based young and dynamic professor, who teaches terrorism studies-in his book under review explores and explicates the "domestic fronts of the war on terror in the US and the UK" (9).
The book spreads over nine chapters preceded by an introduction. In his introduction, Kundnani poses a number of stirring arguments against the so-called "war on terror" policy. He evinces that it is the reification of "radicalization theory" the West formulated through which Western societies view Muslim populations in the aftermath of the 9/11 event. According to this theory, writes Kundnani, "Islamist" identity is viewed as the root cause of terrorism, and Muslims as terrorists. Kundnani impedes and argues the reified theory and asks reasons for thinking Islamic identity behind terrorism, which, of course, is not (9-17). One of the key finds of the book, Kundnani says, is that what the West call extremism, jihadists, radicalists are "to a large degree a product of their own wars" (25).
Chapter 1 "An Ideal Enemy" opens with an episode of a victim of racist lobby of the UK; for them, Muslim identity is the real threat to and enemy of the West. In response to the pervasive racism against the Muslims, Kundnani gives a detailed account of various community movements in the USA and UK in the 1960s and 1970s that mustered their voices against such discrimination, for identity was the main issue facing the innocent Muslim population in the West. Ergo, a globalized Islamic identity inevitably emerged not as a political front "but a broad sociological trend in a reaction to racism,...