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 to read here on University of Minnesota’s manifold platform.

To purchase a copy, click here. 

Featuring:

Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in the fields of Muslim studies, feminist theory, South Asia, and migration studies. She is the author of two award-winning books, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan. Professor Khoja-Moolji is currently working on a book (under contract with the Oxford University Press) that traces the transnational lives of Ismaili Muslim women. The book follows their journeys, past and present, from colonial India to East Africa and then onto North America. It outlines the everyday forms through which women create spaces of joy, forge community, and practice ethical subjectivities.

Professor Khoja-Moolji has published articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Theory, Feminist Media Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Gender and Education, Comparative Education Review, Girlhood Studies, Third World Quarterly, and Feminist Teacher, among others. She also maintains an active public scholarship agenda and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and The Express Tribune.

Mobashra Tazamal is the Associate Director of The Bridge Initiative. Her work focuses on the impact of the War on Terror discourse and state-sponsored Islamophobia around the globe. Given her expertise, she serves as a resource for educators and journalists, and her analysis has been cited in global media outlets such as the New York Times, NBC, Salon, Washington Post, and Al Jazeera. In addition to publishing articles and reports for Bridge, her analysis has also been featured in The Independent, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Truthout, The New Arab, and Byline times. She holds a Master’s degree from SOAS, University of London.