Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chair of the African Union Commission. Wikicommons/US Dept. of State. Some rights reserved.Over the past two weeks we have seen ample media attention paid to US President Donald Trump’s disgraceful Executive Order that suspends the admission of new refugees for 120 days, puts an indefinite ban on refugee entry from the war-torn Syria, and blocks nationals from six other countries from a list of Muslim majority nation-states for 90 days – with a risk of further extension. Critics have condemned the barring of refugees and migrants as “Islamophobic”, whilst over six thousands academics and researchers across the world, including one of the authors, have declared that they will boycott attending conferences and academic events in the US, in the hope of putting pressure on the Trump administration. But is this enough to stop a man like Trump who wants only to build walls, divide nations and exclude people?
We call here for a more critical and robust approach, simultaneously deconstructing the troubling and simplistic nature of the critiques and protests undertaken so far. We echo atheist and ex-Muslim feminist, Maryam Namazie, that everyone “Must oppose it” unreservedly – as “a matter of urgency”. But we also suggest that everyone should consider the need for an intersectional prism to appreciate how this ban is more complicated than a straightforward far-right restructuring.
Muslims and heterogeneity
The Sunday Review editorial of the New York Times has correctly noted that Donald Trump is a man who “Sees what he wants to see, and nothing else”. For Trump, Muslims are a homogenous community whilst, in reality, they are not. He and his followers speak about Muslims in this fashion, thereby suggesting that every Muslim is Islamist and most are conservative. What he does not see is that Muslims are heterogeneous. As Rumana’s previous article on Open Democracy argued, and as Tariq Ramadan points out, there are “a bewildering variety of Muslim theological positions, only some of which might be referred to as Islamist.”
