Al-Qaeda and the Racialization of Religious Freedom: Post-Cold War Islamic Militancy from the Annals of Legal and Legislative Accommodationism in the United States
One of the most important threads of continuity marking post-Cold War legal efforts to indict foreign-born Muslims on charges of terrorism was narratological: a story about al-Qaeda designed to favor law enforcement officials working alongside an emboldened legislative state. This paper resituates the origins of this account in a longer history of First Amendment caselaw whose privileging of liberal and majoritarian definitions of religion has risked not only exposing the judiciary to perpetuating entrenched forms of racial injustice but also expanding the reach of national security and intelligence directives into the ways religious freedoms are being regulated. Drawing upon insights into the history and formation of al-Qaeda made available through work on an audiotape collection formerly owned by Osama bin Laden, the authors re-examine key claims about al-Qaeda made by federal prosecutors and defense attorneys as they explored Muslim suspects’ alleged links to a range of anti-American attacks during the 1990s. Indications of the wealthy Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden’s possible involvement proved useful not only for his notoreity but also because so little evidence could be found tying him to direct involvement in these attacks. Turning to possible conspiracy charges, prosecutors were aided by a string of legislative initiatives that expanded their toolkit for securing indictments and enhanced sentencing and also aligned their work with judicial efforts to accommodate a wider range of religious freedom protections for largely mainline and majoritarian religious groups. While inviting more sustained attention to the ways prosecutors’ narratology magnified bin Laden’s cause in the years before 9/11, I seek, more broadly, to recenter the study of racialized religious formations in histories of the 21st-century American security state.