Ibrahim Negm
Last week’s article explored how rising Islamophobia in the U.S. intensifies during foreign military escalations, linking domestic hostility to global conflicts. This second part continues the discussion, focusing on the intersection of populist nationalism and foreign wars, and how these forces shape the lived reality of American Muslims.
Muslim Americans who have endured Islamophobia for decades know the pattern by heart: every military escalation abroad is accompanied by a parallel escalation of verbal and physical attacks on mosques, women in hijab, and Muslim students at home. Civil rights monitoring centres have already begun documenting a spike in hate incidents in the first days of the war. The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a feature of how American wars in Muslim-majority countries function domestically.
To understand the depth of Muslim American anxiety today, one must look beyond the war itself to the political ecosystem in which it is being waged. A landmark 50-state survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), based on over 22,000 interviews conducted throughout 2025, found that 56 per cent of Republicans now qualify as adherents or sympathisers of Christian nationalism – the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed according to traditional Christian values.
The numbers tell a chilling story. Among Christian nationalism adherents, 67 per cent describe immigrants as “invading” and undermining American culture. Sixty-one per cent support deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Seventy-three per cent view Trump as a strong leader who deserves expansive authority, even if he overrides established political norms. And 30 per cent of adherents – nearly one in three – agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence.”
These are not fringe views confined to anonymous internet forums. They represent the majority sentiment within one of America’s two major political parties and are most concentrated in states where Republicans dominate state legislatures – Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. When PRRI’s president, Robert P. Jones, says this worldview is “an ongoing threat to our pluralistic democracy,” he is describing the political water in which Muslim Americans must now swim.
In this climate, wars in the Muslim world are not presented to the public as complex geopolitical disputes amenable to negotiation. They are packaged as civilisational battles between good and evil, light and darkness, Christendom and its enemies. And Muslim Americans – regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, or political views – are cast in the role of the enemy within: a community whose loyalty is permanently in question, whose religion is synonymous with threat.
What makes the current moment uniquely dangerous is not just the existence of a populist right, but its mutation into what the Institut Montaigne’s Julian Blum has called “an unnatural coalition” – a sprawling alliance binding Christian nationalists and populist conservatives to the tech-right oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
These factions disagree on almost everything of substance. The Christian right dreams of a pre-modern order rooted in faith, tradition, and community. The tech accelerationists dream of Dubai and Singapore – rule by the technological Leviathan. Rod Dreher, a central figure of the Christian right, has declared that “AI is demonic.” Marc Andreessen celebrates the “techno-capitalist machine” and the “technological superman.” Patrick Deneen yearns for a harmonious medieval city. Curtis Yarvin yearns for authoritarian efficiency.
Yet the coalition holds – and it holds for three reasons. First, a shared agenda of destruction: dismantling the “deep state,” humbling universities, crushing the liberal institutional order. As long as there are enemies to demolish, the coalition has purpose. Second, money: the 2024 election confirmed that Silicon Valley’s fortunes are now the lifeblood of Republican electoral strategy. Third, the designation of a civilisational enemy – whether China or the Islamic world – that gives the alliance its narrative coherence.
Trump himself, as Blum observes, is “strikingly devoid of any doctrinal framework,” which allows every faction to project onto him its deepest desires. The Christian right sees a warrior for God. The tech barons see a partner willing to dismantle the regulatory state. And both see in the Muslim world – and in Muslim Americans – the civilisational “other” that must be contained or diminished.
For Muslim Americans, this means that their adversary is no longer a collection of individual politicians who can be pressured through elections. It is an interlocking ideological-economic-media machine that views them, their faith, and the broader Islamic world as a permanent problem to be managed.
The administration markets its war on Iran with rhetoric that transcends the language of nuclear nonproliferation and alliance management. From the beginning of the latest tensions with Tehran, Trump framed himself as the savior of Iranian protesters, warning that America would “come to the rescue” if they were killed by the regime. He wrote on his social media platform that Iranians were “on the verge of toppling their government,” with “help on the way.”
Muslim Americans see through this humanitarian veneer with the clarity that comes from bitter experience. The same administration that claims to care about Iranian human rights implemented a travel ban targeting citizens of Muslim-majority countries and has pursued discriminatory domestic policies that directly affect the Muslim community. The same president who tweets about “saving Iranians” presides over a political movement in which one-third of its most committed ideological base endorses political violence.
This is the impossible position of the American Muslim today: trapped between an Iranian regime they do not trust, an American administration whose track record in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria they know all too well, and a public opinion that is drifting ever further toward a populist right that regards every “other” as a threat to be neutralised.
In the face of these converging pressures, Muslim American organisations and communities are not retreating into silence. They are mounting a deliberate campaign to redefine what it means to be Muslim and American – simultaneously and without contradiction.
Their message has three pillars. First, opposing the war on Iran does not mean supporting the Iranian regime; it means rejecting a doctrine of preemptive warfare that has been proven morally and strategically bankrupt. Second, Muslim Americans are citizens rooted in their communities – taxpayers, voters, professionals, neighbours – not a fifth column for any foreign power. Third, real American security is not achieved by bombing Middle Eastern capitals but by building balanced relationships grounded in sovereignty, international law, and addressing the deep-rooted causes of extremism on all sides.
Inside mosques and community centres, the emphasis is on civic engagement: encouraging young Muslims to attend city council meetings, contact their congressional representatives, volunteer for political campaigns, and run for office themselves. The goal is to ensure that Muslim voices are present – and impossible to ignore – when decisions of war and peace are made.
This is not a defensive posture. It is an assertion of democratic agency by a community that refuses to be reduced to a security file or a talking point in someone else’s culture war.
Ibrahim Negm is Senior Advisor to the Grand Mufti of Egypt
