Muslim Interpellation: Hijabs, Beards, and the Post-9/11 Border Regime

Post-9/11 visual and textual art representing the day-to-day lives of Muslims often reflects the condition of living within a global ideological order that hails them as dangerous threats. We often see this in scenes of interpellation at airport security. This chapter examines literary and popular cultural illustrations of the ramifications of checkpoint interpellation in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), and Riz Ahmed’s rap lyrics and personal essay “Auditions and Airports” (2016). These texts demonstrate the various ways individual border-crossing subjects are hailed as “Muslim” qua threat, terrorist, and enemy through the assessment of incidental features of dress, grooming, taste, as well as politically charged confrontations about national and religious affiliation. In turn, these texts also represent the anticipation of interrogation and the strategic performance of compliance that have necessarily become a quotidian aspect of Muslim life in Europe and the United States. The airport, as these authors show, has become one of the most important sites that determines not only who is a “Muslim,” but also what the consequences of that determination mean in our contemporary moment. And perhaps even more significantly, these texts illustrate how being hailed into the post-9/11 ideological order means that the border itself migrates along with anyone interpellated as Muslim—that is, Muslim with all its attendant pejorative connotations of potential sedition and treachery. The condition of being perceived as a Muslim in the twenty-first century, I argue, is to be always on the border, at the checkpoint, in a perpetual state of migration.