This September marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the beginning of an era defined by an Islamophobia-fueled expansion of U.S. militarism. With each year comes more reflection and analysis on the legacy of endless wars of aggression in Muslim-majority nations across Asia and Africa–and the staggering human toll they have exacted. An estimated 940,000 people were killed directly by post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. Furthermore, an estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million more people have died indirectly in these war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5 million and counting.
As part of the U.S. "War on Terror," our bookshelves, radios, televisions, and social media feeds have told sensationalized stories of meek Muslim women coerced into marriage and modesty or frail Muslim girls beaten for daring to learn how to read: both alleged to be criminals in their homelands due to being assigned the so-called weaker sex. The "War on Terror" is made possible by the remaking of Arab and Muslim men as a faceless, amorphous enemy discernible only as "terror" in the eyes of not just the U.S. but of people everywhere.
These wars have not only reshaped modern American identity around Islamophobia and an insatiable lust for violence—they have also refined an easily replicable political playbook, one presently central to dismantling reproductive freedom in the United States.
Where the U.S. "War on Terror" Meets Anti-Abortion Dogmatism
The anti-abortion, anti-queer, and anti-trans political forces dominating contemporary U.S. politics have always been explicit in naming their political project as a white Christian nationalist one. Despite their intentionality, white supremacists have earned monikers from liberals like "Y'all Qaeda" and "Yeehawdists." There is also a more simplistic and dangerous argument ongoing about whether to denote white Christian nationalists and their organizations as terrorists: If it's terrorism when Muslims do it, it's terrorism when Christians do it.
While the former is more often used in jest, both ultimately validate the premise that white Christian nationalism emerged as a defensive, even if also violent and reactive, movement against an "invading" political ideology. In doing so, we further cement a false chronology in the American psyche, and the caricatured Muslim Other as a prevailing, primary force of terror throughout the world.
To be clear, white supremacy and white supremacists assail and marginalize communities of color at every opportunity. However, "terror" has been used to criminalize Palestinian solidarity in the United States and as a blank check for perpetual war and aggression. It's seemingly shapeless by design, but the intent was never meant to describe the nature or scale of violence: only the part of the world the U.S. is focused on eradicating.
Using that language for domestic actors obscures the truth: White Christian nationalism is not a response to extremism; it is the foundational American extremism. It is the engine driving all forms of gendered violence, from bans on abortion and gender-affirming care to the weaponization of family policing against poor, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families.
Global Policing in the Global City: GILEE, Olympification, and expanding the post-9/11 anti-terror apparatus
A national moment of hysteria around terrorism, new laws and technology expanding the government's ability to surveil citizens, and an upsurge in retaliatory hate, repression, and ostracization of Arab and Muslim communities helped catapult police exchanges with Israel.
Creating "Baby Gabriel": A Case Study in the Nexus Between Islamophobia and Reproductive Injustice
Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, a married couple, entered into a surrogacy agreement that has since landed them at the center of a multi-state, nationally publicized legal battle that has inspired legal and narrative intervention by the anti-abortion right.
From the few facts that do not appear to be in dispute, we know: At about 20 weeks' gestation, the fetus was diagnosed with a severe heart defect—a prognosis requiring extensive surgeries for any chance at survival outside the womb. Like many families in this position, Ahmed and Gilkar weighed their options: terminating the pregnancy to spare themselves future heartbreak, or continuing and hoping that, despite the prognosis, Baby Rumi would live a long and happy life.
Some time later, the surrogate relocated to Texas, where she gave birth and has since pursued full custody of Baby Rumi. At some point in this process, the child at the center of this dispute was renamed. Despite being named Rumi by his parents, statements made by the surrogate, her legal team, and many of their supporters refer to the child as "Gabriel"—a name laden with Western Christian theological significance. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Office and dozens of media outlets have echoed this branding. This is not a casual error. It is a calculated act of white Christian nationalist myth-making: remaking the surrogate into a symbol of falsified martyrdom and venerating the child as near-messianic, deploying the same logic that underpins white nationalist narratives like "the conspiracy of great replacement" and "reverse racism."
25 years of rhetoric to normalize the "War on Terror" has attempted to teach us that Muslims are a threat to American children and to the American way of life, and that American and Muslim identities are mutually exclusive. The renaming is a rhetorical device that transforms Baby Rumi—a child whose parents are read as Muslim, whose names alone signal otherness to the American public—into "Baby Gabriel," a child we have been conditioned to accept as unequivocally ours. As follows, the media coverage overwhelmingly identifies this child as "Baby Gabriel," platforms anti-abortion actors as experts on the matter, and assigns unconditional credibility, moral authority, and righteousness to the surrogate, even as the surrogate now faces a custody lawsuit of her own.
While we do not have definitive confirmation of Ahmed and Gilkar's religious identity, we do know that the nature of Islamophobia means it does not require confirmation to do its work. The public perception of them as Muslim—driven by their names, their heritage, and the broader cultural context—is what makes this case legible to anti-Muslim audiences and useful to anti-Muslim actors. Whether they practice Islam is, in a sense, beside the point: The machinery of Islamophobia treats them as Muslim regardless.
Where this dynamic has proven most troubling is in how it has shaped coverage of allegations that the surrogate experienced reproductive coercion prior to giving birth. Reproductive coercion encompasses behaviors that exert control over another person's body, including interpersonal and systemic pressures to have an abortion or to give birth. The surrogate alleges, and many media reports echo, that Ahmed and Gilkar requested she have an abortion due to the anticipated quality of life Baby Rumi would have.
No person should experience the physical invasion and mental anguish inherent to the loss of reproductive autonomy. For this reason, many of us are struggling to discern what the right stance is in this case. Some believe it is unclear how this truth can coexist with the legal reality that is inherent to surrogacy: one's provision of reproductive labor to assist in another's parenthood. To that end, one of the possible realities for any surrogate is that their reproductive labor may include having an abortion for any number of reasons. Surrogacy is, in itself, a surrender of bodily autonomy—one that, under the law, must be done voluntarily and with informed consent. Like many things, that has always been easier said than done.
That surrogacy remains a legal minefield due to the unique ethical considerations it requires is no justification for the room we have given anti-Muslim and anti-abortion sentiment to come together and determine that Ahmed and Gilkar are fundamentally unworthy of dignity. The fact that any person or couple considers abortion in the course of their reproductive lifecycle is not shameful, nor does it disqualify them from parenting should they choose to. It is the nature of the distinct Islamophobia that defines our post-9/11 world that such basic facts as these become lost and advocates become too afraid to assert them.
American conservatives know well that a couple perceived as Muslim—an ordinary family's surrogacy agreement, not that of a beloved celebrity family—would become the face of all of the ethical questions about surrogacy that make many of us squirm in discomfort. They know that anti-Muslim bias would motivate local and national media to run with the story, implicating itself in the white Christian nationalist agenda. It's likely they also predicted that abortion advocacy organizations, whether due to fatigue or fear in the wake of Roe's fall, would hesitate so long as the allegations of reproductive coercion remained part of the narrative, too. While the actual litigation will continue to play out across three states, what we have collectively experienced is nothing more than a smear campaign.
Decades of propaganda collide at once: The falsehood that controlling women is a cornerstone of Islamic doctrine and Muslim life is just one of the many fallacies used to continue the U.S. "War on Terror" abroad, even as many can't afford housing, healthcare, food, or childcare here at home. Somehow, advocates for reproductive, gender, and racial justice arrive at the conclusion that this isn't their fight, even though the same enemies line the battlefield.
Reproductive Justice Movement: Show Up for Palestinian Solidarity
The struggles for a free Palestine and bodily autonomy are deeply intertwined. What reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations are unwilling to risk in solidarity with Palestine mirrors the limitations within their movement that inhibit their solidarity with all people seeking abortion care, and those who support them, as anti-abortion criminalization escalates across the country.…
Concluding Thoughts
Currently, Texans are navigating a nasty, vitriolic electoral cycle dominated by Islamophobia and racism. This disdain is expressed as much by Texas Republican Party leadership as it is by their supporters: ranging from bizarre claims about the "Islamification" of Texas to physical and verbal assaults to the formation of the Sharia Free Texas Caucus. In June, several Muslims who attended the Texas Republican Convention in Houston were advised to leave both the Republican Party and the country.
Anti-abortion actors have long sought to see the same politicians who criminalize abortion do the same to surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF). This year, the Texas Republican Party signaled that this is precisely the course of action they intend to take in the upcoming legislative session. To deliver on that promise, Texas Republicans are doing what they've always done–using fear and misinformation to fabricate justification for violent and politically unpopular positions. If the "War on Terror" has taught us nothing else, it is that the construction of Islam as incompatible with American values and antithetical to so-called U.S. democracy can clear any and all obstacles that stand in the way of fascism.
Anti-Muslim animus is one of few renewable political resources. No matter how much of this type of political capital is spent to increase defense spending, to further militarize our local police forces, or to normalize racial profiling and surveillance as part of our daily lives, there is always more. To call this anything other than white Christian nationalism obscures the unflinching truth about the forces united not just to dehumanize Ahmed, Gilkar, and their child, but to do the same to the rest of us as soon as it becomes politically necessary.