Surveillance, Secular Law, and the Reconstruction of Islam in the United States

Surveillance is often understood as simply a tool for collecting information, and opposition to the surveillance practices of the US government frequently relies on the analytical framework of privacy and rights violations. Other critical analyses of surveillance practices use the lenses of racial discrimination and/or neocolonial political domination. While all of these are valuable approaches, they downplay the extent to which specific modes of existence and ways of being have been targeted in the current surveillance paradigm. In this paper I discuss the role of religion and its relationship to the law—in other words, the state’s control of “appropriate” religion—in defining surveillance practices. Using critical interpretive and deconstructive readings of the discourse surrounding the surveillance paradigm, I show that surveillance is used as an instrument to revise and alter modes of non-Western moral and ethical life and to render human subjects more suitable for assimilation into the burgeoning secular/liberal world order, including its concept of “appropriate” religion. I argue that the current mode of government suspicion and surveillance in the US continues long-standing demarcations between acceptable and unacceptable religion in secular law (and in liberal/secular Western societies more broadly), and I demonstrate how this paradigm subordinates and marginalizes non-Protestant religions. In order to fully understand the US surveillance state, we need to pay attention to the way that secular order attempts to define and shape non-Protestant religions and in so doing endangers its own democratic principles of tolerance and neutrality.