In The Arena Bobby Jindal’s Muslim Problem How a ‘model immigrant’ is playing to his evangelical base with ugly allegations.

Arif Rafiq is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and president of Vizier Consulting, LLC, which provides strategic guidance on Middle East and South Asian political and security issues.

Bobby Jindal, who was born a Hindu, has a Muslim problem. The Louisiana governor and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate has been repeating a lie that even Fox News was forced to apologize for. In an address before the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society in London last week, Jindal warned of so-called Muslim “no-go zones” in the West—areas in which “non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can.”

He has since doubled down on the claim, even after being pressed for evidence by a British journalist and failing to provide it. Instead, Jindal asserted that no-go zones “absolutely is an issue for the UK [and] absolutely is an issue for America and other European [or] Western nations.”


It’s a sad thing to say for a Hindu convert to Christianity who changed his name from “Piyush” to “Bobby” and paints himself as a model immigrant, but Muslim-baiting is a key part of Jindal’s pitch to a demographic that he is aggressively courting: evangelical conservatives.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, evangelical Christians became America’s most ardent supporters of wars in Muslim lands. Eighty-seven percent of white evangelical Christians surveyed in early 2003 supported the Iraq war—compared with 78 percent of white Americans overall and just 29 percent of black Americans. Evangelical support for the Iraq war was higher than that of mainline Protestant denominations. White evangelicals, more than any other religious demographic, have consistently been the most likely to support torture (the targets of which will invariably be Muslim).

Evangelicals tend to see America’s challenge with jihadism not as part of a war with a radical strain within the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, but as part of a broader war between the Christian (or Judeo-Christian) West and Islam.

The evangelical idea that this is a war of religions is best demonstrated by the Rev. Franklin Graham, who—in the wake of the jihadist slaughter of cartoonists and Jews in Paris earlier this month—invited Muslims to convert to Christianity during an appearance of Fox News’s Sean Hannity Show. Hannity, a Catholic with a soft side for evangelical Christianity, neither interrupted Graham nor reprimanded him. He gave him full license to engage in a display of religious bravado and chest thumping through unabashed proselytization.

Evangelical Islamophobia is distinct. It’s a whole other world when it comes to other Christian denominations, which are making the best displays of American pluralism when it comes to their engagement of Muslims.

America’s oldest Catholic higher education institution, Georgetown University, has been a leader in promoting dialogue between Christians and Muslims.

Last November, in an exemplary sign of tolerance, the Washington National Cathedral, which is affiliated with the Episcopal Church, hosted Friday prayer services for area Muslims.

This month, Duke University’s associate dean for religious life, a Christian, invited the university’s Muslim chaplain to conduct the Muslim call to prayer from the top of the school’s chapel. But they were forced to make more modest arrangements after a national backlash spurred in part by a Facebook post by Rev. Graham.

And, largely at the local level, there is an active Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue scene. A major mosque in northern Virginia rents space for Friday prayers at a Jewish temple that shares a parking lot with a Catholic Church. This is everyday American religious pluralism obscured by headlines that reflect a world that is indeed, unfortunately, on fire.

Over the past three decades, America has been home to growing interfaith dialogue and cooperation between Muslims and Catholic, mainline Protestant, and reform and conservative Jewish communities. But among evangelicals, there is a growing anti-Muslim subculture. This isn’t simply a reaction to terrorism perpetrated by jihadists or the undeniable persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority countries. Evangelicals are being taught to suspect and disdain peaceful Muslims who live in their own country. And that culture of fear is exactly what Jindal is playing into.

There’s a cottage industry of terrorism experts and ex-Muslims who speak at evangelical churches and conferences warning about imaginary Muslim plots to take over the United States and establish “sharia law.”

Most prominent among the demagogues is Brigitte Gabriel, a best-selling author with a six-figure salary, who has addressed the conservative Heritage Foundation and is a regular guest on Fox News. Her fear-mongering organization, ACT! for America, claims more than 500 chapters across the United States, and was built by a former staffer of the Christian Coalition. One small example of Gabriel’s grassroots reach: She gave a lecture at Jacksonville, Florida’s First Conservative Baptist Church on the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged campaign to establish “sharia law” through public schools.

Similarly, Walid Shoebat, an ex-Muslim and self-proclaimed former Muslim Brotherhood member, has addressed churches, appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network and even lectured before law enforcement. Shoebat has alleged that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin married former Rep. Anthony Weiner as part of a surreptitious plot to “promote Islam”—and that such dissimulation was sanctioned by the religion. He has also described President Barack Obama as “ the agent of the anti-Christ.”

Before you dismiss Shoebat as an irrelevant crackpot, note that in 2009, his group earned more than $500,000 in revenue from speaking engagements and video sales. People like Gabriel and Shoebat are backed by a multi-million dollar network of conservative and evangelical foundations. It takes a lot of money to spread hate.

Evangelical and other Islamophobic demagogues have successfully made anti-Muslim hysteria an integral part of contemporary evangelical and conservative politics. It’s a strategy from an old playbook. Read Richard Hofstader’s seminal essay “ The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and replace the word “communism” with “Islam.” The red menace has been painted green.

From anti-sharia law legislation in states like Alabama to the prevalence of Islamic words like taqiyya (religiously-permitted dissimulation) in their lexicon, it’s clear that Islamophobia has been mainstreamed in conservative and evangelical Anytown, USA.

And so that is why Jindal’s anti-Muslim hysteria is not simply a random act by a politician riding on the coattails of the latest tragedy. It’s very much designed to appeal to a base that has been primed for confrontation with Muslims—even when there are none in their midst.

In his London speech, Jindal contrasted his own happy immigrant experience with that of an undifferentiated mass of Muslims who he implied are uniquely resistant to assimilation. Jindal rejects hyphenation. He says he’s simply an American, not an Indian-American. He has prematurely declared the end of racism and opposes identity politics. But the reality is that all politics is identity politics. And Jindal’s politics is that of insular white evangelical Christians masquerading as color-blind American patriots.

The case of Bobby Jindal is a testament to America’s polarization. There really are two Americas.

In Bobby Jindal’s America, a leading Republican person of color has to erase his ancestry and resort to the demonization of another minority group to gain the support of white evangelicals. In that America, nearly 88 percent of voters for the Republican presidential candidate were white; and only 1 percent of viewers of the top (conservative) news channel were black.

And then there is Barack Obama’s America, where you can be named Barack Hussein Obama and serve two terms as president. It’s an America that is pluralistic and, in many ways, post-religious. It’s an America where Christians invite Muslims to pray in their very own houses of worship. It’s an America where black, white, brown and other rally together in support of a black man slain by a white police officer. It’s an America that appreciates the full spectrum of its ethnic, racial and religious diversity. And it’s an America that will have to persevere for this great experiment to remain as beautiful as it is, despite its very deep and systemic flaws.

Which America do we want ?