﷽
I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles...
History rhyming again...
The current manufactured hysteria about Sharīʿah law in the US is in spirit very emblematic of Dred Scott all over again. Like that 1857 miscarriage of justice, there are attempts to dispossess Muslims in America of their rights as citizens.
The irony, or perhaps more accurately political schizophrenia, is the very same people who are clamoring for smaller government are attempting to leverage and expand government powers to reach into the lives of citizens mainly based on a myth. A hyperstition. A hauntology that America is a “Christian nation”. Much of this comes from the self-referencing rhetoric of David Josiah Brewer, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (d. 1910) who quotes himself in The United States a Christian Nation,
“These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”
In fact, Brewer clarifies his position in the very same 1905 book, that the United States is not Christian
“…in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or that the people are in any manner compelled to support it.”
yet what we see today is a blatant 180º turn: an advocacy of not only privileging Christianity above all other religions but also dis-favoring others, chief amongst them Islām and its practitioners.
There are some other interesting similarities between what we see in today’s political landscape and the musings of Brewer who, despite clearly rejecting any notion of America being a Christian nation in any legal means, was in favor of shaping demographics which favored whiteness by narrowing or striking down existing protections for those of African in cases such as:
- 1906’s Hodges v. United States (a decision by the Supreme Court limiting the power of Congress to make laws under the Thirteenth Amendment by overturning the conviction of three white men convicted of conspiring against black sawmill workers. The Court held that Congress did not have the right to intervene against racially motivated interference with labor contracts)
- 1908’s Berea College v. Kentucky which upheld a state ban on integrated classes;
all the while favoring Chinese immigrants where he sided with 18 cases including his dissent in 1893’s Fong Yue Ting, a ruling that would have allowed for the indiscriminate racial profiling, arrest, and deportation of Chinese immigrants. His position on whiteness, its proximities, and blackness, would certainly be an interesting investigation into the history of the “model minority” and the genealogy of its thought given Brewer’s, other jurists’ stances towards blackness.
So here we are again, at the nexus of another historical rap battle, where the same old verse keeps getting chopped and sampled. Whether it’s 1857’s Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s declaration that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” to 1892’s Justice Brewer’s “this is a Christian nation,” America has not progressed very far beyond its deeply ensconced racist inclinations. These inclinations are amplified by this superstition/hyperstitions which haunt the present due to an unfulfilled future promised to white America by its mythical past. However, irony is never lost on the ignorant. When we investigate Brewer’s Christian Nation, we find that one-liner was never the whole truth yet the bars that Brewer dropped have continued to live well beyond the man who wrote them.
This haunting is only possible due to the political necromancy of the likes of Trump, Musk, the techno-fascist oligarchs, and all those who work for them and who employ them, knowing full well their audience already knows the lyrics, that the only thing they need for the hauntology to take full possession is to say the incantation out loud: Sharīʿah law. Muslims. Mexicans. Haitians. That is how hyperstition works: a foundational myth, repeated by those with power, until it bends a social majority and the law toward itself. And that is how hauntology works: when the myth fails, as it must in a country that has never been only white or only Christian, it lingers as the ghost of a “restored” America that never existed (queue make America great again’s greatest hits). Today’s Sharīʿah panic is that ghost, garbed in a thobe and ḥijāb, for 2026.
This year halloween fell on a weekend...
Me and Geto Boys are trick-or-treating...