In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. In Terrified, Christopher Bail demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expanding network of anti-Muslim organizations that exert profound influence on American understanding of Islam. Bail traces how the anti-Muslim narrative of the political fringe has captivated large segments of the American media, government, and general public, validating the views of extremists who argue that the United States is at war with Islam and marginalizing mainstream Muslim-Americans who are uniquely positioned to discredit such claims. Drawing on cultural sociology, social network theory, and social psychology, he shows how anti-Muslim organizations gained visibility in the public sphere, commandeered a sense of legitimacy, and redefined the contours of contemporary debate, shifting it ever outward toward the fringe. Bail illustrates his pioneering theoretical argument through a big-data analysis of more than one hundred organizations struggling to shape public discourse about Islam, tracing their impact on hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, television transcripts, legislative debates, and social media messages produced since the September 11 attacks. The book also features in-depth interviews with the leaders of these organizations, providing a rare look at how anti-Muslim organizations entered the American mainstream.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Acronyms xvii Chapter 1 1 The Cultural Environment of Collective Behavior 1 How Civil Society Organizations Create Cultural Change 5 The Argument 9 Studying Cultural Change with Big Data 11 Outline of the Book 12 Chapter 2 17 From the Slave Trade to the September 11th Attacks 17 Civil Society Organizations and Islam in Early American History 19 The Middle East Conflict 20 The Emergence of the Mainstream 23 The Foundation of the Fringe 28 Chapter 3 33 The September 11th Attacks and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations 33 Shaping Shared Understandings of Islam in the Media 37 Making the News 38 Why Fringe Organizations Fascinate 39 Studying the Evolution of Shared Understandings of Islam in the Mass Media 42 Islam in the American Media, 2001-3 43 The Fearful Fringe 46 Chapter 4 53 The Rip Tide: Mainstream Muslim Organizations Respond 53 Condemning Terrorism 54 Condemning the Fringe 58 Splintering within the Mainstream 61 Chapter 5 67 Fringe Benefits: How Anti-Muslim Organizations Became Mainstream 67 Fringe Networks 68 From the Fringe to the Mainstream 72 How Fringe Organizations Became Authorities about Islam 76 Chapter 6 87 The Return of the Repressed in the Policy Process 87 Casting Mainstream Muslim Organizations as Radicals 89 Marginalizing Mainstream Muslims from the Policy Process 95 Barack Hussein Obama: The 2008 Election 97 Local Politics and the Growth of Anti-Shari'ah Legislation 99 Training Counterterrorism Agents 104 Chapter 7 109 Civil Society Organizations and Public Understandings of Islam 109 The Struggle to Shape American Public Attitudes toward Islam 110 Using Big Data to Study How Civil Society Organizations Shape Public Understandings of Islam 114 Anti-Mosque Activity 121 Chapter 8 131 The Evolution of Cultural Environments 131 Lost in Translation 133 Lessons Learned 134 The Evolution of Cultural Environments 139 Methodological Appendix 141 Sampling Civil Society Organizations and Press Releases 141 Mapping Cultural Environments 145 Measuring Social Psychological Processes 148 Tracing the Evolution of Culture Using Plagiarism Detection Software 149 Alternative Explanations of Cultural Change 151 In-Depth Interviews 156 Notes 159 References 189 Index 213