Islamophobia and adoption: Who are the civilized?
Abstract
AbstractThis paper posits adoption as a function of failed political, economic, and social policies. These policies derive historically from injurious views of populations not ascribed political embodiment. As a tool of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance, adoption joins other extirpating practices. Given this history, the current focus on Muslim-majority countries as sources for adoptable infants is neither charitable nor coincidental. In this regard, Islamophobia is defined as an additional prejudicial justification for adoption. Islamophobia promulgates this justification based in part on faulty readings of the Quran. This maps readily onto similar use of the Bible. This paper offers a contingent, expansive, and corrective reading of these Books. It advances a countervailing argument for child welfare that questions and resists adoption's negation of family, community, and place.