Editor’s note: This is a guest submission from Muhammad Yousuf, a current PhD candidate in ethnic studies with a specialization in critical gender studies. His research in the emergent field of critical Muslim studies examines how sectarianism and secularism shape Islamophobia as well as the tactics many U.S. Muslims use to combat it. Yousuf’s piece is in response to the latest campus mass mail sent by UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla regarding the ICSD mosque shooting.

The May 18 mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego shocked Muslim communities around the country. The attack is undeniably horrific and points to a larger trend of white supremacist violence, particularly mass shootings and attacks at places of worship. Yet, to many U.S. Muslims, it is not surprising. Rather, it is another manifestation of the intensifying Islamophobia we’ve experienced across global, national, and local scales.

Despite the word’s literal meaning, Islamophobia cannot be reduced to a fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims. More than a mindset or worldview, Islamophobia also describes the practices, institutions, and relationships that target, dehumanize, and kill Muslims. Internationally, we have spent the better part of three years seeing our government and its allies indiscriminately slaughter people of all ages in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and Sudan. Places like Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan are likewise reeling from histories of protracted U.S. intervention. Domestically, we have also recently witnessed an unprecedented expansion of carceral, policing, and surveillance infrastructure. Fueled by corporate interests, these technologies have largely been used to surveil activists and harass poor folks rather than stop mass shootings. The concept of Islamophobia can help us parse the connections between white supremacist shootings, domestic policing, and foreign wars, as well as understand UC San Diego’s role in perpetuating those structural forms of violence.

Islamophobia is a multifaceted form of enmity. Some scholars and activists have pivoted toward “anti-Muslim racism” as a more apt descriptor of these forces which indelibly shape Muslim life in a place like the U.S. Others have traced the existence of an organized “Islamophobia industry” profiting from and reproducing anti-Muslim ideas and policies. Thinking more critically about Islamophobia enables us to address the racial, ethnic, gendered, or sectarian — anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, patriarchal, and anti-Shi’a, respectively — dimensions of anti-Muslim attitudes and actions. We may then also understand how non-Muslims, such as Arab Christians or Sikhs in the U.S., become subject to Islamophobia. Thus, the ICSD shooting is not merely a result of Islamophobia, it is Islamophobia in action. As such, it can only be understood within the broader context of white supremacist terror perpetrated by vigilantes and our government alike.

The murders of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad were neither unavoidable tragedies nor mere accidents but the direct result of hegemonic social structures and cultural representations which position Muslims as simultaneously violent and killable. In this light, the University’s failure to mention Islamophobia in its May 19 mass mail is unsurprising. Instead, former drone engineer and current Chancellor Pradeep Khosla decried the shooting as “senseless.” But is it? Islamophobic violence is not beyond comprehension — it operates by its own logic and produces its own common sense, propelled by discrete material forces. UC San Diego demonstrated its own anti-Muslim racism through the brutal repression of the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment, with the administration spending millions of dollars to crush dissent, defend institutional complicity in genocide, and promote the Islamophobic conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. So, to me, nothing about this latest tragedy is “senseless.” If anything, witnessing the lengths UC San Diego will go to to defend its investments in a cycle of violence that could one day take my life helps me make perfect sense of this situation.