Her groundbreaking book The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom explains why Muslims experience discrimination that mirrors racism against racial minorities rather than religious freedom.
[5] Aziz believes that in the Western world, Muslims as a group are assigned negative traits such as being violent and untrustworthy.
[3] Aziz described this attribution of negative traits to Muslims as a process of racialization, which took place in the U.S. after 9/11 terrorist attacks.
One manifestation is that immigrants to the U.S. originally from Middle East and North Africa are perceived as forever foreign, according to Aziz.
Therefore pointing to religion as an excuse for unwelcome behaviour is less available to Muslims, because it is less central to the European legal tradition to start with.