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This chapter explains how anti-Muslim organizations leveraged their newfound standing within the public sphere to forge social networks with powerful civil society organizations and amass vast financial resources between 2004 and 2006. In so doing, anti-Muslim organizations crept from the fringe to the mainstream of the cultural environment as their once peripheral messages spread across more moderate organizations and inspired others to join the struggle to shape shared understandings about Islam. This transformation resulted from the routinization of their emotional energy into a field of terrorism experts, a sophisticated media strategy that resulted in several best-selling books and an influential documentary film, and partnerships with groups that splintered from the mainstream during earlier periods.

This chapter explains why the impassioned warnings of anti-Muslim fringe organizations overshadowed the dispassionate condemnations of terrorism produced by mainstream organizations with superior financial and social resources after the September 11 attacks. Moreover, it explains how the rise of anti-Muslim fringe organizations within the mass media provoked angry responses from mainstream organizations that only called further attention to these once-obscure actors within the American public sphere. Finally, the chapter explains how consternation about whether and how to respond to the continued rise of the fringe created tension and splintering within the mainstream, and thus further opportunity for fringe organizations to advance their peripheral cultural messages within the media.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the dozens of civil society organizations that worked to shape the representation of Muslims within the American public sphere before the September 11 attacks. These include a diverse array of African American and immigrant Muslim organizations, as well as Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious civil society organizations that became involved in public discussions about Islam during the Arab–Israeli War, the Iranian hostage crisis, and other high-profile events involving Muslims. This broad historical perspective highlights the emergence of mainstream civil society organizations that produced positive or neutral messages about Muslims in the decade before the September 11th attacks, alongside a small group of fringe organizations with predominantly anti-Muslim messages.