Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives

Since September 11 the term Islamophobia has entered common parlance across the globe. Widely used but diversely and inconsistently defined and deployed, Islamophobia remains hotly disputed and frequently disavowed both as word and concept. To its supporters it names a defining feature of our times and is an important tool to highlight injustices faced by and specific to Muslims, but its effectiveness is weakened by lack of agreed meaning and of clarity in relation to such terms as racism and orientalism. To its detractors Islamophobia is either a fundamentally flawed category or, worse, a communitarian fig leaf behind which 'backward' social practices and totalitarian political ambitions are covered up. The backdrop to these debates and more generally to the mobilizations and contestations, to which they give expression, is a succession of 'moral panics' centred on the figure of the Muslim. Adopting a global perspective this collection is conceptually framed in terms of four arenas which provide the four distinct contexts for the problematization of Muslim identity, and the ways in which Islamophobia may be deployed. Drawing on diverse fields of disciplinary and geographical expertise twenty six contributors address the question of Islamophobia in a series of interventions which range from large and sustained arguments to illustrations of particular themes across these contexts: 'Muslimistan' (broadly the OIC member countries); states in which Muslims either form a minority or hold a socio-economically subaltern position but in which the Muslim minority cannot be easily dismissed as recent arrivals (such as India, Russia and China as well as Thailand); lands in which Muslims are represented as newly arrived immigrants (Western plutocracies), and the regions in which the Muslim presence is minimal or virtual and the problematization of Muslim identity is vicarious. Rejecting both uncritical transhistorical uses of the term Islamophobia and no less uncritical dismissals of the term the collection navigates a course in betwixt and between these two extremes pioneering a path to a series of investigations of Islamophobia that are predicated in the articulation of Muslim agency as its necessary ground.

Table of Contents:
S. Sayyid Thinking Through Islamophobia; S. Sayyid Out of the Devil's Dictionary; Jonathan Riley-Smith Islamophobia and the Crusades; AbdoolKarim Vakil Is the Islam in Islamophobia the Same as the Islam in Anti-Islam: Or, When is it Islamophobia Time?; Katherine Butler Brown The Problem With Parables; Chris Allen Islamophobia: from K.I.S.S. to R.I.P.; Yakoub Islam The Voyage In: Second Life Islamophobia; Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood The Racialization of Muslims; Muhammad G. Khan 'No Innocents'; David Tyrer 'Flooding the embankments': Race, biopolitics and sovereignty; Adi Kuntsman, Jin Haritaworn and Jennifer Petzen Sexualising the 'War on Terror'; Yahya Birt Governing Muslims after 9/11; Cemalettin Haimi Neoconservative narrative as globalizing Islamophobia; Samia Bano Asking the Law Questions: Agency and Muslim Women; Annelies Moors Fear of Small Numbers? Debating face-veiling in the Netherlands; Madina Tlostanova A Short History of Russian Islamophobia; Lin Yi Culturalism, Education and Islamophobia in China; Yasin Aktay Islamophobia in Turkey; Mohammad Siddique Seddon Reclaiming The Turk's Head; Rodhanthi Tzanelli Islamophobia and Hellenophilia: Greek Myths of Post-Colonial Europe; Duncan McCargo Troubled by Muslims: Thailand's Declining Tolerance?; Nadia Fadil 'Breaking the Taboo of Multiculturalism': The Belgian Left and Islam; Katy Pal Sian 'Don't Freak, I'm a Sikh!'; Peter Millward Islamophobia: A new racism in football?; Ruvani Ranasinha Fundamental Fictions: Gender, Power and Islam in BrAsian Diasporic Formations; Dibyesh Anand Generating Islamophobia in India; AbdoolKarim Vakil Who's Afraid of Islamophobia?

About the Author :
Salman Sayyid is the director of the Centre of Ethnicity and Racism Studies at the University of Leeds and author of A Fundamental Fear and co-editor of A Postcolonial People, also available from Hurst. Abdulkaroom Vakil is Lecturer in the Dept. of Portuguese Studies, King's College London.