Islamophobia in Contemporary Britain: The Evidence of the Opinion Polls, 1988–2006

British attitudes towards Islam and Muslims are examined on the basis of 104 public opinion polls conducted between 1988 and 2006, 90 of them since 2001. Many of these surveys were undertaken at national crisis points of one sort or another for which Islam and Muslims could not avoid being seen as causal factors. Nine high-level conclusions are drawn from this evidence. There has been increasing Islamophobia, not least since 2001. A stereotypical picture of British Muslims in the eyes of the majority population has emerged, Muslims being seen as slow to integrate into mainstream society, feeling only a qualified sense of patriotism, and prone to espouse anti-Western values that lead many to condone so-called Islamic terrorism. To an extent, these stereotypes reflect the reality of Muslim views, as displayed in 29 polls conducted among the British Muslim community, mainly since 2001.     

Challenging the opposition of LGBT identities and Muslim cultures: initial research on the experiences of LGBT Muslims in Canada

ABSTRACT

Many have described the cultural and political opposition between LGBT rights and identities and Muslim cultures. Rahman (2014) has argued that one important way to challenge this perceived enmity is to produce further knowledge about the experiences and identities of LGBT Muslims because they exist at the intersections of this political opposition and disrupt the assumptions underlying it. Drawing on Rahman’s framework of Muslim LGBT as “LGBT Intersectional Identities”, we provide initial evidence from on-going research into the experiences of LGBT Muslims in Canada, based on six in-depth qualitative interviews. Focusing on the tensions between living an LGBT life and being Muslim, we demonstrate that there are strategies for reconciling the two that undermine assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of Muslim cultures and homosexualities. These strategies both confirm the extant evidence of identity processes for LGBT Muslims and provide some new evidence of the awareness of negotiating Islamophobia, racialization and Muslim homophobia as part of the development of an LGBT Muslim identity, and the need to understand Muslim identity in a broader frame than simply religious. In this sense, the experiences of LGBT Muslims present an LGBT intersectional challenge, both to western assumptions about the coherence of LGBT identity and the coming out process, and to assumptions in Muslim culture that tend to position individuals who identify as LGBT outside of their traditions.     

Paranoia predicts out-group prejudice: preliminary experimental data

This article examines the relationships between exposure to terrorism news and state social paranoia, death anxiety and Islamophobia. In two experiments we show that, contrary to previous research in this area, the terrorism news condition did not significantly increase state social paranoia, death anxiety and prejudice towards Muslims, but that paranoid thinking was the sole predictor of Islamophobia. Trait paranoia is associated with both poor well-being and with negative perceptions of Muslim competitive players – a form of inter-relational prejudice. Results indicated that the frequency of paranoid thoughts mediates the relationship between death anxiety and anti-Muslim prejudice and trait paranoia is the main predictor of the negative perceptions of a Muslim competing player. This study elucidates new pathways to understanding terror management theory, by including paranoia as a type of thinking that predisposes individuals to be suspicious of salient out-groups.     

Europe’s “New Jews”: France,Islamophobia, and Antisemitism in the Era of Mass Migration

Are Muslims the “new Jews” of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism now most resemble each other as complementary mechanisms for diverting the anxieties bred by the global economic order. Antisemitism has long scapegoated the Jews for capitalism’s tendency to produce outsized winners. But there has been no comparably global shorthand for the anxiety prompted by capitalism’s losers—until now. Muslim refugees help give a name, Islam, to the masses seemingly encroaching from the margins of the world system. The result, I argue, is the hardening of Islamophobia and antisemitism into the inextricable poles of a reactionary worldview. Taking France as a case study, the article reads the burkini bans prompted by the July 2016 terror attack in Nice as an expression of middle-class fear about downward mobility. Targeted at both internal Muslim leisure and external Muslim encroachment, the bans evoke how European unease about globalization increasingly takes Islamophobic form. Such intolerance threatens not only to lodge Islamophobia at the heart of a reconstituted Europe but also to erode the vigilance against antisemitism once characteristic of the postwar European project.     

‘Out to get us’: queer Muslims and the clash of sexual civilisations in Australia

Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with twelve queer Muslims in Australia, this article analyses the ongoing struggle for queer Muslim recognition within the context of the so-called ‘Clash of Civilisations’. Analysing the rhetoric of national security and ‘Western’ civilisational identity, this article interrogates the incorporation of sexuality into the cultural and political discourse of the ‘war on terror’, from the xenophobic demonisation of Muslims as sexual predators, to liberal Islamophobia that posits Islam as an aggressive and alien Other against which liberal capitalism must be defended. Within this hostile environment, queer Muslims in Australia are articulating various strategies for finding meaning in their lives. From a Marxist perspective, this article analyses these strategies for recognition which range from complex acts of ‘closeting’ sexual, ethnic and religious identities, to subversive acts of critical hybridity that seek to negate the exclusionary nature of homophobia and Islamophobia within Australia’s multicultural society.     

Representing Father–Son Relationships among African-American Muslim Men in Film and Television

African-American Muslims are well-known for their prison reform ministries and initiatives aimed at assisting disenfranchised men and women in inner city communities. In media discourse, the redemption narratives of young African-American Muslim men in these environments have often been stimulated by African-American Muslim leaders who function as highly influential fatherly figures that usually stress an importance of fatherhood in ameliorating juvenile delinquency and hopelessness. While fatherhood is a cherished institution among Muslim families, this analysis focuses on depictions of father-son relationships among African-American Muslim men in film and television. This study examines relationships between Muslim sons and non-Muslim fathers, Muslim fathers and non-Muslim sons, and fathers and sons who both embrace Islam throughout these visual narratives. In exploring these relationships, the article examines the impact of African-American Muslim fathers on their sons’ faith and spiritual development, negotiation of masculinity, management of racism, confrontation of Islamophobia, and maintenance of discipline, social mobility, and life skills.     

Teachers and Teaching Islam and Muslims in Pluralistic Societies: Claims, Misunderstandings, and Responses

The author argues that teachers’ positive work in the education of Muslim students needs to be emphasized and their voices contextualized and critically engaged. He problematizes notions that have been circulating in the public sphere around the education of Muslims in western contexts (racism, Islamophobia, school curricula that ignore Muslim perspectives and contributions) by simultaneously acknowledging and refuting them. He contextualizes these issues by linking them to what education means in the context of intensified communication between diverse peoples, multiple perspectives and globalization. He ends by highlighting the data’s implications for research, policies and practices in education as well as for teachers’ training in Canada and other pluralistic societies.     

Cyber-Islamophobia? The case of WikiIslam

A large amount of academic research has analysed and documented the fact that Muslims are often presented in a negative or stereotypical way in Western media and popular culture. This article focuses on how the Internet can also be used in spreading and publishing anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim opinions. Although the Internet is significant in the development of contemporary society, no studies have focused on the importance of information and communication technologies in spreading Islamophobic opinions. However, the new technologies can also be used for monitoring and combating Islamophobia, and many Muslim organisations are today using the Internet for these purposes. The article is based on an indepth analysis of both anti-Muslim and pro-Muslim homepages that can be related to the debate over Islamophobia.     

To Brexit or not to Brexit: The roles of Islamophobia,conspiracist beliefs,and integrated threat in voting intentions for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum

We used an identities approach to examine voting intentions in the June 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union (EU). In April 2016, 303 British adults (58.7% women, age M = 34.73) indicated their voting intentions for the referendum and completed measures of identification with the national in-group, perceived threat from Muslim immigrants, belief in Islamophobic conspiracy narratives, Islamophobia, general conspiracist beliefs, ambiguity tolerance, and belief in a clash of civilizations. Path and mediation analyses indicated that greater belief in Islamophobic conspiracy theories mediated the link between Islamophobia and intention to vote to leave. Islamophobia and Islamophobic conspiracist beliefs also mediated the effects of perceived threat from Muslims on voting intentions. Other variables acted as antecedents of perceived threat or Islamophobic conspiracy narratives. These findings highlight the role that identity-based cognitions may have played in shaping voting intentions for the UK EU referendum.     

Where Do the Hijab and the Kippah Belong? On Being Publicly Jewish or Muslim in Post-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Hebdo</Emphasis> France

To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France’s Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference.     

The relationships between religiosity,stress, and mental health for Muslim immigrant youth

Acculturation, or the process of change that takes place as a result of intercultural contact, can cause a range of stressors. The task of managing this acculturative stress is particularly difficult for Muslim immigrants in Western contexts due to the global rise of Islamophobia. Research investigating the experiences of young migrant Muslims has found inconsistent results regarding the moderating influences of religious identity and religious practices on the relationship between stress and mental health. The current study examined whether levels of religiosity interacted with distinct forms of acculturative stress in the prediction of depression and well-being for Muslim youth in New Zealand. Results painted a complex picture of the relationships between religiosity and mental health, finding that greater religiosity is generally positive for youth outcomes, but it also carries the risk lowering levels of mental health through its interactions with acculturative stress.     

Reclaiming alterity: strangeness and the queering of Islam in medieval and early modern Spain

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the reclamation of radical alterity or the intentional embracing of difference/otherness/strangeness by Muslims as a location of solidarity with marginalized communities, who have been historically ostracized due to sexuality. As the initial social location of Islam vis-á-vis medieval and early modern Christendom, the rehabilitation of Muslim alterity/otherness today serves as a location for solidarity with other marginalized groups such as members of the LGBTQ community. The chosen historical timeframe of medieval and early modern Spain helps to situate this conversation both inside and on the fringes of European Christendom. This essay seeks to accomplish this by mining both Muslim and Christian sources in medieval and early modern Iberia with special attention being paid to discourses located at the intersections of Islamophobia and sexuality. The texts discussed allow for a more thorough investigation of Muslim alterity in the Iberian context, while serving as a launch point for deeper discussions of contemporary religious and sexual hierarchies.     

The Genocidal Islamophobia of a Late Nineteenth-Century French Anti-Semite: D. Kimon and The Pathology of Islam

This article contributes to the study of the image of Islam among French anti-Semites at the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses D. Kimon's book La pathologie de l'islam, in which the author advocates the need to destroy Islam by annihilating one-twentieth of the world's Muslim population and subjecting the rest to a regime of semi-slavery until they finally convert to Catholicism. Various issues are analysed in the course of this case study: the attitude of anti-Semites towards ethno-cultural groups other than Jews, specifically Muslims; the relationship between anti-Semitism and racism; and the relationship between Islamophobia and racism.     

Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.     

The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation

Opinion poll research suggests that a significant number of Westerners hold negative and fearful perceptions toward Muslims and their religion. Although evidence of Islamophobia has been documented in a number of poll studies, no psychometrically based, multifaceted measure that focuses exclusively on fear related attitudes and is not confounded with a particular group currently exists in the scientific literature. The authors of this study describe the development and psychometric properties of the Islamophobia Scale, which measures cognitive and affective-behavioral facets of fear-related attitudes toward the religion of Islam and Muslims. The results of the study demonstrate a measure of Islamophobia that yielded acceptable psychometric properties of reliability and validity.     

Support for Anti‐Muslim Policies: The Role of Political Traits and Threat Perception

We explored how political beliefs and attitudes predict support for anti‐Muslim policies and extremist behavior in the United States following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. A large sample completed measures of authoritarianism, social dominance orientation (SDO), generalized prejudice, identification with all humanity (IWAH), perceptions of Muslim threat, and support for anti‐Muslim policies and behaviors. These measures accounted for 73% of the variance in moderate anti‐Muslim policies and 55% of the variance in extreme anti‐Muslim policies. Authoritarianism and SDO directly and indirectly predicted support for anti‐Muslim policies, with their effects partially mediated by generalized prejudice, IWAH, and perceptions of Muslims as threatening. Threat both mediated and moderated the relationship between authoritarianism and anti‐Muslim policies. A negative interaction between authoritarianism and perceptions of Muslims as threatening predicted moderate anti‐Muslim policies, but a positive interaction predicted extreme anti‐Muslim policies. A tentative explanation is offered. Perceptions of Muslim threat was consistently a powerful predictor of anti‐Muslim policies and willingness to engage in extremist behaviors targeting Muslims. Programs to combat anti‐Muslim prejudice should consider the role of threat‐related stereotypes in expressions of anti‐Muslim prejudice.     

Islamophobia as Reactive Co-Radicalization

Since 9/11, 2001, a new form of religious extremism has arguably emerged, one which paradoxically portrays itself as a counter to another perceived extremism regarded as a real and imminent threat. Within North America and Western Europe, as elsewhere, there is an upsurge of various forms of reactionary rhetoric and opposition expressed towards Islam and Muslims. An increase in extremist behaviour, even violence, is appearing from quarters opposed to, or varyingly fearful of, Islamic extremism if not Islam or Muslims. Islamophobia, as a manifestation of fear of an exclusionary Islam, manifests as exclusionary or negatively reactive behaviours with Muslims and Islam as the target. This article explores the idea that Islamophobia can be regarded as a manifestation of religious extremism and, further, that such extremism is construable as “reactive co-radicalization.” It focuses on two European cases – the 2009 Swiss ban on the building of minarets and the 2011 Norwegian massacre carried out by Anders Breivik – as examples of this “reactive co-radicalization.” This term, I suggest, is an apt denominator for the exclusionary reaction to the rising presence of Islam within otherwise secular, albeit nominally Christian, Western European and North American societies, among others.     

Living under threat: Mutual threat perception drives anti‐Muslim and anti‐Western hostility in the age of terrorism

This research demonstrates a common psychology of outgroup hostility driven by perceived intergroup threat among three groups and seven cultural contexts: non‐Muslim Westerners, Muslims in Western societies, and Muslims in the Middle East. In Study 1, symbolic, but not realistic and terroristic threats, predicted non‐Muslim Norwegians' intentions to join anti‐Islamic movements. In Study 2, symbolic and realistic, but not terroristic threat, predicted non‐Muslim Americans' willingness to persecute Muslims. In Studies 3 and 4, symbolic threat predicted support and behavioral intentions against the West among Swedish and Turkish Muslims. Finally, in Study 5, a comparison demonstrated that symbolic and realistic threats had the same effects on violent intentions among non‐Muslim and Muslim Danes, and Muslims in Afghanistan. Meta‐analysis showed that symbolic threat was most strongly associated with intergroup hostility. Across studies, participants with high religious group identification experienced higher levels of threat. Implications for intergroup research and prejudice reduction are discussed.     

Are Muslims a Distinctive Minority? An Empirical Analysis of Religiosity,Social Attitudes,and Islam

Scholarly and public discourses on Muslim immigrants in Europe have questioned if Islam is an impediment to sociocultural adaptation and whether Muslims are a distinctive group in their religiosity and social values. We use a new survey of 480 British Muslims in conjunction with the British Social Attitudes Survey to examine differences between Muslim and non‐Muslim Britons on religiosity (practice, belief, salience) and moral and social issues regarding gender, abortion, and homosexuality. Muslims are more religious than other Britons, including both British Christians and religious “nones.” Muslims also are more conservative than other Britons across the range of social and moral attitudes. Multivariate analysis shows, however, that much of the difference on moral issues is due to socioeconomic disadvantage and high religiosity among Muslims. Although being a highly religious group in an otherwise secular country renders Muslims distinctive, factors that predict social conservatism among all Britons—high religiosity and low SES—apply similarly to Muslims.