Muslims in

Contemporary Europe

Islamophobia
History of the Term

• Islamophobia is a much used but little understood term, which is believed to

have become popular after the report of Runnymede Trust’s Commission on
British Muslims and Islamophobia (CBMI) entitled Islamophobia: A Challenge
for Us All (Runnymede 1997).
• In this report it is asserted that the first usage of the term was by an American
newspaper reporter in 1991.
• ‘Islamophobia’ was defined by the CBMI as ‘an unfounded hostility towards
Islam, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims’, and further
elaborated by the proposal of eight possible Islamophobic mindsets.
History of the Term

The eight statements are:

(1) Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change

(2) Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with
other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them
(3) Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as bar- baric, irrational,
primitive and sexist;
(4) Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, and supportive of terrorism,
and engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’
History of the Term

(5) Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military
advantage
(6) Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand
(7) Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards
Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from main- stream society
(8) Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.
The term Islamophobia has become popular since the Runnymede Trust report’s
publication in describing the phenomenon. There is currently no legally agreed
definition of Islamophobia; and the social sciences have not developed a
common definition, policy, or action to combat it either.
History of the Term

• Fred Halliday put ‘Islamophobia’ in inverted commas in the title of his article
‘“Islamophobia” Reconsidered’, written in 1999, the term Islamophobia has also
been discussed by scholars.
• Some criticisms refer to the unintended consequences of the term, or its
possible political and ideological exploitation.
• Halliday himself furnishes an example. Halliday (1999: 898) argues that the
term ‘reproduces the distortion . . . that there is one Islam’ and that this serves
to ‘play into the hands’ of individuals, or groups in Muslim communities who
seek to promote a more conservative agenda and to arrogate to themselves the
authority to speak for the tradition and culture, whether on the status of
women, rights to free speech, or violence.
History of the Term

• Halliday (1999: 898) also posits an objection on the grounds that the term is
a misnomer. According to him, once upon a time, ‘the enemy’ was the
religion of Islam, which was attacked by the Crusades and the Reconquista.
But today the target has changed. The attack now is not against Islam as a
faith, but Muslims as a people. This is why he prefers the term ‘anti-
Muslimism’.
• Similarly, delineating the rationale employed by words such as ‘anti-Muslim
prejudice’ and ‘anti-Muslim racism’, which demonstrate hostile attitudes
towards Muslims, Maleiha Malik (2010) prefers the term ‘anti-Muslim
prejudice’ to Islamophobia, rejecting the pathos and seeming irrationality of
the use of the term ‘phobia’ to describe hostility towards Muslims in favour of a
calculated prejudiced orientation
History of the Term

• Other scholars define Islamophobia as cultural racism (Meer and Modood

2009; Schiffer and Wagner 2011), the roots of which could be traced back to
the writings of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), who was a French nobleman.
• The main concern of de Gobineau (1999) was to offer an answer to question of
why civilizations rise and fall. De Gobineau argued that history is composed of
continuous struggle among the ‘white’, ‘yellow’, and ‘negroid’ races.
• He underlined the superiority of the ‘white race’. The lesson of history is,
according to de Gobineau (1999: 56) as argued in 1853, that ‘all civilisations
derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a
society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble
group that created it, provided that this group itself belongs to the most
illustrious branch of our species’.
History of the Term

• He always complained about the mixture of the races, which, he believed, led
to the crisis of civilization. The racist thoughts in de Gobineau’s works spring
from his fear of the ‘oriental’ attacks on the ‘occidental’ lands, which would
cause the fall of civilizations.
• His line of thinking resembles closely the contemporary debate regarding the
alleged invasion of the West by Islam expressed by Theo van Gogh, Pim
Fortuyn, Oriana Fallaci.
Political Relevance of the Term

• Islamophobic discourse has become mainstream in the West since 9/11. It seems
that social groups belonging to the majority nation in a given territory are more
inclined to express the distress resulting from insecurity and social-economic
deprivation through the language of Islamophobia, even in those cases which are
not related to the actual threat of Islam or Muslims.
• Islamophobic discourse has certainly resonated a great deal in the last decade. It
has made the users of this discourse heard by both the local and the international
community, although their distress did not really result from anything related to
Muslims in general.
• In other words, Muslims have become the most popular scapegoats in many parts
of the world, to be blamed for any troubled situation. For more than a decade,
Muslim-origin migrants and their descendants are primarily seen by the European
societies as a financial burden, and virtually never as an opportunity for the
country.
Political Relevance of the Term

• A Pew survey held in 2006 indicated that opinions of Muslims in almost all of
the Western European countries are quite negative.
• While one in four in the USA and the UK displayed Islamophobic sentiments,
more than half of Spaniards and half of Germans said that they did not like
Muslims, and the figures for Poland and France were 46% and 38% for those
holding unfavourable opinions of Muslims.
• The survey revealed that prejudice was marked mainly among older
generations and appeared to be class-based. People over 50 and of low
education were more likely to be prejudiced.
Can you think of significant
events involving Muslims?
Danish Cartoon

• When Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet

Muhammad in September 2006, they could not have predicted the far-reaching
and devastating consequences it would have for a small country of 5.4 million
people.
• What started as a trivial attempt to provoke debate in defence of free speech
would go on to cause an unforeseen inter-cultural clash on a global scale.
• Some consider it Denmark’s biggest international crisis since 1945. Damaging
not only the Danish economy (a loss of $1 billion in exports), the ‘Cartoon crisis’
destroyed Denmark’s reputation as an open and tolerant society.
• The reactions ranged from peaceful demonstrations to violent riots, embassy
protests, and flag burnings all around the word, and even resulted in a
significant number of deaths worldwide
Switzerland Minaret Ban

• Similarly, in Switzerland, a country where the contact between the majority society and Muslim-
origin immigrants remains very limited in everyday life, the negative perception about Muslims
was explicitly articulated by the majority society through the debate on minarets.
• The requests by Muslim-origin immigrants to erect mosques and minarets aroused significant
public opposition in various European cities (Baumann 2009; Nielsen et al. 2009; Geisser 2010;
Allievi 2010).
• The Swiss majority vote in the 2009 referendum to ban the building of minarets is not a single
and exceptional result. Rather, it is a dramatized culmination of Swiss politics shifting from long-
practised equilibrium to populist polarization and aggressive exclusion of minorities.
• But what was interesting in the Minaret Referendum was that those Swiss citizens who did not
have any interaction with the Muslims in their everyday life were more inclined to oppose the
erection of minarets (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2009). On the other hand, those interacting with the
Muslims in everyday life either did not go to the polls, or expressed their indifference to the
issue.
Qur’ān Burning

• Another event demonstrating the growing negative perceptions of Islam and

the Muslims in the West is the burning of the Qur’an by a pastor in Gainesville,
Florida on 20 March 2011.
• A controversial evangelical preacher oversaw the burning of a copy of the
Qur’an in a small church after finding the Muslim holy book ‘guilty’ of crimes
committed against humanity, especially since 9/11.
• The burning was carried out by pastor Wayne Sapp under the supervision of
pastor Terry Jones, who in September 2010 drew sweeping condemnation over
his plan to ignite a pile of Qur’ans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
• The event was presented as a trial of the book in which the Qur’an was found
‘guilty’ and ‘executed’. Although the event was open to the public, fewer than
thirty people attended.
Securitization on Islam

• Muslims are increasingly represented by the advocates of Islamophobia as

members of a ‘precarious transnational society’, in which people only want to
‘stone women’, ‘cut throats’, ‘be suicide bombers’, ‘beat their wives’, and
‘commit honour crimes’.
• These prejudiced perceptions about Islam have been reinforced by the impact
of the previously stated events, ranging from the Iranian Revolution to the
official ban on the burqa in France in 2011.
• Recently, quite a number of people in the West have felt the urge to defend
Western civilization against this ‘enemy within’ that is culturally and religiously
dissimilar to the ‘civilized’ Western subject.
Securitization on Islam

• Samuel Huntington interpreted the Islamic resurgence as an attempt to counter

the threat of Western cultural advance. He noted that the resurgence is a broad
global movement that represents an effort to find solutions not in Western
ideologies, but in Islam (Huntington 1996: 110).
• Silvio Berlusconi, then the Italian Prime Minister, is one of those to have felt
this urge:
“We are proud bearers of the supremacy of western civilisation, which has
brought us democratic institutions, respect for the human, civil, religious and
political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything…
Europe must revive on the basis of common Christian roots.” (The Guardian,
London, 27 September 2001: 15)
Securitization on Islam

• Then American President George Bush’s speech regarding the ‘Axis of Evil’ (29
January 2002) was also perceived by the American public in particular as an
attempt to demonize ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and the ‘enemies of freedom’
(Asad 2003: 7).
• Although Bush, as well as some European leaders like Tony Blair and Jacques
Chirac, repeatedly stated that the war did not represent a fight against Islam,
many people across the world were highly engaged in deepening the Islam-
bashing displayed very explicitly in the following speech of George Bush:
Securitization on Islam

Our military has put the terror training camps of Afghanistan out of business, yet
camps still exist in at least a dozen countries. A terrorist underworld—including
groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Jaish-i-Mohammed—operates in
remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities...First, we will
shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to jus-
tice...While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting
elsewhere . . . our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from
threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.
Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th . . .
(George Bush, 29 January 2002).
Securitization on Islam

• After the strikes against the United States on 11 September, the ‘Muslim’
became reified as the enemy of the state, as a regressive, violent, bloodthirsty,
and menacing fanatic: the typical terrorist.
• Corey Robin (2004) explicated the ways in which the Muslims and the Middle
Easterners, especially Iraqis, were stigmatized by the Bush administration as
‘typical terrorists’ with reference to the anthrax scare in the wake of 9/11.
• Between October and November 2001, when the story broke, five people were
killed by anthrax, and eighteen others were infected with it.
Securitization on Islam

• Government officials immediately hunted for signs that the attack originated in
the Middle East, particularly Iraq. This incident provided the Bush
administration with a good excuse to go after Iraq. However, no one could find
any evidence linking the anthrax attack to the Middle East. Later it was revealed
that the perpetrator of the attack was an American citizen, with likely
connections to the US military (Robin 2004: 16–17).
• Similarly, this kind of politics of fear has also had a deep impact on the Muslim
residents of the USA, who are considered to be guilty until proven innocent, a
reversal of the classic American legal maxim. For instance, it is reported that in
2005 the FBI admitted that it had yet to identify a sin- gle Al-Qaeda sleeper cell
in the United States (Esposito 2011: 12–13).
Crisis of Multiculturalism

• Securitization and stigmatization of migration and Islam has brought about the
ascendancy of a political discourse known as the end of multiculturalism—a
discourse which has often been revisited in the last two decades since the war
in Bosnia in 1992, leading to the birth of the Huntingtonian clash of civilizations
paradigm.
• The discourse of the end of multiculturalism is often built upon the assumption
that the homogeneity of the nation is at stake, and thus it has to be restored at
the expense of alienating those who are not ethno-culturally and religiously
part of the prescribed community of ‘us’.
• It should be kept in mind that migration was a source of content in Western
Europe during the 1960s.
• More recently, however, migration has been framed as a source of discontent,
fear, and instability for nation-states in the West.
Crisis of Multiculturalism

• Many different reasons, such as deindustrialization, unemployment, poverty,

exclusion, violence.
• After the relative prominence of multiculturalism debates in both the political
and scholarly arenas, we witness today a change in the direction of debates
and policies about how to accommodate cultural diversity.
• Diminishing belief in the possibility of a flourishing multicultural society has
changed the nature of the debates about the integration of migrant-origin
groups.
• Initially, the idea of multiculturalism connoted compromise, tolerance, respect,
interdependence, and universalism, and was expected to bring about an
‘intercultural community’.
Crisis of Multiculturalism

• Over time, it began to be perceived as a way of institutionalizing difference.

• Europe and the other parts of the world including the USA have experienced
increasing tensions between national majorities and ethno-religious minorities,
more particularly with marginalized Muslim communities.
• Declaration of the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ has become a catchphrase of not
only extreme-right-wing political parties but also of centrist political parties all
across the continent, although it is not clear that each attributes the same
meaning to the term.
• Angela Merkel for the first time publicly dismissed the policy of
multiculturalism as having ‘failed, failed utterly’ in October 2010, and this was
followed by David Cameron’s call for a ‘more active, more muscular liberalism’
and Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement that multiculturalism is a ‘failed concept’.
Crisis of Multiculturalism

• Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, has made no
apologies for arguing that Christians ‘should be proud that our culture is better
than Islamic culture.’
• Thilo Sarrazin (2010), a politician from the Social Democratic Party who sat on
the Bundesbank board and is the former Finance Senator for Berlin, has argued
in his bestselling book that Germany is becoming ‘naturally more stupid on
average’ as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.
Further Reading

• Allen, Christopher (2007). ‘The “First” Decade of Islamophobia: 10 Years of the Runnymede Trust
Report: Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All’. West Midlands, UK. <http://www.
euromedalex.org/sites/default/files/Decade_of_Islamophobia.pdf>.
• Allen, Christopher (2010). Islamophobia. Farnham: Ashgate.
• Asad, Talal (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
• De Gobineau, Arthur (1999). The Inequality of Human Races, trans.Adrian Collins. New York: Howard
Fertig Publications.
• Esposito, John (2011). ‘Introduction’, in John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalın (eds.), Islamophobia: The
Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century. oxford: oxford University Press, 9–17.
• Geisser, Vincent (2010). ‘Islamophobia: A French Specificity in Europe?’, Human Architecture: Journal
of the Sociology of Self and Knowledge 8(2): 39–46.
Further Reading

• Halliday, Fred (1996). Islam and the Myth of Confrontation. London: I. B. Tauris.
• Halliday, Fred (1999). ‘Islamophobia Reconsidered’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(5) (September): 892–
902.
• Huntington, Samuel (1996). The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
• Laitin, David (2010). ‘Rational Islamophobia in Europe’, European Journal of Sociology 51: 429–47.
• Malik, Maleiha (ed.) (2010). Anti-Muslim Prejudice in the West, Past and Present. London: Routledge.
• Marranci, Gabrielle (2004). ‘Multiculturalism, Islam and the Clash of Civilisations Theory: Rethinking
Islamophobia’, Culture and Religion 5(1): 105–17.
• Meer, Nasar and Tariq Modood (2009). ‘Refutations of Racism in the “Muslim Question”’, Patterns of
Prejudice 43(3–4): 335–54.
Further Reading

• Modood, Tariq (2002). ‘The Place of Muslims in British Secular Multiculturalism’, in Nezar Alsayyad
and Manuel Castells (eds.), Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam: Politics, Culture and Citizenship in the Age of
Globalization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 113–30.
• Modood, Tariq (2007). Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Runnymede Trust (1997). Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. London: Runnymede Trust.
• Schiffer, Sabine and Constantin Wagner (2011). ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: New Enemies, old
Patterns’, Race and Class 52(3): 77–84.
• Semati, Mehdi (2010). ‘Islamophobia, Culture and Race in the Age of Empire’, Cultural Studies 24(2):
256–75.
• Vertovec, Steven (2002). ‘Islamophobia and Muslim Recognition in Britain’, in Y. Yazbek Haddad (ed.),
Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens. oxford and New York: oxford University Press, 19–
35.
• Werbner, Pnina (2005). ‘Islamophobia, Incitement to Religious Hatred: Legislating for a New Fear?’
Anthropology Today 21(1): 5–9.