The most significant developments in Islamophobia research are evident in cross-disciplinary definitions and conceptualizations of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. In an attempt to describe the phenomenon of Islamophobia, a wide range of researchers have critiqued the social construction, othering, and racialization of Muslim identities in the US. These bodies of work include historical contextualization of Islamophobia and intellectual engagements in diverse fields of theoretical analyses, such as racialization/racism, Orientalism and de-colonial, anti-imperial, and deconstructionist frameworks. In doing so, these works highlight how Islamophobia operates within both historical and current global processes of colonialism and imperialism. In addition, recent efforts provide a range of descriptions, definitions, and measures of how Islamophobia operates and manifests in the US.
Annotations
Frequently cited
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books (1978).
Edward Said (1935-2003) was among the most widely known intellectuals in the world and one of the forefathers of the field of post-colonial studies. He was best known for his book Orientalism, considered one of the foundational texts for the study of Islamophobia. Orientalism describes the way Western cultural, academic, and imperial projects have crafted a dehumanizing representation of “the Arab” as an exotic and barbarous Orient. By decoding the body of writing that compares a "civilized" West to a "backwards" Arab world, Orientalism provides one of the earliest critiques of stigmatized Muslim identities and the way in which Orientalists exploited the negative stereotypes of Eastern cultures as a justification for colonial ambitions.
The book is organized in three parts, beginning with “the scope of Orientalism,” whereby Said surveys the development of the field of Oriental Studies, and focuses on how Muslim Arabs came to be perceived as “the Orient” by the West. The book then interrogates the “orientalist structures and restructures” through which Orientalism was systemized and disseminated as a form of “specialized knowledge.” The final section, “Orientalism Now,” highlights the way in which nineteenth century Orientalist works inspired the twentieth century body of knowledge that further stigmatized the Muslim and Arab world. Overall, Said critically exposes how Western studies of Islamic civilization has consistently served as cultural discrimination and used as a justification of empire. He asserts that since at least the period of European colonialism in the seventeenth century, the Orient has been seen as an other, who is cast as irrational, psychologically weak, and in need of salvation.
Based on these critiques, this book is considered one of the most significant texts in the study of East-West relations. Thus, it is a foundational text for theorists and scholars interested in Islamophobia studies and has inspired much of the later works cited and listed in this reading resource pack.
Critical Insight
Ernst, Carl W. Islamophobia in America : The Anatomy of Intolerance. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, (2013)
Professor Carl Ernst in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the editor of this collection of five critical essays which deconstruct the concept of Islamophobia from a range of standpoints. This includes informative, contextual chapters, as well as empirical commentaries and case studies. Ernst’s introductory chapter provides a valuable critique of the complex, intricate nature of Islamophobia. Namely, he emphasizes that anti-Muslim prejudice is constructed by a range of media outlets and political institutions. Thus, this book highlights the need to approach the subject of Islamophobia from a variety of angles, reflected in the diversity of the essays. In the first chapter, Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg trace the history of British and American views towards Muslims between 1687 and 1947. The second chapter by Kambiz Ghanea Bassiri contextualizes the exclusion of Muslim Americans within a wider intolerance towards minority groups such as Jews, Black Americans, and Catholics in the US. In the third chapter, Edward Curtis draws connections between anti-Muslim sentiment in the US with twentieth century racism against African American Muslims, which he argues has shifted towards brown foreigners in the post-9/11 era. Julianna Hammer brings readers’ attention to the gendered components of Islamophobia, particularly the experiences of victimization among Muslim women from members of the public and the media. Most importantly, this chapter sheds light on the global and interconnected nature of media stereotypes of oppressed Muslim women in Islamophobic discourses. Finally, Andrew Shyrock contextualizes the long history of Islamophobia in Western societies and wider hostile beliefs around nationalism, citizenship, and a rejection of minority identities. Collectively, the chapters in this book provide an insightful and diverse source of information on the intensifying nature of Islamophobia in the US.
Recent perspectives
Garner, Steve, and Saher Selod. "The racialization of Muslims: empirical studies of Islamophobia." Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 9-19.
Steve Garner, head of Criminology and Sociology at Birmingham City University, and Saher Selod, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons College (USA), provide an overview of the 2015 Special Issue on “Islamophobia and the Racialization of Muslims” published in Critical Sociology. Drawing on their combined expertise in social and racial theory, they frame racialization as a useful theoretical concept for explaining and understanding anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. Namely, they draw on the range of scholarly works that explore Islamophobia as a form of racism towards Muslim populations in the US and Europe. This opening article highlights the lack of academic engagement with racialization when discussing Islamophobia, and the equally weak presence of fieldwork-based studies with Muslim subjects. Garner and Selod therefore draw connections between racism, racialization, and Islamophobia to highlight the utility of racialization in understanding Islamophobia. They do so by theorizing the core elements of racism, discussing the limits of exploring Islamophobia without a racial lens, and providing a historical overview of racialization. The article therefore reveals how Muslims are racialized through religious/physical signifiers in the US and advocates the re-thinking of race and “fluid racisms” that change in form across time and place. This article and the larger Special Issue in Critical Sociology provide important perspectives for those interested in theorizing Islamophobia, particularly as a form of racism in the US.
Reading List
-
Abdulrahim, Sawsan. “Whiteness and the Arab Immigrant Experience.” In Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, edited by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, 131–146. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press (2008).
-
Allen, Chris. "Still a challenge for us all? The Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia and policy." In Religion, Equalities, and Inequalities , edited by Dawn Llewellyn, Sonya Sharma (2016): 113.
-
Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Is critique secular?: blasphemy, injury, and free speech. Oxford University Press (2013).
-
Awan, Muhammad Safeer. "Global terror and the rise of Xenophobia/Islamophobia: An analysis of American cultural production since September 11." Islamic Studies (2010): 521-537.
-
Bakali, Naved. "Historicizing and Theorizing Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Racism." In Islamophobia Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth, edited by Bakali, Naved. Rotterdam, Boston: Sense Publishers (2016): 11-25.
-
Bazian, Hatem.Annotations on race, colonialism, Islamophobia, Islam and Palestine. The Hague: Amrit Consultancy (2017).
-
Belt, David D. "Anti-Islam Discourse in the United States in the Decade after 9/11: The Role of Social Conservatives and Cultural Politics." Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51, no. 2 (2016): 210-23.
-
Beydoun, Khaled A. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. Oakland, CA: University of California Press (2018).
-
Bilici, Mucahit. "Homeland Insecurity: How Immigrant Muslims Naturalize America in Islam." Comparative Studies in Society & History 53, no. 3 (2011): 595.
-
Bleich, Erik. "What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is There? Theorizing and Measuring an Emerging Comparative Concept." American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 12 (2011): 1581.
-
Cainkar, Louis A. Homeland insecurity: the Arab American and Muslim American experience after 9/11. Russell Sage Foundation (2009).
-
Casanova, José. "The Politics of Nativism: Islam in Europe, Catholicism in the United States." Philosophy & Social Criticism 38, no. 4/5 (2012): 485.
-
Cashin, Sheryll. "To be Muslim or Muslim-looking in America: A comparative exploration of racial and religious prejudice in the 21st century." Duke Forum for Law & Social Change 2 (2010): 125.
-
Cole, Juan. "Islamophobia as a social problem: 2006 presidential address." Review of Middle East Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 3-7.
-
Dobkowski, Michael. "Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism." 321-33: Wiley-Blackwell (2015).
-
Drennan, Daniel. "Islamophobia and Adoption: Who Are the Civilized?". Journal of Social Distress & the Homeless 24, no. 1 (2015): 7.
-
Duderija, Adis. "Literature review: Identity construction in the context of being a minority immigrant religion: The case of western-born Muslims." Immigrants & Minorities 25, no. 2 (2007): 141-162.
-
Elver, Hilal. "Racializing Islam before and After 9/11: From Melting Pot to Islamophobia." Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems. 21 (2012): 119.
-
Ernst, Carl W. Islamophobia in America : The Anatomy of Intolerance. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, (2013)
-
Esposito, John L., and Ibrahim Kalin, eds. Islamophobia: The challenge of pluralism in the 21st century. Oxford University Press (2011).
-
Esposito, John L., and Dalia Mogahed. Who speaks for Islam?: What a billion Muslims really think. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (2007).
-
Evans, Jade. "Politics, Stereotypes and Terrorism: The Politics of Fear in Liberal Democracies." International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 6, no. 5 (2011): 71-78.
-
Ewing, Katherine Pratt. Being and Belonging : Muslims in the United States since 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2008).
-
Fink, Steven. "Fear under Construction: Islamophobia within American Christian Zionism." Journal of Islamophobia Studies 2, no. 1 (2014)
-
Garner, Steve, and Saher Selod. "The racialization of Muslims: empirical studies of Islamophobia." Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 9-19.
-
Garner, Steve. "Islamophobia?." In Racisms: An Introduction, 159-174. London: SAGE, (2010).
-
Ghanea Bassiri, Kambiz. "Islamophobia and American History." In Islamophobia in America, pp. 53-74. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, (2013).
-
Gottschalk, Peter. "The Sum of All Fears: Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment Today." American Heretics: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the History of Religious Intolerance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2003): 167-96.
-
Gottschalk, Peter, and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia: making Muslims the enemy. Rowman & Littlefield (2008).
-
Grewal, Zareena. Islam is a foreign country: American Muslims and the global crisis of authority. NYU Press (2013).
-
Grosfoguel, Ramón, and Gema Martín-Muñoz. "Introduction: Debating Islamophobia." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 8, no. 2 (2010): 2.
-
Grosfoguel, Ramón. "Epistemic Islamophobia and colonial social sciences." Human Architecture 8, no. 2 (2010): 29.
-
Grosfoguel, Ramon, and Eric Mielants. "The Long-Durée entanglement between Islamophobia and racism in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system: An introduction." Human Architecture 5, no. 1 (2006): 1.
-
Grosfoguel, Ramon. "The multiple faces of Islamophobia." Islamophobia Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2012): 9-33.
-
Halliday, Fred. "'Islamophobia' reconsidered." (1999): 892-902.
-
Hardy, Mike, Fiyaz Mughal, and Sarah Markiewicz. Muslim Identity in a Turbulent Age. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2017).
-
Hassan, Farooq. "American Muslim Minorities: Victims Of Islamophobia of a Pluralistic Society In The 21st Century." International Journal of Academic Research 7 (2015).
-
Helbling, Marc, ed. Islamophobia in the West: Measuring and explaining individual attitudes. Routledge (2013).
-
Hollander, Nancy Caro. "Anti-Muslim Prejudice and the Psychic Use of the Ethnic Other." International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 73-84.
-
Hussain, Amir. "In the Decade after 9/11." Political Theology 12, no. 5 (2011): 696-698.
-
Imhoff, Roland, and Julia Recker. "Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique." Political Psychology 33, no. 6 (2012): 811-24.
-
Iyer, Deepa. We Too Sing America : South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future. New York : The New Press (2015).
-
Jackson, Liz. "Islam and Islamophobia in USA: The tip of the iceberg." Educational Philosophy and Theory 48, no. 7 (2016): 744-748.
-
Johnston, David L. "American Evangelical Islamophobia: A History of Continuity with a Hope for Change." Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51, no. 2 (2016).
-
Kazi, Nazia. "Voting to belong: the inevitability of systemic Islamophobia." Identities (2017): 1-19.
-
Khan, M. A. "Us Government and American Muslims Engage to Define Islamophobia." American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24, no. 2 (2007)
-
King, C. Richard. "Renewed Hate." Cross Currents 65, no. 3 (09// 2015): 302-10.
-
Klug, Brian. "Islamophobia: A concept comes of age." Ethnicities 12, no. 5 (2012): 665-681.
-
Kreamelmeyer, Kathleen. "Islamophobia in Post 9-11 America." Journal of International Diversity, no. 4 (2011): 42.
-
Kumar, Deepa. "Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush Ii Era." Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 254-77.
-
Kumar, Deepa. "Mediating Racism: The New Mccarthyites and the Matrix of Islamophobia." Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication 7, no. 1 (2014): 9.
-
Lawrence, David. "Islamophobia as a Form of Paranoid Politics." Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture 10, no. 1 (2011): 8.
-
Lean, Nathan Chapman. The Islamophobia industry: How the right manufactures fear of Muslims. Pluto Press, 2012.
-
Lean, Nathan. "The Problems of Islamophobia." Soundings, no. 57 (2014): 145.
-
Lee, Sherman A., Jeffrey A. Gibbons, John M. Thompson, and Hussam S. Timani. "The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation." International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 19, no. 2 (2009): 92-105.
-
Love, Erik Robert. Islamophobia and Racism in America. New York : New York University Press, 2017.
-
Malik, Maleiha. "Anti-Muslim Prejudice in the West, Past and Present: An Introduction." Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 3/4 (2009): 207-12.
-
Massad, Joseph A. Islam in liberalism. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
-
Massoumi, Narzanin, Tom Mills, and David Miller, eds. What is Islamophobia?: Racism, Social Movements and the State. Pluto Press, 2017.
-
Meer, Nasar, and Tariq Modood. "On Conceptualizing Islamophobia, Anti-Muslim Sentiment and Cultural Racism." Thinking Thru’ Islamophobia (2008): 34
-
Meer, Nasar. "Islamophobia and Postcolonialism: Continuity, Orientalism and Muslim Consciousness." Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5 (2014): 500-15.
-
Michael, George, and D. J. Mulloy. "Riots, Disasters and Racism: Impending Racial Cataclysm and the Extreme Right in the United States." Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 4/5 (2008): 465-87.
-
Mignolo, Walter D. "Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2006)
-
Morgan, George. Global Islamophobia: Muslims and moral panic in the West. Routledge (2016).
-
Mugabo, Délice. "On Rocks and Hard Places: A Reflection on Anti-blackness in Organizing against Islamophobia." Critical Ethnic Studies, no. 2 (2016): 159.
-
Paul, Crystal, and Sarah Becker. "“People Are Enemies to What They Don’t Know” Managing Stigma and Anti-Muslim Stereotypes in a Turkish Community Center." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 46, no. 2 (2017): 135.
-
Phillips, Richard. "Remembering Islamic Empires: Speaking of Imperialism and Islamophobia." New Formations, no. 70 (2010): 94.
-
Rahim, Emad. "The Growing Epidemic of "Islamophobia" in America: Social Change through Appreciative Inquiry." International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations 10, no. 1 (2010): 239.
-
Rana, Junaid. "The Story of Islamophobia." Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture & Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 148.
-
Rauf, Imam Feisal A. "The Relationship between the Muslim World and the United States and the Root of Islamophobia in America." Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51, no. 2 (2016)
-
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books (1978).
-
Said, Edward W. "Orientalism reconsidered." Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 1-15.
-
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. Random House (2008).
-
Said, Edward W. Culture and imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage Books(1994)
-
Salem, Jackleen M. "Citizenship in Question: Chicago Muslims before and after 9/11." Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 7, no. 2 (2011):
-
Saylor, Corey. "The U.S. Islamophobia Network: Its Funding and Impact." Journal of Islamophobia Studies 2, no. (2014)
-
Sayyid, Salman. "A Measure of Islamophobia." Journal of Islamophobia Studies 2, no. 1 (2014): 11.
-
Sayyid, Salman, and AbdoolKarim Vakil. Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst & Company (2010).
-
Schwartz, Stephen. "Islamophobia: America's New Fear Industry." Phi Kappa Phi Forum 90, no. 3 (2010): 19-21.
-
Selod, Saher. "Citizenship denied: The racialization of Muslim American men and women post-9/11." Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 77-95.
-
Semati, Mehdi. "Islamophobia, culture and race in the age of empire." Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 256-275.
-
Sharif, Raihan. "White Gaze Saving Brown Queers: Homonationalism Meets Imperialist Islamophobia.” Limina 21, no. 1 (2015): 1-19.
-
Shryock, Andrew Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (2007)
-
Sriram, Shyam K. "A Foucauldian Theory of American Islamophobia." International Journal of Islamic Thought 10 (2016): 47.
-
Sziarto, Kristin, Anna Mansson McGinty, and Caroline Seymour-Jorn. "Diverse Muslims in a Racialized Landscape: Race, Ethnicity and Islamophobia in the American City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin." Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 34, no. 1 (2014): 1-21.
-
Tehranian, John. Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority. New York, NY: New York University Press (2009).
-
Tyrer, David. The politics of Islamophobia: race, power and fantasy. Pluto Press, 2013.
-
Wadud, Amina. "American by Force, Muslim by Choice." Political Theology 12, no. 5 (2011): 699.
-
Wright, Stephanie. "From "Mohammedan Despotism" to "Creeping Sharia:" Cultural (Re)Productions of Islamophobia in the United States." Journal of Islamophobia Studies 3, no. 2 (2016)
-
Yaghi, Adam. "Popular Testimonial Literature by American Cultural Conservatives of Arab or Muslim Descent: Narrating the Self, Translating (an)Other." Middle East Critique 25, no. 1 (2016): 83.