Chapter 2 The cultural-political, socioeconomic and educational flash points of
2.13 The Islamophobia modality of racialisation and the media representations
According to some academics, the origins of Islamophobia in the European West can be traced back to 16th century (Matar, 2009 ). In the 16th century Islamophobia accounts,
the semantics of racial blood and religious culture were synonymised in caricaturing Muhammad as unpleasant dark skin and his religion as a devilish threat (Meer, 2013a). In addition, anti-Semitism and Islamophobic vocabularies in the 16th century, Europe
associated Muslims and Jews with animals (Grosfoguel, 2012). The term Islamophobia in the modern European context emerged in the early 20th century, through the writings of orientalists like H.A.R Gibb and Ernest Renan, and by 1970s became established in the European academic circles (Rana, 2007; Kumar, 2012, p. 35). On the British scene, rigorous Islamophobia scholarship emerged in the 1990s; partly in relation to the after effects of the Rushdie saga, and its impact on Muslim lives in Britain. For example, the Runnymede Trust published its landmark report on Islamophobia. The Runnymede Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (CMBI) defined Islamophobia as “fear and dislike of all Muslims or most Muslims"(p.1) and an “unfounded hostility towards Islam” (p.4). The report further noted that Islamophobia feelings in Britain were widespread (CMBI, 1997).
After the terrorist events in United States in 2001, and 2005 bombing incidents in London; the Islamophobic feelings in Europe gave rise to growth of discriminatory attitudes. For example, both small and large samples based research studies in local, national and cross-national contexts noted prejudicial treatment and the rise of hate crimes against Muslims (Meer, 2012; EHRC, 2011; EFRA, 2010). Allen (2007)
reviewed the decennial impact of Islamophobia since the publication of CMBI report in 1997. He reported the nature of Islamophobia in the UK in these words:
As Islamophobia, therefore, is clearly not a new phenomenon, neither can be the associated processes through which such expression and sentiment have become almost ‘commonsense' and ‘taken for granted'. Yet such is the nature of Islamophobia - a myriad phenomenon that can be seen to have permeated across different levels of society - that it has remained largely unchallenged and despite efforts to the contrary in Britain, has been allowed to proliferate and become acceptable. Whether at the institutional levels of national government that have repeatedly failed to close an anomaly in the law that certainly allows hatred against Muslims to be perpetuated in favour of tightening security legislation that overwhelmingly affects Muslims communities only, or at the street level, where Muslim men, women and children have been subjected to various Islamophobically motivated verbal attacks, through to the rise of Islamophobically driven neo-Nazi organizations finding electoral gains in local elections, Islamophobia has become such that it cannot be overlooked if future, cohesive communities within a multi-faith, multi-ethnic society are going to be achieved (Allen, 2007; pp. 14-15).
The above Islamophobic experiences and practices mentioned by Allen (2007) could partly be mapped by the Runnymede CMBI definition of Islamophobia, as I mentioned earlier. Meer and Noorani (2008) have more precisely pointed to this; historically, the
aberrance of British Muslim identities and belonging has been practised through the mobilisation of a "composite of cultural racisms". In this regard, the motivation of Islamophobic acts ranged from xenophobic and religiously racialised understanding of bodies, mistrust, securitised and racial profiling, uncritical assumptions, moral panic, and assumed abnormality related to identities pertaining to Muslims (Bleich, 2009a; 2011; 2012; Hussain and Bagguley, 2012; 2013; Kunst et al., 2012; Kotecha, 2013; Meer, 2013b; Soyer, 2013; Ogan et al., 2014).
According to Meer (2013b), Muslims in Europe, because of their perceived Muslim- ness, race and culture, are situated next to the historical and contemporary "semantics, scales and solidarities" with the Jewish understanding of oppression. The comparative Jewish- Muslim historical and contemporary debased predicament is persistent in Europe (PGAP, 2008; Meer and Modood, 2012). The Islamophobia narrativisation of Muslim identities, on the one hand, described Muslims as unreasonable, non-
accommodative, heathen, extremist, on the other hand, projected Muslims’ cultural and racial identities as dirty brown and black, oppressive, conservative, rowdy rustic and alien. The Islamophobia then conflated phenotype, religious and cultural aberrance of Muslim identities in Europe (Meer, 2013b; Meer and Modood, 2012).
According to many academics, the Islamophobic construction of Muslim identities is in many ways linked with the media coverage of British Muslims particularly after
Rushdie and 9/11 terrorist incidents. For example, Poole (2002) suggests that the non- coverage of British Muslims prior to 9/11, suddenly shifted to high levels of negative coverage of Muslims. One persistent highlight of such coverage is the synonymous linkage of “fundamentalism” with Muslims and Islam (Abbas, 2001). In the “Islamic fundamentalist” imaginary; media storyboards constantly manoeuvre images of violence with that the Islamic terrorism threat, Muslim radicalisation as to embed the discursive construction of all Muslims as terrorists, at a common-sense level, in the public imagination. Muslim resistance to negative and essentialising discourses is further mobilised as the response of "angry Muslims". Meer argues that in the "angry Muslim" invocation, the media produces hot-headed and terrorist connotations about Muslims to construct the irrationality of Muslim voice and political mobilisation (Meer et al., 2010a). Furthermore, Kassimeris and Jackson (2011) emphasised that media sharpened the terrorist storyline of Muslims by further discussing them in binary
Muslim and Western value lines. In this value line discourse, Muslimness in any form is "danger” and problematic to the European values and social cohesion. They in their analysis of the “Weekly Standard Magazine” about its opinion columns about Muslim observed:
Every article studied had this as its background and the idea is manifested in several ways. First, several writers explicitly drew a dividing line
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, with the former being placed in passive roles to illustrate that contemporary Islam is a problem even for Muslims. Second, ‘good’ Muslims were regularly portrayed as begging for help from the West to repel their ‘bad’ co-religionists. Third, Muslims in Western countries were shown as making trouble and abusing the generous freedoms afforded to them, or as a dangerous and ever-increasing minority, lurking in inner cities and ready to rampage at the slightest provocation. Even ‘good’ Muslims are a problem for neoconservatives; their temperaments were presented as strange and inscrutable, ruled as they are by emotion and passion. There is a sense in the texts that all Muslims are in danger of being radicalised and must be treated with suspicion and watched carefully (Kassimeris and Jackson, 2011; p. 31).
Kassimeris and Jackson’s (2011) analytical observations about negative representations of Muslim in the media are broadly consistent with other studies, about media
discourses of Muslims and Islam, conducted nationally and cross-nationally (Ogan et al., 2014; Bleich et al., 2015). Awan (2014a) argues that the media scare and
construction of all Muslims as lesser or greater devils, strange and angry, bad in the guise of good is constantly being bombarded in social media. Different large scale survey based empirical studies have highlighted that Islamophobia trends across Europe and in the UK, continue to have adverse effects on Muslim children and adults (PGAP, 2008; IHRC, 2014). Furthermore, academics have reported that the daily realities of schooling such as experiences of xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism and increasing social exclusion for Muslim pupils is being denied as a problem in academic and social debates (Meer and Modood, 2009; Shain, 2011; Housee, 2012; Sian, 2013).