Structural Islamophobia: a class analysis?

The various political and intellectual attempts in recent years to grapple with the relationship between race and class (see, for example, Virdee 2014; Roediger 2017;

Bhattacharyya 2018) go far beyond the scope of this research. However, much less has been said about the relationship between Islamophobia – as a form of racism – and class, with analyses that do address the relationship between capitalism and Islamophobia tending to be US-focused (see Kundnani 2017; Kumar 2012). This section explores how participants understand the role of class in reproducing Islamophobia, but also in offering possibilities for resistance.

When asked to explain ‘where Islamophobia comes from’, there was a sense amongst many participants that socio-economic factors had some role to play in fostering hostility towards Muslims and other racialised minorities. This broad understanding was expressed in reference to a number of issues relating to class inequality such as poverty, inadequate housing, homelessness, unemployment and austerity. The following extracts are taken from two quite different participants in Glasgow but are interestingly similar in their conception of the relationship between racism and Islamophobia, on the one hand, and social inequality, on the other. Clive is a white, Christian man in his late twenties, who does work with an anti-racist sports club in Glasgow. Elisa is an Alevi woman of mixed ethnicity, also in her twenties, who has been involved with various grassroots anti-racist organisations in the city (but, to my knowledge, not the same organisation as Clive):

Clive: But they don’t have, in some parts of Edinburgh, in some parts of Glasgow, if you say can’t get a council house in the scheme that you’ve already grown up in then you’re gonna look for someone to blame and that often isn’t the council it’s usually people of colour that have just moved into your scheme, so Glasgow in terms of it’s a lot more diverse [than Edinburgh], so therefore I think the generation coming up realise, are kind of in a quite strong position for that, but maybe older generations are still…. There’s a lot of hardship in Glasgow and a lot of poor people who are struggling and so therefore when you’re struggling you’re gonna look for something or someone to blame and I think immigrants and immigration and people who are not white Scottish are easy.

Elisa: I think they react to something and reacting in a racist way seems much more easier than any other way. And when you have like a community or when you have like a group of people who went through austerity or who are jobless or who went

through a lot in life, and if the first thing you see on TV or in a newspaper saying ‘our jobs being taken by Muslims’ or by refugees, asylum seekers, you’re

automatically going to blame them ‘cause either you don’t see the bigger picture or it’s easier to blame another group, than saying ‘oh the government is too big to change’, but if we get rid of these people, that might change something. So that’s another interesting area, so it’s like a reaction I think from people to say, it’s like why’s that building being given to that people, it should have been ours. And I seen that like a lot. I dunno if you notice like in the city centre, you know the homeless people in the street, they put signs saying like ‘I’m Scottish’, and they like

underline Scottish. It’s like ‘I’m Scottish’, underlined, ‘and homeless, please help me’. But they make a difference by underlining, saying ‘I’m Scottish’ or saying ‘I’m a real scot’, give some money.

There are two key themes that need attending to here. The first is the imbrication of racism, nationalism and class: in other words, the ways in which appeals to national belonging are made by some sections of the working class at the exclusion of others. This is, as work by Virdee (2014) and Valluvan (2019) demonstrates, not a new phenomenon. It does,

however, present questions for building solidarity, and this is something I will return to towards the end of this section, referring also to some of the findings laid out in previous chapters.

The second is the claim that some individuals react to their experiences of social inequality with racism, Islamophobia and appeals to nationalism because it is ‘easier’ than blaming those in power. Rather than interrogating the validity of such a claim, I want to ask what it says about conceptualisations of Islamophobia and racism more broadly in relation to understandings of class. Although a significant number of those I spoke to articulated a connection between Islamophobia and class inequality, the role of the state in these

dynamics often remained unclear or sometimes altogether absent. The above accounts from Clive and Elisa are illustrative of this and reflect a wider pattern amongst those I spoke to. The notion of ‘ease’ obscures the reproduction of Islamophobia through particular state institutions. If we recognise instances of everyday racism as being intimately connected to – and as saying something important about - wider structural conditions (Smith 2016), it

raises the following questions: what social and political factors create the conditions for this ‘easy’ blaming? And who or what is responsible for producing them?

The construction of both Glasgow and Manchester as cities with strong working class identities forms an important backdrop to these discussions. As mentioned in chapter 3, the working class histories of both cities have been memorialised and celebrated in various ways. Statues of venerated working class figures have been unveiled in Glasgow in recent years, including a statue of Mary Barbour who led the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, erected in Govan, once the heart of Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry (Dalziel 2018).

Meanwhile in Manchester, during the summer of 2019, as the first drafts of this thesis were beginning to take shape, a plethora of cultural events took place across the city in

commemoration of the 200th _{anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre (BBC News 2019), an}

event that placed Manchester at the very centre of ‘the’ historical workers’ struggle. The ‘worker bee’ has long been the city’s emblem, more recently given new life in the wake of the Manchester Arena attack (see chapter 4). Reflecting these public displays of working class history, both cities were described across various interviews as having significant working class populations and well known radical histories. We might consider the ways in which these histories help to inform a particular (often implicitly racialised) vision of the historical working class (see Virdee 2014; Niven 2019). However, accompanying the public displays of, and personal attachments to, a particular working class civic identity is an alternative story: one of declining industry and a retreat from class politics, marked by decades of attacks on a multi-ethnic working class, its associations and institutions. In a paper addressing the social and political conditions that led to the Brexit vote in 2016, Virdee and McGeever (2018: 1810) argue that the vote to leave Europe can be understood not only in terms of a resurgent racialised Englishness, but also the way in which:

The period of working class defeat under the Conservatives led by Thatcher was accompanied by the loss of alternative class frames of resistance, including those that re-imagined the working class as multi-ethnic. Although the organizations of the working class and the left more generally have a long history of imbrication in the politics of racism in England, these organizations have, at the same time, provided limited but nevertheless important cultures of solidarity that have in turn

played a key role in re-imagining black and brown migrants (and their British-born descendants) as part of the working class.

With this context in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that the discussions with participants which addressed the role of class in reproducing Islamophobia, often pointed not only to a lack of solidarity and fragmentation of working class communities, but also to an overall absence of a class-informed framework for making sense of Islamophobia, despite some limited appeals to ‘multicultural’ working class solidarity. It is within this space that the kind of claims addressed in chapter 5 emerge, which slide towards or even orient around the so-called ‘legitimate’ concerns of ‘white working class’ communities. This being said, there were a small number of participants who offered an alternative conception of

Islamophobia, one that placed more emphasis on the ‘manufacturers’, or the

‘emboldeners’, of Islamophobia, and one that might offer an alternative framework to a resurgent left nativism (Valluvan 2019). Once again it tended to be Muslim activists who put forward these conceptualisations, which better reflect the structural accounts described by Kundnani (2017; see also Massoumi et al 2017). Espo, for instance, in reflecting on the far-right, emphasises the role of what he identifies as the establishment. As part of an email exchange, he writes:

I would also like to qualify my statements regarding the threat of the Far Right. My biggest issue is the racism emanating from the establishment who in my opinion are the manufacturers of racism. I feel they deflect a lot of attention to the Far Right [FR] as a means to white-wash their own racism. They create the narrative for the FR. They embolden the FR. Many working class who join the FR are often victims of austerity, often desperate for answers to their social problems and unfortunately swallow the rhetoric about Muslims, migrants etc.

Similarly, Aziz describes Islamophobia as “[working] through the words and actions of […] people in power”, while Abdul describes the importance of understanding and tackling the “politically generated” Islamophobia of neo-conservative strategy in the US, which he emphasises is reproduced by right-wing movements and organisations (see Griffin et al 2017). What I want to emphasise here is the centring of power, and

often pointed to an absence of – or an ambivalence around – the role of class in making sense of Islamophobia, an appreciation of the role of power moves the analysis beyond the terrain of the purely interactional. Perhaps, then, providing a starting point for examining the nature of structural Islamophobia and considering the ways in which these forms of power manifest.

The second half of the chapter will consider the strategies that activists pursue in organising around this more state-centred understanding, including the sorts of radical traditions that inform a more structural view of Islamophobia; here I simply want to highlight the key features of (or absences in) such an understanding. This being said, I want to consider another example of the way in which class was understood to relate to Islamophobia and concurrent resistance to it. In this example Aziz, who has been involved in various grassroots anti-racist organisations in Glasgow, provides a revealing anecdote about his experience of the divisions within Glasgow’s Muslim community. The discussion begins with an exchange between myself and Aziz around the social conservatism of the Muslim community in the city, despite, as Aziz points out, the community’s strong support for the Labour Party:

Aziz: Well yeah, I would agree. Conservative… well yeah and like in terms of what people do, a lot of, just from as far back as I can remember, everything has been centred on like hard work, and improving the self, getting a good education, going to uni, getting a good job has been part of like uplifting the whole community. And yeah, obviously it’s a very like, there’s massive class divisions I think as well. SH: Within the Scottish Pakistani Muslim community, big class divisions?

Aziz: Yes. Uh-huh. It’s like if we go to Nando’s for example, it’s like my sister or other people that I’m with, will be like ‘oh there’s so many pakis here today. So many pakis oh my god’, or like if you go through Pollokshields, it’s like ‘aw, full of pakis’. And I’ve always found it quite interesting how they’ve used that word. SH: And what do they mean by that word in that context?

Aziz: I think they mean like loud, crass, vulgar Pakistanis that they would probably think are like tarnishing the image of like Pakistanis as a whole. Like the boys who will like drive their cars loud late at night. Boys on corners who will like be a nuisance or whatever, other like middle class Pakistanis will look down upon them and, yeah, I feel there’s lots of divisions there. And I’m not sure like, I’ve not read a lot into the AYMs [Asian Youth Movement groups] from down south and how they were composed, if it was a middle class grouping or more middle class than working class, but yeah I don’t feel there’s lots of solidarity there in the community itself. If it could like come together to identify like common struggles or things that need to be demanded.

What this exchange clearly demonstrates is Aziz’s sense of how classed divisions within the Muslim community in Glasgow might prevent the sort of solidarity needed for

effective resistance against Islamophobia. In conversations elsewhere there were claims of a sort of taken-for-granted solidarity across different communities, assumed to be bound by a shared class position. However, in addition to the accounts of Clive and Elisa earlier in the chapter, Aziz’s example complicates such assumptions. The use of a racialised name in Aziz’s account – one that continues to be used as a racist slur against many Asian people in Britain – as a signifier of classed difference also points to the complex ways in which nationalism and race are imbricated with class: implicit in the use of the ‘P’ word is, perhaps, also a claim to national belonging. Aziz’s invocation of the work of the Asian Youth Movement (discussed further in section 6.3.1) is important too. The Asian Youth Movement, which dissipated before Aziz was born, had branches all over England, but none in Scotland. Yet Aziz clearly draws on his own knowledge of the politics of this movement to inform his analysis of the role of class in generating (or undermining) solidarity in what he calls ‘common struggles’. Aziz’s example once again suggests that it may be Muslim activists – and especially those with more ‘radical’ political tendencies – who are most alive to the material realities of Islamophobia today, the barriers to solidarity (within and across communities) that can render such relationships “uneasy” (Roediger 2017: 188), but also the histories of multi-ethnic working class struggle that may offer resources for organising more effectively in the current moment. A key sociological question which thus begins to emerge is: what else (beyond personal experience) is key to helping sustain a structural account of Islamophobia amongst activists?

6.3 Strategy

What are the strategies that activists pursue in organising around a structural critique of Islamophobia, of the kind mapped out above? What resources do activists draw on, and conversely, what are the factors that prevent or limit these understandings being translated into practical resistance?