That the attacks of September 11, 2001 so fundamentally transformed the image of, and interaction with “the Muslim” in Western Europe and North America is remarkable upon measured reflection. A decade has now passed, allowing us to better understand what effectual externalities were unleashed on that day. This edited volume by Esposito and Kalin attempts to place these reactions toward Muslims and Islam within the larger context of historical interactions with and depictions of the “Islamic” other in literature, art, civil discourse, public policy, and popular culture.
The literature on Islamophobia in English has exploded in the last two decades, particularly with the publication of the 1997 Runnymede Trust Report on Islamophobia. The strength of this volume lies in its selection of contributors from various backgrounds allowing a multiplicity of perspectives on this pernicious and salient issue. Being a relatively newer field of study, a considerable amount of the volume is dedicated to establishing and documenting this phenomenon making the volume citation-heavy with a solid 13 page bibliography, particularly the first five chapters. The most incisive contributions in the understanding of this phenomenological category termed “Islamophobia” are seen in the latter half of the volume; specifically, those chapters with detailed case studies that attempt to explain historical causality by demonstrating the underlying philosophical and ontological challenges to Euro-American identities caused by the presence, imagined or real, of the “Muslim.”
Sherman Jackson's presentation of “racial agnosia” in Chapter six is a particularly adept way of conceptualizing the interaction with the American binary racial categories by immigrant Muslims and their offspring. Particularly moving was his retelling of an interaction with a Pakistani-American Muslim university student who was tempted by extremism because of his inability to understand the racial dimension in asserting an authentic American identity. Jackson's multilayered chapter also articulates the enormous subconscious impact of Islamophobia in political discourse and popular culture on those second-generation American Muslims who came of age in the years since September 11, 2001.
Sunaina Maira's chapter, following Jackson's, picks up on this theme through a sociological study of South Asian immigrant youth in a New England city. The focus on various forms of citizenship, such as cultural and “dissenting,” is used as a theoretical framework to highlight questions of authenticity, belonging, and loyalty. These students are torn between recognizing the humanity of those Muslim civilians killed in the two foreign wars pursued by the United States since 2001 and the desire to be recognized as civic equals in supporting the American republic.
Anas Al-Shaikh-Ali, in Chapter nine, masterfully ties the theme of Islamophobia, as seen in American literature, to its origins in European colonialism. The Orientalist images of the Muslim as barbaric Turk and lascivious Moor in history is clear, which he strikingly ties to a contemporary reinventing of these images in popular thrillers, such as the Left Behind series. Anas brings another very concrete contribution to the volume, that of answering the rise of Islamophobia. His solution is education at every level promoting equality and respect of others rather than the heretofore brittle tolerance of the other.
Larger questions in understanding the complexity of Islamophobia are raised by this volume. First, are all these reactions to Islam and Muslims motivated by phobias or are some simply motivated by a base hatred as seen in the history of Western anti-Semitism? Delving deeper, do Muslims pose a perceived or real existential threat to the national identities of post-Christian Europe? Beyond the work of describing and documenting the phenomenon, as much of this volume does, where is the agency of the Muslim in the processes which generate and sustain Islamophobia?
Second, what are the finer demarcations of this phenomenon? Europe is a diverse place, take for instance the United Kingdom. Issues of Islamophobia differ widely even from England to here in Scotland. The devolution of political power and avowed multicultural position of the dominant Scottish National Party has made Islamophobia almost imperceptible allowing the inculcation of a strong Scottish national identity among the Muslims of Scotland.
Third, as for the case of the United States, an assumption in the introduction and other chapters is to see Islamophobia as simply another nativist American reaction to a newer wave of immigrants; as in the past this too shall fade. Kalin argues that “[t]he debate is shaped and largely determined by the liberal-secular ideals of the European Enlightenment, which cannot accommodate a non-Western religion such as Islam.” Surely the spread of Buddhism has not garnered such vitriolic opposition. Is the Muslim qualitatively different being a civilizational peer competitor to “the Christian” with an equally universalistic claim to salvation? At the international level, only certain Muslim societies remain the last challengers to dominant Western political, economic, and social norms as universal and essential to human aspirations. Will this brutal process of integration in an environment rife with Islamophobia facilitate or hinder the development of “American Islam”?
This edited volume's strengths lay its diverse perspectives and meticulous documentation of particular instances of Islamophobia to demonstrate the larger historical trend. These case studies, in particular, provide much needed depth on the human toll of hatred masquerading as free speech. It is an excellent introductory text for the lay educated reader in beginning to understand these diverse phenomenon termed “Islamophobia.”
