This volume assembles a range of authors to discuss the extent of Islamophobia around the world. The geographic scope contributes a great deal to our understanding of stigmatization, discrimination, and attacks on Muslims in multiple regions. There are chapters on Western cases such as the United States, Germany, Britain, France, and Belgium, as well as less-studied locations such as Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, India, China, and Myanmar. This geographic diversity provides uncommon breadth and depth. Each chapter reviews the history of significant episodes of Islamophobia within a country or countries. The United States and India are covered in two separate chapters, which offer complementary perspectives on the concerns in the world’s two most populous democracies.
Individual chapters by Uddin, Kalmar, and Govil and Ghertner are especially engaging. Asma T. Uddin’s chapter on “The Politics of Vulnerability: Today’s Threat to American Muslims’ Religious Freedom” argues that being anti-Muslim has become part of a “mega identity” among conservatives (p. 42). Uddin emphasizes how perceptions of status threat amplify social psychological attributes such as Social Dominance Orientation and Authoritarianism, traits that social scientists have connected to voting for Trump in the 2016 election and to support for the post-9/11 war on terror. For Uddin, these dynamics result in “political tribalism” (p. 55) that can turn members of outgroups such as Muslims into opponents who “must be defeated at all costs, lest our own team loses” (p. 55).
Ivan Kalmar investigates the puzzle of “Islamophobia without Muslims” in Eastern Europe. Focusing on the 2015–2016 refugee influx from the Middle East, he observes the strong political instinct to close borders in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. He notes that these countries accepted significant numbers of refugees from Ukraine and other neighboring countries, concluding that the objections during the 2015–2016 refugee crisis were “not to migrants as such, but to these migrants” (p. 132). He attributes this to “peripherality,” not just in Eastern Europe but in “what might be called the white periphery” of regions, countries, and rural groups that have not thrived in the globalized neoliberal economy (p. 148). Kalmar and Uddin share the perspective that status fragility generates action to maintain racial and class privilege at the expense of even more peripheral Others (p. 148).
Govil and Ghertner’s study of India takes a more structural approach to anti-Muslim outcomes. They focus on the concept of “urban citizenship” in India, arguing that Muslims have been confined to the periphery of spatial politics in a Hindu-dominated country. For these authors, “Muslim ghettoization and exclusion serve as the foundation upon which fear of Muslims encroaching on the ordinary public spaces of the city becomes possible” (p. 207). The marginalization is furthered by the failure of infrastructure in Muslim neighborhoods and the lack of police support during outbreaks of violence (p. 212). The authors demonstrate that urban politics can be both an expression of Islamophobia, as well as a signal to the country that such stigmatization and marginalization are appropriate for this group.
Scholars interested in specific case studies will find this volume extremely useful as the book conveys substantial, important historical information. However, social scientists hoping for a rich theoretical discussion of the interactions between Islamophobia and populism will be disappointed. With few exceptions, each of these concepts is undertheorized in the substantive chapters, and there is rarely an attempt to explore the interplay between the two.
The links are notably thin in Aziz and Esposito’s introductory chapter, which focuses on the argument that the US-led “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) fostered Islamophobia across the world. This assertion is undoubtedly true at a very general level, such as when they observe that “Muslims are [viewed as] a threat to the nation’s domestic security” and “Muslims across the world are experiencing myriad forms of discrimination” (p. 6). However, local differences are significant enough that every substantive chapter must be considered a “context-specific analysis” (pp. 6, 19). Readers may want more evidence to substantiate the claim that “the GWOT legitimated hateful discourse that in turn justified racist state practices against Muslims across the world, albeit to different degrees and in various forms” (p. 19).
Most chapter authors do not directly speak to the main concepts or their interplay. Frequently, they define Islamophobia and populism in passing, if at all; nor do they pick up the thread of the introduction by integrating a discussion of the US-led Global War on Terror. At times, the conceptual stretching of Islamophobia makes it difficult to know whether marginalized groups are targeted specifically because of their identity as Muslims, or whether their out-group status hinges partly (or largely) on their ethnic, racial, regional, caste, class, or immigrant identity. These markers often overlap in practice, but authors rarely address this issue directly. Instead, they tend to subsume all forms of discrimination and disadvantage under the rubric of Islamophobia when a more subtle and nuanced approach may provide greater insight.
If Islamophobia receives limited theoretical treatment throughout the book, populism receives even less. Authors largely do not engage with the history or politics of populism in their individual countries. Readers may raise questions about the extent to which the Chinese or Myanmar regimes count as populist. Even where populism clearly exists within a country, authors seldom explicitly investigate how it interacts with Islamophobia in the national context. In the end, the book title’s references to “global Islamophobia” and “the rise of populism,” as well as the introduction’s focus on the Global War on Terror, are not developed throughout the book in ways that build theoretical connections between them.
These limitations will likely reduce engagement with this volume, especially among social scientists. Despite these drawbacks, students of Islamophobia can learn much from the individual case studies. The final chapter is an extended reflection by Ibrahim Rasool on how Muslims have been integrated into South Africa in ways that might offer lessons for other countries. It is a welcome positive note on which to end a kaleidoscopic work.
