What Is the Case against Muslims?

Widespread aversive sentiment against Muslim co-citizens and migrants persists among the European and American publics. On both sides of the Atlantic, new political formations have challenged established parties by leveraging recent exogenous shocks—economic crisis, migration surge, and terrorism wave—to stake a claim for political power on avowedly anti-Muslim grounds. For now, naked appeals to animus remain exceptional. Instead, specific disputes or policy disagreements work as prisms. They refract and blend anti-Muslim sentiment into larger, more neutral, and broadly appealing justifications. This chapter examines this ideological and political conjunction through the lens of three specific policy disputes, each of which conjoins anti-Muslim sentiment with a neutral political principle. These disputes concern the veil, the mosque, and the terrorist profile. Respectively, these disputes integrate anti-Muslim policy vectors into the programmatic aims of securing liberal freedoms, national culture, and public order: Ambitions that can be invoked without a superficial taint of animus. Close examination of the terms of each of these public debates, however, reveals unravelling inconsistencies and internal contradictions. The actual behaviour or beliefs of Muslims have little purchase within these arguments. A naturalized category of “Muslims” with affinities to anti-Jews and anti-black stereotypes, instead does intellectual work. As a result, each of the three goals avowedly pursued in anti-Muslim polemicals—liberalism, national culture, and public order—can be conditionally embraced, and can further conduce to rejections of specific anti-Muslim positions. The chapter concludes by considering whether an insistence on the mundane and the empirical, rather than the symbolic, is a viable political strategy.