Muslim Origins and Destinations

Patterns of racism in the Global North are correlated with the changing nature of globalization and its impact on individual economies, especially over the last four decades. The ‘left behind’ are groups in society who have faced considerable downward social mobility, with some becoming targeted by the mainstream and fringe right-wing groups who do this to release their pent up frustration towards the center of political and economic power. How this form of racism has evolved over time to focus on race, ethnicity, culture and now religion is explored in relation to the UK case, discussing the rise of Trump and the issue of Brexit as symptoms of a wider malaise affecting societies of the Global North. These forms of tribalism act to galvanize the right, combining racism with white supremacy, xenophobia and isolationism.

Epilogue

The final chapter returns to the core themes of this book-Islamophobia and radicalization-to suggest some possible ways forward in breaking down the formidable cycle of hate, intolerance and cruelty. This concluding chapter summarizes the primary messages of this book, which have concentrated on establishing the sociological, political and ideological associations between two important concepts in the current period–Islamophobia and radicalization. The main contribution of this book has been to outline how they are interrelated but also mutually reinforcing due the interaction of global, national and local forces. In this process, the nature of Muslimness is being molded by the state, which seeks to create a moderate Muslim amenable to the idea of an identity based on ‘values’. In an uncertain future, the only inevitability is change itself.

Fear and Loathing at the End of History

This chapter explores the notion that Islamophobia is not only a lived social and political experience facing British Muslims. It is conflated by a paradigm of anti-multiculturalism, which has sought to abandon a critical acceptance of differences in society and replace it with an outmoded, reductive and exclusive notion of English nationalism, especially in the post-EU referendum era. It reflects the normalization of anti-Muslim hatred, which has grown exponentially since the outset of the war on terror that began after 9/11, a period that has witnessed growing intolerance, bigotry and the development of far-right, radical left and religious extremist groups. Cumulative extremisms at the margins of society incubate the discourses of intolerance and hate that allow these subgroups and their ideas to flourish. Accepting differences between groups clearly raises challenges for those who regard such differences as a threat to wider society. Yet, for others, these differences are an asset. This is where politics enters the fray and helps to explain why the idea of ‘multicultural societies’ has caused so much confusion. It is possible to think about the ‘management’ of differences in society.

Vanquishing False Idols

The online world is a space for exploring identities, learning more about the ‘other’ and questions of being and becoming in a much wider space than previously understood. This online world of the far right and Islamist is an alternative reality that enables people to promote their own political views. Unreconstructed patriarchy, in the form of an anti-feminist discourse grounded on selective aspects of conservative Islamic and Christian norms, is finding a new voice on the internet, coupled with hate towards the ‘other’, more generally presented as a common enemy to the collective male ‘self’. The individuals attracted to various forums are often reclusive and difficult to identify. The victims in both cases are young men who are angry, enfeebled and distrustful of one another, now morphed into a cyber-realm where their rage finds a voice online, where their digital tribalism gives them new meaning in an otherwise broken and divided world. A crisis of masculinity is at the heart of the malaise facing young men all over the world. Both radical Islamists and the far-right fringes have galvanized in the online space in resistance to neoliberal globalization, their loss of identity and the increasing prominence of women in society.

Islamophobia as New Racism

A historical process of framing Muslims negatively within popular discourses in society during imperialism and colonialism reveals how the emergence of Orientalism and the birth and eventual dominance of neoliberal capitalism had coincided. In the current period, both mainstream and social media continue to disseminate negative views on Islam and Muslims - transmitted through the 24-hour new cycle – which is heightened by an emphasis on extremism, radicalization and terrorism. These concerns reflect the unease felt about matters related to security and counterterrorism, and reinforce the notion that Muslims en masse are somehow antithetical to the norms and values of all of society. A populist politics of division has forced through the ideas of ethnic nationalism, which have come to define this anti-Muslim moment. The confluence of far right normalization in media, and Islamophobia propagated through the news cycles, has real-world implications – from attacks on people and property. In exploring the Danish Cartoons Affair of 2006, which had a global impact on Muslim-non-Muslim relations and perceptions, and the localized nature of anti-Pakistani sentiment in a popular BBC television sitcom, Citizen Khan, there is a discussion of the local and global being bound in framing Muslims.

Framing Muslims

This chapter provides an overview of the experiences of Muslim minority communities in Britain, as well as in other parts of Western Europe. It explores the nature of the immigration process and its associations with the changing nature of the economy and society. Over time, a myopic concentration on ethnic, racial and religious differences has fed into Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, where a discourse on mutually recognized integration has shifted into forced assimilation, partially into a dominant framing of ‘values’. For example, the discourse in relation to Britishness has shifted away from a focus on celebrating diversity and differences in society as part of a vision of a unitary political whole, and instead moved towards one in which ethnic nationalism, in the form of an idealized notion of Englishness in the case of the UK, is the centerpiece. Examining immigration in the contexts of politics, culture and identity, this chapter reveals the complexity of contested identities in post-industrial urban settings that were once the initial sites of immigration for these groups, focusing on Britain and other important centers of Muslim politics and populations across Western Europe. How such conditions provoke specific types of responses from these Muslim groups is also explored, and two aspects of the nature of the fissures within Islamism are also introduced – one is potentially regressive and reactionary, with the other being worldly and spiritual.

In Conclusion

This chapter focuses on a range of acute crises facing the world. Britain’s post-war approach to multiculturalism has differed from the other countries comprising ‘Old Europe’, such as France and Germany, for example. All three countries once had empires but later had to reach out to their once-colonized peoples to reduce employment gaps created by the loss of men and infrastructure during the Second World War. However, the idea of history as a dialectical process, propounded by Friedrich Hegel and later enhanced by Karl Marx, was challenged by Francis Fukuyama, who obtained notoriety during the early 1990s for his end of history thesis. Fukuyama suggested that Western capitalism had championed in the conflict between communism and free market economics. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun also wrote about the rise and fall of civilizations. But the crises of civilizations are man-made. They are not inevitable.

The Racism of the Radical Right

This chapter explores the nature of racism in the Global North, exploring its antecedents in imperialism and colonialism. It surveys the growth of European cultural and political power, and how racism characterized its economic relations with the rest of the world. Europe imagined ‘the other’ in polarized terms, largely because of the power monopoly it possessed. How this racism entered popular culture is also explored, as well as its lingering impact in the context of post-colonialism, migration and diaspora of minorities often coming to the ‘mother country’ in search of better opportunities or having been invited to work in declining industrial sections as part of the post-war reconstruction process. The rise of ethnic nationalism reflects on the prominence of cultural and structural binary racism that has seen a gradual shift away from a strictly black-white dualism. The reductionism and essentialism of the racism are shifting more and more towards a Muslim-non-Muslim dualism.

The Postcolonial Subject’s Discontent

The prevailing post-war paradigm on education and social class is based on a direct association between these two concepts, such that they are inseparable in the minds of many. That is, education leads to class mobility as a direct result of the education system. In extending this argument, the idea that minority children underperform in education due to their ethnic and class characteristics should hold sway, but research has also claimed that stronger schools can raise the average performance levels of pupils from weaker backgrounds, while weaker schools tend to reduce the average performance of pupils from lower-class backgrounds. Many see educational underperformance among young Muslims as an intractable problem; however, in reality, the poor educational performance of young British Muslims is often due to policy decisions made at a local or national level. The education of British Muslims has evolved in the context of the policies of post-war immigration, integration and diversity policy. In reality, in situating these groups, popular systems of multiculturalism endorse notions of tolerance and secularity through the popularization of a multiculture that racializes the civilized, modern or backward in the construction of national identities.

Plugged Into the Rage

This chapter is an attempt to explore the theoretical and conceptual nature of the symbiosis that defines and characterizes far-right and Islamist extremism. It synthesizes current knowledge on the similarities and differences between these two types of extremism, which are based on a disjuncture between the interplay of social structure and identity, the knowledge gaps in existing research, and the implications for policy and practice in this area. These kinds of extremism need to be recognized as two sides of the same coin. Both forms of extremism feed off the rhetoric of the ‘other’, compounded by an elite discourse that seeks to divide and rule when it comes to dealing with differences in society, combined with the issue of the diminished status of white working-class communities in general. It is therefore crucial that there is greater understanding of the linkages, interactions and symbiosis between these two oppositional but related extremisms.