Call for Papers to the 9th Annual International Islamophobia Conference

The Road Travelled

Center for Race and Gender’s Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project
University of California, Berkeley
&
Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies
University of Leeds, UK

Islamophobia Studies Journal

&
ReOrient

Call for Papers to the 9th Annual International Islamophobia Conference

Conference Dates: April 27-29, 2018

Location: UC Berkeley

Submit abstract online

https://irdp.submittable.com/submit/103537/cfp-the-road-travelled-the-ninth-annual-international-
islamophobia-conference

The theme for the ninth annual International Islamophobia Conference is framed by a critical
article written by Professor S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim Vakil (https://irdproject.com/reports-of-
islamophobia-1997-2017/) on the occasion of Runnymede Trust publishing, “Islamophobia: Still
a Challenge for us all”. We included the full article below to contextualize the ninth annual
conference call for papers, which seeks to examine five areas framed by the authors and abstracts
should engage one or more of these strands. The conference welcomes panels organized around
one of the themes or a panel that have distinct papers each covering one of the themes.

1. What’s In A Name

2. Islamophobia and Racism

3. The Globalization of Islamophobia

4. The Muslim Ghost in the Machine

5. Are We There Yet?

6. Note: Abstracts are limited to 300 words and a one paragraph (100
words) biography to be used for the program, if the paper is selected.

7. Abstracts are due by Jan. 30th, 2018

 8. Response to abstracts by Feb. 15th, 2018
9. Final Invite by March 1st, 2018

“Reports of Islamophobia: 1997 & 2017”

by S. Sayyid S. & Abdoolkarim Vakil

The Road Travelled

Earlier this month the Runnymede Trust launched a new report, “Islamophobia: Still a
challenge for us all”, to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of the landmark
1997 report, “Islamophobia; A challenge for us all”. The significance of the original
Report is hard to under-estimate. While it is the case that it did not coin the term
Islamophobia, it certainly gave it legs. And while it is also true that the report did not
end Islamophobia, it did indict it.

The 1997 report was the first comprehensive combined survey and policy intervention
on an increasingly prominent phenomenon and against the context of heightened global
problematisation of Muslims as Muslims. This is worth remembering for two reasons.
Firstly, whatever its final form as a document, the consultative nature of the work
which fed into its pages generated a momentum and a sense of stake-holding
important to its reception and impact. Whether adopted as leverage or contested in
whole or in part, the report and the momentum of its discussion produced Muslim
agency over Muslim agendas. The publication of the report propelled Islamophobia into
public consciousness. It shaped the national and global conversation, even if much of
that conversation was only to contest the vocabulary that the report sought to
establish. Second, because it is worth being reminded that already in 1997 the report
was a response to diverse interrelated historical shifts, both local and transnational: the
post third worldist and post-67 global resurgence of Muslims signified by the Revolt of
Islam; the increasing debasement of the grand narratives of modernisation come-
secularisation in the social sciences; cumulative postcolonial and post-cold war
challenges to the Eurocentric world order; the identification and ascriptive
reclassification of ethnically marked and immigrant populations as Muslim, and
concomitant mobilisations over the way in which existing race-relations based anti-
discrimination legislation afforded them only uneven and inadequate protection,
recourse, and redress as Muslims. This isn’t just about recasting a twenty year view
into a longer genealogy. Against presentist fixation on framing the Muslim Question in
the horizon of 9/11, it bears remembering that the report was published four years
before George W. Bush declared the ‘war on terror’, and that in some ways this never-
ending war was as much a reflection of Islamophobia as it was its intensification.

The 2017 report does not repeat the impact of the original report; perhaps never could.
In any case, it is a very different document. The 1997 report was the work of a
commission; the present report is an edited collection. It is based neither on
community consultation, nor on new research and evidence into the policy areas it
covers, but rather on commissioned chapters by academics summarising their research
in different registers. Each chapter, as their bibliographical references mostly attest,
speaks in an individual voice, and the volume makes little effort to engage let alone
convey or build upon the mounting and increasingly diverse body of academic
scholarship on Islamophobia produced across the world, including in two specialist
journals, and numerous reports. Even its most significant departure from the 1997
report, that of defining Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, is eroded by this lack of
engagement. There is something to be said for an edited collection of single-theme
focused chapters, but the absence of connection and engagement across the chapters is
problematic.

The difference between the two reports provides a useful index of how Islamophobia as
concept and phenomena has changed in the intervening twenty years. What follows is a
brief comparative and relational analysis of the two reports as a way of arguing for the
need for a theory of Islamophobia which can broaden the diet of examples by which we
can apprehend this phenomenon. Theorizing Islamophobia is important not just
because of reasons of intellectual aesthetics but because only such an account can turn
the noise of data into facts, organise our perceptions and fortify any recommendations
which we care to make.

1. What’s In A Name

It is almost a cliché that any substantive writing about Islamophobia from any genre
will begin with a rather hand-wringing acknowledgement about the inadequacy of the
term. What animates this anxiety seems to be the belief that the problem with the
reception and effectiveness of the term is a matter of etymology rather than of politics;
that a different word would not have elicited the hostility that Islamophobia does. The
problem with this is not only the apparent underlying assumption that a word has an
isomorphic relationship with the object that it names and constitutes, but a historical
naivety about our political vocabulary. The use of words to challenge entrenched
structures of power elicits the same response and contestation that meets the work
they are called to do. Even a cursory glance at the range of expressions within various
forms of civil rights struggles in the Western plutocracies would make clear that it is not
Islamophobia’s morphology which is the problem but the phenomena that it seeks to
designate and the challenge that it implies to the prevailing established order. Racism,
feminism, antisemitism, genocide, hate crime, to note the most obvious examples,
were all contested and considered inappropriate and counter-productive in their time.

What this constant anxiety over the correct designation for Islamophobia, already
present in the original report and manifest with greater virulence in this latest report
points to, is a conceptual lacuna. The various attempts to read Islamophobia as anti-
Muslim bigotry, or anti-Muslim prejudice, or anti-Muslim hostility, are attempts to
resolve the theoretical problem by etymological diktat. This is most evident in the 2017
report, where, despite the editors’ acknowledgment of the bad faith of literalist
etymological readings, lingering anxieties over the inherited term appear to require
both constant reassurance that the use of the term will not curtail freedom of speech,
and robust protestation that Islam is, must be, and will continue to be open to criticism
as a religion. The almost logical concomitant to this ambivalence is not merely the
inclusion of a chapter in the report which argues that the term is inadequate and
counter-effective, but that the argument goes unanswered.

A similar and related anxiety concerns the obsession to establish a single definition of
Islamophobia, which appears to have gained consensus as the next most imperative
priority to follow the report. The focus on a single definition is problematic in three
respects. First, much of the work of challenging Islamophobia is and will be done
irrespective of a definition since it is about calling out and challenging the curtailment of
Muslim autonomy and barriers to equality of participation and outcomes in ways that
have little to do with government legislation per se. (The far more fundamental
obstacles are the lack of political will to resist populist and racist electoralism and the
public courage to commit mainstream political agendas to antiracist futures backed with
effective funding, resources, and mandates). Second, because it implicitly takes the
contextually specific and especially legal terrain of British law as the parameters both of
a definition and of its scope of action. Third, because it construes Islamophobia, and the
combating of Islamophobia, within the confines of the existing racial grammar of race
and religion which underpins public discourse and legislation, rather than challenging it
in the articulation of a radical and global social justice agenda.

2. Islamophobia and Racism

The 2017 report signals a welcome shift in its short definition of Islamophobia as anti-
Muslim racism. But to describe Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism is only an advance
if racism is not being used merely as a euphemism for bigotry. Racism means not so
much a set of beliefs and attitudes that individuals hold, but rather a form of
governmentality that establishes systems of practices and protocols which distribute
power and opportunity unevenly across populations. Islamophobia belongs to the genre
of racism understood as racialised governmentality. What is brought to bear in the
experience of passing through airport security, is not just the individual beliefs and
attitudes of the security staff, it is also their training, the expectations of their senior
managers, the establishment of key performance indicators, the assessment of targets,
all the panoply of the contemporary organisation of workflow, as well as the multiple
registers of insecurity nested in successive technical and regulatory framings of
securitisation. The problem is not the definition of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism
per se, but that in the context of this report what it signals is a failure to grasp the
sense in which Islamophobia is racism fully.

This failure arises from the insufficient attention paid to the category of racism; in fact,
the word racism is conspicuous largely by its absence. The report is populated by
categories such as prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination which are presented as being
equivalent to racism, when at best they have only a metonymic relationship to racism.
Reading racism from the prism of bigotry and its cognates renders racism as a ‘boo
word’ rather than an analytical tool. It evacuates the dimension of power, empties out
the category of racism, and opens the door for charges and counter-charges of racism
to circulate between and within Muslims, Muslim communities, and ethnic minorities,
with little sense of the structural overdetermination of unequal social relations. It is also
unclear what the greater emphasis on individuals (highlighted at the launch as one of
the significant differences between the original and current reports) means for the
discussion of structural and institutional racism. Nor, for that matter, is it made clear
what the reframing of Islamophobia by reference to human rights, in the wording of the
longer definition, adds to the effectiveness of the work of the term or concept.

The practical consequence of this is that while the 2017 report is highly critical of the
government’s PREVENT programme, it is unable to account for the myriad ways in
which state agencies sponsor and promote Islamophobia without it being reducible to
the remit of PREVENT. The failure to acknowledge that Islamophobia is racism results
not only in the loss of the vital tool in the work of combating Islamophobia which
establishing its equivalence with racism enables, but the loss of robustly and
consistently addressing the dimensions of institutional Islamophobia. The chapters that
allow that racism is structural are the chapters most focused on ethnic minorities and
only indirectly on Muslims. Without the conceptualisation of structural and institutional
Islamophobia, evidencing Islamophobia requires identifiable individual Islamophobes.
To demonstrate that the Office for Standards in Education demand that Muslim girls
should be interrogated on their reasons for wearing the hijab is Islamophobic; that the
Charity Commission’s hounding of Muslim charities is Islamophobic; that government
department directives are Islamophobic, calls for the identification of institutional
arrangements, policies and practices, not of card carrying Islamophobes.

3. The Globalization of Islamophobia

Islamophobia is global; the 2017 report is national. The rationale for such a narrowing
of focus could be that as policy-making is within national jurisdiction a report that
wishes to change policy must be resolutely framed within the horizon of policy-makers.
Such a rationalisation, however, does not accord with how struggles against racism
have rarely been led by policy changes. Most often it is mobilisation that facilitated
policy shifts in the direction of anti-racism. Further, an exclusively nationalist focus on
phenomena which is transnational risks its elision rather than elaboration. Islamophobia
is always contextually and historically specific, but it is never reducible to its context,
least of all to any disarticulated single framing of context abstracted from the
overlapping spatial scales and interlocking formations which constitute it. Thus,
combating Islamophobia can never be framed either in exclusion of its transnational
articulations or of more concerted global action. After Brexit, after Counter-Jihad, after
PEGIDA, after Trump and White revanchism it seems even more quixotic to dispense
with the global in favour of an exclusive focus on Islamophobia in England (and it is
England, since the report neglects a UK wide coverage).

The globalization of Islamophobia presents a challenge not only of scale but of

significance. This was a challenge that perhaps the writers of the original report could
not envisage. Islamophobia in 1997 was for them essentially a problem akin to those
that afflicted other ethnically marked population in the UK. In a sense, the 1997 report
was only extending the conceptual policy matrix to a community that hitherto had been
obscured, that of Muslims. But the globalisation of Islamophobia does not mean the
multiplication of national sites in which the phenomena is present, rather its
institutional embeddedness in the international system. This is illustrated by the way in
which standard measures that curtail and regulate expressions of Muslimness are now
part of the trans-national machinery of the war on terror. It is represented by the way
in which Islamophobia provides a common platform in which various geopolitical actors
coalesce and co-operate. Most of all, it is represented in the circulation of the ideology
of white revanchism which is connected through the glue of Islamophobia. The
circulation of Islamophobic tropes is not restricted to one national jurisdiction. Nor is
state centred securitisation disentanglable from trans-state and global articulations.
Twenty years on from the original report this is even clearer. So whether the exclusive
focus on ‘British Muslims’ in the 2017 report is a principled or a pragmatic concession,
the end result is the same capitulation, a parochial solution for a global problem. In this
sense too, the ‘us all’ in the call for understanding Islamophobia as a Challenge for us
all remains, twenty years on, short of its promise.

4. The Muslim Ghost in the Machine

The emergence of Muslims is supplemental to many of the chapters in the 2017 report.
It is of course possible, as is similarly known from the historical literature on
antisemitism, to have Islamophobia without the presence of Muslims; but it is
impossible to have Islamophobia without the figure of the Muslim. And without an
account of the emergence of Muslims in Britain, of how ethnically marked and subaltern
populations increasingly identified and mobilised as Muslim, it is impossible to
historicize Islamophobia. The inability to historicise Islamophobia has important
implications even for the currency of policy-making. Firstly, because if Islamophobia is
something constant since the advent of Islam in the seventh century, it is difficult to
see how the policy of amelioration can be formulated and implemented with any degree
of precision or confidence. Second, because neither the specificity of the contemporary
racial formation – of race, of racialisation, of the state, of its technologies, of its global
articulations – nor the Muslim agency which is the condition of possibility of naming and
problematizing it as Islamophobia, would be possible.

In a sense, Muslims continue to haunt both the 2017 and 1997 reports. It is true that,
in its rather fragmentary and sometimes contradictory manner, it does point to
significant differences between Muslims in the Britain of 1997 and Muslims in Britain in
2017. That, for example, the Muslim population has grown and become more confident,
with the newer generation of young Muslims better able to navigate the norms of
contemporary society. This, of course, is a version of the narrative of progressive
‘integration’ through succeeding generations which had been such a staple of the
sociology of race relations. There is, though, little recognition that the various
populations that are described as Muslim in public discourse were not constant. Britain’s
ethnoscape, as one of the contributors spells out, has been transformed by the various
permutations of Black, Asian, and now Muslim identification and mobilisations. Yet by
and large the report essentialises Muslim identity and by so doing contributes to the
conceptual obfuscation of Islamophobia.

In two other regards, not much ground has been gained since the original report. The
inclusion of a comparative discussion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the present
report is one of its critical strengths. A striking, and ideologically loaded contrast had
marked the discussions of the role and responsibility of Jews and of Muslims in
accounting for antisemitism and Islamophobia in the respective Runnymede reports of
1994 and 1997, A Very Light Sleeper and A Challenge for Us All. Ironically, the very
discrepancy which the addition of this chapter contributes so much to undo, continues
to linger in the rest of the report through the discussion of the Islam as religion strand
of the Islamophobia neologism. Similarly, while it is true that the current report
decidedly moves beyond the original report’s overemphasis on interfaith relations as a
core strand in tackling Islamophobia, the same limitation over the question of religion
and race riddles both reports’ conceptions of Islamophobia. The thrust of the 1997
report was the need to expand racial discrimination policies and legislation by
supplementing their scope as racial and religious discrimination; the most fundamental
failure of the 2017 report’s conception of Islamophobia as racism is the failure to queer
the categories of race and religion and their ontologies.
Are We There Yet?

Contradictorily, the new publication both acknowledges and falls short of some of the
critical shifts in the activist work and academic scholarship on Islamophobia over the
twenty years that separate the two reports. It is disheartening, on the one hand, to see
research so narrowly construed as academic research, with little effort to acknowledge,
draw upon, or connect with, the breadth of critical research and policy
recommendations generated by activist work on the ground. Given the privileging of
academic work, it is also remiss, on the other hand, to see little acknowledgement of
the role of impact-driven and public funding carrots in reshaping university research
agendas, and the contribution of their disproportionate focus on Muslims, from
radicalisation to integration and related ‘problem’ areas, in entrenching Islamophobia.

The fall of the Soviet Union signalled by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 meant the
retreat of ontological social science and the domination of ontic social science. That is, a
social science unable to historicize its object of enquiry, and the marginalization of
genealogical accounts. The ‘normal science’ version of the humanities and social
sciences are inadequate to deal with epistemological challenges raised by the growing
post-Western world. The demands to decolonize the curriculum can be seen as
recognition of this challenge. The emergence of Muslim political subjectivity is
deconstructive not only of a geopolitical or cultural order but also of an ontic
epistemology. That is, the emergence of Muslim political identity interrupts the
paradigms which governed the production of knowledge and policy towards those
deemed to be outside the pale of white normativity. The attempt to write about
Islamophobia without that genealogical imagination perpetuates Islamophobia. The
struggle against Islamophobia has to be a decolonial one. The failure of this latest
report to even cite the coloniality of Islamophobia, more than an omission, becomes a
marker that while it may have been written twenty after its predecessor, in many ways
it speaks to the same starting point.