After 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, the racialization of Islam, which includes troubling and persistent assumptions about Muslims as terrorists, Muslims as outsiders, and Muslims as incompatible with modern democratic nation-states, took on new valences, as many scholars have shown in the last two decades. But being twenty-plus years removed from 2001 has not put a damper on Islamophobic rhetoric, violence, and laws, which are having an unprecedented rise across the world.
Naved Bakali and Farid Hafez’s edited volume The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror: Coloniality, Race, and Islam seeks to illuminate the complicated historical roots of Islamophobia and its current iterations, both global and local; all of these topics are covered, at least in part, in this ambitious collection. Overall, it is a successful tour of the world’s anti-Muslim hostility.
The collection is organized into four parts, with an average of three essays per section, but these are divided thematically rather than geographically. For example, part 1, “Islamophobia in Settler Societies,” (rightly) includes pieces about Canada, the United States, and Australia, and each does excellent work parsing how these particular nodes of ongoing colonization reflect broader histories of imperialism, as well as the uniquely complicated milieu of those contemporary societies. Furthermore, this book does not lean into the still-popular (but bankrupt) notion of an “East/West” or “West and the Rest” divide that so often characterizes these sorts of conversations, especially in political and social science arenas. The approach and framing feel fresh, important, and if not novel, then at least underrepresented.
As a whole, the volume is comprised of solid essays that offer specific glimpses into how a global ideology, like Islamophobia, plays out in hyper-local contexts. Like any edited volume, the work is uneven, both in terms of scope and quality, but overall the essays offer helpful, specific illuminations of how Islamophobia functions in very particular locations. There are too many contributions to single out effectively in a short review, but a few stood out and are worth mentioning directly.
The introduction sets the tone for the volume and presents a gripping, personal, global, and incisive framing for the stakes of the project. From the jump, The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror makes clear the personal, political, physical, and material consequences of Islamophobia, the War on Terror, coloniality, and race or racialization. It is worth noting that the introduction does the majority of the theoretical heavy lifting for the volume, as we might expect. There is little effort in the remainder of the volume to highlight connections between essays; each offer free-standing, unique arguments that hang together because they all address post-War on Terror Islamophobia somewhere in the world. This means that the introduction takes on more heft in both setting the tone and framing the work, since it is really the only place where the stakes of the volume as a whole are laid out and explored. The introduction is strong: there is a clear statement of argument (5), a very precise and concise overview of Islamophobia (5-9), and a clear overview of the global War on Terror and Islamophobia (9-10). That said, because this is the only place where the connective, overarching themes are explored and stated directly, the introduction’s impact wanes as one reads the volume straight through, as I did.
Of note is Silvia Montenegro’s contribution, which focuses on Muslim “Others” in the tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, an area (along with the entire South American continent) that is often ignored within Islamic and Islamophobia studies. The essay offers a complex view of Muslims, the borderlands of three states, their relationship to the US, and the unique context of Latin American anti-imperialist movements, as well as global ideas about Muslims and worldwide patterns of migration (149-166). It is a rich narrative that pushes back on ideas about where Islam is located, how Islam is practiced, and in what ways Islam is (or is not) deployed as part of anti-imperial, anti-colonial movements. It is among the best of the volume for its clarity, distinctiveness, and boundary-challenging articulation of the multiple ways Islamophobia functions locally at these borderlands and globally with regard to international policy, rhetoric, and migration.
The contributions of Tahir Abbas (114-129) and Leyla Yildirim (79-96), about Islamophobia in the UK and Netherlands, respectively, place racism, and the cyclical logics of racialization/otherization, in historic context and helpfully detail how they manifest today. While the authors do not position their work in clear conversation—again, few of the chapters in this volume engage with one another directly—the readers will find resonances between the two, especially in terms of connecting colonial and imperial history to contemporary forms of racism. Abbas rightly points out how Britain’s “ethnic nationalism” is “exclusionary to indigenous-born minorities who are citizens and outsiders,” (114). In doing so, he places definitions of “Britishness” as part of the equation for how Islamophobia works in the UK. Yildirim locates colonial-era Dutch definitions of Muslim “backwardness” as an ongoing feature of how Islamophobia operates in the Netherlands; similar to Abbas’ chapter, Yildirim focuses on integration policies and their emphasis on the so-called “good” and “bad” Muslim trope as a way to see colonial legacies within contemporary anti-Muslim racism.
Todd Green’s accessibly written essay neatly demonstrates how Islamophobia became mainstream in the US, and while there are many works that focus on US policy, politics, and anti-Muslim hostility, Green’s piece stands out as especially succinct. He offers an overview of post-9/11 Islamophobia, but is careful to demonstrate how this pattern of anti-Muslim politics is not limited to the American Republican party or conservatives broadly. Instead, Green demonstrates that Islamophobia is a value held across American politics—that it is a mainstream, widely held position (if not ideology) that works to preserve American imperial interests at home and abroad.
A genuine critique—one that has nothing to do with the editors or authors and everything to do with the press, the state of publishing, and our libraries—is that it is prohibitively expensive at £90 ($113). A number of these articles would work very well in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, but unless this was the only text to be required for purchase, The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror seems like yet another edited volume that is for library shelves only. Which is a pity: this is a worthwhile volume.
Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst is associate professor of religion and director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont.
Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst
Date Of Review:
June 29, 2023