This pedagogic pack is intended for anyone who is teaching any aspect of Islamophobia or who wishes to introduce teaching on Islamophobia into their pedagogic practice. The pack primarily draws on resources produced by ReOrient and the Critical Muslim Studies project as part of their critical engagement with Muslim presence worldwide through academic and informal channels. The pack offers suggestions on how to teach Islamophobia in a university context, though select resources could be adapted for learners in other settings as well. Independent learners could also choose to use this pedagogic pack to learn about Islamophobia, by imagining themselves in the role of the ‘teacher’ or ‘lecturer’ addressed here.

1. Understanding Islamophobia

What is Islamophobia? Learners may already have a sense of this, and one way to begin might be to ask them what they think Islamophobia is, in terms of examples that they may be aware of in the world around them. Home Office data up to and including March 2024 shows that 38% of hate crimes recorded by the police were against Muslims and that 42% of mosques in the UK have been attacked in the last 3 years. A Centre for Media Monitoring report in 2018 showed that 59% of all articles about Muslims associate them with negative behaviour and stereotypes. These statistics make clear that Islamophobia is a part of many learners’ lives, and evident at all levels of the societies in which they live. Learners may also be aware of Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslims in films, TV, video games or other media.

The first comprehensive survey of Islamophobia was undertaken in 1997 by The Runnymede Trust. This report did not coin the term Islamophobia, but certainly contributed to a growing popular awareness of the term and is therefore an important milestone in society’s understanding of Islamophobia. In 2017 the Runnymede Trust launched a new report to mark the 20-year anniversary of the first one.

Invite learners to read this blog post, by S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil, which analyses the two reports to ask significant questions about racism, the globalisation of Islamophobia, and the problematisation of Muslim presence over the intervening years. 

You may wish to discuss some of the following questions:

• • Which events does the blog post point to as significant in the development of Islamophobia between 1997 and 2017?
  • What has happened since 2017 that has an effect on Islamophobia around the world?
  • In what ways did the 1997 and 2017 reports fall short of an adequate description of Islamophobia?
  • Imagine that you are writing a reflection on the 3oth anniversary of the Runnymede Trust report, in 2027. How do you imagine Islamophobia will be different? What factors are likely to influence it over the next few years?

2. Defining Islamophobia

1997 was not the first time that anyone had tried to find a word to describe Islamophobia – and it certainly was not the first time anyone had experienced it. But it would not be until much later that a definition of Islamophobia could be debated and accepted by large numbers of organisations (including charities, local councils, universities…) in the UK. You may wish to introduce this topic to learners by asking them how they would define Islamophobia, and reflecting on the terms that they use. Do they understand it to be predominantly a prejudice against a religion (i.e. criminalising prayer), or as something that is directed at what Muslims wear (i.e. items of clothing like the hijab or the niqab), say, or as prejudice manifested against what is perceived as Muslim presence in the world (i.e. regularly stopping brown skinned men at airports or when driving?) Does Islamophobia in their definition cover structural aspects, like discrimination in access to employment, housing or schooling, or is it restricted to unwelcome comments made on the streets, lack of appropriate (halal) food at events, or physical violence and aggression? All of these different aspects play a key role in how effective a definition will be.

Here you will have the opportunity to introduce learners to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) definition on Islamophobia. The APPG was established in 2017 and resulted, in 2018 in a report that defined Islamophobia as follows:

“Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

How does this definition compare with the definitions that the learners came up with? To further understand this definition, learners could engage with any (or all) of the following three resources:

• • This blog post by Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil explains the logic of the definition.
  • This podcast in which Hizer Mir and Salman Sayyid analyse an example of an Islamophobic incident in order to answer the question ‘Is Islamophobia racism?’
  • This graphic, designed to make the definition easy to understand for a non-specialist audience:

Learners may also wish to develop their understanding of the relationship between Islamophobia, racism, and gender, and could choose to listen to this podcast in which Amina Easat-Daas, Ben Whitham and Nadya Ali discuss these questions.

3. Islamophobia(s) Global and Local

So far our discussion has centred on Islamophobia in the United Kingdom (and learners who wish to learn more about Islamophobia in the UK before moving on could read a recent account here). But Islamophobia is a global phenomenon, even if it has local specificities. In this section learners will be introduced to blog posts, podcasts and journal articles that describe the structural operation of Islamophobia in different places around the world. You may wish to allow learners to choose a specific example to engage with and then discuss what they have read / heard with other learners who have chosen different examples. In their discussions, learners could be asked to focus on collectively establishing the common features or family resemblances of Islamophobia across the examples that they have individually chosen to focus on.  Learners could choose from:

• • This blog post on Islamophobia in Switzerland by Johanna Loock.
  • This podcast on the Islamophobic persecution of the Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan by China, with Darren Byler
  • This blog post on the relationship between whiteness and Muslimness as it relates to an Islamophobic attack in New Zealand by Uzma Jamil.
  • This blog post on Islamophobia in India by Sheheen Kattiparambil.
  • This blog post on Islamophobia and the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 by Hatem Bazian.
  • This podcast on Islamophobia in Palestine, Japan and Denmark with Saul Takahashi.
  • This blog post by by Ashraf Kunnummal and Alexander Abbasi on Islamophobic violence in Myanmar.
  • This blog post by Nik Zych on racism and Islamophobia in Poland.

You may instead prefer to encourage learners to focus on one specific case study. Here you will find materials on Islamophobia in France which could serve as a case study for understanding logics of Islamophobia globally:

• • This blog post, by Amina Easat-Daas, written in 2020, provides an introduction to Islamophobic policies in France.
  • This podcast, recorded in 2023, with Kawtar Najib, brings us up to date on more recent Islamophobia in France.
  • In this podcast, Houria Bouteldja explores the relationship between decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France.
  • In this podcast, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Marwan Muhammad about the attacks on the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

France will also be an important case study for the next section of this pedagogic pack. Another salient case study is Islamophobia in India. Learners could explore this via this special issue of the ReOrient journal themed around Hindutva in India. This example comes from ReOrient’s (open access) academic journal and not its public-facing output and so may be more appropriate for learners who already have some familiarity with reading scholarly articles.

Islamophobia is not simply a problem for places where Muslims are a minority among the population, like most parts of Europe or North America. It can also be apparent in Muslimistan, that is, countries where Muslims are not a demographic minority. The term ‘Kemalism’ is often used for policies that attempt to diminish the role that Islam plays in Muslim societies (the use of the term Kemalism in this way is coined in Salman Sayyid’s  book, A Fundamental Fear). In this podcast Hizer Mir and Sumeyye Sakarya discuss what they understand the term ‘Kemalism’ (and the term ‘Islamism’) to mean. Two blog posts and one podcast episode on Pakistan provide useful material for learners to develop their understanding of Kemalism: this blog post by Salman Sayyid introduces the idea of Pakistan as Kemalist and this blog post by Shehla Khan considers Kemalism’s role in Pakistan’s changing policy on Palestine. This podcast episode with Ayesha Khan examines the relationship between Kemalism and coloniality in Pakistan.

4. Histories of Islamophobia

When did Islamophobia begin? Many people mistakenly= believe that Islamophobia began in response to the 9/11 attacks. In such a narrative, Islamophobic policies are part of the necessary control of Muslims that is required in order to avoid more events like 9/11. In fact, it is increasingly understood that Islamophobia played a role in the colonial project, and that policies to control Muslim populations (who made up a large proportion of the people Europe colonised) operated long before 9/11.

In this podcast, we return to France to hear from Kawtar Najib and Rayan Freschi about the ongoing state Islamophobia in France. Invite learners to listen carefully to how these two guests narrate the history of Islamophobia. They point out that Islamophobia did not begin after 9/11, and was crucial to how the French oppressed their colonised populations in places like Algeria. Are learners able to point out the important actors / moments in this history?

You may also wish to invite learners, as they listen, to make a note of other ideas that link Islamophobia with coloniality. One of the key ideas that connects together colonialism and Islamophobia that is discussed in this podcast is ethnonationalism. Another is the idea that Islamophobia aims, above all, to inhibit Muslim political subjectivity (or Islamism). Do learners know what these terms refer to? Can they describe any examples of them that they are aware of in the world around them?

Some scholars have argued that the sorts of stereotypes and tropes that we would later call Islamophobia are evident much earlier. Ambereen Dadabhoy, for instance, argues that it is possible to read in Shakespeare’s plays some of the stereotypes about Muslims that we will later be able to recognise as Islamophobic. You may wish to invite learners to listen to this podcast episode, in which Ambereen makes this argument and discusses her book on this topic. As they listen, learners could note down the answers to questions like:

• • How convincing is the argument that Islamophobia is apparent in early modern literature?
  • How clearly can we distinguish between stereotypes that are specifically Islamophobic, and those that are more broadly Orientalist (as described by Edward Said in his 1978 Orientalism)?
  • Is Islamophobia as old as Islam itself, or does it come to the world at a later stage?

These questions are still open fields of discussion on which many scholars disagree. But the idea that it is difficult to say when Islamophobia begins has inspired other scholars to reflect on the fact that Islamophobia also structures the way we tell the story of world history. In this blog post, Marchella Ward reflects on the fact that the grand narrative we tell about ancient history can have the effect of producing Islamophobia in the present. Islamophobia is also responsible for the fact that Muslims were at various points in history considered to be a-historical, or to have a history not worth knowing. For this reason, there are serious challenges in the present day to doing Muslim history. In this podcast Richard Bulliet discusses some of them in the context of his work on Islamicate history.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, you may wish to ask the learners to reflect on how their understanding of Islamophobia has changed. They may also be able to engage with more methodological questions, like:

• • What difference does it make to our understanding of Islamophobia if we understand it as a global project, not simply localised expressions of prejudice?
  • What do we gain from understanding Islamophobia to be a kind of racism? How does this help us to combat it?
  • How does the story we tell about the history of Islamophobia shape how societally acceptable this prejudice may seem to be?
  • What questions do I still have about Islamophobia and combatting it, and where might I find the answers to them?

Learners who want to investigate their questions further will find many more resources than we have been able to introduce here via the ReOrient blog (ReOrientations), podcast series (Radio ReOrient) or journal (ReOrient: A Journal of Critical Muslim Studies) which they could explore.

6. Some Further Resources

Open access journals:

• • ReOrient Journal
  • Islamophobia Studies Journal

Books:

• • The Muslim Problem: From British Empire to Islamophobia by Ismail Patel
  • Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives edited by S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil
  • Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign against Muslims by Stephen Sheehi
  • Spatialized Islamophobia by Kawtar Najib
  • Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism, edited by Sahar F. Aziz and John L. Esposito
  • The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North, by Jasmin Zine

FAQs / Definitions

What is “Perceived Muslimness”?

As well as Muslims, non-Muslims frequently find themselves the targets of Islamophobic violence. In fact, the first person to be killed after 9/11 – in an act that was said to be ‘in revenge’ for 9/11 – was a Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi. He was killed because Sikhs wear a turban, and it was thought to be a sign of his Muslimness.

Since Islam is not a race, how can Islamophobia be racism?

Islam is not a race, but Muslimness is racialised. Islamophobia is usually directed at the things that identify someone as Muslim, rather than at their private practice. This may be something like wearing the hijab, living in a particular place (e.g. Bradford, or Tower Hamlets, residential areas with high concentrations of Muslims), using particular types of language (e.g. ‘salaam alaykum’) or taking part in / refusing to take part in particular types of activities. Islamophobia racialises Muslims, turning them into one group about whom it is possible to make judgments and assumptions.

Orientalism

In his book of 1978, Edward Said used the term ‘Orientalism’ to describe the image that the West produced of the East. Orientalism includes Islamophobia, but also extends to include tropes of Easternness beyond Muslimness. Some tropes of Orientalism imagined ‘the East’ as an alluring place that was hyper-sexualised and effeminate, whereas others imagined it as violent, depraved and inherently threatening to the West.

Kemalism

This term is used to describe political regimes that seek to diminish the role that Muslimness plays in public life, and instead value concepts such as Westernisation, modernisation and secularity. The term uses the practices of Mustafa Kemal – the first president of the Turkish Republic after the fall of the Caliphate – metaphorically of other ostensibly Muslim states (it is first used metaphorically in this way in S. Sayyid’s book ‘A Fundamental Fear’, 1997). Implicit in the term is the idea that Kemal prized nationalism on a Western nation state model over the idea of a trans-national community of Muslims (the ummah).

Muslimness

One way of understanding the term ‘Muslimness’ is by analogy with the term ‘Englishness’. The term ‘Englishness’ refers to a set of features that make for a person’s perceived Englishness, whether or not they are actually English. The same is true of Muslimness. Features of Muslimness might include having skin a particular colour, wearing particular kinds of clothing, using certain words, living in particular places or celebrating certain holidays. These features can indicate Muslimness whether or not someone is actually Muslim.

Ethnonationalism

This term refers to a kind of nationalism that is concerned with ethnic belonging and which usually adopts the notion that a land belongs to a racially constituted group of people. Ethnonationalism plays a role in different kinds of racist discourses (such as, for example, in the presumption that Europe has historically been a place inhabited only by white people). It is particularly injurious to Muslims, because it often relies on an imagined historical narrative that privileges certain races and ethnicities over others in the construction of nationalist traditions, leaving Muslims as always outsiders to ethnonationalist imaginaries of belonging.