This episode explores Islamophobia across Europe as a form of structural racism. How does Islamophobia operate as a tool of diversion and division? And why do such perceptions play a crucial role in European politics today? Listen to hear about the prospects for emancipatory politics on various scales to combat Islamophobia.
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Glossary
The 2015 European Refugee Crisis
(01:57 or p.1 in the transcript)
In 2015, a record 1,005,504 asylum seekers and migrants reached Europe in search of security and a better future. (For definitions of refugee, asylum seeker and migrant see here). That same year, almost 4,000 people went missing in the trajectory to Europe, with many presumed to have drowned in the Mediterranean. Fifty percent of people came from Syria, followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. Most people landed on the shores of Italy and Greece, while others trekked from Turkey, through the Balkan states, into Hungary. The majority of refugees and migrants aimed to go to northern and western Europe, particularly Germany and Sweden, where reception and support facilities were deemed to be better. These countries were already home to family and community members of the countries of origin, which asylum seekers hoped would facilitate integration. The uptick in people arriving in Europe was due to several factors. After four years of a brutal civil war, many Syrians felt they could no longer risk their lives in the country. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which by then already hosted four million Syrian refugees, were not ideal options given limited work, education and housing opportunities. The situations in Afghanistan and Iraq were also becoming untenable as extremist groups such as the Taliban and Islamic State strengthened their grips on parts of the countries. In addition, political and social instability in Libya opened the door to increased human trafficking towards Europe. Concurrently, routes to Western Europe via the Balkans were also becoming a viable option: they were cheaper and came recommended by smugglers paid to get people into Europe. This did not result in a rerouting of people, but rather an increase in the number of travellers via the various routes. Another factor that increased the number of migrants and refugees was Germany’s announcement on August 21, 2015, that it would suspend the Dublin Regulation for Syrian asylum seekers in Germany. This meant people could claim asylum in Germany, as opposed to in the country where they first reached Europe. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute. This is the ninth episode, season eight of "Democracy in Question." I'm very pleased to welcome today Seema Syeda. She's an activist and a researcher on Islamophobia across Europe. She's based in London and is currently engaged in a multi-year research project funded by the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The project is in conjunction with “Another Europe is Possible”, which is a member-led alliance of progressive groups fighting the causes and the consequences of Brexit.
Seema is also based in Marseille, where she is Head of Communications for European Alternatives, which is an NGO that promotes democracy and equality beyond the nation-state. Today Seema and I are going to focus on several reports[i] that she has co-authored as part of this project over the last couple of years on the rise of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, and what it means for democracy in Europe.
I'll ask her to specify first the meanings of this term and how they vary across national and political contexts. "Islamophobia in Europe can't be understood without relating it to structural racism," she has argued, in the report which raises, of course, broader questions about historical lineages including the long shadow of colonial legacies and post-colonial migration to Europe. However, anti-Muslim sentiments have risen sharply of late as well. So I'll ask her to reflect on the impact of the so-called migration crisis of 2015 and Brexit. A key insight in her reports is that, and I quote her here, "Islamophobia cannot be seen as a fringe, extreme right-wing phenomena, but has, by now, permeated and shaped mainstream political discourse and policies all over Europe."
What explains this tendency of mainstream Islamophobia across most European political parties? How does it work as an ideological tactic, a tool of diversion, and of division? Why do perceptions and fears about religion or ethnic belonging in the composition of the citizenry play such a crucial role in European politics today? We'll also talk about the remarkable success of Islamophobic discourses as narratives which cement transnational alliances and the lack of an effective internationalization of progressive discourses to counter these. We'll conclude by assessing the prospects of an emancipatory politics on various scales to combat Islamophobia. Welcome to the podcast, Seema, and thanks very much for joining me today.
Seema Syeda (SS): Thank you so much, Shalini. It's a real pleasure to be here today, and we are discussing something that is increasingly urgent as we're seeing the rise of the far right in Europe.
SR: Seema, let's begin with conceptual clarifications. In the reports on Islamophobia in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, which you and your colleagues have co-authored, you point out that the very definition of the term represents an important first step. So what would you consider to be the most useful definition of the term, and how does its usage vary across national political contexts in Europe? You point out that the in the United Kingdom the All-Party Parliamentary Group, which excluded the Tories, interestingly, adopted in 2018 a rather broad definition of the term.
The conservative party refused to accept this definition and continued to use the term anti-Muslim hatred as a phrase instead. In the German context, Islamophobia is sometimes used to mean anti-Muslim attitudes as well as anti-Muslim racism. So I think it's important first to distinguish between subjective beliefs or prejudices and more deeply ingrained structural racism. In France, Islamophobia seems to be often disguised as laïcité – the secular option. So could you explain, to begin with, why the term also requires us to rethink racism, bringing together race, ethnicity, and the discussion around culture and civilization as related to Islam as a religion?
SS: As you mentioned, there are different definitions of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism circulating in different contexts. However, for me and for our project, the most important thing is to hone in on the phenomenon that we're actually talking about. And the phenomenon that we're actually talking about is racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness, as well as structural racism and discrimination that prevents people from Muslim backgrounds or people who are perceived as Muslim from accessing services like health care, from getting jobs and being discriminated against in employment, from being discriminated against because of migration status, from being treated differently by state services like the police and in hospitals and in schools, in public employment as well.
So there is the direct targeting of Muslims as individuals and Muslims as groups. And then there is what could be seen as a more invisible structural and state discrimination. Now, when it comes to definitions, most political parties in the U.K., except for the conservatives, have actually accepted a working definition of Islamophobia. And because “Another Europe is Possible” is based in the U.K., this is the definition that we have started from.
So this includes calling for aiding, instigating or justifying the killing or harming of Muslims in the name of a racist, fascist ideology, or an extremist view of religion, making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations about Muslims or of Muslims as a collective group, such as, especially but not exclusively, conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics, government or other societal institutions. The myth of Muslim identity having a unique propensity for terrorism, which is something that is being talked about a lot in discourse at the moment, and claims of a demographic threat posed by Muslims or a Muslim takeover of Europe, which has also been used in relation to the migration crisis.
There's also the accusation of Muslims as being responsible for wrongdoing committed by a single Muslim person or a group of Muslim individuals. And there's also the accusation that Muslims are inventing or exaggerating Islamophobia, ethnic cleansing or genocide perpetrated against Muslims. So the denial of Islamophobia is also a kind of Islamophobia in itself. Furthermore, there's the accusation of Muslims being more loyal to the Ummah, which is the transnational Muslim community rather than their countries of origin, that Muslims are more interested in their own community than that of the nations that they live in.
This is all in the actual working definition that's been produced by the parliamentary working group in the U.K. and has been accepted by the Labour Party and other parties. It's also applying double standards to Muslims, requiring them to have loyalty oaths. It's also holding Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of any Muslim-majority state, whether that state is secular or Islamic. So, for instance, things that are happening in Iran and other places in Turkey are often linked to Muslims, and we see rise in hate crime when certain big geopolitical events happen, which are associated with Muslim countries.
So, these are a few of the different examples of the working definition of Islamophobia that's being used in the UK. And I think this definition is important because we are really at a stage in Europe, where across mainstream society, most people don't really understand what Islamophobia is. There's a lot of ignorance. There's a lot of denial that it exists.
SR: Speaking of the kinds of racist imaginaries and cultural civilizational hierarchies that these are tied to, we can see that Islamophobia has a long history in the West, if we define the term broadly. The European colonial past, as you rightly insist in your reports, and let me quote you here, "Continues to structure European countries' relationship with former colonies, including global Muslim populations." However, it was the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, I think, and in the specific case of the United Kingdom, also Brexit, that amplified the collective biases and fears catalyzing anti-Muslim sentiments.
So could you say something about why Islamophobic sentiments have increased of late all across Europe? Is it due to higher levels of migration, both documented and undocumented? Or do you see the general economic crisis, which hit European countries since 2008, as fueling a lot of these popular fears? Or do you also think that radicalization amongst some of the disadvantaged Muslim youth also plays a role in fueling a lot of the political courses in this direction?
SS: We do have to understand the colonial context. And from the perspective of the UK, Britain had one of the biggest empires in the world and was effectively dominating over the vast swathes of the world's Muslim population during the height of empire. And in order to justify this domination, colonialists propagated an idea of a hierarchy of races and a hierarchy of religions. And that included this idea that European civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most rational way of structuring the world, was the epicenter of knowledge, and that Europeans themselves were more developed and higher beings who deserved to dominate over others. And this was then used to justify the exploitation and extraction of resources and labor from the many Muslim-majority countries that the British empire dominated over, but also many other countries with people from other faiths and racial backgrounds.
It was also during this period that racialization as an idea became more and more prominent. The idea of categorizing different groups by race, categorizing groups by nations and tribes, was quite a popular way that the British empire's knowledge-building and cartography project structured the globe and created hierarchies too. So that is one of the embedded ideological discourses arising from the 18th and the 19th centuries that continues to structure our discourse today. So fast forward into today, there is a continued exploitation of people from Muslim-majority countries in former empires, for instance in Bangladesh, where most clothing is manufactured in factories and textiles are produced in that way.
At the same time, Europe has a huge need for migration. There are huge labor shortages, and this is also happening in the U.K..By demonizing migrants and by raising militarized border regimes, it creates a sphere of control and repression that continues to allow the exploitation of Muslims in the U.K., who do form a big group within all migrants who have come to the U.K., and who are also one of the most working-class groups in the U.K.. So these are some of the most exploited people in the lowest paid jobs but in the most crucial jobs, in healthcare, in delivery, in transport, that are actually enabling the economy to run.
And this phenomenon is repeated not just in the U.K., but in Germany, and in France, and in other countries across Europe. So when we talk about the migration, the so-called migration crisis, what it actually appears to be is governments knowing that there's a huge need for migration, using those migrants as scapegoats for economic crises within Europe, and then continuing to exploit people of Muslim and migrant populations around the world.
SR: An important point that you make in your report is that, and I quote you here, "Islamophobic views shouldn't be attributed solely to the far right." And to be sure, the AfD in Alternative für Deutschland as it's called, Nigel Farage's UKIP in the U.K., Marine Le Pen's National Rally, or Eric Zemmour's "Reconquest," and, of course, leaders like Orbán, Wilders, Salvini, Meloni, all across Europe have continually fanned the flames of anti-Muslim racism. And as you’ve already mentioned, there has been this discourse of the so-called great replacement, the demographic fear that Muslims will take over as the majority in every country in Europe because of the high fertility rates among the community. What is worrying about these views, as you point out, is the mainstreaming, that is the diffusion into the ideological repertoires of center-right conservative parties, and as you also point out, into progressive left parties.
We've seen in Germany prominent conservative politicians trying to woo back voters by competing with the far right on anti-immigration platform. In France, we've seen President Macron's administration adopting partly the agenda of the far right too, denouncing, for example, critical race theory with unusual vehemence as an ideological tool in the repertoire of what they called Islamogauchisme, Islamic leftism, and not as a discipline, which should be taught at university. And of course, in Britain, we've had overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric used by Tory leaders such as Boris Johnson. However, what came as a surprise to me in your report is the fact that you point out that "even progressive socialists, leftists, social democratic parties and organizations have been plagued by institutional and often unconscious forms of Islamophobia." Could you give us some examples of these, and do you have any explanation why this kind of narrative has so successfully diffused across the political spectrum?
SS: So what we've been seeing across Europe is that centrist parties, center-right parties, center-left parties, even left parties, respond to the far-right attacks on Muslims and far-right Islamophobia, as well as well as far-right attacks on migrants, by moving to the right, by accommodating that discourse. And we're seeing that shift happening since at least 2015, if not earlier. To give an example, in 2017, the Labour MP, Sarah Champion, who was then Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, repeated far-right discourse linking Muslims to sex abuse, pedophilia, and grooming gangs in an article that she published in "The Sun".
And at that point, she was forced to actually resign her position from the Shadow Cabinet in the Labour Party. But since then, we've continued to see Islamophobic figures being platformed in the Labour Party. For instance, there's a public figure and a Labour member called Trevor Phillips, who was the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in the U.K., and he's published comments which have attacked Muslims as being a nation within a nation, having different values from the rest of us, and, again, linking Pakistanis and Muslims to grooming gangs and child abuse. And while he was temporarily suspended, there was no disciplinary action taken, and he has since been reinstated.
What's quite interesting, and what I'd like to point out actually, is that there are quite a few Muslim politicians who have been elected to positions in the U.K. during my lifetime, and they include, for instance, Sadiq Khan, who is the Mayor of London, includes Humza Yousaf, who is the First Minister in Scotland, although, he's just recently resigned. And both of these politicians are actually very progressive when it comes to, for instance, LGBTQ rights, when it comes to trans rights. Humza Yousaf, for instance, when he ran for the leadership of the Scottish National Party, was pitted against a candidate who was anti-abortion and anti the Gender Recognition Act that was recently passed in Scotland.
Similarly, in Germany, a number of Muslim MPs that were elected to the Bundestag in recent years, all voted for, for instance, the gay marriage proposals. And so there is this discourse about Muslims in elected office that portrays them as anti-progressive, as religiously extremist, as attacking all of our civil liberties, which is also just actually false.
Without the votes of the Muslim population, which is a large part of the working class of Europe, it's difficult for left-wing and progressive parties to win. However, Macron's party, En Marche, continues to give ground to the far-right and has started banning the wearing of the headscarf during the Olympics. Muslim women who wear the headscarf are not allowed to take jobs in public settings. So these attacks are actually attacking a minority within a minority. It's gendered Islamophobia, where Muslim women who are discriminated against, not just because they are Muslim but also because they are women, are facing more and more barriers to taking part in public life.
And the laws that are being promulgated to limit the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion of Muslims in France in the name of laïcité are now also being extended to limit the expression of other groups. For instance, laws against the freedom of association of Muslim group were passed superficially in order to stop extremism, but in reality, they were then applied to climate action groups, to trade union groups. So the Islamophobic discourse and anti-Muslim hatred is a neat way to introduce more repressive measures across Europe by winning the consent of citizens who have been riled up to be afraid of Muslims, and then sneakily using those laws and those repressive mechanisms against the rest of the population as well.
SR: Let me turn to the role of the press because you've just pointed to not only tabloids like "The Sun" in Britain but also the mainstream British press as being instrumental in spreading some of these views. What is striking, and I speak here from Vienna, where I am located and looking from here at Eastern Europe as well, that in countries like Hungary or Poland, which have hardly any immigrants from Muslim countries and therefore almost no Muslim minorities, Islamophobia is still a remarkably successful rallying cry for right-wing political mobilization, in fact also contributing often to electoral success of right-wing populists.
And I think that really alerts us to the role that media propaganda plays in defusing this kind of politics of fear and of anxiety. The instrumental use of the trope to scaremongering, including demographic fears that we've just talked about, also serves as a means to divert attention from other issues, from problems which one would rather not focus on. I'm thinking, for example, of Hollande, the former socialist president of France, and let me quote from your report here again "The Islamophobic campaigns were useful for deflecting from Hollande's deeply unpopular neoliberal policies, as Hollande himself declared publicly, 'Yes, there is the economy and unemployment, but what matters is the identity wars.'" So, let's look in this context at how perceptions and fears about religion, race, ethnicity, and the composition of the citizenry comes to play a role in European politics.
SS: Yes, and this is a really, really important question and an important point to raise. We've seen years of austerity after the financial crash in Europe. We've seen health sectors decimated. We've seen wages stagnate while inflation has risen at an alarming rate. We've seen huge profits at the same time in the energy and the gas sector increasing every single year. And at the same time, we've seen rising inequality between the richest and the poorest in our societies, not just in Europe but around the world as a whole. And one of the key roles of the media has been to blame the failing health sector, to blame the lack of investment in education, in local services, in community services, in care on the influx of migrants.
The tactic of the government and the parties who are responsible for the economic crisis has been to blame migrants and Muslims for taking over the NHS in the U.K., for instance, and using up the waiting lists for occupying social housing that could be used for "native populations," for creating crime and rising crime rates when community measures and community ways of dealing with crime and of supporting youth who might end up in crime haven't been invested in. And the media has played a very important role in this. For instance, in the U.K., "The Sun" has platformed quite extreme far-right people like Katie Hopkins in the past, and "The Daily Mail" as well has platformed her.
And she has often used very violent rhetoric against Muslims, saying things like there should be gunboats in the channel used against migrants, saying that "there needs to be a final solution for Muslims," which is reminiscent of obviously the rhetoric of the Nazi regime in Germany. And it was only really at that point that "The Daily Mail" had to let her go because she went too far. But since then, she's been actually making links and doing tours of Europe. So she's been connected with Viktor Orbán in Hungary. She connects with the far-right in the Netherlands and with the far-right in France, and she gets platformed and does events.
And, now, she's also going to India and making links with the BJP in India. And she's invited on YouTube channels for an Indian audience where, again, she's allowed free reign to spout hateful rhetoric against Muslim populations. And the entire media landscape has platformed far-right figures, and instead of delegitimizing them, has given a space for their ideas. In Germany as well, when it comes to the violence that Muslims in Germany have experienced over the years, and if we go back to the 1990s, there was an arson attack on the home of some Turkish Muslim migrants, where children and women and entire generations of a family were brutally murdered. And the reaction of the media was to, firstly, deflect what actually happened and not directly say that "it was a far-right attack on Muslims." It was also to downplay racism in Germany, and this was a mainstream media.
And I think at that time, one of the chancellors and one of the government ministers also said that "that was not their role to create a memorial for Muslims or to highlight that kind of racism, and that wasn't an important thing for them." So there's a denial in the media of the reality of Islamophobia at the time. And also, now, as we fast forward to the present day in Germany, we still have extremist far-right attacks on Muslims, such as a shooting that happened in Hanau recently, the stabbing of Marwa El-Sherbini in a court of justice, where she had actually taken a claim against an individual who was racist to her in the playground, and where she ended up being stabbed by the person that she had brought claim against in the court. And then a police officer in the court shot her husband in racially assuming that the one foreign-looking man in the courtroom must have been the attacker.
And the way that these events have been reported in the media is either not at all or not naming the racism and the motives, and also downplaying all of these shootings and attacks as rival kebab gangs fighting each other. The first culprit is always seen as the racialized, orientalized Muslim man, rather than looking internally at their own society to see and point out the continued existence of far-right and extremist groups. So, yes, the media has a huge role to play in denying the violence against Muslims and in propagating the hatred against them as well.
SR: Seema, the other point that your report alludes to is the fact and let me quote you here that "Islamophobia seems to be an effective tool for dividing and turning minoritized communities against one another." Not surprisingly, therefore, we see even far-right politicians today proclaiming themselves to be self-oriented defenders of Jewish minorities, politicians who were quite anti-Semitic until very recently. Even far-right politicians have turned into defenders of women's rights or of liberal values whom they think they need to protect against Muslim communities in Europe. However, if Islamophobia is only a thin ideology to create diversions and divisions, doesn't it make it even more difficult to refute and to combat? And what kind of deep-seated popular anxieties and prejudices manage to give it so much salience?
SS: This is obviously a difficult question. There aren't any easy, simple answers to this issue. It is definitely, without a doubt, true that the media, governments and politicians are trying to create divides between communities based on identity, based on race, based on religion. The question of separating Muslims from Jewish minorities, from women, is a really important one, especially in the current context that we're in today. So the far-right, for instance, in France recently marched on a march for anti-Semitism in Paris with Marine Le Pen from the Rassemblement National was there. And firstly, the most important thing that we need to say is that these proclamations of support, especially for Jewish communities against Muslims by the far-right, should not be taken seriously.
When Donald Trump was president of the United States, we saw white supremacists mobilizing in Charlottesville chanting, "Jews will not replace us." So the media also plays an important role in failing to highlight the occasions where these far-right groups are in fact anti-Semitic. And also we're seeing the revival of neo-Nazi groups. Recently there were thousands of people on the streets in Italy doing the fascist salute as well. So what civil society really needs to do is to speak up, actually, about far-right anti-Semitism as loudly as it possibly can, and to speak up as well about Islamophobia as loudly as it possibly can, rather than putting it in a controversial box away from, you know, day-to-day of human rights campaigning.
Certain elements of communities in Europe who haven't met Muslims, who don't live in areas with Muslim populations, can easily be susceptible to the dehumanization of these groups in the media. And there is a fear, and there is an anxiety, amongst people in Europe because of the economic crisis, insecurities that can be addressed through good government policy. But instead, because government policy and action providing key services isn't there, it's very easy to latch on to this blame of Muslims and of migrants.
Now, actually platforming more Muslims, actually giving Muslims more power, giving them a representative voice within the democracies of Europe would be a very, very good way of trying to slowly counter the hegemony of the Islamophobic discourses. Right now, the European Parliament is very unrepresentative of Muslims. I'm not sure exactly how many Muslims there are, but it can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.
And the reports that we've published talk about the representation gap of Muslims within political spaces, but also within decision-making spaces in local authorities, within employment, in positions of power across society, in the media. And by allowing more representativeness and by representation, I don't mean Muslims who will just repeat the narrative of their employers and of the far-rights and of those who wish to continue to oppress the rest of the Muslim population, but those who are really willing to be representative of the population itself. So not tokenization, but genuine representation. I do think that this is a really important first step in providing an alternative narrative.
SR: Your report recommends certain institutional reforms to be able to afford a genuine representation from the community itself. Let me ask you two questions in that connection. Let's talk, on the one hand, about how homogeneous the Muslim community itself is, but let's also understand the kinds of measures, for example, positive discrimination that you suggest. These seem to assume that being a Muslim is not only a salient aspect of identity, but it's the determining or over-determining identity of people.
So this kind of communitarian understanding assumes that there are no differences within the Muslim community. But not all Muslims are practicing Muslims. There are secular Muslims too. There was earlier a lot of identifications, for example, with left-wing politics in many minority communities in Britain. Some of it seems to have been displaced by radical forms of political Islamism, which also needs to be addressed. So, let's talk about both the internal diversity of Muslim communities and how that would complicate the kinds of institutional measures for representation that you are suggesting.
SS: So first of all, the ideal situation would not be a situation where quotas or positive discrimination is needed because the structures of discrimination would be dismantled and Muslims would easily find spaces in the most powerful parts of our societies in the media, in parliaments, in local governments, in civil society. Now, the fact is because of structural racism and because of structural discrimination, this representation doesn't exist. And the urgency against the rise of the far-right to change this is why quotas might be a useful tool in certain circumstances.
Now just to be clear, I'm actually talking on the basis of experience and experiments that have actually been implemented by people who we've engaged with in the process of our research. The positive discrimination that we recommend, for instance, which was actually implemented in Oxford City Council, was to ensure that there was a proportionate representation of racialized groups on the council and in the cabinet, which is the executive decision-making body. And that was actually implemented in the council, and it changed from being a very, very white majority council that did not represent racialized groups to one that was representative of all of those groups. And the reason it is necessary in this period right now is because, as I explained, we need to end the discrimination that people who don't necessarily choose to be defined by race or their religion are feeling from the state. And the only way to do that is by putting them into the decision-making bodies.
And hopefully, this can then trigger a societal change where we ultimately will not actually need to have quotas and positive discrimination and where we can move on from talking about structural racism and structural discrimination and begin to knit together a class consciousness which includes intersectional identities and doesn't deny them, but which can act in a more united way across Europe and the world.
SR: Let me pick up on that last point because, you know, you've done a lot of excellent work in empowering Muslim women, making their voices heard, making them more visible. But patriarchy is, after all, a problem within Muslim communities, as in most other communities as well. It is a problem which sort of feeds into not only homophobia, but it also feeds into a lot of anti-Muslim attitudes in the LGBTQI communities but also in Black communities where we need to address racism within Muslim and other minority communities too. This raises, for me, a very serious question about communitarian understandings of identity and the politics that can be derived ultimately from this kind of an understanding.
SS: You are completely right to say that "patriarchy exists within Muslim communities, as it exists in many other communities and wider society." Completely correct to say that "homophobia exists," that "anti-Blackness exists." And these are some of the intersectional issues that we raised in our reports as well, which to be honest with you, we do need to do a lot more work on these things.
What I would like to highlight, of course, is that the lack of prominence given to voices from Muslim communities and to individuals from the community also means that our own narrative about who we are, and obviously we're very diverse, there's not one single narrative, also doesn't really get a chance to express itself. So the narrative that dominates is the negative one that has actually been defined not by us, but by media and by politicians. And people might actually be quite surprised when they start hearing from the voices of young Muslim women in their local communities who, in my experience, are very, very aware of the LGBTQI rights context and would stand up and defend LGBTQI rights, for instance, without a blink of an eye. However, what I think is needed is that these individuals need to be empowered because right now they're in a system which tells them their voices aren't legitimate. And they also live really in the sharpest insecurity when it comes to jobs, when it comes to housing, and when it comes to facing discrimination.
So I think what we need is more funding and more training and programs targeted towards young Muslim women where they can access the know-how and the resources to start driving change within their own communities from the bottom up. What different states have been doing is forcing change on communities and saying that "they are acting to save Muslim women from a patriarchal society," which is a big current of discourse in France. The banning of the hijab and the abaya and all of these things are justified by saying that "Muslim women are oppressed and the French state needs to liberate them."
Now, Shaista Aziz, who is one of the key contributors to our reports, has recently said in an event that we had that "this actually goes back to this colonial dynamic where the invasion of Algeria was justified by liberating Muslim women." One of the big slogans of the colonizer in Algeria was, devoilez vu, remove your scarves, don't you want to be free, aren't you pretty? And the question here isn't whether it is wrong or right to wear a headscarf whether somebody likes it or not. The question really is the liberty of the Muslim woman to choose, and neither should a European state nor a patriarchal community force a woman to wear or not wear an item of clothing.
It goes back to this lack of space for our voices to be heard, a lack of resources. And if we have these resources, if states make them available to us, and they do it in a way that is not telling us exactly what to do but is allowing us the agency to use them in our own way, that's how we can start to shift some of these issues. And the reports talk about how some of the bureaucratic structures can be changed. What happened on Oxford City Council was that smaller grants were opened up to groups that didn't have a legal entity but were doing good community work and support was made to make those grants more accessible to them. So we need to think about how we change our systems and institutions to make them accessible to the people who are most discriminated against by those institutions.
SR: Let me turn, finally, to the impending European Parliament elections where you're going to see quite a lineup of far-right parties and politicians, many of them using anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and racist tropes such that the international linkages of an alliance using Islamophobic discourses is likely to play quite a role in political mobilization and electoral success, I’m afraid. Could you say something about the effective countering of this kind of transnational alliance across Europe and countermobilization by progressive forces in Europe?
SS: Progressives cannot shy away from confronting Islamophobia head-on. They cannot avoid the question. The second thing is that progressives who want to really tackle the underlying anxieties, and fears and insecurities of those who are voting for the far-right, which we discussed earlier, also need to be clear on the economic policies and the social support that they will provide when they are in power and in government.
And not only that, once they do get into power and in government, they need to actually put their money where their mouth is and enact those kinds of reforms and enact the kind of public funding that is needed to make sure that everybody in Europe and in the rest of the world has a secure life, has a secure access to housing, to education, to basic services. And that their working life as well is one where they can also have good leisure time with families and enjoy culture, and enjoy arts in their communities so that the human condition is not one that is so brutalized and dehumanized as it often is in society right now where people are in insecure work, and overworked, and paying half of their wages for rent or mortgages, and one that is genuinely humanizing and joyous. And I think that is what is driving this movement towards the far right.
And if the progressives, the centrists, the left, the greens can actually articulate a more joyous way of living, a more secure way of living, and be very, very clear that it is not migrants or Muslims that are to blame and to be very, very clear that it is austerity and governments that are implementing poor funding regimes to blame, that is the way that we can produce a vision that will mobilize people to vote for our parties in the European Parliament. But to be honest with you, what I've been seeing so far is capitulation to the far-right discourse, to the centrist discourse. Every time the far right says, "We're going to stop migration," the center-left says, "We're going to stop it too, but in a better way than them." And all that does is reinforce and strengthen the far right. Because if your premise is that we need to stop migration, if your premise is that Muslims are dangerous, or that there's no need to stop racism and racism is fine and we're not going to challenge it, then the people who will win are the people who promote those views in the strongest way and in the most convincing way. And that's always going to be the far right.
SR: Thank you, Seema, for being with me here today and for explicating so many of the conceptual and empirical issues which are dealt with in your report on Islamophobia.
SS: Thank you so much, Shalini, for having me here.
SR: As Seema has emphasized, Islamophobia in the European context must be understood as a pernicious form of deeply entrenched structural racism, which targets perceived expressions of Muslimness at the level of individuals.
But it also manifests itself as a more pervasive form of state-sanctioned discrimination in many walks of life. The very definition of the term is contested, so that the denial of the phenomena itself ought to be analyzed critically as a latent symptom of Islamophobic patterns of thought as well. Seema traced the historical lineages of contemporary Islamophobia to the racialized hierarchies of civilization, culture and religion in the era of colonialism and imperialism. And she pointed out the remnants of this ideological legacy continue to structure our political and everyday discourses today, even as the rich Western societies remain vitally dependent on emigrant workforce, including from Muslim majority countries. Left wing progressive parties in Britain, France or Germany should therefore be more sensitive to the challenges faced by local Muslim populations, which make up a large part of their working classes.
Paradoxically, however, even left parties have often accommodated the discriminatory and hostile rhetoric of right-wing parties when it comes to Islam and immigration. The media, of course, bears responsibility for reinforcing this drift to the right in our political culture, whether by providing platform to overt Islamophobia or by underreporting racially motivated attacks against Muslims.
Deeply ingrained prejudices are thus further reinforced. Ordinary citizens are even more receptive to the instrumental deployment of Islamophobia by political leaders who use it as an effective tool of division and diversion. Seema made a strong case for specific institutional measures meant to increase the visibility and participation of underrepresented Muslims in the public arena, including political office.
Measures such as the introduction of quotas on the basis of religious belonging may raise questions about the biases of a communitarian logic of ascriptive identity. But Seema has argued that giving more voice and more prominence to members of the Muslim community would reveal its internal diversity and thus successfully help to discredit negative stereotypes in Islamophobic discourse, including that of a homogeneous Muslim community.
On the eve of the European parliamentary elections, her forceful plea that progressive parties should not shy away from taking a stronger stance against Islamophobia has more urgency than ever.
This was the ninth episode of season eight. Thank you for listening. Join us again for the next episode in a fortnight, when my guest will be Catherine Fieschi, a leading expert on European politics. We'll discuss the rise of populism in the context of the upcoming European parliamentary elections.
Please go back to the episodes you might have missed and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy in Geneva at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] https://www.anothereurope.org/resources/