The objective of this article is to highlight the impact of regulatory issues of the Shari’ah Supervisory Board (SSB) on Shari’ah compliance in the contemporary Islamic finance industry. For institutions offering Islamic Financial Services (IIFS) to gain the trust of their Muslim clients, financial institutions normally incorporate a religious board in the form of an SSB. In theory, the function of the SSB is to ensure that IIFS operate within Shari’ah norms and teachings. However, given that SSBs in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the United Kingdom are generally unregulated, concerns have been raised about the feasibility of a viable and functional Shari’ah governance culture in IIFS. Doubts relate mainly to the unclear functions and legal settings of SSBs; a lack of accountability and transparency; conflict of interests and the lack of independence of SSBs, as well as poor training and the inadequate qualifications of SSB members. The key argument in this article is that the prevalence of these critical governance issues largely reduces the level of Shari’ah compliance in the Islamic finance industry. Thus, the article argues that regulators in Islamic and secular countries need to intervene and regulate Shari’ah governance in IIFS so as to ensure a sound financial system and investor confidence.

The British National party (BNP) is the most successful extreme right party in Britain's electoral history and is the fastest growing political party in twenty-first century Britain. This article presents the first ever individual-level analysis of BNP supporters, utilising a survey data set uniquely compiled for this purpose. We find that support for the BNP is concentrated among older, less educated working-class men living in the declining industrial towns of the North and Midlands regions. This pattern of support is quite distinct from that which underpinned the last electorally relevant extreme right party in Britain – the National Front (NF) – whose base was young working-class men in Greater London and the West Midlands. Extreme right voters in contemporary Britain express exceptionally high levels of anxiety about immigration and disaffection with the mainstream political parties. Multi-level analysis of BNP support shows that the party prospers in areas with low education levels and large Muslim minority populations of Pakistani or African origin. The BNP has succeeded in mobilising a clearly defined support base: middle-aged working-class white men anxious about immigration, threatened by local Muslim communities and hostile to the existing political establishment. We conclude by noting that all the factors underpinning the BNP's emergence – high immigration levels, rising perceptions of identity conflict and the declining strength of the cultural and institutional ties binding voters to the main parties – are likely to persist in the coming years. The BNP therefore looks likely to consolidate itself as a persistent feature of the British political landscape.

A multifaceted, multidimensional, changing, and inconsistent Islamism is a subject under study in this chapter. It is impossible to comprehend modern Muslim societies without an account of the impact of Islam on all sides of life. It would be a mistake to present Islamism as a node on the body of Muslim societies. In fact, Islamism in many respects reflects the essence of modern Muslim societies, of their mode of thought and life. It helps to maintain social, economic, political sphere at different societal levels as well as create a peculiar Islamic pattern of modernization. That is why Islamism cannot be eliminated at the present stage; it can be only overgrown. And this will take a long time. One should understand clearly that it is impossible to reduce the dangers of radical and terrorist Islamism only by force. It will decrease only after it is separated from moderate Islamism having made the latter a more respectable, open, and involved in normal political life movement. We analyze in this chapter a number of issues. Among them are general characteristics and functions of Islamism; confrontation of Islamism with secular regimes; evolution of Islamism; modern trends and the future of Islamism, etc.

Answering longstanding questions about the relationship between immigrant identity, collective action, and societal incorporation requires a dynamic theory that integrates these micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. I propose a Du Boisian framework of immigrant incorporation that centers immigrants' subjectivities, accounting for variation in immigrants' perceptions of their relational social positions and subsequent strategies for shifting these positions. In this conceptualization of collective identity and collective action, macro-contexts enable and constrain collective identities through the process of ethnoracial formation , but immigrants negotiate competing perceptions of these identities and the political context, shaping divergent strategies to negotiate group position. I illustrate this framework by drawing on focus groups with Muslim American immigrants, identifying three central couplings of perceived identity and collective action strategy: 1) a perception of an integrating , "model citizen" collective identity that is aspirationally white, shaping assimilationist strategies for incorporation; 2) a perception of temporarily stigmatized identity with corresponding "identity-improvement" strategies for incorporation; and 3) a perception of racial-ized identity that rejects aspirational whiteness coupled with coalition-building with Black and Brown communities to target racialized systems altogether. Following Du Bois' legacy, this framework expands our understanding of the dialectic between macro-contexts and micro-dynamics in immigrant incorporation and builds upon growing research that questions whether the quest for societal inclusion is necessarily a process of integration into the dominant category.

Focusing on the Muslim Other in Amsterdam, the article explores how individual young Muslims embody their agency in the forms of micro-practices and socio-spatial relations. By highlighting the spatio-corporeal aspects of Muslims' presence within urban space, our ethnography foregrounds how young Muslims negotiate identities and belonging within everyday urban spaces of encounter. Dealing with the everyday panoptical white Othering gaze, we describe a range of "unremarkable" ordinary practices and everyday small agencies that young Muslims in Amsterdam adopt including invisibility, challenging whiteness, and accumulating whiteness.

Islamophobic sentiments in the Western world have gained scientific attention, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, the effects of religious stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation have rarely been studied. Using structural equation modeling, this cross-sectional study examined direct and indirect effects of different forms of religious stigma on the national affiliation of 210 Norwegian-Pakistani and 216 German-Turkish Muslims. Furthermore, the study examined the mediator role of religious identity. Our results suggest that being a Muslim in Norway is more reconcilable with affiliating with the nation than being a Muslim in Germany. However, across the samples, the results indicated that various forms of religious stigma affected Muslims’ national identity and engagement in the public and private sphere in distinct ways. These effects were both positive and negative, differed between the two samples, and in Germany, were mediated by the participants’ religious identity. The findings indicated that the ways in which religious stigma influences Muslims’ national affiliation is context and culture bound.

Islamophobia is a rather new term in scholarly fields but it is an old concept. A rather large amount of studies related to Islamophobia issued in the West has been debated among scholars. They can be categorized into the three fundamental areas of time, space and social groups (Bleich 2012, 182) to which, as I am convinced, debate on the accuracy of the term Islamophobia. As for the Cental European context, apart from Russia, post-Soviet areas and the Balkans, there was scarce evidence of scholarly interest and literature on Islamophobia there until recently. i assume that the three articles in this special section of the JNMLP peer-reviewed journal would contribute to bridging the existing lack of texts on the issue and would support better understanding of Islamophobia in the Central and Eastern Europe. First a text with comparative ambitions encompassing the Eastern European
perspective (nevertheless, despite of the used notion “Eastern”, countries
analyzed here may be surely considered as “Central” European also) in general will be introduced. Gert Pickel from Leipzig University and Cemal Öztürk from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in their article titled "Islamophobia Without Muslims? The “Contact Hypothesis” as an Explanation for Anti-Muslim Attitudes – Eastern European Societies in a Comparative Perspective" argue that CEE societies are more prone to Islamophobia on an individual and societal level despite of the reality that these societies are (almost) without Muslims. Second, Vladimír Naxera and Petr Krčál from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, the Czech Republic, contributed to the debate with the text titled rather emotionally “This is a Controlled Invasion”: The Czech President Miloš Zeman’s Populist Perception of Islam and Immigration as Security Threats. They introduced an academic text analyzing the strategy of the Czech President Miloš Zeman using the term “security” in his “speeches, interviews, statements, and so on,” during his first term in office (2013–2017) with the help of a data set processed by MAXQDA11+. Third and finally, Ľubomír Zvada from Palacký University in Olomouc
in the Czech Republic contributed to the special section with the text
called Securitization of the Migration Crisis and Islamophobic Rhetoric: The 2016 Slovak Parliamentary Elections as a Case Study. Zvada focuses on the “migration crisis” in Slovakia and thus his contribution brings to an end the focus on the CEE realm.

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The main objective of this paper is to determine the religious attitudes of Muslims living in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic and their reaction to restrictions on free access to religious practices introduced by the Government of Poland. The article is interdisciplinary, and the methodology combines elements of religious studies, political science of religion, and reference to communication and media studies (the importance of the role of the media in supporting government activities and the analysis of online access to Islamic religiosity during a pandemic). The study was conducted in February 2021, but the time frame of the analyzed issues ranges from 4 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, i.e., the year of the epidemic in Poland and the introduction by the Government of restrictions on religious gatherings and the response of the Muslim community to these restrictions. The analysis was carried out on the basis of the author’s in-depth interview scenario; it covers representatives...

A generative turn in scholarship examines the institutional and political dimensions of Islamophobia, conceptualizing Muslim representations as a mechanism of ethnoracial formation in which the media is one such site of racialization. Moments of great political and cultural transformation can motivate and activate these racial projects, generating racialized representations that attach racial meaning to bodies. Much of the research on Muslim representations in news media centers on this very question: did the attacks of 9/11 usher in a new racial project? Previous studies offer competing hypotheses. Bridging social movement and communication theories with a theory of ethnoracial formation, the author develops an approach for evaluating racial framing processes through a comparison of diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames. The author applies this approach using computational text analysis techniques to examine latent shifts in the racial framing of Muslims in the New York Times in the decade before and after 9/11. The author finds evidence of increasingly racialized, but more complex, representations of Muslims in the decade after 9/11 in which diagnostic frames evolve from locating social problems in states and institutions to locating social problems in Muslim bodies. Prognostic frames shift from institutional reforms to those targeting group pathology. The author argues that excavating the latent mechanisms of racial projects helps us better understand the dynamic and ongoing processes of ethnoracial formation.

I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and rational search for all knowledge to a narrowed focus on religious knowledge, void of rationality. By synthesizing literature on education and knowledge in Islam, this study identifies three shifts in the cultural history of Islamic education. I argue that those shifts in what was deemed valuable knowledge have played a significant role in the emergence of radicalization today. The study shows that once the social world of Islam destabilized, the sense of belonging and sense making became inward and less reflexive as compared to that of early Muslims. Belief became privileged over the rationality mechanisms that had previously formed Islamic endeavors. I demonstrate that a decline in intellectual and scientific production followed, allowing extremists to skew Islam's narrative by putting forward an idealized version of the Islamic caliphate divorced from rationality.

The ecosystems framework is relevant to social work because it helps to envision a better fit between clients and their environments by improving the quality of transactions across different ecological systems. This approach can be useful to understanding the experiences of Muslims living in America, and is consistent with Islam’s emphasis on person-in-context. This article analyzes American Muslims’ experiences at different ecological levels; namely, family and peers, organizations that individuals are in regular contact with (school, college, workplace, Islamic center), and pervasive sociopolitical influences at the macrolevel. For each of these ecosystems, the article outlines challenges the person may have in adapting, strategies that enhance the quality of the environment and person-environment fit, and practical recommendations for social work practice. The aim of this review is to provide social workers with a rich understanding of the various systemic factors that can influence the well-being of their American Muslim clients so that they can support their growth and empowerment.

This article examines the dramatic changes brought to English townscapes by Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. These "new" religions have arrived with the large-scale immigration and subsequent natural growth of the minority ethnic populations of Crcat Britain since the 1950s. The article traces the growth and distribution of these populations and religions. as well as the development of their places of worship from front-room prayer roonis to cathedral-scalr buildings. It explores the way in which the British planning process, dedicated to preserving the traditional, has engaged with the exotic. Krywnrrks: EngLirirt Hitiriirs, Midirtis, Sikhs, irrlinri plnritiirig . . -' We arc grateful for thc construclivr suggcstions of three anonymous rcfcrees. We would also likc t(1 thank the fdlowing three funding agencies for research grants: ESKC grant uooo239765, Social Geography of British South Asian Muslim, Sikh and Hindu Sub-Communities; the Leverhulme Trust grant ~/ 7 7 3 .

A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on 'fields of power' and social difference, I suggest that researching together with Muslim women in UK cities (Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham) challenges normative approaches in Euro-American social sciences towards producing knowledge about people and place. It addresses two key questions: how do different Muslim women's experiences of urban space and anti-Muslim acts impact upon walking practices? What are the everyday politics and conflicts that shape multilayered and entangled temporalities of urban walking practices? Drawing on Urry's movement/moorings dialectic, I advance that we need to take seriously stasis caused by physical and perceptual barriers to mobility, such as threat of violence, and to rethink entirely our right as researchers to orchestrate the movement of others. By re-framing mobile methods we can become more attuned to mobility justice and distinct registers of difference in the politics of knowledge production.

Politicians within the United States and across many Western societies are concerned about the extent to which Muslims are successfully integrating within their countries. The present research examined how interpersonal (discrimination) and mediated (nega-tive news coverage of Muslims) social identity threats dynamically change young Muslim Americans' strength of identification as American and Muslim, as well as their trust in the U.S. government. Data from a three-wave longitudinal survey show that Time 1, negative news coverage of Muslims (but not discrimination), significantly reduced Time 2, strength of identification as an American, which subsequently reduced Time 3, trust in the U.S. government. Muslim identification did not change as a function of interpersonal or mediated social identity threats. These findings suggest that negative media portrayals can have adverse effects on the national identification of some minority groups, and-crucially-that these effects may be stronger than those of personally experienced discrimination.

Contemporary analyses of citizenship emphasise the importance of being able to occupy public space in a manner that does not compromise one’s sense of self. Moreover, they foreground individuals’ active engagement with others (e.g., being concerned about others) and the active exercise of one’s rights. We explore such issues through considering the psychological and social significance of having one’s various self-definitions mis-recognised in everyday social interactions. We do so through reporting interview and focus group data obtained from Scottish Muslims concerning their experience of surveillance at airports. Focussing on their accounts of how they orient to others’ assumptions about Muslim passengers, we consider what this means for our participants’ ability to act on terms that they recognise as their own and for their citizenship behaviours. Our analysis is organised in two sections. First, we examine the strategies people use to avoid painful encounters inside the airport. These include changes in micro-behaviours designed to avert contact, and where this was not possible, identity performances that are, in various ways, inauthentic. Second, we examine citizenship-related activities and how these may be curtailed in the airport. These include activities that entail the individual reaching out and making positive connections with others (e.g., through helping others) and exercising the right to criticise and complain about one’s treatment. Our analyses highlight the psychological and social consequence of identity misrecognition, and how this impacts on individuals’ abilities to act in terms of their own valued identifications and enact citizenship behaviours.

This study used a mixed methods approach to investigate Muslim traveler experiences of inconvenience while visiting Korea, combining focus groups and semistructured interviews (a qualitative approach), and questionnaire-based surveying (a quantitative approach). The authors investigated the reliability and validity of a customized structural model by merging covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) and partial least squares SEM (PLS-SEM). There were five salient and observable constructs which cause inconvenience for Muslims when visiting Korea. The results showed significant effects on the part of the identified constructs on affective experience, satisfaction, desire, behavior intention, and place attachment. The study findings can guide Korean tourism stakeholders in tackling the issues causing inconvenience for Muslim travelers, as well as informing authorities in other countries and territories.

This article examines in detail for the first time the later life and work of the Orientalist G. W. Leitner (1840-1899), who retired from Indian government service and settled permanently in England in the 1880s. It explains why Leitner devoted the last years of his life to creating an ambitious Oriental Institute in Woking, Surrey, which included the first purpose-built mosque in Britain. It also considers why and how Leitner went against convention to publicly explain and defend aspects of Islam and Muslim culture, most famously in his 1889 lecture and pamphlet entitled 'Muhammadanism'. It reveals, however, that Leitner's imperialist outlook and preoccupation with class and caste drew him into conflict with some of the leading Muslims in late-Victorian Britain, and argues that his interaction with them exposed the limitations of his Christian charity and benevolence.

There has been growing discussion surrounding the phenomenon of
Islamophobia in Western societies over the last few years. However,
in-depth empirical research of the prevalence and patterns of prejudice
toward Muslims remains scarce, especially in the Canadian context.
With data from the 2011 Canadian Election Study and the 2014 General
Social Survey, this study measures the extent to which negative feelings
toward Muslims are present among the general adult population, and
the extent to which Muslim Canadians themselves say they have
experienced discrimination in recent years due to their religion,
ethnicity, and culture.

Direct and indirect social identity threats can influence stigmatized individuals to seek identity management strategies that restore a positive sense of social identity. The current study examined the effects of media representations and selfreported experiences of discrimination on Muslim American students' identity management strategies. Results revealed that Muslim American students who viewed negative media representations of their religious ingroup, relative to a control video, were less likely to desire acceptance by other Americans and more likely to avoid interactions with majority members. Additionally, self-reported experiences of discrimination significantly and positively influenced a desire for collective action. These results reveal the powerful effects of media representations and discrimination in threatening minority group members' social identity and exacerbating negative intergroup relations between majority and minority groups.

This essay offers a brief review of existent literature in the field of Islamic studies in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Americas focusing on its main themes and suggesting some areas for further consideration and research. The essay makes theoretical suggestions for where scholars could inject their energy and efforts to advance this unfolding field of study. These theoretical considerations suggest that more work could be done in expanding the field in its engagement with prevalent theories in the field of global Islamic studies and those that treat the Americas as a geography of dynamic hemispheric engagement and encounter. Essentially, the paper argues that there is still a necessity to explore the tensions, interactions, frictions, and collaborations across and at the boundaries between the global umma and the American assabiya, between the global and the local, and between immigrant communities and the growing number of regional converts. Finally, the author suggests some practical considerations that may prove beneficial to the field's advancement.

Salvatore, Armando. 2004. “Making Public Space: Opportunities and Limits of Collective Action Among Muslims in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(5): 1013-1031.

Recent research suggests that the settling of Muslims in secular Europe is leading to the individualisation of their religious identity and to the fragmentation of their social life. Such research purports to show the production of a specific 'European' Islam that eludes the traditional authority in which Islam is allegedly still mired in most Muslim majority societies. This paper considers the predicament of Muslims in Europe from a different perspective, through a consideration of the ambivalence of secular norms of the public sphere and of their limits in dealing with religious expressions. While much of the current literature concentrates on the diasporic and transnational aspects of the Muslim presence in Europe, the focus here is on specifically European and postcolonial dimensions. The institutional sedimentation of historic traumas, rather than universal values, specific to the formation of European societies and public spheres are considered in both their internal-metropolitan and external-colonial articulations. Set against these original characteristics of European public spheres, an analysis is offered of some of the most vocal activism, particularly that of Muslim women and youth, as instances of a struggle to transform and enrich, and even to decentre, European public spheres.

In 2017, we conducted a research project in Victoria, Australia, aimed at improving understanding of the unique service needs and delivery requirements for vulnerable members of the Muslim LGBTIQ+ community in Victoria. The study involved semistructured interviews with 12 members of the LGBTIQ+ Muslim community discussing their experiences with 3 identified areas of service provision: Muslim services, LGBTIQ+ services, and mainstream services. The findings demonstrate how participants' sexualities, gender identities and religious beliefs affect their healthcare access and use, the meanings they derive from such experiences, and the accountability and culpability of systemic and structural inequities. The paper concludes with a summary of recommendations for future research, resourcing and realisation.

Abstract
Purpose: This article explores the changing attitudes to, and perceptions of Islam that developed
over a period in which substantive engagements between Anglo-American strategic interests
brought them more and more into contact with Muslim majority governments and cultures.
Methodology: Using historical analysis, the article examines selected primary literature to understand
how perceptions of Islam within American and British policymaking circles evolved during the
European Colonial period.
Findings: The key finding is the extent to which perceptions of Islam and Muslims were governed
not just by the nature of the incidents and issues that politicians and officials were dealing with, but
also by the shifting cultural shifts taking place in America and Britain.
Originality: The article’s originality lies in the methodological approach of examining US-British
policymaker’s perceptions of Islam based upon their experiences. In so doing, the article offers an
approach to West-Islam relational debates that avoids critiquing the validity of the observations and
instead deepens our understandings of where the perceptions came from as a basis for improved
dialogues in the future.
Keywords: Islam; Muslim; West; Government; Policymaking; History; America; Britain

Sociological theorizing on race emphasizes the importance of recognizing both the ideological and structural dimensions of racial projects. Ideological dimensions manifest themselves in narratives, stereotypes, and representations, while structural dimensions are identified through laws, policies, and concrete micro and macro level practices. In the U.S., the sociology of race that dominated the second half of the twentieth century centered its work on ideologies, while paying
less attention to structural practices, therein supporting the claim that
since ideas about and attitudes toward race have changed for the better,
we now live in a post-racial society. Using this framework of ideologies and practices, as well as Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s articulation of racial projects, I demonstrate the ways in which Arab Americans have been racialized and account for why this process has produced some consequences that differ from those of historically racialized groups. For example, its outcomes are not firmly tied to domestic socio-economic subordination, due in part to the racial project’s different timing, objectives, and trajectory. I further argue that although their history with race is different from that of East and South Asian Americans, the "War on Terror" racial project that ensnared Arab Americans eventually expanded to include South Asians via its ideological extension to Muslims, the deployment of the socially constructed notion of the “Middle Easterner,” and its ocular representation as a “type of brown” terror threat. This ideological and representational convergence manifests itself in government policies and macro- and micro-popular practices that simultaneously target Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, and persons perceived to be members of these groups. The "War on Terror" racial project is a newer, different, and global racial project that intersects with the historic project of domestic white supremacy.

This article attempts to situate the UK 'Prevent' policy debate in the wider framework of the global Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) paradigm that emerged in late 2015. It is argued that the omission of a nuanced approach to the social, cultural, economic and political characteristics of the radicalised, there is a tendency to introduce blanket measures that inadvertently and indirectly lead to harm. Moreover, though 'Prevent' has been the outward-facing element of the UK govern-ment's counter-extremism strategy since 2006, it conflates legitimate political resistance among young British Muslims as indications of violent extremism, providing credence to the argument that 'Prevent' is a form of social engineering ultimately mollifying resistance by reaffirming the status quo on domestic and foreign policy. In these circumstances, 'Prevent' can unintentionally add to structural and cultural Islamopho-bia, which are amplifiers of both Islamist and far right radicalisation. 'Safeguarding' vulnerable young people is imperative in this social policy domain but the language of inclusion in this is absent.

Colonization, I postulate, has a far more profound effect on the colonized than conceptualized in Aimé Césaire's postcolonial equation, colonization  =  thingification. Rather, here I put forward a new postcolonial equation for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of colonialism: Colonization  =  thingification + re-appropriation of subjectivity. I argue that Western imperial narratives and what Edward Said calls its ‘evaluative judgment’ and ‘implicit program of action’ also subjectify the thingified subject's Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I present this equation through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit program of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a manual that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, this genealogical exploration demonstrates that imperial enthusiasts, from Napoleon, Renan, Le Bon and Stoddard to Winston Churchill and David Petraeus, in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions—from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’—draw on four Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thought, which, I argue, are responsible for interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance, and which I denominate as: Recrudescence of Fanaticism, Progress Fetishism, Outsourcing of Agency, and the bipolar cognitive device Revolutionary Narcissism-Red Peril.

The Middle East Critique
Western Notions of Middle Eastern Revolutions 2

This article examines how Žižek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalization of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and, closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press’ coverage.

Gender emerges as a key site of contestation with respect to immigrants’ integration and public presence in Europe. The recent politicization of gender and Islam in immigration debates marks an increasingly salient constructed opposition between egalitarian European values and traditional immigrant cultures. Against this background, this study investigates how gender structures attitudes toward immigrants of different economic and cultural profiles. Prior research finds that women are usually less likely to exhibit anti-immigrant attitudes than are men. Using 2014 European Social Survey data, results show that women are no less likely to hold anti-immigrant attitudes. However, in a significant reversal of traditional gender patterns, women are more likely to hold targeted anti-Muslim attitudes. Further, social trust moderates this gendered anti-Muslim effect. I interpret findings as a shift in how gender structures xenophobia resulting from the increased salience of gender ideology as a boundary-defining feature and growing demonization of Muslims as gender inegalitarian.

Sind antimuslimische Diskurse Ausdruck einer aktuellen Form des Rassismus?
Anhand von Fallbeispielen – darunter auflagenstarke Buchpublikationen, Zeitungsartikel, Webseiten und Zuschriften an muslimische Verbände – geht Yasemin Shooman den antimuslimischen Narrativen und ihren Funktionen nach. Sie untersucht die artikulierten Selbst- und Fremdbilder ebenso wie die Rolle historischer Bezüge und arbeitet das Repertoire dominanter antimuslimischer Stereotype und Topoi heraus. Die empirische Analyse trägt auch zur Theoriebildung in dem relativ jungen Forschungsfeld bei und zeigt, dass eine Rassifizierung religiöser Zugehörigkeit zu beobachten ist, die auf dem Ineinandergreifen der Kategorien Kultur, Religion, Ethnizität, Geschlecht und Klasse basiert.

Research on language learning strategies (LLS) has pointed to a significant association at a general level between learners' gender and their choice of LLS. To explore this generality further, we conducted a study on gender and strategy use with Sri Lankan learners (N = 886) of English as a second language (ESL) in five different learning contexts: speaking in class, listening in class, listening and speaking outside class, reading in class and writing in class. We found that when preferences for individual strategies were considered rather than for strategies in some broadly categorised group such as cognitive, metacognitive or affective strategies, some preferences did not associate with gender; nevertheless, some strategies were clearly preferred by males while others were clearly preferred by females. Perhaps most importantly for teacher development, we found that there were distinct preferences for males and females depending on the learning contexts in which specific strategies were reportedly being utilised.

Current literature finds that radicalization is correlated with both the holding of fundamentalist religious beliefs and low socio-economic status. The authors interrogate these proposed relationships through a survey we commissioned of 1,200 Muslims
living in Western Europe. They analyze, inter alia, Islamic religious fundamentalism,
and explore its relationship to self-reported affluence. Controlling for demographic
variables, they find that, on average, respondents from more prosperous families are
more likely to practice Islam in a way closely associated with fundamentalism – they
are more conservative regarding gender roles, seek the universal application of Islamic
law, and embrace attitudes associated with a more politicized Islam. This relationship
is strengthened among respondents who are unattached to the labor market due to
unemployment. Additionally, respondents espousing this belief set are more supportive
of the use of violence to ‘defend their faith’.

Muslim racialization literature argues that a new racialized group emerged after 9/11, but does not examine how this group is positioned relative to US blackwhite binary racial logic. In fact, many argue that to understand Muslims, we must move our analysis "beyond black and white". Literature on the blackwhite binary, on the other hand, offers valuable theory for analysis of racial structures, but does not often examine the role religion plays in these structures. My project employs and fills gaps in these two literatures by examining how black and white Muslims are positioned relative to US blackwhite racial logic. Analysing ethnographic data, I find that black and white Muslims are positioned as either black/white or as Muslim. This suggests that Muslimness, and religion more generally, shapes the construction and attribution of blackness and whiteness.

This article provides a critique of the PVE initiative and its implementation within the context of primary education following the events of 9/11, the 2001 riots and 7/7. Drawing upon empirical data I will argue that the monitoring of young Muslims and ‘extremism’ is problematic and reinforces the logics of Islamophobia through practices of governmentality. Moreover I will examine how whilst the monitoring of extremism is prioritized in many schools, training for teachers on race equality, tolerance and accepting difference is weak if not absent. This, I suggest, demonstrates a clear manifestation of contemporary hegemonic post-racial politics which increasingly silences the critique of institutional racism. Additionally this article will explore how Muslims in the sphere of education have been implicated and problematised against the backdrop of a ‘muscular liberalism’ intent on the return of assimilationist discourses.

This article examines the discourse of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in Pakistan produced through commissioned transnational documentaries. While the documentary apparatus is mobilized to make visible gender and sexual minorities in Pakistan, they deploy self-othering schema within which the other is defined in comparison to the Euro-American center and its politics of normative citizenship. Sexual practices and gender embodiments that do not match up to the normative ideals are deemed aberrant and rendered abject, while simultaneously Muslim cultures are metonymically linked with homophobia and oppression. I demonstrate through a close reading of three documentaries that the optics and modalities that they employ do not make intelligible the other and their relationalities but rather circumscribe them. I argue that the discourse is not constituted to empower but instead functions to subordinate, impoverish, and incapacitate the other.

Although the hijab has recently attracted much attention from social scientists, the discrimination experienced by hijabis has been insufficiently investigated. Data are difficult to obtain, partly because surveys usually do not have items on this practice and victims are difficult to reach. However, field experts, namely active agents in governmental racism-prevention institutions and in Muslim associations, can provide rich insights into processes of discrimination. Based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews, I answer the following question: how do governmental and non-governmental experts describe discrimination against hijabis in Switzerland? The results reveal that, according to the experts interviewed, the hijab is the most important marker leading to processes of discrimination; this discrimination takes a variety of forms and affects a wide range of life domains and profiles of hijabis; such discrimination leads to a segregation of the social space of hijabis; many women are unwilling to report discrimination to governmental services for different reasons.

This article focuses on how 377 reports from popular lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) websites represented Omar Mateen, the shooter of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, drawing particular attention to the exclusion of Mateen’s native-born status.  Based on a grounded theory analysis of the five most-trafficked LGBTQ websites, results demonstrate that the reports generally decontextualized Mateen from his country of birth, the United States, and excluded any emphasis on xenophobia or anti-Latinx prejudice as a potential motivating factor in the shooting.  Instead, Mateen was usually associated with “terrorism” and sometimes implicitly positioned as a “foreign threat.”  These results, building on Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism, have implications for LGBTQ positions on the U.S. political left, as the reports typically constructed themselves as anti-Republican and opposed to Islamophobia, while simultaneously reinforcing homonationalist, and relatively conservative, positions.

There is currently no clarity on what Islamophobia covers: Does it relate to hostility towards
Islam, hostility towards Muslims or racism against Muslims? While some argue that the term
Muslimophobia should replace Islamophobia due to the hostility being directed at Muslims as
people, rather than Islam the religion, it is not clear whether this is the case in practice. This
article examines expressions of Islamophobia and Muslimophobia and their relationship to
racism in Swiss parliamentary debates on banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland.
It demonstrates that Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are different from each other but mostly
occur in tandem. Furthermore, Muslimophobia can be but is not always a form of racism due to the
‘manipulation of culture’ in which proponents of the ban can de-essentialise, as well as essentialise,
cultural traits to argue that Muslims can become integrated if they fulfil certain conditions. Such
conditions can, however, be easily manipulated to continually exclude undesirable ‘others’. The
article contends that the minaret ban initiative relied heavily on the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy to
make both Islamophobic and Muslimophobic arguments, that is, accusing Muslims and Islam of
transgressions against Swiss society that have not even occurred.

This article analyzes how the Muslim majority has engaged with, and contributed to parallel processes of democratization and European integration in post-Communist Albania. The assessment of Muslims’ choices focuses on the Central organization, the Albanian Muslim Community (AMC), which is recognized by the state as the only authority in charge of all the administrative and spiritual issues pertinent to the community of Sunni believers, and serves as the main hub of respective religious activities in the country. The analysis of democratization, and Muslims’ respective choices, are divided into two different periods, namely democratic transition (1990-1998 and democratic consolidation (1998-2013), each facing democratizing actors, including Muslim groups, with different challenges and issues. We argue that the existence of a useful pool of arguments from the past, the so-called Albanian tradition, has enabled Muslims to contravene controversial foreign influences and recast Islam in line with the democratic and European ideals of the Albanian post-communist polity. This set of historical legacies and arguments explain also Muslims’ similar positioning towards democracy throughout different stages marked by different institutional restrictions and state policies.

A number of studies have found a relationship between religious affiliation and attitudes toward LGBQ individuals. To date, however, research on religious attitudes has focused primarily on Christians. We expanded upon existing research by including two of the three largest U.S. religions previously overlooked-Islam and Judaism. We used data from the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, which provided a larger sample of Jew-ish (n = 475) and Muslim (n = 135) respondents than most public opinion surveys. We found that Muslim and Protestant participants were the least accepting of homosexuality and supportive of same-sex marriage compared with Roman Catholic and Jewish participants. Results also showed that fundamentalism and religiosity were significant predic-tors of attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage across all participants, regardless of denomination. Implications for future research and data collection efforts learned from this study are discussed.