In this draft academic paper, Islamophobia is analyzed as a “lay ideology” that offers an everyday “common sense” explanatory framework for making sense of mediated crisis events (such as terrorist attacks) in ways that disavow those events’ political meanings (rooted in empire, racism, and resistance) and instead explain them as products of a reified “Muslimness.”…
Arun Kundnani, Scottie Hughes, and Kurt Schlichter discuss Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US.
ISIS’s recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology. More radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem. After the Paris attacks, what are the logical and tragic consequences of war with no geographical limits? In this interview, published by openDemocracy, the ramifications of the…
The discourse over Muslims today resembles the manner in which Jews were vilified around a century ago. Since the 1970s, Muslims have repeatedly been stereotyped in the US as dangerous terrorists. But, over the last six years, a new fear of Muslims has gradually entered the conservative mainstream: that Muslims are taking over the United…
In each of the last fourteen years, essentially the same speech has been delivered by one or another UK government minister. From Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Hazel Blears, and Ruth Kelly to David Cameron and Theresa May, the message has been identical: Britain is said to be in crisis because a minority of Muslims have…
On June 26, an ISIL-supporting gunman trained in Libya carried out a massacre on a Tunisian beach. Over the course of 47 minutes, Seifeddine Rezgui shot and killed 38 holidaymakers, including 30 British tourists. It was the worst terrorist attack targeting British civilians since the 7/7 bombings on London’s transport system a decade ago. As…
Co-authored with Deepa Kumar Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles based on whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s collection of documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a detailed account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection. What…
The shooting of three American Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this month has focused attention on anti-Muslim hatred in the US. The murder of Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19, was initially ignored by mainstream media in the US. Only when large numbers of Twitter users started circulating…
On his “Real Time” show on HBO recently, host Bill Maher told his audience: “Liberals need to stand up for liberal principles” and that “in the Muslim world, this is what’s lacking”. His guest, atheist writer Sam Harris, went on to state that “Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas” and that “we are misled to think…
Co-authored with Emily Keppler and Muki Najaer The case of Ayyub Abdul-Alim fits a decades-long pattern of government criminalization of African-American Muslims. On the night of December 9, 2011, Siham Stewart called her husband, Ayyub Abdul-Alim, as he closed down his corner store, Nature’s Garden, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She asked him to bring home…