Refutations of racism in the ‘Muslim question’

The racism that dares not speak its name: Rethinking neo-nationalism and neo-racism in Norway

“…That argument of course pre-supposes that 'race' is ontologically 'real' rather than a mere artefact of socially constructed imaginaries -a view that finds very little support in serious scholarly literature on the topic (see Sussman 2014). But as the sociologists Tariq Modood and Nasar Meer have argued, it is by now more than clear that Muslims came to become subject to racism through processes of racialization, whereby individuals who 'look' Muslim in public are ascribed innate characteristics analogous to those of 'race' and these characteristics are cast as unchangeable and as a marker of alleged inferiority (Meer and Modood 2009). The question as to whether a person born to Muslim parents is a practising Muslim who identifies with the descriptor 'Muslim' as a category of self-definition or self-characterization or not is, as the religious scientist Mattias Gardell has noted, irrelevant in and to this process of racialization of Muslims (Gardell 2010).…”

Can Religious Affiliation Explain the Disadvantage of Muslim Women in the British Labour Market?

“…The global image of Muslims has negatively shifted due to increased levels of Islamophobia on the one hand (Gottschalk and Greenberg, 2008;Meer and Modood, 2009) and growing resentments among various segments of the population in relation to migration generally on the other hand (Geddes, 2014). Parallel to this, Muslim women now seem to be outperforming Muslim men in relation to their school achievement and are more likely to obtain higher qualifications and degrees (Khattab and Modood, 2017).…”

The relationship between media discourses and experiences of belonging: Dutch Somali perspectives

“…The Netherlands was in the past known as tolerant, particularly to religious newcomers, but as Lucassen and Lucassen (2015) describe, a 'strange death of Dutch tolerance' seems to have occurred. As we have shown above, academic work has confirmed a stronger focus on anti-Islamism and anti-Muslim sentiments, at first driven by global conflicts but further magnified through a reasoning of assumed divergences on the basis of cultural or religious affiliations (Meer and Modood, 2009;Poole, 2002;Poole and Richardson, 2006;Saeed, 2007;Van der Valk, 2012). The 'Orientalist discourse' that Said described in 1978 reappeared.…”