2 - Islam and Antiracist Politics
Summary
The Runnymede Trust's 1997 report into prejudice and discrimination against Muslims in Britain not only popularized the term ‘Islamophobia’ but also offered a taxonomy of the various attitudes and opinions that it encompasses. These included seeing Islam as monolithic, inferior, and aggressive, and Muslims as manipulative and opposed to the ‘West’. The report goes on to detail many incidents of racial violence suffered by Muslim Britons. Among the recommendations offered to the government is that legislation against racial hatred should include a specific reference to religion, suggesting that ‘the least society owes the victims is an accurate naming of the offence from which they suffer. It is adding insult to injury to imply that the violence inflicted on them is only ever “racial”.’ The arguments given in the report in favour of this supplement to existing legislation are varied. In part, it suggests that many of the definitions of racism at work within the judicial system, for example, have a limited notion of what constitutes racism and are ‘insufficiently sensitive to hatred of religion as an ingredient in racist violence’. Elsewhere, however, it states that ‘If the term “racial violence” is used to describe attacks on mosques […] the implication will be that Muslims belong to a “race”,’ and that such an implication ‘should be wholly unacceptable’. Taken together, these two statements seem to suggest that the prevalent notion of racism as a prejudice made possible by biological difference is insufficient to describe Islamophobia in Britain, but that this does not necessitate an abandonment of the essentialist definition.
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010