Thinking Through Islamophobia

Description

Use of the term Islamophobia is today both inexorable and controversial. Thinking Through Islamophobia offers a series of critical engagements with the concept, its history and deployment, and the phenomena that it seeks to marshal. In an original and pioneering collection of essays twenty-eight contributors hailing from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds draw on their expertise to map out the tensions between the concept and the phenomena as they are played out across different contexts and continents. Extending the discussion of Islamophobia beyond its commonplace focus on the West and staking a claim for the continuing relevance and critical purchase of Islamophobia in struggles for justice, Thinking Through Islamophobia locates the polemical debates on Islamophobia within wider cultural and political mobilizations engendered by the ‘Muslim question’.

Reviews

‘This diverse compilation is an extremely significant contribution, progressing current debates on Islamophobia beyond a Eurocentric perspective through an analysis of the global milieu, providing a timely and crucial analysis of a perturbing and troubling phenomenon.’ – The Muslim World Book Review

‘Thinking Through Islamophobia is a rare endeavour of collective scholarship that is timely, prescient and seminal. Challenging us to develop Critical Muslim Studies in post-western epistemologies, it provides exemplary analyses of the imbricated formations of racism, Orientalism, secularism and post-colonialism largely silenced by contemporary social and political theory.’ — Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University

‘Islamophobia has become a dominant form of racist expression across the contemporary global North. Thinking Through Islamophobia provides an especially welcome, timely, and varied set of accounts about what the phenomenon covers, why the current upsurge, and how effectively to think about it.’ — David Theo Goldberg, author of The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism

Author(s)

S. Sayyid is Professor of Decolonial Thought and Social Theory at the University of Leeds, where he is also Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy.

AbdoolKarim Vakil  is Lecturer in the Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College London.