(AIS3) Locating Systemic Islamophobia: Geographies, Epistemologies, and Space

In this panel, participants will contribute to the contemporary discourse surrounding Anti-Muslim racism, its intersections, and the global phenomena of Islamophobia. Moving away from dominant positivist research paradigms which often valorize so-called objective knowledge and truth, this panel discussion will center non-dominant research paradigms, methodologies and methods. It will bring to the forefront much ignored critical knowledge related to Muslim identity, Muslimness and what it means to be Muslim. Creative, narrative and story-based submissions which embody alternative epistemological, ontological and axiological perspectives are explored, as are those which highlight the possibilities of decolonial, intersectional and liberatory knowledge creation practices and approaches.

Organizers: Ayesha Mian Akram, University of Calgary, Nadiya Ali, Trent University, Nooreen Hussain, York University, Rashmee Karnad-Jani, Public Scholar; Chair: Lucy El-Sherif, McMaster University

Presentations

Nadiya Ali, Trent University

Exploring the everyday lived geographies of Black Muslim women

Black Muslims make about 12-13% of the overall Black population, and roughly 9-10% of the overall Muslim Population in Canada (BMI 2023; Jackson-best 2017), yet largely invisible in discussions of anti-Black racism or Islamophobia (Akande 2023; Yusuf 2023; Mugabo 2016; Mendes 2019; Ali, El Sherif, Mire 2021; Mohamed 2017; Abdi 2005). Furthermore, the pervasive climate of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia has corresponded with a persistent rise in violent public attacks disproportionately targeting Black Muslim women (Yourex-West 2021;Kanygin and Thomas 2021; Bernhardt 2023). Against this backdrop, our research explores the compounding effects of Anti-Black Islamophobia (ABI) (Mugabo 2016) on the everyday lives of Black Muslim women, where routine activities such as commuting, shopping, working, and dining out take on heightened racially charged risks (Yourex-West 2021; Kanygin and Thomas 2021; Bernhardt 2023). Our research intervention is designed to focus on unraveling the complexities of the "everyday racial geographies" (McKittrick and Woods 2007) that Black Muslim women endure, survive, and navigate. Employing a grounded theory approach (Charmaz and Mitchell 2001), we pose the following research questions: (R2) How does the compounding interplay of Anti-Black Islamophobia (ABI) shape the ways in which Black Muslim women navigate and engage with everyday public spaces? (R2) Given the prevailing geographies of Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, how do individuals at the intersection of Black and Muslim identities actively engage in place-making? Moving beyond episodic hate-crime driven engagements of racial violence, our research aims to understand the everyday lived geographies of Black Muslim women in order to uncover the underlying mechanisms that sustain Anti-Black Islamophobia (ABI) as a structural system, giving rise to the most severe forms of racial violence that capture national attention in hate crime reports.

Aida Al-Thayabeh, OISE (University of Toronto)

Blinded by White Supremacy: A Critical Exploration of Anti-Black Racism in the Arab World"

In the Arab world, a pervasive denial of racism often takes the form of asserting, "How can we be racist? Were not white." This denialism is deeply rooted in the enduring impact of colonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism that Arabs have faced (Said, 1979; Fanon, 1963; Wa Thiong’o, 2011). This paper confronts this denial by critically examining colour prejudice in the Arab world, particularly directed at Afro-Arabs and Black Africans. By exploring the connections between this denial and the enduring legacies of colonialism, white supremacy, and Orientalism, the research aims to unravel the intricacies of anti-Blackness in the region. In addition, this paper challenges the Western-centric definition of “racism” in the Arab context, emphasizing that the Arab world did not create racial hierarchies or implement racist laws akin to the “one-drop rule” (Mills, 1997; Pateman and Mills, 2007). Many Arabs view the concept of “racism” as an imported Western colonial ideology (Downing and Gamil, 2021; El-Geressi, 2020). Instead, these concepts originated in white Euro-Christianity regions. Drawing from seminal works by Said and Fanon, the paper delves into the psychological impact of colonialism, investigating how colour prejudice is perpetuated. It contends that while Arab society is more colour-conscious and class-conscious than race-conscious, the ideologies of white supremacy have been inadvertently reproduced in the region. This reproduction has fostered complacency and silence concerning discrimination and violence against Black Africans and Afro-Arabs. The paper examines several reasons for the manifestations of anti-Blackness and colourism in the Arab world. The first being the emergence of anti-Muslim racism/Islamophobia from white Euro-Christianity around the 11th to 13th century that embedded a seed of fear, hatred, and resentment for Islam, Black Africans, and dark-skinned peoples, ultimately leading to the Crusades and Holy Wars between the 11th to 13th century (Allahar, 1993; Briggs, 2022). It is here that the seed of inferiority, lesser than ‘other,’ was embedded into the psyche of the Black and dark-skinned peoples. Another significant factor contributing to the manifestations of anti-Blackness and colorism in the Arab world is the emergence of the “other,” which materialized into uqdat al-Khawajah (Jazz, 2103; El Amrani, 2011). Initially rooted in notions of economic superiority, these negative and racist attitudes evolved over time into deeply ingrained narratives of good versus evil, white versus Black, and an "us versus them" mentality (this concept will be further discussed in the subsequent section) (Said, 1979; 1993). This process contributed to the concept of “othering,” which resulted in the ideology of white supremacy becoming embedded in the psyche, social fabric, and structural systems, perpetuating the practice of othering (Maldonado-Torres, 2014; Rana, 2011). Furthermore, colonialism’s role in contributing to racial and ethnic divisions cannot be understated. White Euro-Christian colonial powers actively engineered a racial hierarchy structure to uphold their authority and control (Fanon, 1963; Pateman and Mills, 2007; Wa Thiong’o, 2011). This divisive strategy extended to Africa, where colonizers deliberately created discord along religious and racial lines, separating and categorizing communities by race, class, ethnicity, and geographic regions (Fanon, 1963). As Fanon aptly points out, the very structure of colonialism is to perpetuate and enforce these divisions, “colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces it and separates them” (Fanon, 1963, p.94). Such divisions perpetuation that Arabs were superior to Africans and other groups of people, creating ongoing tensions and violence between Arabs and African communities like Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Chad (Perry, 2006; Al-Azraki and Kadhim, 2021; Khan, 1979). As a result, the region remains stuck in a cycle of inner inferiority, uqdat al-Khawajah, and a sense of superiority over Black Africans, Afro-Arabs, or other darker-skinned peoples (Khan, 1979; Noakes, 1993; El Amrani, 2011). The paper concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for the region to acknowledge and address anti-Blackness, bigotry, and discrimination, advocating for internal reform that rejects external forces perpetuating racist Orientalist narratives. It sheds light on the growing youth and feminist movement in the Arab world, illustrating that transformative progress is achievable through internal change.

Aleezay Khaliq, George Mason University

Constructing Spaces of belonging: Participation of young Muslims in Mosques and Faith-based organizations

Community-based organization help immigrants integrate into society. By participation in these community based nonprofit organizations, individuals get to interact with other individuals with similar background, who look similar to them, who speak the same language and carry the same cultural norms and values. These interactions develop into associations, networks and trust through which new immigrants resolve many of the challenges they face in their daily lives. These safe spaces of familiarity help ease the process of adjusting and adapting in a new country and help to alleviate some of the stress that goes along with it. They also help new immigrants maintain their ethnic and cultural identity in a foreign country where everything is new to them, while also providing a shared sense of solidarity. These organizations also provide a platform for individuals to mobilize, organize and rally for social causes collectively as a community. Traditionally mosques have been spaces where new and more established immigrants look for some familiarity and support. But the increasing Muslim population and multiculturalism has meant that the mosques are no longer able to cater to the everyone’s needs and demands. And the involvement of younger Muslims with the mosque has also decreased considerably due to variety of reasons. In the wake of these challenges, the emergence of faith-based organization is a recent phenomenon. These organizations are both religious and social in nature and attempt to fill the gap left by mosques. They are catering to the unique needs of young professional Muslims living in Washington D.C. Maryland and Virginia. These organizations seem have successfully managed to provide a platform to young professional Muslim adults who would like to learn more about their faith in an effort to become a better human being and also built a network of friends and relationships that acts as a support group while you as in individual make this journey to becoming a better Muslim and a better human being. They have successfully identified the need for a more open and safe space to discuss Islam in the light of modern-day challenges which may be contentious in traditional settings such as mosques. Hence, they are serving the dual purpose of educating young individuals on religion while building networks, strong friendships and solidarity so as to cater to the religious and social needs of young Muslims. They are providing a physical space and a symbolic space of belonging where young individuals who are working in the D.C. metropolitan areas can come together, mingle, learn more about Islam and also socialize and feel that they have a place where they belong. Hence, they serve as religious places of solidarity as well social spaces of belonging and integration. Therefore, my paper examines the sense of belonging among young second-generation Muslim immigrants by documenting their lived experiences and interactions in mosques and faith-based organizations. Based on in-depth one-on-one 45 interviews and participant observations in two mosques and two faith-based organizations operating in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, my research explores the factors that contribute to the construction of ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’ in these spaces. This process involves boundary maintenance and is also intertwined with politics of belonging. In the face of the ever-increasing polarization taking shape in the American society questions Muslims once again face backlash and negotiate their belonging and identities navigating the complex intersections of local and international socio-political landscape. I use the theoretical framework of belonging and politics of belonging from intersectional perspective (Yuval-Davis 2011) to examine the role intersectional racial and ethnic identities impact the level of engagement of young Muslims in these spaces as I focus on second generation Muslim immigrants. My findings suggest that suburban mosques in the area are ethnically centered and they cater to the religious and social needs of an older first-generation Muslim immigrant population who want to persevere their ethnic and cultural identities stemming from their country of origin whereas faith-based organizations cater to the needs of the younger second-generation Muslim immigrant segment of society who are actively seeking to create a sense of belonging with other young Muslim in effort to transcend racial, ethnic divisions by engaging with the local civil society in a variety of ways. 

Nathan Viktor Fawaz, University of Alberta

Now, tell me of your knowledge - what did you do with what you knew?

As with many scholars who would identify the concept of intersectionality as necessary to considering social movement(s), my work rests upon the presumption that researcher positionality matters, and must be accounted for in research design and study implementation. Faith - whether expressed religiously, spiritually, or secularly; and whether engaged with explicitly or rested upon presumptively through adherence to disciplinary fidelities, is always a part of the fabric of one's research paradigm that could (and arguably should) be engaged with directly. The Islamic tradition is, in part, articulated through a vast legacy of scholarship. Indeed, there is much historical and contemporary research on what it is to be Muslim, on our Quran and holy texts, on our beloved Prophet ﷺ, and on the nature of Islam itself. I, however, am not an Islamic scholar. But, early in the process of drawing together the proposal for my doctoral research, I came to wonder: what is it to be engaged in research Islamically? What of our faith tradition can be brought into the 'how' of our way through research? How can approaching the methodological concerns of paradigm, ontology, and epistemology from an Islamic axiological perspective enhance our understanding and experience of research design and implementation for scholars and research participants alike? And what could this approach mean, not just for Muslim scholars and participants or for projects with a specific Islamic focus, but for research situated more broadly? How Islam teaches me to look at and be in the world is significant in terms of how I would conduct research. It shapes the sorts of research questions I would or even could imagine asking. It informs the ethics of care and of consent I would need to engage in a research project. Acting axiologically, Islam offers a series of remedial interventions and admonitions, - or, in an Islamic conceptualization: a series of ayat or signs I may follow - in setting off on any research journey toward an unknown horizon. In his book chapter "An Islamic Theoretical Orientation to Psychotherapy," Dr. Abdallah Rothman identifies a gap in the literature of his field; he writes: Much of what has been written on and explored with regards to the intersection of Islam and psychology tend to examine the Muslim experience and how psychotherapy can cater to this population. It has been more of a response to the increasing call for multicultural capacity building than it has been an exploration of psychology from the perspective of an Islamic worldview. [...] [T]here remains a dearth of collective understanding of how an Islamic worldview can be practically and effectively integrated into psychotherapy as well as a lack of understanding of how an Islamic orientation to psychology might also have something to offer to a broader range of people beyond those who identify as Muslim (2018, p. 25). Where Rothman is writing about psychology and psychotherapy, I am thinking similar thoughts in terms of methods and methodology. Rothman is calling our attention to the need within research, for something beyond the address or inclusion of situated others into a dominant Western, colonial, orientalist hegemony of knowledge production; but, rather, work that is created and pursued within other situated knowledges. The scholarly traditions of Islam are centuries old, and membership as knowledge-keepers within them is regulated and rigorous by any standard. So, again, I must be clear about what I'm asking, what I'm suggesting, and where my capacities lie. I am not claiming any affiliation or association as a knowledge-keeper within the deeply established tradition of Islamic scholarship. I'm not asking what it is to be a scholar of Islam in a global North-Western university, or even what it is to be a Muslim in this cultural location at this time; but, I am asking what is it to create and to contribute to knowledge production from an Islamic perspective. Invested in understandings of Islam as a disciplined, anti-oppressive, and liberatory faith practice which centres the heart and emphasizes stewardship, interrelational responsibility, and individual accountability; this paper offers an autoethnographic account of developing the methodology section for my dissertation through the tracing of Islamically situated methodological impulses and the conversations they (and I) find ourselves in as the research unfurls.

Alia Wazzan, Brock University

Islamophobia and Consumptive Islam: Two Sides of a Naturalized Irrationality

Unsurprisingly, the French documentary Qatar’s War of Influence over Islam in Europe, produced in 2019 and scripted by George Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, is just another Islamophobic production of Western media, which has targeted the expulsion of Muslims from white Europe. While this presentation is not interested in investigating to what extent the accusations that are made by the filmmakers regarding Qatar’s involvement in funding “terror” are legitimate or not, my presentation is concerned with critically analyzing the documentary’s Orientalist discourse that homogenizes Islam and Muslims in one negative image, exposing the colonialist binaries of Islam-vs-Europe, and tracing the Islamophobic claim of fighting “radicalization,” three main narratives that nurture hatred sentiments against the whole body of Muslims. However, this paper mainly argues that although such Islamophobic discourses that have originated in the West are now notoriously familiar, these Islamophobic stereotypes, namely, the irrationality of Muslims and blind obedience to Islam, are not challenged but rather fueled by the Qatari media institution Al Jazeera during the FIFA World Cup 2022. The naturalized narrative that Al Jazeera was defending Muslims against Western mainstreamed stereotypes of Islam as an anti-democratic barbaric body (which went viral on social media during World Cup) was mainly promoted by Al Jazeera’s many hosts’ celebration of the Indian Islamic Orator and Preacher Dr. Zakir Naik activities of converting huge and collective numbers of non-Muslims to Islam. Based on the Muslim feminist Fatema Mernissi’s argument that stereotypes of anti-democratic and irrational Islam are legacies that have been constructed by “Islam of the palaces” to erase a long Islamic tradition of rebellion from Muslim memory to keep power in office, this paper argues that the converting-people-into-Islam narrative fails to do justice to the image of Muslims. Using the media studies’ approach to Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra, simulation [1], and the sign as elaborated on by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright in Practices of Looking, my paper proves that Naik’s religious world has much more in common with consumer capitalism than it does with Islamic thought. I argue that his discourse of defending Islam against what he calls Western stereotypical “virulent propaganda” is a system of vacuous signs identical in purpose and construction to those that are employed by the system of advertising in a consumer society, which is cultivated by manipulating the needs of the viewers more than developing heated and critical arguments - the latter being core to Islamic thought. The paper gives examples of what it calls “blind obedience to the sign” as Naik’s basic methodology of defending Islam: it is the language of collective followers and emotional epiphanies that are built on unthought and non-meditated spiritual rituals, and which cannot be trusted as anti-Islamophobic counter-narratives. For this purpose, the paper employs the media studies’ concepts of the narcotic effect, therapeutic catharsis, and commodity fetishism to showcase that oversimplistic approaches to embracing/defending Islam wish to transform a believer into an active consumer of a politicized version of Islam that is shaped by power and into a robotic human being whose mental agency is tamed in obedience rather than trained in debates over controversies. This paper recognizes that Edward Said’s dream of a politically independent and antithetical Arab/Muslim media institution is still far from realization. While Muslim liberatory struggles against the many forms of brutal ongoing Western imperialism and colonization need to be acknowledged as legitimate resistance, a state-friendly Muslim media discourse that naturalizes an instant and immediate surrender to Islam can be more damaging to the image of Muslims. The premise of this paper is that it is the representation that Muslims supposedly produce about themselves that perpetuates the image they have in the media. This interdisciplinary paper concludes that it is equally essential to spot discourses that nurture Western Islamophobic discourses even if they claim to subvert them and even if they are produced by a Muslim institution.