Seema Syeda on day to day Islamophobia in Europe and the drivers behind it
The fight against Islamophobia is an essential part of the fight for working class politics and democratic socialism. It cannot be understood without reference to the systemic framework of capitalism, imperialism and racialisation that underpin it. Recent waves of mobilisation around the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQIA+ and abortion rights, and anticolonial resistance from Palestine to Sudan and the Congo should not be dismissed and packed away as “identity” politics in opposition to “class” politics. Rather it is the expression of resistance of a global working class confronting an order of imperialist capitalism that racialises and demonises the “other” in order to ideologically justify its resource, land and labour exploitation – the systemic basis for the epic proportions of wealth transfer we see taking place now and in recent history from global majority populations to the elites of the global north.
At Another Europe Is Possible and alongside the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a number of research reports and fact-finding delegations have taken place in order to understand and confront rising Islamophobia across Europe. In these reports, working definitions of Islamophobia can be found, as well as facts about the lived realities of Muslim communities across the UK, France and Germany. In these reports, we detail the shocking rates of physical violence Muslims in Europe experience on a daily basis. The failure and complicity of policing and justice systems in relation to this violence. The higher mortality and poorer health rates stemming from discrimination in healthcare, housing and public services. The low employment and income rates stemming from structural racism and discrimination. The reports show that Islamophobia is present across the political spectrum, including in left and progressive spaces. There is a huge amount of education, training and work that needs to be done to confront the issue. So what are the structural causes of Islamophobia and one of its key discursive drivers: “counter-terror” ?
Colonialism: a structural cause
Continuing colonialism and its relationship to fascism is a key structural underpinning of the Islamophobia and racism we see rising across Europe and the West today. As Aimé Césaire and others have theorised, the brutalising experience of colonisation which transformed both coloniser and colonised was the ideological and historical predecessor of European fascism, where theories of racial and civilisational superiority that hitherto had gone unchallenged by European political and media institutions when applied in the colonies, were turned against Europe’s own Jewish population – as well as Roma, LGBTQIA+, racial minorities and political opponents. Fascism’s high point arrived coterminously with the high point of global independence movements, when the brutality of empire came to roost in the imperial metropole and was used against Europe’s own populations.
This ideological and historical continuity is too often missing in contemporary analysis of the rise of fascism and the resurgence of extreme right parties. Further, while overt theories of racial superiority have become more and more anathema, discourse around “civilisational” superiority continues to have an insidious influence in not just right-wing and centrist spaces, but progressive and left-wing spaces too. The underlying assumptions of a Western Eurocentric discourse that posits Europe and the West as the cradle and exemplar of modern democracy and human rights, against an increasingly authoritarian and tyrannical “rest of the world’. The discourse which perpetuates a “clash of civilizations” ideology by fearmongering about the threat of “Islamism” and the wholesale tarring of anticolonial resistance as “terrorism” and supporters of e.g. the Palestinian cause as “terrorist sympathisers” is again an instrumental part of this discourse (see the article in Chartist 328 on the treatment of Marwan Barghouti); whereby the US-empire-led coalition of global violence, which maintains the status quo, is legitimate, while any other kind of resistance to it is not.
The discourse of “terror”, specifically the “war on terror”, is key. The UK APPG working definition of Islamophobia, which, although it could be improved by referencing structural discrimination, enumerates useful examples of widespread Islamophobia. One of them is the following:
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims as such, or of Muslims as a collective group, such as, especially but not exclusively, conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics, government or other societal institutions; the myth of Muslim identity having a unique propensity for terrorism, and claims of a demographic “threat” posed by Muslims or of a “Muslim takeover”.
In today’s geopolitical climate, the reference above to “terrorism” and its connotations is critical. The discourse connoting Muslims with terrorism has been mainstreamed across the political spectrum and is one of the key drivers of violence against Muslims today. It is this discourse which has enabled and been used to justify the decades-long genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people that we are witnessing with horror today. It is this discourse which framed the spurious invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the hundreds of thousands killed and maimed, and millions displaced. It is this discourse which enabled the bombing of Libya, and so on. Pioneered in the West, it is now being used by the Chinese government to justify the genocide of the Uyghers, and by the Russian government against the Crimean Tartar population. The number one victim of the Islamophobic “counter-terror” discourse, then, is the lives of the millions of Muslims, part of the global working class, killed and maimed in the name of counter-terror. Dismantling the discourse of terror is a key priority in order to end the epic violence enacted against Muslim communities across the globe.