1st Edition
Global Islamophobia Muslims and Moral Panic in the West
The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflict, Global Islamophobia considers the role played by 'moral entrepreneurs' in orchestrating popular xenophobia and in agitating for greater surveillance, policing and cultural regulation of those deemed a threat to the nation's security or imagined community. This timely collection examines the interpenetration of the global and the local in the West's cultural politics towards Islam, highlighting parallels in the responses of governments and in the worrying reversion to a politics of coercion and assimilation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in race and ethnicity; citizenship and assimilation; political communication, securitisation and The War on Terror; and moral panics.
Biography
George Morgan is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, author of Unsettled Places: Aboriginal People and Urbanisation, and co-editor of Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia. Scott Poynting is Professor of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is co-author of Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, and Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime, and co-editor of Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice, and Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia.
'Carefully articulating the continuing relevance of moral panics, the editors chart the rise of the transnational "Muslim" folk devil and the globalisation of Islamophobia. With a series of compellingly written, conceptually engaging, and grounded case studies, this book makes a significant contribution to contemporary understandings of Islamophobia, and the local, national and transnational factors (re)creating its unfortunate presence.' Peter Hopkins, Newcastle University, UK 'This lucid and penetrating study of Islamophobia presents fresh insights into the process of generating modern-day folk devils, causing fear and panic. Examining the demonization of Muslims in the West as an accumulative and global process, this book reveals serious flaws in the way liberal governments have responded to their Muslim citizens and, more fundamentally, to social and cultural diversity.' Shahram Akbarzadeh, The University of Melbourne, Australia 'Global Islamophobia is a robust book that examines and tackles the fear of Islam with great brio and optimism. It is a carefully balanced academic collaboration: simultaneously sympathetic, elegiac and open, whilst also argumentative and at points dispassionately critical. The breadth of vision and depth of research demonstrates an assuredly lucid grasp of the variegated societal problems and the all too human vicissitudes covered by the subject matter. ... The editors have produced a useful, germane and well-considered book, liberal in its approach and accurate in its working methodology.' Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
