Muslims in Europe and Islamophobia

A workshop of research in progress and symposium
28th May 2010, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon

The Portugal-based international academic research network MEL-net (Muçulmanos em Espaços Lusófonos; Muslims in Portuguese Speaking Areas, hosted at ICS-UL) and "Our Shared Europe" share as major objectives the aim of promoting critical academic and wider public debate on perceptions and experiences of Muslims in Europe. To this end, a one day workshop was held at ICS which brought  together research-in-progress on diverse aspects of Islam and Muslims in the European context from historical, contemporary and comparative perspectives.

The workshop programme was organised in terms of two self-contained but complementary sessions. The morning session with a more localised focus on Portugal and Spain showcased work in progress from research which ranges from shifting historical attitudes to the Islamic heritage of the Peninsula, colonial attitudes, policies and epistemological legacies, to the metropolitan and postcolonial history and formation of community structures and organisations, and the everyday lives and experiences of contemporary Muslims in these two countries. The afternoon session was  dedicated to a symposium on islamophobia and brought together the editors and two of the contributors to Thinking Through Islamophobia, an edited collection of critical engagements with the history and politics of Islamophobia in global perspective.

The wider currency of the term “islamophobia” in British and later European and global public debates and polemics dates from around the 1990s. This coincides with the formation of the new ‘Muslim Question’ at the end of the Cold War traversed both by geopolitical and domestic spectres of the figure of the Muslim and the emergence of diverse forms of Muslim public mobilisation within postcolonial reconfigurations of citizenship, race and religion across Europe and Western European national contexts.

The Runnymede Trust report on Islamophobia published in 1997 contributed to an internationalisation of the term which its adoption as a theme at the 2001 UN Conference against Racism in Durban further consolidated globally. Today Google records over 600,000 references on the internet and nearly 4800 scholarly citations in a proliferation of increasingly polarised and polemical contestations.

What case can be made for serious engagement with the term, its usefulness and potential in contemporary academic research, public policy, and wider struggles for social justice? Thinking Through Islamophobia (London, Hurst), acknowledges that islamophobia remains a controversial and ill-defined term but responds by means of a serious and critical conceptual engagement with its limitations and possibilities. It makes a virtue of multi-disciplinary and comparative approaches in clearing the ground for public policy, media, and other forms of public deployment and debate on its usefulness. S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil outline the conceptual and polemical debate on the term; David Tyrer scrutinises denials of the racist nature of Islamophobia and how they have related to the generalisation of Islamophobia as a defining form of contemporary racism, and Nadia Fadil analyses a recent shift in the discourse on Multiculturalism and the Muslim presence among the political Left in Belgium.

The full programme can be found here.