November in the UK has been designated Islamophobia Awareness Month. Arzu gives some thoughts on what seriously tackling Islamophobia requires.
It is coming to the end of the Julian year and my review of past works is barely started. As I have written on Islamophobia for the best part of three decades, I thought I would look at the ten key counter-narratives to Islamophobia in the UK report I authored for the Counter-Islamophobia Toolkit project in 2017-18.
In short, this is what we found were the best existing and desired ways to end the street and system abuse of those perceived to be Muslim. If you want the key details, read the second report of the project here. You can find a summary here. Bear with the list. They are not meme-worthy or suited to 30 second TikTok videos, but they have bite. I will post the findings here section by section over the next few weeks.
To understand how this works, there are four things I realise we – as those committed to justice – need to understand and act upon:
- Key to everything is the understanding that everyday experiences of Islamophobia – the street attacks, the discrimination at school and work – cannot be alleviated by well-meaning PR campaigns on the intrinsic niceness of Muslims or nominal changes in laws around discrimination and hatred (though both are worthy projects in themselves).
- The structural change that is required is wider than simply on the issue of Islamophobia. We don’t just need to make our institutions “un-Islamophobic”, the so many injustices of the society we live in, need addressing. As part of this, those with faith values, specifically in my case Islamic values, have the right to and should bring those values to bear in thinking of solutions.
- We need to be wary of internalising the narratives of Islamophobia we purport to oppose. Whether that is as advocates for Palestine, social justice across communities (and across borders) or in our intra-communal conversations.
- We need to understand that it is not just Muslims or those perceived to be Muslims, who are victims of Islamophobia. The hatred that divides us, that incites everyday people to commit acts of hatred including violence, also victimises those people too. They are manipulated by the environment of hatred to take these actions. They do not generate the hate, they are indoctrinated into it.
What is needed is structural change. Institutions – media, political, legal, educational, cultural – need to be transformed. Unless institutional Islamophobia is eradicated, then no amount of persuasive pro-Muslim content, or laws that criminalise anti-Muslim hate, can alleviate let alone transform the worsening environment of hate facing Muslims today.
The Ten Key Counter-Narratives are listed below, but a post on each separately will follow over the next few weeks.
- Decentring conversations on Islam and Muslims from current institutionalised narratives.
- Diversifying the understanding of what, who and how is a Muslim, and the acceptance of this plurality within a plural understanding of the nation.
- Contextualising the nature and level of ‘threat’ posed by political violence per se by reviewing the epistemology of current security policies.
- Acknowledging structural issues and racism(s)
- Acknowledging Islamophobia as a form of violence that is relational to both recent and colonial history and current events in various Westernised settings that refer to each other in order to perpetuate each other.
- Removing hierarchies of racism and acknowledging Islamophobia as a form of racism.
- A refocus on equalities, or ideas of injustice as the normative focus of the state.
- Mainstream and Alternative Media initiatives, media (self)regulation, reform and cultural transformation
- A cultural shift in understanding who is part of the national, and how national histories have been intimately intertwined with Muslims and Muslim cultures and nations over centuries.
- Recapturing and creating further space for Muslim narratives of being
Read more of Arzu’s work on Islamophobia on this site.
