The Touch and Feel of Australian Islamophobia

Notes on Randa Abdel-Fattah’s ‘Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia’ from Arzu Merali.*  

 

There is so much to recommend Randa Abdel- Fattah’s book, it is difficult to know where to begin. I also fear that, without a forensic chapter by chapter analysis, I will do an injustice and leave important aspects of this landmark work out. I start, instead of this, with the overarching response it left with me. Abdel-Fattah’s work meticulously explicates what Islamophobia feels like – in all its visceral and emotional sense – for those who express / internalise this bias. The journey of the book is one of understanding how people are literally affected not simply in an abstract cognitive sense – where bias sits in some part of the (sub)conscious – but with the viscerality of Islamophobia that has the power to create self-fulfilling cycles of agitation, relief, anger and action in those interviewed.

Decrypting and disrupting Islamophobia as the oppressors’ narrative Abdel-Fattah connects at the outset the role of the white gaze in its exoticising ‘Muslim sensory data – bodies, spaces and objects’ as non-normal, with the every-day function of Islamophobia amongst Anglos and non-Muslim non-Anglos. A bottom-up understanding of Islamophobia is the missing piece, in her contention, of the understanding of Islamophobia usually discussed at the structural level…

To read more download a PDF of the full article here.

* First published on Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association‘s website.