Category Archives: Islamophobia

More on the Danish Cartoons

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Danish Cartoon Controversy

What the Danish Cartoon Controversy Tells Us About Religion, the Secular, and the Limits of the Law
By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Religion Dispatches, January 7, 2010

Review of: Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (University of California Press, 2009)

This very rich little book seems to me a very good place to begin the new decade. It is smart, informed, thoughtful, urgent—and properly unsettling. It is also very difficult to read quickly or to summarize in short order. It is well worth the effort.

The principal essays, by anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, take the Danish cartoon controversy as a starting point. They review the contexts of the publication of the satirical cartoons of Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, and the angry responses that ensued; they ask us to take seriously the fundamental incoherence of the assumptions about religion that underlie the dominant narratives of those events (dominant narratives that were repeated again this week in the stories about a recent attack on one of the cartoonists.) The book also includes an introduction by political scientist Wendy Brown and a response to the essays by philosopher Judith Butler. Continue reading More on the Danish Cartoons →

Following Seward’s Folly: #2 Hopeless Arabia

Islamophobia, Lithographs, Orientalism, Travel, Yemen


Illustration from Seward’s Travels (1873)

William H. Seward, the American Secretary of State who is forever linked with the “folly” of acquiring Alaska from the Russians, spent a year traveling around the world near the end of his life. In a previous post I recorded his comments on the British rule in India, as reported by his daughter. On April 27, 1871 the Seward party neared the Yemeni port (and British fueling station) of Aden. Here is how the approach is recorded by Ms. Seward:

April 27th. – After eight months travel in the incomprehensible East, with its stagnant civilization, we are now passing into another region still more incomprehensible and hopeless.

On the right hand is Yemen, once ‘Arabia the happy,’ and still known in poetry as a land of light and beauty, but now the dwelling of Arab hordes, who are sinking every day deeper into barbarism. On the left, wee are passing Somali, that part of Africa which stretches from Mozambique to Abyssinia. Continue reading Following Seward’s Folly: #2 Hopeless Arabia →

Why they hate us: You can count on it

Iraq War, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media

Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?(II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?

by Stephen M. Walt, The New ForeignPolicy.com, November 30

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday’s New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America’s supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren’t so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that “U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny.” He concedes that we made a few mistakes here and there (such as at Abu Ghraib), but the real problem is all those anti-American fairy tales that Muslims tell each other to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.” Continue reading Why they hate us: You can count on it →

Fear of Minarets

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

My compatriots’ vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear

by Tariq Ramadan, The Guardian, 29 November 2009

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth? Continue reading Fear of Minarets →

Why Minarets?

Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

Swiss voters, at least those who bothered to show up at the polls, today voted to deny any future building of minarets in their country. As reported on Al-Jazeera:

Of those who cast votes in Sunday’s poll, 57.5 per cent approved the ban, while only four cantons out of 26 rejected the proposals.

The result paves the way for a constitutional amendment to be made.

“The Federal Council [government] respects this decision. Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted,” the government, which had opposed the ban, said in a statement.

The minaret is, of course, a symbol, but a rather unusual choice. In one sense it is like saying that MacDonalds cannot have a high sign (as is the case in some municipalities) but they can serve all the hamburgers they want. Thus, this ban is not on building mosques, nor does it prevent Muslims from praying in mosques. Since minarets long ago ceased to have functional value, apart from perhaps holding a loud speaker, the minaret is indeed symbolic.

But why the minaret? Continue reading Why Minarets? →

Swiss Minaretxia

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Luke R. E. Publican, Terrorism Issue


Cows will no longer give milk in Switzerland if minarets are allowed to stand.

The rightwing political parties in Switzerland are up in arms, preparing for a vote on Sunday to save their alpine paradise from the dreaded cultural eyesore of mosque minarets. This proposed ban on minarets comes from the same friendly yodelers in the nationalist Swiss People’s Party that has previously campaigned against foreigners, including a proposal to kick out entire families of foreigners if one of their children breaks a law and a bid to subject citizenship applications to a popular vote. But they have the pure white chocolate science to back up their campaign this time. It is now evident from a pretentious hypothetical analysis that purebred Swiss cows refuse to give milk, even 1 percent, when they see a minaret. This spells the end of Swiss milk chocolate, a loss that would udderly ruin the Swiss economy, not to mention the sense of shame the bovine residents of the country would feel.

Save Switzerland for the pure Swiss, those wily Swiss Bankers who for decades have allowed brutal dictators to launder their money in untouchable Swiss bank accounts. Continue reading Swiss Minaretxia →

Going (after) Muslim

Anthropology/Sociology, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue


A picture making the news rounds of Major Hasan on the day of the shootings.

[Note: I have just published a commentary on a commentary in Forbes Magazine in which Major Nidal Hasan is said to have “gone postal” in his frenzy. This is published on Religion Dispatches. I excerpt the first couple of paragraphs here, but please go to the Religion Dispatches site, where you can post comments as well.]

If the media frenzy over the Fort Hood killings is any gauge, the ugly specter of 9/11 has again taken its psychological toll. This time, instead of the “bad Muslim” being a bearded terrorist called bin Laden, there is a US Army psychologist who was trained to be a healer of military personnel. He happens to have an Arabic ancestry and is Muslim.

Prominent American Muslim organizations issued statements right away condemning the murders. Debate in the media is now focused on his motivation. Was he a fifth-columnist wolf in military dress? Did his sympathies for innocent victims in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan overwhelm his common sense of decency? Should the FBI and security arms of the US military have pounced on him when they uncovered his initial links to a radical imam?

One result that I have noticed among those who study Islam, especially my Muslim colleagues, is a growing fault line over the dubious “good Muslim/bad Muslim” binary. As Mahmood Mamdani has eloquently argued, the choice is not between good and bad individuals or citizens, but about being Muslim. Major Hasan is a man who looked very much like a “good Muslim”: a military officer providing therapy to returning veterans. But, now, it seems that at some tipping point he became the “bad Muslim,” the kind who places mosque above state.

For the rest of this commentary, click here.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Contesting Islamism

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Islamophobia, Scholars, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue

Stanford University Press has just published Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, edited by Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar. In this book Political Scientist Donald Emmerson argues for an inclusive use of the term “Islamism” in order to rescue the term from its misappropriation in the media. This is followed by my essay, in which I argue that the term “Islamism” is as tainted as “Mohammedanism” and should be avoided as a replacement for fundamentalist and political Islam. Our two essays are followed by twelve short responses from a variety of perspectives, Muslim and non-Muslim. The contributors include Feisal Abdul Rauf, Syed Farid Alatas, Hillel Fradkin, Graham Fuller, Hasan Hanafi, Amir Hussain, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Bruce Lawrence, Anouar Majid, Angel Rebasa and Nadia Yassine. Given the range of perspectives on one of the hot topics of the day, this volume will be a great addition to courses on Islam or the Middle East.

The publisher’s description is presented below: Continue reading Contesting Islamism →