The Muslim: Islamophobia as disembodiment

ABSTRACT

Islamophobia is not just a fear of people ascribing to the religion of Islam, if that was the case simple religious conversions would erase hatred. In the world of surging Alt-Right movements, Islamophobia embodies racism, anti-migrant xenophobia, and orientalism. This article explores Alt-Right groups in the US and Europe, traces their ideological gurus, deconstructs political speeches, reports of rightwing think tanks to understand how Islamophobia is a process of disembodiment. Inspired by Bourdieu’s habitus, and feminist work on embodiment/disembodiment, this article argues that the Muslim narrative thoroughly disembodies the Muslim body. Disembodiment is annihilation before corporeal death ensues, the Muslim does not get to mark her corporeal and intellectual existence. Disembodiment nullifies the Muslim’s life, she is only valuable in death, because disembodiment reclaims her death as a vanquished terrorist, as a murdered jihadi, or a bombed city where weapons of mass destruction or uranium may have existed.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• race
• embodiment
• disembodiment
• culture
• anti-immigrant xenophobia
• orientalism
• geopolitics
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I carried out discourse analysis of web contents, blogs, YouTube videos published in the last five years by ten social and political groups in Europe and the U.S. that explicitly declares Islam and Muslims as enemy, terrorists, and targets of fear. This discourse analysis is based on 150 YouTube videos, 123 speeches, 116 newspaper articles, study of 98 websites, and 115 blogs. I use the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPCL) top-ten Islamophobic hate groups as the basis for my empirical exercise. The SPCL is a premier non-profit organisation tracking the activities of more than 1600 hate groups of all kinds (Islamophobic, Neo-Nazi, racist skinheads, Ku Klux Klan). The groups and parties studied include Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA), ACT for America, Soldiers of Odin, the Crusaders, Youth For Western Civilisation, BombIslam, Counterjihad, Stop Islamisation of America, youth members of political parties like, Sweden Democrats, Norway’s Progress Party, Austrian Freedom Party that have together formed Young Europeans Alliance for Hope (YEAH) on 2014 (Hafez 2014). Discourse analysis deployed here involves a study of the text, rhetoric and intentionality of statements (Rose 2001). In analysing these, I paid attention to: the social context of the discourse, i.e. who is saying them, what institutional weight does he/she have? When is it being said and under what circumstances? What rationale is being cited to legitimise Islamophobic othering? Is the rationale an extension of the past or is there a disjuncture? (b) the structure of the statements, i.e. what are the key words and key themes in the rhetoric? How often are they repeated? What is Islamophobic about this rhetoric and how do they attempt to persuade? How are the key themes related to each other? In deconstructing mission statements, objectives, blogs, websites, campaign rhetoric of twelve alt-Right groups and political parties, I also hope to trace the academic racism that serves as ideological inspiration to some of them.