Everyday living with Islamophobia

ABSTRACT

In this paper I discuss Islamophobia as a form of racism especially intensified in the press and media. The women in my study talked about how they coped with what they saw as a backlash of Islamophobia. I show how they have come to deal with the effects of this in their everyday life. Even though most of the women in my study were born and raised in Britain, this antipathy towards Muslims has made them question their sense of belonging. This paper brings to light the experiences of prejudice and discrimination from the perspective of middle-class British-Pakistanis.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• British-Pakistanis
• British-Muslims
• belonging

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Angela Torresan and Peter Wade for their support while supervising me on my PhD at the University of Manchester. I am grateful to Sinead O’Sullivan for her feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Runnymede Commission on Anti-Semitism (1994). A Very Light Sleeper: The Persistence and Dangers of Anti-Semitism (Allen 2010).

2. Runnymede Trust report (1997) Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (Allen 2010).

3. Runnymede Trust report (2017) Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All (Elahi and Khan 2017).

4. Bhimji (2012) uses the term ‘Asian’ to refer to mainly South Asian Muslim culture, because her study was about the experiences of British South Asian Muslim.

5. My participants referred to White British as ‘English’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded independently.