Transnational Feminist Approaches to Anti-Muslim Racism

This special issue brings together feminist scholars to theorize anti-Muslim racism. It specifically attends to an understanding of anti-Muslim racism as transnational, proliferating, and linked to other racisms and projects of rule. Three key questions are addressed: How do we understand global circuits of power as they travel and shape local contexts in which anti-Muslim racism operates, including contexts in which Muslims are the majority? How is global anti-Muslim racism a gendered phenomenon? What is a revolutionary politics in which resistant forms of Muslimness imagine another world? With its emphasis on the transnational, the special issue assembles scholars whose work on the regional contexts of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, the Middle East, Europe, Canada, and the United States, among other nations, reveals the global circuits along which anti-Muslim racism travels. Their explorations of how the global and the local are intertwined pay special attention to how discourses of anti-Muslim racism install white, Western subjects as superior and the heteronormative white family as the basis of political life. This is a racism that morphs as it travels transnationally and attaches itself to supremacist, colonial, and imperial projects everywhere. The special issue offers an explicit feminist analysis, paying attention to how racial discourses are gendered and sexualized and how those who are the targets of anti-Muslim racism articulate their gendered dreams of an alternative lifeworld in the face of their marginalization.

Islam has long been the antonym to Europe, the Other of modernity. As Minoo Moallem explores in this issue, the colonial construct of Islam maintains the idea of Islam as a premodern, primitive, and fetishistic religion in which women are oppressed and compelled to veil. Installing Europe as modern and Islam as premodern, the idea that Muslims are an uncivilized people provides a path for the ascendancy of whiteness, a racial structure that relies on gender to establish its component parts. An institutionalized anti-Muslim racism has been developing for some time in the West building on earlier racial formations and Orientalisms but escalating in the post-9/11 period into authorized torture, extrajudicial killings, and a legally authorized eviction from political community apparent in such diverse legal projects as the Muslim travel ban in the United States and the banning of full-face veils (see Razack 2008; forthcoming). Muslims have been targeted by white supremacist shooters in Quebec City, Canada and Christchurch, New Zealand. Spectacular violence joins a more mundane everyday harassment and persecution including the disciplining and surveillance of anyone visibly associated with Muslim cultural practices. Each conflict is recast as a Muslim problem. For instance, the treatment of migrants, entailing a willful blindness to the deaths of migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, is often underwritten by a wellorganized Right that insists that many refugees are "terrorists" and that people from Muslim cultures do not belong in Europe. Outside the West, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, Muslims in India, the Uyghurs in China, and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine all suggest a globally circulating discourse of anti-Muslim racism that provides a new intensity to long-standing local conflicts, infusing them with new life and contributing to international indifference over the fate of targeted Muslim communities. Genocides of Muslim populations are proliferating. This special issue generates a feminist dialogue on these pressing contemporary issues with an eye for transnational mis/translations and the potential for resistance.

The idea that anti-Muslim racism exists and operates in contexts where it forms a part of long-standing conflicts is often resisted. If, in the past few decades, Muslims have become the universal enemy, there is still a popular understanding that Muslims are a religious group and not a racial one. When recognized only as a faith community or a minority, Muslims are not considered to be racially targeted. Relatedly, when anti-Muslim racism is understood as prejudice or hate and uncoupled from projects of rule, we do not easily see its role in undermining the sovereignty of Muslim communities, nations, and regions. Anti-Muslim racism, or (more...