The only common aspect among all definitions of Islamophobia is that all of them have something negative to say about Muslims or Islam or both. This book traces Islamophobia as a phenomenon from history and attempts to break some of the myths that are dominant in contemporary literature. It explains how the fear of Islam travelled through ages, adding more ills into its ambit and escalating to a level of generalized fear of Muslims today. Islamophobia: History, Context and Deconstruction challenges many established theories including that of the influential post-colonial writer and critic.
Edward Said’s view that Islamophobia is European hostility and prejudice towards Arabo-Muslim people. The author envisages Islamophobia as a multidimensional construct and provides tools for measuring its manifold dimensions. The book focuses on providing a diagnosis of the problem and prognostic solutions to avoid further degradation of the relations between Islam, the West and the rest. It is a response from the East to the Western discourses on Islamophobia.
Traces Islamophobia as a phenomenon from history and attempts to break some myths dominant in contemporary literature
| Foreword |
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ix | |
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| Preface |
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xi | |
| Acknowledgements |
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xv | |
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1 | (52) |
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Chapter 2 Sociocultural Dimensions of Fear of Islam and Muslims |
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53 | (76) |
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129 | (29) |
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Chapter 4 Cultural and Religious Racism |
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158 | (29) |
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Chapter 5 Securitization of Islam and Muslims |
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187 | (28) |
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Chapter 6 Islam as a Political Threat |
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215 | (26) |
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Chapter 7 Othering as Islamophobia |
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241 | (15) |
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Chapter 8 Clash of Civilization or Islam versus West |
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256 | (31) |
| References |
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287 | (26) |
| Index |
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313 | (4) |
| About the Author |
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317 | |
Zafar Iqbal, PhD, has more than 23 years of teaching and research experience. He received doctorate in mass communication in 2003. He serves at International Islamic University, Islamabad, and has published in the reputed national and international journals. During the last 10 years, he remained a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Surrey, UK, University of Southern California, LA, USA, and a Chevening Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. His work aims at exploring the negative sentiments that historically exist between Muslims and non-Muslims, and attempts to figure out the present state of hostility towards Muslims/Islam in the contemporary mediadominated world. His basic assumption explains that Islamophobia as a phenomenon is historic in nature, and contemporary construction is mainly mediated and its epistemic/symbolic dimension has different connotations. As such, its construction is rendered in a pluralistic manner; hence, it appears as a corpus constituted of Islamophobias. He tested an instrument for measuring Islamophobia in the epistemological spheres by finding its nexus with media and other social antecedents
