Global Islamophobia: Muslims anti Moral Panic in the West.

AuthorAppleton, Michael
PositionBook review

GLOBAL ISLAMOPHOBIA: Muslims anti Moral Panic in the West

Edited by: George Morgan and Scott Poynting

Published by: Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, 2012, 240pp, 55 [pounds sterling].

In March 2009, a 24-year-old Somali woman named Nadifa was pulled out of her bed in the middle of the night, dragged to the floor of her London apartment, handcuffed, and screamed at. Nadifa's description of her experience at the hands of police--of shock, embarrassment and shame--is compelling. But it is telling that her story does not appear in this book's pages until the penultimate of its twelve chapters. For the vast majority of Global Islamophobia, the voices of individual Muslims in the West, and how their lives have been affected by prejudice, are conspicuously absent.

Global Islamophobia is a collection of eleven case studies from around the Western world--North America, Western Europe and Australia--which seek, in their sum, to demonstrate that Islamophobia (irrational fear of Muslims or Islam) 'permeates' the West, with 'momentous' consequences. The case studies are varied and generally interesting and well-drawn--ranging from the ability of the German state education system to deal with racially heterogeneous student bodies in lower socio-economic communities to the use of crude anti-Muslim propaganda in a political campaign in western Sydney.

The underlying analytical concept organising the case studies is moral panic. Muslims in the West are described as being the victims of a 'volatile', 'hostile' and 'disproportionate' moral panic, and as being built into 'folk devils' who are blamed for many of the underlying social and economic problems of the Western societies in which they live.

Evidence to support this thesis is sprinkled throughout the book. Political movements, such as those described in this volume in Sweden and Italy, that present Islam as the primary source of Western moral and social decay and as being fundamentally inconsistent with 'Western values' exist throughout Europe. Traditional news media organisations, especially in the wake of psychically challenging events such as terrorist attacks, can tend to exaggerate, engage in demagoguery and simplify, including on matters of religion and race. And some Western governments have taken actions over the past decade that have been experienced by Muslims as confronting, victimising and unfair.

But, as a work of media analysis or political sociology, Global Islamophobia feels like a lengthy and...

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