This panel asks how we as scholars can bring Islamophobia research beyond a national focus in methodology and research design, exploring intersecting, global flows of Islamophobia across nations and societies. By developing an explicitly comparative and transnational focus that explores multiple dimensions of global flows of Islamophobia—focusing on language, visuality, media, and technology—this panel aims to make an intervention in theorization, methodological advancement, and empirical research on the intersecting, global flows of contemporary Islamophobia.
Given the massive anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states it is surprising that Buddhist Islamophobia has escaped the attention of most post-colonial and de-colonial theorizing emerging out of Europe and North America. This paper argues for the relevance of Buddhist forms of Islamophobia for our understanding of Islamophobia as a global and globalizing phenomenon. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to analyse core elements of Buddhist Islamophobia and compare it with other forms of Islamophobia, and second, to theorize Buddhist Islamophobia as part of Global Islamophobia(s). Comparing Buddhist Islamophobia with other forms of Islamophobia help us tease out similarities and particularities of anti-Muslim ideologies and practices across national contexts, thus providing necessary empirical data for a broader theorizing of this particular form of religious identity formation.
Islamophobia is increasingly global in scope, but manifests in local ways, contributing to racialization, control, oppression, and hatred against Islam and Muslims. Much of the literature on Islamophobia focuses on individual nation-states or comparisons across them. While this is a crucial perspective on Islamophobia, it is a phenomenon that is entangled with planetary and subplanetary networks of humans, symbols, interfaces, bits and materials that flow across territorial boundaries. This paper proposes a revised framework for the analysis of Islamophobia, aspiring towards the development of a non-deterministic and non-Eurocentric conception of Islamophobia through the lens of five dimensionsof the phenomenon across which we identify a set of migratory, symbolic, informational, technical, and material flows. Developing this framework, the paper enumerates five dimensions of Islamophobia: control, group-making, racialization, discourse, and movements. In doing so, it argues that Islamophobia is fundamental to the rise of global majoritarian group-making projects.
Since 9/11, western programmatic narratives of the need to reform Islam, undergirded by an Islamophobic vision according to which Islam can only be good if it has been reconciled with modern, western values, have deeply affected Muslims’ self-understandings. Yet, Muslims’s navigation of western pressures to be moderate and tolerant also point to the inherent contradictions of these western demands. Focusing on contemporary Indonesia, this paper discusses how Muslims are faced with the choice to either be moderate or tolerant, as being moderate entails the rejection of all those not deemed sufficiently so. Known in the western political philosophy as the paradox of tolerance, this dilemma divides even groups of Muslims who are committed to a peaceful vision of Islam. Whereas a majority has aligned itself with global Islamophobic discourse, some resist its claims, thereby rejecting the identity politics that have been forced onto Muslim communities since 2001.