The Impact of Islamophobia

In the major Western democracies Muslims live as minority communities and are subject to the same out-group prejudice that usually confronts such groups. In these countries there is a general public awareness of the dangers of racism and xenophobia. However, racism can be a slippery phenomenon, and the fact that the Holocaust and colonialism have enjoyed public prominence in the years following World War II can serve to restrict awareness of racism as a problem to another time and place - for example, Germany in a bygone era - leading to unwitting complacency about it in the here-and-now. In the 1990s, the Runnymede Trust published a report that successfully highlighted the existence of anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain, followed by a parallel report some years later outlining discriminatory practices faced by Muslims in the country (Runnymede Trust 1997). Unlike Jews, Muslims are an ethnically diverse group and do not form a homogeneous race, but on examination it became abundantly clear that the processes involved in Islamophobia are in fact those of racism (Seabrook 2004; Sheridan 2002). This bore out Edward Said's observation that:

Malicious generalisations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, or other Orientals, or Asians. (Said 1997, p. xii)

Occasionally an incident does flare up in the public domain that can be seen as symptomatic of this background of intolerance and hostility towards Islam and Muslims. For example, in Paris on 18 September 1989:

Leila Achaboun, Fatima Achaboun and Samira Saidani-three schoolgirls of North African descent - were suspended from College … for refusing to remove the headscarves that they understood to be prescribed by Islamic tradition.

Page 175

The school's principal … claimed to be acting in accordance with