anti-Muslim Violence Research Articles

Islamophobia in India and the Racial State

This article focuses on the relationship between nation-making and the emergence of Islamophobia in India. Studies on anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia in India either tend to dismiss the concept or limit its deployment by identifying it within the actions of Hindu nationalist groups situating their rise as an exception to India’s secular and multicultural trajectory. Premising on the idea that Islamophobia should be understood as the negation of Muslim political subjectivity this article argues that Hindutva is not an aberration. Rather, it is a continuation of the Indian nation-making project with the Muslim placed as the other of this project. Further, the article frames India as a racial state and this argument would include identifying its systemic nature by looking at the sections of the Indian constitutions and constituent assembly debates. Thus, the Indian state will be understood not as a mere facilitator but as an embodiment of Brahminical hegemony that generates racial conflict and divisions and attempts to exclude or eliminate Muslimness through homogenizing or marginalizing processes.

An ‘unfathomable hatred of Islam’: Ethno/graphing the trial for the Québec City mosque massacre

On the night of January 29, 2017, six Muslim worshippers were killed, and many others severely injured when a white man opened fire at a mosque in Québec City (QC, Canada). This article is based on a collective ethno/graphy of the assailant’s trial, from its beginning in March 2018 until the verdict in February 2019. During this period, our research group – formed of three sociologists and a visual artist – attended trial hearings at the Superior Court of Québec and collected related media coverage and political statements. To analyze the legal, political, and media treatment of the 2017 massacre, we put forth a political ethnography of justice, informed by critical scholarship on depoliticization and epistemologies of white ignorance. Our analysis identifies distinct sequences in a process of depoliticization that obscures historical, structural, and political dimensions of anti-Muslim violence. In attending to this process, our article advances sociological research on the institutional treatment, and concealment, of religiously and racially targeted violence.

Theorizing Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism as global Islamophobia

ABSTRACT In the wake of anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states in Asia, increased scholarly attention is paid to anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism. These studies have paid particular attention to historical legacies within the confines of state borders, be they colonial or post-colonial. However, as this paper shows, the concerns raised in Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism are not only shaped by local contexts. On the contrary, they are very much informed by global discourses and concerns. Drawing on media and globalization theory, this paper explores the transnational and global aspects of anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism, arguing that it needs to be understood as a constituent element of global Islamophobia(s). Moreover, the paper shows that Buddhist Islamophobia cannot be reduced to being the result of Western export of Islamophobia globally. Rather, Buddhist Islamophobia has to be understood as a global as well as a globalizing phenomenon, contributing in its own right to global Islamophobia(s).

Archives as the Infrastructure of Anti-Muslim Violence in India

Archives as the Infrastructure of Anti-Muslim Violence in India

Critical feminist resistance to the politics of hate in India

ABSTRACT Genocide Watch has declared a ‘Genocide Emergency’ in India with serious consequences for Muslims and Dalits in India. The Hindutva ecosystem uses the figure of Muslim women as central to the politics of hate. However, Muslim women have also emerged as an important force in resisting this. In this context, this article interrogates what discourses and processes of anti-Muslim violence are being enabled by the Hindutva anti-social learning movements, and how critical-feminist social-learning movements, especially feminists from Muslim backgrounds, challenge and disrupt Hindutva politics. The article shows how critical-feminist social movements are learning, producing, and theorising new understandings of resisting the politics of hate. The article ends with reflections on the significance of this learning in subverting fascistic politics today.

Saffron geographies of exclusion: The Disturbed Areas Act of Gujarat

This article elucidates the discursive, spatial and procedural mechanisms by which residential segregation and ghettoisation based on religion in Ahmedabad is reproduced and reinforced. It studies the application of the Disturbed Areas Act of Gujarat, a 1986 law ostensibly intended to curb spatial segregation based on religion by preventing the distress sale of property in ‘disturbed areas’ affected by sectarian violence. However, this law is being used for precisely opposite ends and as a tool of ‘ethnocratic urban planning’ to advance the Hindu right’s goal of separate and hierarchical nations based on religion and to actively ‘Hinduise’ urban space. Current practices of the law enable the state to police boundaries between Muslim areas and adjoining Hindu localities, sealing their porosity and preventing the formation of mixed areas by restricting property transfers. The article uses semi-structured interviews, mapping techniques, participant observation and official data as sources of evidence. It maps ‘disturbed areas’ in Ahmedabad for the first time and presents previously unpublished data on applications for property transfers between persons of different religions under the Act. The article argues that ethnocratic planning combines with a range of other vectors, such as targeted anti-Muslim violence, the hindrance of justice and reconciliation thereafter and the persistent vilification of minorities, to produce saffron geographies of exclusion in Ahmedabad. These saffron geographies of exclusion are grids of Hinduised spaces cleansed of Muslim presence that embody the ascendancy of the ideology of Hindutva over the city and simultaneously create Muslim ghettos.

Empire, diplomacy, and the racial imagination: Spain at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932)

ABSTRACT This article uses Spain's participation at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932) as the basis to raise questions pertaining to the place of Arab music in the racial imagination of Europeans. It argues that Spain's unique response to the challenges arising from the study of Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry reveals still uncharted tensions and fractures running through musicology and Orientalist discourse at the time. My line of inquiry sheds light on the origins and characteristics of the forms of self-reflexivity evident in the musicological work produced by Spain and other European countries. In what ways did the shifting tectonics of North African politics impact or even impair the capacity of European musicological discourse to inscribe Arab music in the global imagination in ways supportive of Europe's identity projects? To what extent was the discourse on Arab music emerging in the context of colonial rivalry suitable for Spain to rewrite the memories of its past of anti-Muslim violence? What could Spain's unique position as both an insider and an outsider relative to notions of Europe reveal about western attitudes towards Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry? The answers to these questions lie not only with the peculiar ways in which Spain addressed its identity crises, but also with the extent to which the Cairo Congress exposed the inadequacy of reigning paradigms in musicology, anthropology and the social sciences, and underscored their inability to keep up with the changing face of North African societies.

“Fight, Die, and If Required Kill”: Hindu Nationalism, Misinformation, and Islamophobia in India

This article provides a deep dive into several recent cases of majoritarian hate speech and violence perpetrated against Muslims in India. We first provide an introduction to Hindutva as a social movement in India, followed by an examination of three case studies in which Islamophobic hate speech circulated on social media, as well as several instances of anti-Muslim violence. These case studies—the Delhi riots, the Love Jihad conspiracy theory, and anti-Muslim disinformation related to the COVID pandemic—show that Hindu nationalism in India codes the Muslim minority in the country as particularly dangerous and untrustworthy.

COVID Roundtable

COVID Roundtable

Life after violence in North India: Islamic relief organizations and transactional relationships in a plural humanitarian space

AbstractReligious humanitarianism is often closely scrutinized, as it is either viewed as exerting a positive influence in post-conflict contexts—through peace-building and sense-making—or a negative one—through proselytism and division. This article contends that both these (negative and positive) perspectives on the role played by religious organizations overemphasize, to a certain extent, their transformative power in post-conflict contexts, at least in the short term. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with both Islamic and non-confessional humanitarian organizations supporting internally displaced people—victims of anti-Muslim violence in Muzaffarnagar, India—I suggest that the inherent plurality and competitive dimension of the humanitarian field leads to a form of transactional relationship between displaced people and organizations and tends to reduce the importance of ideological differences between organizations. Paying attention to this particularity of the humanitarian field and how displaced people deal with it can provide us with a better understanding of the actual influence of religious humanitarianism in post-conflict contexts.

The Muslim Minority-Phobia in Context: A Critical Study on Majoritarian Ideology and the Structural Roots of Anti-Muslim Phenomenon in the Post-War Sri Lanka

In post-war Sri Lanka waves of anti-Muslim riots and violence has become a common trend. This paper critically analyses how the century old Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian ideology contributes to the post-war anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka. This paper argues that post-war Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence is not just a matter of political gambling or electoral strategy of political parties. Instead, it resulted from the deep-rooted extreme Buddhist majoritarian ideology that tries to drive the state and the society towards an exclusive Buddhist state. The ideology creates a cultural legitimacy to criminalize the Muslims as “invaders” and “the other” within Sri Lanka. This cultural cover up has led to epidemic direct and structural violence across the island. Hence, this paper suggests that the conflict management process should diverted towards structural changes, which includes both the constitutional and educational aspects, into account, rather than depending solely on the civil society driven inter-community co-existence projects.

Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

As the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we contemplate and reflect on the current social/political imagination of terror(ism) and U.S./Canadian patriotism. For educators seeking to unpack 9/11 and its reverberations, it is important to highlight Islamophobic and anti-Muslim racism, discrimination, prejudice, and violence, as well as to consider Muslim students’ lived experiences. (Re)thinking about whose voices are included (or not) within the nexus of sociopolitical power is an important step toward justice and then rapprochement within and beyond the classroom. We consider this assemblage of articles to be a distinctly communal effort that responds to and attempts to disrupt the (perpetual) echoes of terror(ism) which became amplified by/through the events of 9/11.

Islamophobia in Myanmar: the Rohingya genocide and the ‘war on terror’

This article analyses the Rohingya genocide of August 2017. The accusation of genocide has been denied by the state of Myanmar, but what is demonstrated here is how the phenomenon of Islamophobia – anti-Muslim racism – informed, sanctioned and culminated in a genocide whose consequences are ongoing. Islamophobia has generally been understood to relate to the ‘othering’ of Muslims in settler societies and the nations of the global North, as documented by critical race, postcolonial and feminist scholars, with much of the current discourse on it structured around the ‘war on terror’. But increasingly, it has also come to encompass systemic racism and anti-Muslim violence in the global South, with, in Myanmar, the ‘war on terror’ used to sanitise more recent violence against the Rohingya. This article examines both structural Islamophobia, and the Islamophobia of private actors in Myanmar, in particular the powerful Buddhist extremist movement. It demonstrates that the co-dependent relationship between structural and private Islamophobia since military rule in Myanmar, in the absence of a strong and unified resistance, contributed to the genocide. Moreover, the troubling logic used to defend state-sponsored violence and killing in Myanmar bears a number of similarities to Islamophobic trajectories in other spaces of the global South in the context of the ‘war on terror’.

Anti-Muslim Violence, Hate Crime, and Victimization in Canada: A Study of Five Canadian Cities

The major sociological theories explaining social violence omit both the daily violence suffered by certain social categories and its many impacts on the victims. In 2019, we conducted face-to-face and/or phone-based interviews with fifty-one persons who identified themselves as Muslim and who had suffered hate words or gestures in public space. The (51) interviewees were living in one of five major Canadian cities. The results of our study show the negative effects of hate acts that they have suffered, be it on their moral conditions, their daily routine, their religious practice, or their sense of belonging to Canada. They testify to the harmful impact of hate crimes on individuals and on the social fabric.

Muslim Minority in Post-war Sri Lanka: A Case Study of Aluthgama and Digana Violences

Sri Lanka saw an unprecedented degree of anti-Muslim sentiment followed by violence perpetrated by certain extremist elements in recent years. This article primarily examines the implications of anti-Muslim violence that occurred from Aluthgama to Digana and the causes behind the violence. The article shows that anti-Muslim sentiment is manifested in several dimensions: campaigns against Halal, Muslim attire, cattle slaughter, and attacks on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses. This manifestation has resulted in violence against Muslims, causing massive damages to their properties. The study argues that fear of growing Muslim population, economic competition with Muslims, Mahavamsa mentality, and exceptionalism to Buddhist clergies, fear of Islam, and formation of ethnic-based political parties are the causes of anti-Muslim sentiment which later culminated in the form of violence. Therefore, the government needs to enforce law and order equally on all citizens and ensure a policy of multiculturalism and tolerance is strictly maintained.

Hybridity, National Identity, and the Smartphone in the Contemporary Union of Myanmar

Hybridity, National Identity, and the Smartphone in the Contemporary Union of Myanmar

Mob, Murder, Motivation: The Emergence of Hate Crime Discourse in India

Since 2015, various legal and civil society actors started highlighting the visible rise in media-recorded incidents of anti-Dalit and anti-Muslim violence in the country. These conversations were marked by diverse and competing ways of describing and legally addressing such events. One of the categories that the various actors came to deploy was hate crime. The hate crime concept is distinct from other alternatives like lynching, communal riot and vigilantism due to its simultaneous focus on motivation and social hierarchy. In response to a set of petitions in 2018, the Supreme Court of India through a series of guidelines in Tehseen Poonawalla v Union of India, sought to introduce greater official accountability, procedural protection to victims and witnesses, and more stringent punishment for perpetrators. This article argues that the Court’s intervention is best interpreted in the light of the hate crime concept. This is evident when we situate the case in the longer trajectory of the media and public discourse, the framing of the legal arguments, and finally the Court’s order. Nevertheless, the article argues that while there is a definite emergence of the hate crime framework in the Indian legal and policy discourse, it continues to be inconsistently and contradictorily applied to the detriment of coherence and effectiveness. The article concludes that the most effective way to address these limitations is to foreground the conceptual and institutional recourses of the hate crime concept.

Proto-fascism and State impunity in Majoritarian India: An Interview with Teesta Setalvad

This interview with Teesta Setalvad was conducted in the wake of the February 2020 anti-Muslim violence in North East Delhi. Drawing on her vast experience as a human rights activist, journalist, and peace educator, Setalvad’s responses map the continuum — across years, anti-minority pogroms and ruling parties with divergent ideologies — of the cultures of hate, and the practices of state repression and impunity in a proto-fascist India. Setalvad offers an interrogation of the ideology of the Hindu right, delves into the historical trajectories of the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She also charts the repeating patterns of police and media complicity in fomenting anti-minority hate and critically analyses the contradictory role of the criminal law and the Constitution of India in both enabling and resisting communal violence. In conclusion, she offers hopeful strategies for keeping alive the promise of secularism.

Mob, Murder, Motivation: The Emergence of Hate Crime Discourse in India

Since 2015, various legal and civil society actors started highlighting the visible rise in media-recorded incidents of anti-Dalit and anti-Muslim violence in the country. These conversations were marked by diverse and competing ways of describing and legally addressing such events. One of the categories that the various actors came to deploy was hate crime. The hate crime concept is distinct from other alternatives like lynching, communal riots, and vigilantism due to its simultaneous focus on motivation and social hierarchy. In response to a set of petitions in 2018, the Supreme Court of India through a series of guidelines in Tehseen Poonawalla v Union of India, sought to introduce greater official accountability, procedural protection to victims and witnesses, and more stringent punishment for perpetrators. This article argues that the Court’s intervention is best interpreted in the light of the hate crime concept. This is evident when we situate the case in the longer trajectory of the media and public discourse, the framing of the legal arguments, and finally the Court’s order. Nevertheless, the article argues that while there is a definite emergence of the hate crime framework in the Indian legal and policy discourse, it continues to be inconsistently and contradictorily applied to the detriment of coherence and effectiveness. The article concludes that the most effective way to address these limitations is to foreground the conceptual and institutional resources of the hate crime concept.

Myanmar: The Rohingya Crises as an Analytic Lens to Understanding Violent Extremism

On November 28, 2016, an Ohio State University student drove his car into pedestrians on campus. He then exited the vehicle and stabbed multiple people with a butcher’s knife before a law enforcement officer killed him. Mere minutes prior to the attack, the 18-year-old student complained in a Facebook post that he had reached a “boiling point” and was “sick and tired” of seeing Muslims around the globe “killed and tortured.” While his post began with a broad condemnation of anti-Muslim violence “everywhere,” it then referenced the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, specifically. The attacker’s stated motivations - no matter how unjustified and reprehensible his actions - are significant for a number of reasons. First, the attack demonstrates the international ripple effects that a humanitarian and human rights crisis seemingly regional in nature have in an increasingly interconnected world. Second, it evidences the myriad factors that “push” or “pull” individuals - from Myanmar to the United States - towards violent extremism. Third, it also illustrates how extremist violence creates a cycle that culminates not only in mass migration but transnational violence. This chapter explores these themes in greater depth, employing the Rohingya crises in Myanmar as its analytic lens to better understand violent extremism in both minority and non-minority contexts.