Runnymede Trust Research Articles

Accept or challenge? Exploring the experiences of pre‐service teachers from minoritised groups

AbstractThe shortage of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups is well documented. Over the past decade, a body of research has confirmed that discrimination and inequality is a factor in the recruitment of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups in England. Drawing on findings from the 2017 Runnymede Trust Report, which highlighted Bristol's lack of racial diversity within the teaching community, this paper explores the experiences of a group of pre‐service teachers on university teacher education routes who are minoritised within the general teaching population. The identified lack of diversity in the teacher workforce extends beyond race to other aspects of identity and representation in the classroom and is mirrored in teacher education. A series of focus group interviews were conducted across a 9‐month period. Results are presented as vignettes to capture the voice of minoritised participants. The findings have implications for the recruitment and retention of a diverse teacher workforce, as well as highlighting the need to ensure a sense of belonging for all pre‐service teachers entering the teaching community. This paper proposes a model relating to the analysis of critical incidents, which aims to inform future research into how pre‐service teachers respond to critical incidents regarding their identity. This model seeks to clarify tensions in the diverse lived experiences of pre‐service teachers and helps to explore the importance of context.

Aksi PEGIDA Terhadap Pengungsi Muslim di Jerman

This research examines the actions of Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) towards Muslim refugees in Germany through the framework of Islamophobia as formulated by the Runnymede Trust. The study utilizes a qualitative methodology with a descriptive-analytical research design to comprehend the nature and implications of PEGIDA's anti-Muslim sentiments and actions within the broader context of the refugee crisis in Germany. The research begins by discussing the refugee crisis and the development of Islamophobia in Germany, which serves as the rationale for the rise of PEGIDA. The study identifies the main objectives of the group and the prevailing public sentiments towards Muslim refugees. Based on the Islamophobia framework, this research analyzes the ideological foundations and strategies employed by PEGIDA. The conceptual framework examines aspects of prejudice, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices faced by the Muslim community due to PEGIDA's actions, which contribute to the academic discourse on Islamophobia, right-wing movements, and refugee integration in Europe. The results of this research reveal that PEGIDA's actions, based on aspects of Islamophobia, have created divisions between the society and refugees that can lead to crimes. The government has also made several efforts to address this issue, including reapplying the Dublin Regulation and collaborating with Turkey.

REVISITING RHS'S ‘RACE, ETHNICITY & EQUALITY IN UK HISTORY: A REPORT AND RESOURCE FOR CHANGE’

AbstractThis paper considers the Royal Historical Society (RHS)'s ‘Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History’ report published in 2018. The report contained the findings of a survey sent to staff and students working or studying in History higher education in the United Kingdom. In this paper, I reflect on the various findings of the report related to staff and student numbers, the attainment gap between white and Black and Ethnic Minority students, the curriculum, and racial harassment in History within universities. The RHS report emerged out of the work done by a number of organisations championing race and equality in the sector over decades. By connecting the work of RHS to these earlier initiatives it is possible to map a broader societal change in the historical sector to address historic inequalities, racialised disadvantage and structural exclusion. The RHS and institutions such as Runnymede Trust, the Institute of Historical Research, and Leading Routes are championing greater racial and ethnic equality which reflects broader political, economic and cultural transformations taking place in Britain. In this paper, I show how the RHS is part of an important conversation in foregrounding racial and ethnic equality in the historical profession to the inevitable benefit of History higher education.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

New research that will explore mental health interventions for young people affected by racism as well as ways to level the playing field for people of color in the music industry across genres has been launched, NME reported Oct. 11. The initiative, funded through Sony Music's Social Justice Fund, sees mental health charity Mind and race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust partner with Sony Music UK to deliver important new findings. Sony Music UK and Mind's Young People and Racial Trauma project will investigate the best mental health interventions for young people affected by racism. Per a press release, the new project will “seek to understand the best blueprint for interventions and support, given statistics show that people from racialised groups may be more likely to experience mental health problems but less likely to receive appropriate mental health support.” And Sony Music's work with The Runnymede Trust will deliver “ground‐breaking research exploring structural barriers that may prevent [B]lack, brown and ethnically diverse artists from starting or succeeding within genres where such artists are less represented.”

Offline: Independent science advice for COVID-19—at last

“Is the government's objective to suppress infection or to manage the infection?”, asked Sir David King at the first press conference of a newly formed independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), held last week. The UK now has two SAGEs. The officially constituted SAGE has seen its reputation collapse during the past 3 months. Partly, this loss of credibility arose out of the group's unwillingness to be transparent about its membership and its proceedings. At a moment of national emergency, SAGE's secrecy simply became unacceptable. The public had a right to know the evidence on which advice was being made to government—advice that was not only protecting lives but also destroying livelihoods. But the official SAGE luxuriated in elite insouciance. It displayed a very British characteristic: the arrogance of exceptionalism. Rarely has a publicly constituted body been so out of touch with the public mood for accountability. By striking contrast, the independent SAGE published its membership before holding its first meeting. A more gender and ethnically diverse scientific group than the official SAGE, the new committee was also broader in the range of science it drew upon. Public health was its core, but it also included experts on modelling, behavioural science, and public policy. This wider intellectual reach made its recommendations more relevant to the UK's current predicament. The first meeting was broadcast on YouTube, giving the public full access to the difficult judgments needed to steer the country out of lockdown. It also displayed the challenges faced by political decision makers who have to ensure the country is prepared should a second wave of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic ensue. “I completely disagree with you Martin”, replied Allyson Pollock to Martin McKee at one point. He had suggested that legislation to reform the health and social care system in the aftermath of COVID-19 was unlikely in the short term. Pollock disagreed. She believed that legislation was possible if the political will was there. It was an example of the transparency many observers of the regime of science policy making had been craving. The recommendations from the independent SAGE focused on five additional areas beyond seeking clarification of the government's overall objective in managing the pandemic. First, how was the government planning to ensure financial security for the most marginalised groups in society, including black and minority ethnic populations? COVID-19 has revealed, exploited, and accentuated deep socioeconomic and racial disparities in the UK. As Zubaida Haque noted, the existing “economic safety net is not enough”. Haque is deputy director of the Runnymede Trust and an expert on race equality. The government had ignored those least able to protect themselves, she argued. Second, community public health and primary care systems needed to be urgently strengthened. Pollock directs the Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science. She pointed out that community public health had been decimated during the past decade. Third, improved long-term planning was required to meet the needs of those most at risk of infection—by increasing intensive care capacity, for example. Fourth, policies were needed to control borders—at seaports, airports, and for train services to Europe. And finally, the emphasis on vaccines as a means to return life to some measure of normality should be tempered by accepting that no vaccine was going to be a perfect “magic bullet”. As Deenan Pillay, Professor of Virology at University College London, stressed, even if a vaccine was made and manufactured by the end of the year it was unlikely to be completely effective and would almost certainly not be universally taken up. King's argument for setting up a rival body to SAGE was that ensuring public trust in scientific advice given to government demanded that those giving advice should not be dependent on the government. Too many of those on the official SAGE were government employees. This first meeting of an independent SAGE set a new standard for science policy making. The openness of the process, vigour of discussion, and identification of issues so far barely discussed by politicians injected much-needed candour into public and political discussions about COVID-19. It is hard to predict the longevity of this new group. But its point was made. On the same day it held its first meeting, the government published the names of the members of the official SAGE.

Book Review European States and Their Muslim Citizens: The Impact Of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries

Book Review European States and Their Muslim Citizens: The Impact Of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries

Islamophobia : An Attitude or a Real Threat.

There is much hue and cry in many parts of the world as to the threats of fanatic Islam practitioners and various radical terrorist outfits. What will be the outcome of such fanaticism? Perhaps …… a total collapse of humanity for the so called beliefs of one religion. Present time is under the threats and clutches of Islamophobia. ‘Islamophobia’ is defined by the British Runnymede Trust as the “dread or hatred of Islam and therefore, fear and dislike of all Muslims”. It also refers to the practice of discriminating against Muslims by excluding them from the economic, social, and public life of the nation. Muslims believe their religion to be a religion of peace and totality but many people find it to be the contrary. In order to establish their religion as a religion of the whole world and also to establish Islamic State, it has been noted that Jihadis or Religious Terrorists are distorting the tenets of Islam and also using its ideology for brain-wash the Muslim youths to meet their ends. Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. The growth and regional migration of Muslims combined with the ongoing impact of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other extremist groups that commit acts of violence in the name of Islam, have brought Muslims and the Islamic faith to the forefront of the political debate in many countries. There is no concord among various Muslim sects as to what is and is not acceptable as lesser jihad. Richard Ostling, in his, ‘Is Islam a “Religion of Peace?” says that “Amid the general mayhem now afflicting the Muslim world, venerable understanding of Islam is defined by a rising movement that’s attractive to a subset of young Muslims. It claims divine sanction to embrace thievery, torture, mutilation, terrorism, suicide bombing, kidnapping for ransom, sexual slavery, gruesome executions without trial, killing of envoys and guest aid workers, slaughter of worshippers and Jews and Christians, and of fellow Muslims who dissent from those who hold power or belong to rival factions.” Muslims extremists attack Muslims and non-Muslims alike, committing the most atrocious and despicable acts of terrorism under the pretense of promoting what these terrorists consider being ‘pure Islam.’ The effort here is to find out the significance of the term in present context and see whether it is just a hyped word or really has some implications at present as we are witnessing the operations of radical Muslim outfits like ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Qaida, Hizbul etc. increasing day by day and threatening humanity.

Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia edited by DeborahGabriel and Shirley AnnTate. London, UK: Trentham Books/IOE Press, 2017, 164 pp., £24.36, ISBN10-185856848X, ISBN13-978-185856848.

Women of colour (WoC) working in British academia have been waiting a long time for a book like Ivory Tower to be published by a British publisher. Since, for far too long, our stories, experiences and marginalization have been ignored or left unattended to by the university sector we work in. In the post‐feminist post‐race university (Tate & Bagguley, 2017) women have been encouraged to identify only one area of difference that determines their marginalization by structures of power — their sex (Lorde, 1984; see also Liu, 2018). This narrow focus on sex permits a sector‐wide fictionalization of WoC's career trajectories that occludes Whiteness and class from an analysis of why WoC in academia are the most bullied, precarious, underpaid and junior workers in a given faculty (Runnymede Trust, 2017). By centering and drawing on Black Feminisms, Ivory Tower, as an edited volume of ten chapters written by ten British women academics of colour,supplies multiple counter‐narratives to the post‐feminist post‐race fictionalization. Drawing on similar projects from across the Atlantic (e.g., Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012), these narratives are published in the hope that they may spark critical consciousness among their readers who can then take the steps of informing others that WoC exist in British academia and that they are needed (Wilson, 2017). To this extent, Ivory Tower is much more than a book, writes Gabriel (2017, p. 3) in her introduction, it is a ‘collective research project centred on discursive activism’.

Islamofobia brasileira online: discursos fechados sobre o Islam em uma rede social

Atualmente, circulam representações negativas sobre os muçulmanos em diferentes redes sociais, operando uma estereotipia dos muçulmanos e do Islam. A islamofobia, compreendida enquanto ações de violência simbólica ou física contra muçulmanos pelo mero fato de serem muçulmanos, é pressuposta enquanto o mote dessas representações. A apreensão de que os muçulmanos seriam uma ameaça constata-se desde o medievo. O presente texto visa expor as oito leituras de discurso islamofóbico presentes no relatório do The Runnymede Trust aplicadas sobre postagens na rede social Twitter, de modo a constatar tais modalidades de islamofobia online. As leituras são de que o Islam é monolítico, estático, alheio à nossa sociedade, inferior, nêmesis, manipulador, sendo justificável a discriminação contra muçulmanos, desmerecendo a crítica ao Ocidente realizada pelos muçulmanos e naturalizando o discurso anti-Islam. Os exemplos mobilizados indicam a presença de esquemas de preconceito já identificados em outros países. Para tanto, remetemos a pesquisas e relatórios internacionais. Em nosso levantamento, apreendemos também a leitura de que o Islam não é uma religião, mas uma ideologia. Concluímos refletindo sobre o posicionamento islamofóbico ser tratado enquanto manifestação de barbárie.

“Most Muslims are Like You and I, but ‘Real’ Muslims . . .”

The aim of this article is to analyse the views of a public critic of Islam, namely the Swedish Somali-born former Muslim Mona Walter (b. 1973). She has been selected because she has been very active in online media, social media and more ‘traditional’ forms of media such as print, radio and broadcasting. In my analysis I will discuss whether her thoughts can be viewed as Islamophobic, and if so to what extent. To decide on this matter, I have compared her statements about Islam with how the Runnymede Trust and the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (brå) define Islamophobia. The empirical data consist of an online interview with Mona Walter for the Swedish podcast rlm. This particular interview has been chosen for analysis because this program has been associated with anti-Muslim views and is renowned for its strong criticism of Sweden’s migration policies and its multicultural society. The interview with Walter is analysed with the help of a content analysis.

When the Victims are not so Innocent: Extremist Muslim Activity in Western Bloc Countries

When the Victims are not so Innocent: Extremist Muslim Activity in Western Bloc Countries Khaleel Mohammed To some observers, the horrific crimes on 9/11 were not just the work of a few Muslim extremists, but rather the culmination of a philosophy preached by a religion bent on world domination. This negative image of Islam and Muslims, however, did not begin on September 11, 2001. Two decades before this event, Edward Said, had observed: So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Arabs and Muslims are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab‐Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession is to report the Arab World. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make the world vulnerable to military aggression. In the 1997 reprint of his Covering Islam, Said further noted that, “malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable from 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, other Orientals or Asians” (Said , xii). To add to the egregiousness of this discrimination, Jack Shaheen has documented almost 900 films from the beginning of the cinema industry in the West, starting in 1896, that show how Arabs (read “Muslims”) have been constantly portrayed as “brutal, heartless, uncivilized fanatics and money‐mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews” (Shaheen , 172). The recent furor over Donald Trump's failure to correct a supporter who assumed President Obama to be a Muslim, as well as Ben Carson's statement about not voting for a Muslim president only underline the pervasive demonization of Muslims in America. Anti‐Muslim prejudices in the U.S The word Islamophobia has been widely used to denote such prejudice against Islam. The term came into prominence with the 1997 Runnymede Trust's publication, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, although it had been used earlier without much notice (Richardson ). In opposition to the Runnymede Trust findings, some popular writers stridently claim that there is no such thing as Islamophobia—arguing that is it perfectly acceptable for people to state their feelings against a faith whose followers commit acts of terror with a goal to world domination. The pervasiveness of the negative depiction in films and news media, however, completely debunks this contention. In the week after 9/11, Arabs and South Asians reported 645 cases of bias and hate crimes (Cainkar ). During 2001, anti‐Muslim hate crimes in the United States increased by 1,700 percent. In the hurriedly passed Patriot Act of October 2001, John Ashcroft, the born‐again Christian U.S. Attorney General, rounded up 1,200 Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men on suspicion of possible ties to terrorism (Curtis IV , 100). Authorities stopped counting after that number, due to what it termed “statistical confusion” (Abdo , 84). Citing the need for national security, officials refused to release the names of the detainees or to allow them access to lawyers; they held them in custody without charging them with any crimes; in some cases, they refused to even notify their families. Although the importance of religion is often downplayed in the United States, a Newsweek poll in 2009 showed that approximately 62 percent of Americans believed the USA to be a Christian nation. Church leaders have not been reluctant to weigh in with their views of Islam and Muslims. In October 2002, Jerry Falwell, at the time Chancellor and President of Liberty University, the largest private Christian college in the USA, pronounced Muhammad a terrorist, the opposite of Jesus and Moses. Franklin Graham, son of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, called Islam a “violent and evil” religion. He later amended this sentiment to, Islam “is not the faith of this country. And that is not the religion that built this nation. The people of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith...

Islamophobia and Anti‐Semitism: Shared Prejudice or Singular Social Pathologies

Islamophobia and Anti‐Semitism: Shared Prejudice or Singular Social Pathologies Michael Dobkowski There is no doubt: there has been a significant rise in anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia in recent years. Both have deep roots in history as well as being generated by more recent political and economic influences. Some see them as basically parallel phenomena, characterized more by their similarities than their differences. Others believe that anti‐Semitism is a unique prejudice that really stands alone and cannot be compared to Islamophobia or even racism. What I will attempt to do in this essay is to provide a theoretical and historical framework for approaching this complex and controversial question. I don't expect my analysis will satisfy everyone, but I do hope it will generate additional thinking on these impactful “hatreds.” The roots of Islamophobia Let me briefly begin with some context. Islamophobia is a term first put into use in 1997 in a report of the Runnymede Trust, a think tank in Britain launched by the British Home Secretary Jack Straw. It was given further currency by the 2001 UN conference on racism at Durban that most observers believe devolved from an examination of racism to an exercise in racism and anti‐Semitism. Israel was singled out for special criticism prompting the U.S. delegates to walk out. The official declarations eventually included a reference to anti‐Semitism, but this was counterbalanced by the addition of Islamophobia suggesting an equivalency between the two phenomena. Clearly, Muslim populations around the world are experiencing a hostile pressure and waves of discrimination that come from non‐Muslim populations of various sorts—the product of Hindu–Muslim tensions in India, of Christian–Muslim competition in Africa, of Jewish–Arab disputes in Israel and Palestine, and of anti‐Muslim immigrant sentiment in Europe and North America. There have been countless incidents of stereotyping, scapegoating, and bigotry directed against Muslims because of their religious identity. There exists a huge and profound ignorance about Islam. There is no shortage of voices proclaiming that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic tradition, that horrific violence against enemies of Islam and people defined as infidels have deep Qur'anic roots (Yoffie , 121). Many believe and are spreading the image that Islam is the enemy of the West, America, and Israel and that it is a religion prone to violence and terrorism. This tendency is certainly fueled by a long tradition of anti‐Muslim discourse in Western history and culture—from Dante to Don Quixote, to basic Orientalist scholarship; it has been exacerbated by ignorance, bigotry, and post‐9/11 fears. Islamophobia is real and to a certain extent is ingrained in Western culture. In his Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrated that the West's reified view of Islam has its roots in European colonialism. In his Covering Islam, he showed how these colonial notions continue to influence Western coverage of the Middle East in the 1990s. Islamophobia needs to be examined and confronted. It results from ignorance and from limited social contact, which is in turn buttressed by conflict and violence occurring around the world and its treatment by mainstream culture. This anxiety, like most prejudices, relies on a sense of otherness (Mattson , 129–130). Similarly, anti‐Semitism remains a persistent prejudice. The murder of Jewish shoppers at the Parisian Hyper Casher supermarket on January 9, 2015, after the killing of twelve people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, was particularly disturbing, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a troubling pattern. By every measure, there has been a rise of anti‐Semitism around the world—incidents of violence and intimidation, negative polling data, incitement, desecrations, rhetoric, etc. In 2006, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Paris. In 2012, Mehdi Nemmouche killed four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammad Merah. In early February 2015, there were killings in Copenhagen, and 300 Jewish graves were desecrated in Eastern France. Additionally, there were smaller affronts like the popularity of the quenelle gesture (a reverse Nazi salute...

Passing the Dinner Table Test

Through establishing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia and Cross-Government Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred, the Coalition government has afforded significance to Islamophobia. Focusing on definition, evidence, and politics, this article considers British governmental policy approaches to tackling Islamophobia over the past 15 years. Tracing religiously based discrimination from the 1980s to the publication of the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 groundbreaking report into Islamophobia, this article explores how the New Labour government sought primarily to address Islamophobia through a broadening of the equalities framework. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and 7/7, a concurrent security and antiterror agenda had detrimental impacts. Under the Coalition, there has been a marked change. Considering recent developments and initiatives, the Coalition has seemingly rejected Islamophobia as an issue of equalities preferring approaches more akin to tackling Anti-Semitism. In conclusion, definition, evidence, and politics are revisited to offer a prospective for future British governmental policy.

Careless talk can have serious consequences

Few people set out to discriminate against others on the grounds of their ethnicity or sexual orientation, but unintentional racism or homophobia is still commonplace. Evidence that this is the case was laid out last week in a hard-hitting report from the charity Stonewall and the Runnymede Trust think tank.

Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.

Islamophobia (review)

Reviewed by: Islamophobia Simon Sorgenfrei Islamophobia by Chris Allen, 2010. Farnham: Ashgate, 210 pp., £16.99 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5140-6. [AC] Ever since the UK-based think tank the Runnymede Trust published the report Islamophobia: A Challenge for us All in 1997, the phenomenon and concept of Islamophobia has been widely discussed and debated by scholars and journalists alike. There are supporters of the term as well as stern critics. One of the most active scholars in these discussions has been Chris Allen, at the University of Birmingham, UK. Soon after the atrocities of 9/11, Allen co-authored the Summary Report on Islamophobia in the EU after 11 September 2001 with Jorgen S. Nielsen (University of Copenhagen), and since then he has published a number of articles and book contributions on the subject. In 2006 he defended his PhD thesis entitled Islamophobia: Contested Concept in the Public Space. His most recent book, simply entitled Islamophobia, without any subtitle, must be comprehended as a summing up of more than ten years of research on the subject. Sitting in Sweden, I was asked to review Allen's book just months after Anders Behring Breivik blew up parts of central Oslo, including government buildings, killing eight persons before going on to shoot sixty-nine young Social Democrats by hand at the nearby island of Utøya. Just hours before the killings Breivik published a more than 1,500 pages long 'manifesto' which in itself can be said to summarize the central claims and ideas of the islamophobic discourse. It is inevitable that this influences my reading of Allen's book, even though it was written and published before these acts of terror. Chris Allen's Islamophobia can roughly be split in two parts; first comes an empirical section stretching between chapters 1 and 7, discussing the term per se, Christian-European images of, and relations to, Islam and Muslims in past and present, and a number of events which makes up the case that is analyzed and defined in the second section of the book. The last four chapters of the book are more theoretical in character and here is where Allen presents his own [End Page 216] definition of the concept, based on the findings and considerations presented in the preceding chapters. The material presented and analyzed is taken from a European context, with a strong focus on the UK and Western Europe. After scrutinising historical images and ideas of Islam and Muslims in the West, Allen concludes that islamophobia is to be considered a contemporary phenomenon, even though a number of its building blocks borrow from historical narratives. Following a brief discussion of the origin of the term, he uses the Runnymede report as a starting point for the general discussion on islamophobia, as well as for his own investigation. He disposes two whole chapters (four and five) to deconstruct and criticise the Runnymede report, and much of his later discussions, as well as his own attempt at a definition, relate to it as well. Allen's critique of the report is, if not new or original, thorough and convincing. A main merit of his book is that Allen is methodical and meticulous in each step of his argumentation, showing how and why he believes some argumentation or definition is flawed or weak, rather than just pointing out he believes it is so. He scrutinizes the Runnymede report's failure to differ between ethnic-cultural background and religion, as well as between racism and what will later be defined as islamophobia. Following Fred Halliday he also turns against the report's classification of 'open' and 'closed' attitudes towards Islam and Muslims, which, he claims, forces people into being either 'islamophobes' or 'islamophiles'. As 'closed' and 'open' are largely interchangeable with 'negative' and 'positive' [. ..] the assumption must be that the report suggests that Islam be both understood and engaged with 'openly' or indeed 'positively', irrespectively of whether any 'closed' or 'negative' realities exist to the contrary. (74) In this critique, two of the most important constituents of Allen's own definition can be detected, the need for a definition which avoids 'essentialising' Islam or Muslims, as well as a...

Beyond Islamophobia and Islamophilia as Western Epistemic Racisms: Revisiting Runnymede Trust's Definition in a World-History Context

The media have become obsessed with something called “Islam,” which in their voguish lexicon has acquired only two meanings, both of them unacceptable and impoverishing. On the one hand, “Islam” represents the threat of a resurgent atavism, which suggests not only the menace of a return to the Middle Ages but the destruction of what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls the democratic order in the Western world. On the other hand, “Islam” is made to stand for a defensive counterresponse to this first image of Islam as threat, especially when, for geopolitical reasons, “good” Moslems like the Saudi Arabians or the Afghan Moslem “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union are in question. … But rejection alone does not take one very far, since if we are to claim, as we must, that as a religion and as a civilization Islam does have a meaning very much beyond either of the two currently given it, we must first be able to provide something in the way of a space in which to speak of Islam. Those who wish either to rebut the standard anti-Islamic and anti-Arab rhetoric that dominates the media and liberal intellectual discourse, or to avoid the idealization of Islam (to say nothing of its sentimentalization), find themselves with scarcely a place to stand on, much less a place in which to move freely. (Said, 1980:488)

Is race no longer a significant disadvantage?<BR> Philip Dayle reports on a debate held by the Runnymede Trust that is at the heart of <I>RET</I>

Is race no longer a significant disadvantage?<BR> Philip Dayle reports on a debate held by the Runnymede Trust that is at the heart of <I>RET</I>

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media

Personalised medicine: who is an Asian?

“The Asian word is abused…I would rather somebody called me ‘Indian’, ‘Hindu’—but to be called Asian is a violation…Half of Russia is Asian but they are never called ‘Asian’. Chinese are Asians and they are never called ‘Asians’. They are called ‘Chinese’. But Indians, somehow, become ‘Asians’ as though they own the whole of the continent of Asia.” “Actually I'm not an Asian, I'm a Hindu.” 1 Department for Communities and Local GovernmentConnecting British Hindus, an enquiry into the identity and public policy engagement of British Hindus by the Runnymede Trust. 2006. http://www.hfb.org.uk/FileServer.aspx?oID=307&lID=0 Google Scholar These quotations, from a UK Government report in 2006, 1 Department for Communities and Local GovernmentConnecting British Hindus, an enquiry into the identity and public policy engagement of British Hindus by the Runnymede Trust. 2006. http://www.hfb.org.uk/FileServer.aspx?oID=307&lID=0 Google Scholar expresses the views of two Hindus living in the UK about being labelled as Asian.