Race, Gender, and Religion: Islamophobia and beyond

Abstract

This article focuses on anti-Muslim racism as a discourse that collapses race and religion and cannot be reduced to phobia. It is instead about a racial project of accumulation based on European superiority and how cultural racism upholds the European civilizational project. The author argues that Islamophobia should be traced back to colonial modernity, its regimes of othering, and its perception of Islam as Mohammedanism that conceals its nature as a fetishistic, primitive, barbaric, patriarchal, and irrational set of beliefs. To illustrate anti-Muslim racism, the author elaborates briefly on three interconnected ideas: the construction of Islam as a unified religious and cultural mindset, its fetishistic character, and its enigmatic image of the woman to reflect on how Islam is presented as the antonym of Western civilization.