The “Trojan Horse” Plot and the Fear of Muslim Power in British State Schools

In 2014, an alleged “Trojan Horse” plot to Islamise education in a number of schools attended predominantly by diverse Muslim pupils in the inner city wards of Birmingham raised considerable questions. Ofsted investigations of 21 schools explored these concerns at the behest of the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove MP. At the head of this so-called plot, a certain Tahir Alam, once a darling of New Labour’s policies on British Muslim schools, faced the brunt of the media and political furore. Based on a series of face-to-face interviews with Alam in 2015 and 2016, this paper provides a detailed insight into the allegations, the context in which they emerged and the implications raised for young Muslims in the education system. Ultimately, as part of the government’s counter-terrorism policy the accusations of the “Islamisation” of education in these “Trojan Horse” schools foreshadowed the additional securitisation of all sectors of education. However, there was neither the evidence nor the legal justification to ratchet up anti-extremism education measures that eventually followed; namely the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. The consequences of the negative attention heightened existing Islamophobia but, paradoxically, they also limited the opportunities for de-radicalisation through education.     

Making the “Other” from “Us”: The Representation of British Converts to Islam in Mainstream British Newspapers

There is now a great deal of literature that shows how Islam and Muslims are routinely represented in negative ways in the mainstream newspapers. With overt or covert reliance on Orientalist discourse, discourses of cultural clash and extremism, including terror, are prevalent. Not only are Muslims less likely to feature in “normal” stories, abuse and prejudice against them is also more unlikely to constitute “news”. British converts to Islam have only recently begun to receive more focused attention, both in academia and in the mainstream press. Occupying a unique position in respect to the idea of the “other” and of integration in a multicultural society, converts offer a powerful point of critique of these concepts. The aim of this study is to understand how and in what discourses British converts to Islam are represented, and thereby contribute empirical knowledge to these theoretical concerns.     

The “Mainstreaming” of Halal: Muslim Consumer-Citizenship in Australia

Abstract

The expansion of halal commodities globally reveals how Muslims are an object of increasing commercial interest. In Australia, despite a hostile political context, the recognition of Muslims as consumers, captured by the growing availability of halal goods, is providing alternate modalities of belonging. Drawing on fieldwork from Melbourne, Australia, this paper illustrates the ways halal consumption works to produce local, national and global orientations in citizenship and belonging for Australian-Muslims. By paying close attention to ethnographic encounters, the paper demonstrates how participation in the research process played a significant role in shaping the way participants defined, delimited and expanded the meanings of halal and its relationship to identity claims and ethical consumption. The paper argues that the concept of consumer-citizenship offers an important prism for understanding these experiences and for challenging prevailing binaries of minority and mainstream belonging in a consumer society.     

Iconizing “Muslim Terrorism” in a British Newspaper and Public Perception

By examining a news story and reader responses published in the Daily Mail Online (DMO), our study discursively argues that this daily newspaper promotes an Orientalist perception of Islam and Muslims. The religion and its adherents are both framed and perceived as a threat to British society and its “Western values”, thus reinforcing Islamophobia within society. This study also argues that the DMO espouses the perceived Orientalist threat posed by Islam through juxtaposition, exaggeration and manipulation of facts, through lexical choices and visual images that eventually establishes the perception of a cultural clash. In addition, by examining the readers’ responses toward the news story, this study demonstrates that the vast majority of respondents perceive Islam and Muslims as a threat to “the West”. Their comments, as triggered by the text, also contribute to the discourse of Islamophobia and the perceived Orientalist view of an Islamic threat.     

Overcoming the Fear of the “Other”: Building Trust Between British Muslims and the Wider Community

Initiatives that seek to build community trust are timely given the increasing focus on terror-related attacks and the rise in associated hate crimes as well as scrutiny of the way Muslim leadership is responding to such incidents. This paper details a novel and proactive model that aims to improve and build trust between Muslims and the wider community. The Trust Building Project was found to accomplish its two objectives. Not only was there an improvement in participant knowledge of Islam scores but there was also evidence suggesting trust had improved through engagement, understanding and through getting to know one another. Listening and learning sought to dispel myths and highlight shared morals and values. We propose that through these interactions the basis to building a more trusting society can be formed. It is unclear to what extent this could reduce incidents of hate crime and discrimination, however social change has been shown to occur where there are grass roots initiatives and suggestions are made to examine how this work can be rolled out nationally in order to address the trust deficit seen within our society today.     

Urbanization of Muslim Community in India—A Metaphor for Development? Evidences from States of West Bengal and Kerala

Historically, the religious affiliation of urbanization in India has always rendered a relative advantage for Muslim Community. During 2000–2011, in situ urbanization process has strengthened this popular belief. This trend is more pronounced in the states of Kerala and West Bengal, perhaps due to the colossal escalation of new Census Towns (CTs). This present study is an endeavour to understand whether recent upsurge of urbanization among Muslims in India can be linked with “development” in these two states based on availabilities of Basic Urban Infrastructures (BUIs), principally in the new CTs. This has been done by employing an “availability index” of infrastructures by obtaining data from Village Directory of West Bengal and Kerala, Census of India. The BUIs include educational and health institutions, bus and railway services and drinking water facility. Most importantly, where these amenities were absent in 2001, the distance travelled by the inhabitants, to get access to these services has also been examined here. The study concludes through extending the debate on whether an increase in the number of population, particularly of Muslim community, in urban areas can be taken as a true signature of development or not.     

Ideal liberal subjects and Muslim “Others”: liberal nationalism and the racialization of Muslim youth in a progressive Danish school

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals of respect, individualism, and equality in ways that racialized immigrant students. I consider moments of vacillation in teacher talk to explore tensions between teacher’s desires to assimilate immigrant students to national norms of belonging and their desires to be perceived as inclusive and ‘open.’ In doing so, I ask how visions of liberal schooling impose ideas of what a ‘normal’ citizen should be and how teachers produce ‘ideal’ liberal subjects in their talk and in the everyday practices of schools. I argue that teachers engage the ideals of abstract liberalism to establish a colorblind discourse of non-racism. While educators described the school as an idealized space where students are encouraged to freely express themselves, to develop unique individual outlooks, it was clear that this vision of ‘openness’ did not include Muslim students’ attachments to religious and cultural identities.     

Muslim Women in Australia,Britain and the United States: The Role of “Othering” and Biculturalism in Identity Formation

When Muslims migrate to Western countries, they bring their identity and culture with them. As they settle in their host countries, some Muslims encounter structural inequality, which is often revealed through media representation, unequal labour market status and racial profiling. Through the dynamics of structural inequality, some Muslim women remain doubly disadvantaged. Within their ethnic/religious community, Muslim women are expected to follow their cultural traditions and in the wider society their overtly Muslim appearance is often questioned. The discussion of identity formation in this paper is based on interviews with Muslim girls and women in Australia, Britain and the United States, aged between 15 and 30 years. Though the cultural and political contexts of these three countries are different, the practice of “othering” women have been similar. Through their life stories and narratives, I examine the formation of the participants’ identities. It was found that for many of these women their sense of identity shifted from single to multiple identities, thus revealing that identity formation was a flexible process that was affected by a variety of factors, including the relevance and importance of biculturalism in the women’s identity formation.     

New Identity/Identities Formulation in a Post‐Nomadic Community: The Case of the Bedouin of the Negev

Research conducted by the author in the mid‐1990s found that while the bedouin culture and lifestyle in Israel's Negev Desert has been altered significantly as community members were resettled in stone houses, surrendered their camels for automobiles and entered the wage labour workforce, an expressed ‘bedouin’ identity remained strong. Indeed, it was found that rather than integrate the bedouin into the Jewish‐Israeli social mainstream, coerced settlement only served, if anything, to Arabise and Islamicise communal identity. Using evidence gathered in 2000 in the planned bedouin town of Segev Shalom/Shqeb, this study serves as a follow‐up analysis of more recent changes found in bedouin identity formulation. The data will reveal that ‘bedouin’ identity remains, but that it is on the slow decline. In its place, two new identity/identities matrices have formed: the Arab/Palestinian/Muslim matrix and the bedouin/Israeli matrix. It will be shown that these expressed identity/identities matrices are not randomly chosen or expressed, but rather have evolved out of the social, economic and political environments within which the settled Negev bedouin community is situated.     

Islamophobic Hate Speech: What is the Point of Counter-Speech? The Case of Oriana Fallaci and The Rage and the Pride

What role does counter-speech play in media controversies surrounding hate speech? Analysis of a high-profile controversy, namely the case of the Italian bestselling author Oriana Fallaci, may provide an answer to this question. In 2001, shortly after the terror attack against the Twin Towers in New York City, Fallaci published a pamphlet The Rage and the Pride that later gave birth to the best seller with the same title—which sold more than one million copies in several countries—in which she asserts that Muslims “breed like rats”. In this study, all texts from the largest circulated Italian newspapers, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica mentioning the writer and published in the first 12 weeks after the first publication of The Rage and the Pride were selected and submitted to content analysis. Outcomes show that counter-speech did not lead either to consensus or to refutation of such contents. The pivotal role of counter-speech was to contribute to putting the controversy on the agenda and therefore adding to media operational bias.     

Cultural Explanations of Patriarchy,Race, and Everyday Lives: Marginalizing and “Othering” Muslim Women in Canada

The image of the “oppressed” Muslim woman is one that has become deeply entrenched in Canadian society. It is fuelled not only by the over decade-long “War on Terror”, but also by the increasing use of cultural explanations of patriarchy, which posit gender inequalities in Muslim communities as simply being a result of Muslim cultures and religion. While scholars have cited the problems of such an approach, the impact of these representations on Muslim women’s everyday lives and their access to important social institutions has not been extensively studied. In a bid to fill this gap, this study draws on 56 in-depth interviews with Canadian Muslim women to illustrate how misperceptions of Muslim women as oppressed and passive victims of their culture and communities works to marginalize and increasingly “other” them in mainstream Canadian society.     

The “Nationalization” of Oil Painting and Cartoons

1 .Breakout of Oil Painting After crushing the "gang of four"in October 1976, Deng Xiaoping returned to political power , and all China advocated “emancipating the mind , and seeking truth from facts...     

“When will They Ever Learn”? Selective Discrimination in Provision of Schooling Facilities in Muslim Majority Areas: A Case Study of Murshidabad District of West Bengal,India

Inequality in educational attainment among various religious communities in India has come to light in the public domain only after the publication of Sachar Committee Report. The committee opined that selective discrimination of schooling facilities in Muslim concentrated areas is one of the major reasons behind the low educational attainment of that community. The present study aims at understanding the disparities in the provision of schooling facilities in Muslim-dominated and non-Muslim-dominated regions of West Bengal considering Murshidabad district as the study area. The present study constructed an Educational Development Index by considering 11 socioeconomic indicators and using the principal component analysis method, applied it to the study population. It has been found that the blocks having a higher share of Muslim population registered lower levels of educational development. It has also been found that most of the deprived schools located in the Muslim-dominated areas and within the non-Muslim-dominated areas the schools having higher share of Muslim pupil are mostly deprived.     

Islamic Law,Secular Law,and Societal Norms: The Recognition of Islamic Legal Practices in the Netherlands and the Protection of Muslim Women’s Human Rights

This article examines the extent to which Islamic law is accommodated in the Netherlands, by analysing legislation, case law, and the political discourse in the field of Islamic divorce, and focuses on the tension and proposed balance between gender equality and freedom of religion. It finds that, as the priority lies with protecting Muslim women’s rights, Muslim law in the Netherlands remains in the unofficial sphere, potentially alienating Muslim communities. This article explores whether and how Dutch law could continue to ensure respect for gender equality while working towards greater respect for a minority group’s cultural and religious freedom. Two options are presented in this regard: more responsibilities for Civil and Criminal courts, or the establishment of Sharia Councils. Lessons are drawn from the United Kingdom’s experiences.     

The Quality of Data on “Race” and “Ethnicity”: Implications for Health Researchers,Policy Makers,and Practitioners

Implicit assumptions about the quality of data on “race” and “ethnicity” underlie the design of much of today’s research on health disparities. Health researchers, policy makers, and practitioners tend to take it for granted that racial/ethnic categories are clearly and consistently defined; that individual race/ethnicity can be easily, validly, and reliably determined; and that categories capture population groups that are so inherently different from each other that any reported racial/ethnic difference can automatically be generalized to the US population as a whole. This article outlines a series of issues that challenge these assumptions about the quality of race/ethnicity data. While race/ethnicity classifications can approximate socially constructed identities for some groups of people under some circumstances, these classifications are inherently too imprecise to allow meaningful statements to be made about underlying biological or genetic differences between groups. Findings of racial/ethnic differences should be reported with appropriate caveats and interpreted with caution. Particular caution should be exercised in hypothesizing genetic differences between groups in the absence of convincing genetic evidence.     

The Role of Labeling and Bias in the Portrayals of Acts of “Terrorism”: Media Representations of Muslims vs. Non-Muslims

Several high-profile negative events involving Muslim perpetrators have recently been covered by the media. We investigated whether the same negative actions are more likely to be labeled “terrorism” when they are committed by Muslims than when they are committed by White non-Muslims. In Experiment I (n?=?60), using a real article about a Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a non-Muslim perpetrator, we found that participants were more likely to identify a crime as terrorism when it was perpetrated by a Muslim. The label “terrorism” also mediated the effect of Muslim identity on negative judgments of the behavior. In Experiment II (n?=?60), we replicated the results of Experiment I and clarified that the effects persisted when we used a real article about a non-Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a Muslim perpetrator. We discuss implications for cross-group communication and representations of Muslims in the media.     

“Arabic is Not my Language…”: Debates over Teaching of Arabic in Irish Muslim Schools

Based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place in 2014 in two Irish primary Muslim schools in the Republic of Ireland, this article draws from both observations of Arabic classes from fourth and fifth classes as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers and parents. The research findings explore the content of and approaches towards the teaching of Arabic and the views held by participants towards the learning of Arabic as part of Islamic religious education. The study reveals the diversity of views that exist and questions the importance of learning Arabic, as part of formal religious education for young Muslims living in non-Muslim pluralist societies. The author concludes with some implications from the study and offers some direction for Muslim schools as it relates to teaching Arabic and, more broadly, to Islamic religious education of young Muslims in Western contexts.     

Modern Muslim Thought in the Balkans: The Writings of Mehmed ef. Handžić in the El-Hidaje Periodical in the Context of Discrimination and Genocide

Abstract

The withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a significant impact on the population of the region, especially on the Muslims. Muslim intellectual life was strongly influenced by the arrival of a new political and social order and cultural and religious value system. During this period, Balkan Muslims painfully and irreversibly became an administrative part of Europe. The aim of this paper is to examine the main themes which characterized the writings of Bosnian Muslim intellectuals in the post-Ottoman period, particularly on the eve of and during the Second World War. This work examines the writings of Mehmed Hand?i?, a prominent Bosnian scholar that were published in the El-Hidaje Periodical from 1939 to 1945. The paper brings the scholar's views and commentaries on a variety of topics such as the impoverished Muslim state, the history of Islam and Muslims, and patriotism and nationalism from the Muslim point of view. In most ofHand?i?’swritings the focus is on Muslim intellectual responses to the new political and social changes as well as challenges of the ongoing Second World War. However, hiswritings and reflections continue to have far-reaching effects on Bosnian Muslims and remain relevant to the Bosnian Muslim situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the world observes the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in 2015.     

Fabricatingthe Glory of the “Sun King”：The Divine Kingship and the Shaping of Nation-State in The Fabrication of Louis XIV

Louis XIV ( September 1638—Sep-tember 1715 ) , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France from 1643 until his death.His reign of 72 year...