Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives [Paperback]

'An excellent and wide-ranging exploration of how the term Islamophobia has been applied in academic discourses and general representations of Muslims throughout the world. This thought provoking anthology contributes significantly to our understanding of a much used and abused concept.' --Ziauddin Sardar, author of Desperately Seeking Paradise and Balti Britain

'Islamophobia has become a dominant form of racist expression across the contemporary global North. Thinking Through Islamophobia provides an especially welcome, timely, and varied set of accounts about what the phenomenon covers, why the current upsurge, and how effectively to think about it.' --David Theo Goldberg, author of The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism

'Thinking Through Islamophobia is a rare endeavour of collective scholarship that is timely, prescient and seminal. Challenging us to develop Critical Muslim Studies in post-western epistemologies, it provides exemplary analyses of the imbricated formations of racism, Orientalism, secularism and post-colonialism largely silenced by contemporary social and political theory.' --Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University

Use of the term Islamophobia is today both inexorable and controversial. Thinking Through Islamophobia offers a series of critical engagements with the concept, its history and deployment, and the phenomena that it seeks to marshal. In an original and pioneering collection of essays twenty-eight contributors hailing from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds draw on their expertise to map out the tensions between the concept and the phenomena as they are played out across different contexts and continents. Extending the discussion of Islamophobia beyond its commonplace focus on the West and staking a claim for the continuing relevance and critical purchase of Islamophobia in struggles for justice, Thinking Through Islamophobia locates the polemical debates on Islamophobia within wider cultural and political mobilizations engendered by the 'Muslim question'.

S. Sayyid is Director of the Centre of Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia and a Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Leeds. He is the author of A Fundamental Fear and co-editor of A Postcolonial People, also available from Hurst. AbdoolKarim Vakil is Lecturer in the Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King's College London.