Racialization and Religion

Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia

Nasar Meer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138676565
• eBook ISBN: 9781317432449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume locates the contemporary study of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such, it challenges the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this collection of articles makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits.

The collection brings together a range of perspectives on this subject, including a comparison between Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first century Europe, an examination of the 'new anti-Semitism', and an analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Racialization and religion: race, culture and difference in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia

Nasar Meer

Abstract

It is striking to observe the virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia; something that is only marginally more present in the discussion of antisemitism. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies locates the contemporary study of antisemitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such it problematizes the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this special issue makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits.

Those heeding Pope Urban II’s exhortation at Clermont in 1095, to take up the cross in the First Crusade, remembered him saying that the Holy Land and much of Byzantium had been taken by “the Turks”, an “accused race”, a “slave of the demons”. He urged his coreligionists “to exterminate this vile race from the lands of our brethren”.’ (Drakulic 2009, p. 234)

The challenge, then, is to trace the inter-coursing connectivities of the ethno-racial. (Goldberg 2009, p. 1280)

Beyond internal debates

In his poignant Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben (1999, pp. 42–5) makes a provocative observation, one that he partly sources to Primo Levi, in reminding readers of the widely used term ‘Muselmäner’ to describe the most wretched of those incarcerated in the camp. Often bent double, in a prostrate position as if in prayer, the Muselmäner became ‘the name for those Jews in the Holocaust camps that had left life but not yet given into death’ (Goldberg 2006, p. 346). This stirring semantic connection, however, is not substantively pursued in his full account because Agamben recoils from relating the ways in which the condition of the Muselmäner may signal, as Rana (2007, p. 158) puts it, ‘a shared and overlapping racial history of the Jew and the Muslim’.¹ This relational problematic, as a mode of inquiry, is only relatively recently being charted in the works of scholars such as Junaid Rana, Gil Anidjar, Erik Love, Moustafa Bayoumi and, in a broader sense over a longer duration, by David Goldberg. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies speaks to this intellectual activity by locating something of the contemporary study of antisemitism² and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such it problematizes the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates.

With some important exceptions, it is striking to observe the virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia; something that is only marginally more present in the discussion of antisemitism.³ By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this special issue makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits. This is not an easy task, of course, for it must overcome, on the one hand, a historical narrative on the emergence of race as an explicitly secular and ‘modern’ phenomenon – one that has its genesis in Atlantic slavery and Enlightenment-informed colonial encounters (an account that has become entrenched as the prevailing view). On the other hand, we are cautioned that ‘the usage of “racialization”so broadly in the literature is at the very least ambiguous, and may sometimes be vacuous. One cannot always tell, either explicitly or contextually, whether it is being invoked as a merely descriptive term or with deeper normative, critical thrust’ (Goldberg 2006, p. 332). To this we can add an obstacle that is less analytical and more political: namely, the discursive opposition to placing antisemitism and Islamophobia within the same tier as each other, and in the same register as race.⁴ So, in attempting to bring to bear ideas of racialization in the conceptualization of these matters, we are, first, engaging in a degree of historical revision; second, seeking analytical precision; as well as, third, remaining politically cognizant.

Othello and Shylock walk into a Bard

Beginning with the first issue, there is a long-standing methodological (and indeed philosophical) question as to whether ‘the possession of a concept can predate the possession of a corresponding word’ (Thomas 2010, p. 1739). Without seeking to resolve this, if one is persuaded that language is both constitutive and reflective, then one can take issue with a central tenet of the highly influential realist (and for our purposes illustrative) ‘racial formation’ thesis put forward by Omi and Winant (1994). In focusing upon the place of race in culture, economics and law, these authors maintain that a ‘conception of race does not occur until the rise of Europe and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas’ (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 61). Theirs is a wide-ranging and highly engaging account, and it is most relevant to our discussion because of how they limit precursor articulations of antipathy toward Muslims and Jews as expressions of religious bigotry, in the following manner:

[T]he hostility and suspicion with which Christian Europe viewed its two significant non-Christian “others” – the Muslims and Jews – cannot be viewed as more than a rehearsal for racial formation, since these antagonisms, for all their bloodletting and chauvinism, were always and everywhere religiously interpreted. (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 61)

While the authors concede that the prospect of the negative treatment of Jews and Muslims reflects a ‘rehearsal’ of racial formation, temporally, in my view, this reading assumes too linear a conception, moving as it does from pre-modern-irrational (entrenched religious bigotry) to modern-rational (racial discrimination within a matrix of economic imperatives) (cf. Arendt 1968). This alleged trajectory is punctuated, for example, in noting that the word race in Sebastian de Covarrubias’s infamous sixteenth-century dictionary was in fact synonymous with the words ‘blood’ and ‘religion’ (see Mignolo 2010, p. 29). Indeed, there is ample evidence that religious culture and biology are deemed as co-constitutive of a racial category prior to its articulation in Atlantic slavery and Enlightenment-informed colonial encounters, even prior to the Reconquista. For example, when Islam is first encountered in Europe, ‘the Prophet Mohammed (with his Jewish parents and Nestorian/heretical teacher)’ is embodied as a dark-skinned, satanic menace (Matar 2009, p. 217). To the extent that:

allusions to animals were allegorically, anagogically or historically applied to the Muslim … As English prejudice against Jews had led to their association with a special “odour”, so prejudice against Muslims led to their association with animals; and as Jews were stigmatized for “crucifying” Jesus, so were Muslims stigmatised for circumcising Christians. (Matar 2009, p. 218)

What is being argued is that while the racial formation thesis accurately captures many of the mechanics of racialization, the account needs to commence earlier in order to observe how racialized categories have saturated cultural portrayals of Muslims and Jews, endowing each with characteristics that offered ‘reassurance that their difference could be easily identified by Christians’ (Thomas 2010, p. 1747).

In different ways both Nabil Matar (1999) and James Shapiro (1996) have provided a rich discussion of how ideas of the Moor and Jew featured in Elizabethan England, and in the period’s most celebrated author we find illustrative depictions of each. Namely, Shakespeare’s characterization of the tragically violent Othello and the shrewd and sinister Shylock. While each are replete with redeeming qualities, and even by today’s standards imbued with striking degrees of ambiguity, they nonetheless make sense as racialized affectations of their time. In the case of the former, the moral panic over Moors in London is well documented. Popular depictions in which Muslims ‘raged and lusted, killed their children or enslaved and brutalized Christians’ (Matar 2009, p. 219) were widely circulated. As Harris (2000, p. 35) reminds us: ‘To Elizabethan Londoners the appearance and conduct of the Moors was a spectacle and an outrage, emphasizing the nature of the deep difference between themselves and their visitors, between their Queen and this “erring Barbarian”.’ (For more polysemic readings of the context of Othello see Lerner 2000; Soyinka 2000). Thus, and complaining to the Lord Mayor of London that they were ‘infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel’, Queen Elizabeth expelled Turks from her realm (quoted in Jones 1971, p. 20).⁵ In the case of Jewish minorities in Elizabethan England, who were yet to be formally readmitted following their expulsion in 1290, the character of Shylock was at least partly sustained by a mythology and ‘threat of Jews circumcising Englishmen, taking Christian servants, and racially contaminating the English nation’ (Shapiro 2000, p. 128). The point is that for Shakespeare no less than his audiences, these ideas of the Moor and the Jew had achieved traction as corporeal shorthand for non-Christian difference, and in so doing problematizes the familiar Atlantic narrative. As Thomas (2010, pp. 1738–9) summarizes:

Most scholars still conceive of race as a post-Enlightenment ideology built upon the Atlantic slave trade, hinged upon observable phenotypical human differentiation…. Yet, discourses of modern racism not only antedate the social taxonomies arising out of nineteenth-century scientific thought, but it was Christianity which provided the vocabularies of difference for the Western world …

What this means is that the category of race was co-constituted with religion, and our resurrection of this genealogy implicates the formation of race in the racializiation of religious subjects. Frederickson (2002), for example, has charted the relationship of the race concept to religion in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, proposing that the othering and ethnic cleansing of Jews and Muslims is paradigmatic of European racialization. Yet while Fredrickson retreats somewhat and characterizes this as a matter of culturalism instead of racism, François Soyer (this issue) offers a different reading of the same history of the Muslim presence in Spain from the early Middle Ages until the beginning of the seventeenth century. In so doing he charts the processes through which the crypto-Muslim minority in Spain, the Moriscos, came to be racialized as a subversive threat. His analysis of the unprecedented measures that the early Spanish state initiated to address the perceived ‘Morisco problem’ charts how these came to represent a perfect model for the study of the mechanism that underpinned the Muslim experience in the Iberian peninsula. Soyer therefore provides an important reading of the ways in which race has an older pedigree than is currently registered, especially the ‘political effects informed by prior relations of power existing throughout Europe’ (Thomas 2010, p. 1739).

Re-articulating racialization

This last point leads nicely to the next. In my contribution (this volume), I note that the idea of racialization boasts a long pedigree, even if the term itself does not (Barot and Bird 2001), and proceed to elaborate a reading from Banton, Miles, Modood and others. Here at the outset, however, a helpful means of addressing Goldberg’s earlier concern for precision in the use of racialization is to turn to Kushner’s (2006, p. 209) summary of Small’s distinction ‘between “the racialization problematic”, a theoretical framework of analysis, and the “process of racialization”, that is ‘a process of attribution which has been unfolding historically, and continues to unfold”.’ Where the previous section takes up the first issue, this one takes up the second. In so doing it allows us to observe some of the ambiguities of racialization, an issue that is returned to below, but more immediately provides an opportunity to showcase how racialization can be a meta-concept that is nimble enough to host a number of potentially competing concerns. Perhaps most importantly, it allows us to:

guard against the characterization of racism as a form of single “inherentism”or “biological determinism”, which leaves little space to conceive the ways in which cultural racism draws on physical appearance as one marker among others, but is not solely premised on conceptions of biology in a way that ignores religion, culture and so forth. (Meer and Modood 2009, p. 344)

This analytical challenge is resolutely taken up in Raymond Tara’s wide-ranging contribution; expertly moving through the multidimensional components of racism, but more broadly recognizing how racialization has been pervasive in European imaginaries of Jews and Muslims, old and new, and so never ‘stands still’. Let us, however, offer more detail as to the component parts of racialization that we are using.

In their elegant overview of racialization in theory and practice, Murji and Solomos (2006) note the myriad ways in which racialization is appropriated and contested, often corresponding to different national traditions of inquiry (e.g. its meaning in the USA in contrast to the UK). The objective here is much narrower, however, and takes its cue from Miles’s (1989, p. 75) conception of racializa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Racialization and religion: race, culture and difference in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia
• 2 Faith, culture and fear: comparing Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first-century Europe
• 3 ‘Islamophobia never stands still': race, religion, and culture
• 4 Anti-Semitism in Britain: continuity and the absence of a resurgence?
• 5 Folk devils and racist imaginaries in a global prism: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century
• 6 Interrogating ‘new anti-Semitism'
• 7 A rhetorical discourse analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes
• 8 Semantics, scales and solidarities in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia
• Afterword
• Afterword: Islamophobia and the struggle for recognition
• Index