Islamophobia and Securitization

Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice

Tania Saeed

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319326795
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319326801
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores everyday realities of young Muslim women in Britain, who are portrayed as antithetical to the British way of life in media and political discourse. The book captures how geo-political events, and national tragedies continue to implicate individuals and communities at the domestic and local level, communities that have no connection to such tragedies and events, other than being associated with a religio-ethnic identity. The author shows how Muslim women are caught within the spectrum of the vulnerable-fanatic, always perceived to be 'at risk' of being 'radicalized'. Focusing on educated Muslim females, the book explores experiences of Islamophobia and securitization inside and outside educational institutions, and highlights individual and group acts of resistance through dialogue, with Muslim women challenging the metanarrative of insecurity and suspicion that plagues their everyday existence in Britain. Islamophobia and Securitization will be of inte

rest to scholars and students researching Muslims in the West, in particular sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. It will also appeal to analysts and academics researching security and terrorism, race and racialization, as well as gender, immigration, and diaspora. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Tania SaeedIslamophobia and Securitization Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series10.1007/978-3-319-32680-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Gender, Islamophobia and the Security Discourse

Tania Saeed¹

(1)

Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan

End Abstract

In February 2016, Tareena Shakil became the first British Muslim female to be found guilty in a British court of law for joining the terrorist organization Daish, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq or the Levant (Isil or Isis). In his ruling, the judge presiding over Shakil’s case observed, ‘[y]our role as a woman in Isis was different to that of a man but you embraced it and were willing to support those in Raqqa, and potentially those outside, to come and play their role in providing fighters of the future and were willing, shamelessly, to allow your son to be photographed in terms that could only be taken as a fighter of the future’ (Morris 2016). Shakil’s case, like the fifty or more British Muslim women dubbed the ‘jihadi brides’ who have fled to join Isis, has shocked the British public, with experts and policy makers struggling to understand how and why British Muslim women are joining terrorist organizations (Sanghani 2015). As noted by the judge in Shakil’s case, these women are providing a supportive role as wives of existing Isis members, or mothers to future terrorists. British Muslim men like ‘Jihadi John’, on the other hand, are a direct physical threat who are violent, as evident in Isis’ video of Jihadi John beheading fellow British citizens, and later threatening to unleash terror on his return to Britain (Sawer 2015; BBC News 2016). While the reasons why Muslim men and women join such terrorist causes continue to be investigated (Hoyle et al. 2015; Saltman and Smith 2015), where radicalization is no doubt a problem that needs to be carefully tackled, the response of media and political actors in Britain and across Europe has resulted in a sensationalized narrative that implicates all Muslims as potential terrorists, hidden in plain sight. The security agenda has crept into the mundane and the ordinary with families, school teachers, universities and other social institutions all carrying the burden of preventing the radicalization of young Muslims (see HM Government 2015a). While the Isis phenomenon is more recent, the Muslim community has been submerged in a discourse of (in)security and terrorism since 9/11 and 7 July 2005.

The radicalized Muslim female first emerged in 2007, when Samina Malik was tried and found guilty under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possessing material ‘useful’ for terrorists (Bowcott 2007). Media and political actors responded with a sense of heightened insecurity and paranoia about the Muslim community, with the Muslim woman located within an oxymoronic spectrum of the vulnerable-fanatic, one susceptible to radicalization and therefore in need of being rescued. The Muslim male, however, continued to be perceived as dangerous, posing a more direct physical threat, with examples of terrorists such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (BBC News 2011b), who attempted to blow up a plane bound for the USA. This paranoia led to counter terrorism policies that, since 2005, have increasingly brought social institutions within the ambit of security, often at the expense of human rights and freedoms—which, ironically, are what these policies aim to protect as ‘British values’. The entire Muslim community of 2.7 million Muslims have been ‘securitized’ (Croft 2012; Office for National Statistics 2012) and made to take responsibility for the actions of self-defined ‘Islamist terrorists’, who are as much a threat to the Muslim community as they are to the British public at large. This securitization has further increased suspicion and discrimination of the Muslim community in the form of Islamophobia, resulting in physical and verbal assaults, direct and indirect, where Muslim men and women have constantly to prove their innocence, against a wider socio-political discourse that labels them as would-be terrorists.

This book enters this conversation by exploring the ‘everyday,’ mundane realities of British Muslim women that are submerged within this wider discourse of insecurity and paranoia. Forty British Muslim and non-British Muslim women living across England share biographical narratives highlighting their experiences of securitization and Islamophobia. These women express different ‘degrees of religiosity’ from those who wear the niqab, hijab or jilbab,¹ to practising Muslims without any religious signifiers, highlighting how the level of acceptability of a Muslim in modern day Britain is determined by a non-Muslim host community, where Muslim acceptability fluctuates within an extremist/moderate spectrum.

These Muslim women are educated, either studying in universities or, on graduation, entering the labour market. Media and political stereotypes of the Muslim terrorist also evoke the ‘educated’ ‘alienated’ Muslim citizen, vulnerable to radicalization within educational institutions. This is evident particularly in the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which has made it legally incumbent on universities and other educational institutions to report on any student in danger of ‘being drawn into terrorism’ (HM Government 2015a, sect. 26(1)). Police officials and anti-terrorism experts have also been working with universities in attempts to provide student ‘welfare’ by countering radicalization on campuses (Association of Chief Police Officers 2012). Between the tragedy of 7 July 2005 and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, a period of ten years, the Muslim student identity has been subject to ‘surveillance’ and a discourse of constant (in)security (Home Affairs Committee 2012; Saeed and Johnson 2016). As educational spaces—not just in Britain, but also Europe and the USA—become implicated in the security discourse of the state, the experiential narratives in this study provide insights into the realities of Muslim female students, who become vulnerable targets of hate, ignorance and surveillance as a consequence of such counter terrorism measures. Islamic student societies (ISocs) and the ISoc sisters, placed within the vulnerable and ‘at risk’ category are further implicated in the security discourse, having to defend their innocence against accusations of radicalization and extremism (Home Affairs Committee 2012; HM Government 2011c).

While the exploration of Islamophobia and securitization highlights the racialized religion and gendered identity(s) of the ‘educated’ Muslim, the book further unpacks the category ‘Muslim’ to examine how other categories of identity, such as ‘ethnicity’, play a role in experiences of hyper-securitization and Islamophobia. For the sample presented in this book, the ethnic identity is Pakistani; both British Muslim women with a Pakistani heritage and Pakistani Muslim female nationals living in England are part of the sample. Their experiences highlight how the dominant ‘security’ discourse related to terrorism, Islam and Pakistan creates paranoia about the Muslim and the equally dangerous Pakistani. Islamophobia often takes the form of a ‘Pakophobia’, where both identities become problematic in the socio-political imagination. The religio-ethnic conflation is important in highlighting diversity in experiences amongst the Muslim community, which is often overlooked when Muslims are treated as a homogenous group, or a single category. These differences are not only important in developing an in-depth theoretical understanding of Islamophobia informed by lived experiences, but has further policy implications for Muslim communities who, at particular points in the socio-political narrative, may be at greater risk of discrimination because of the hyper-securitization of not only their religious identities, but also their ethnic identities. A case in point is the Syrian connection in a post-Isis socio-political context, where either Muslims from Syria, or those travelling to Syria and the region, are more likely to be viewed as suspect.

The narratives further reveal how young Muslims are not simply passive victims of discrimination and securitization, but are also playing their part in resisting the dominant stereotype about their identities as potential terrorists, by the simple act of resistance through dialogue. They are attempting to ‘normalize’ their presence in universities and across communities to counter the hatred and insecurity that results from sensationalist accounts of their identity in media or political rhetoric. By presenting biographical narratives of (in)security and Islamophobia, the book focuses on individuals who get lost in sensationalized reports about Islam and terrorism. The representation of Muslims, their ‘otherization’ ‘racialization’ and ‘securitization’ ( Said 1994; Meer and Modood 2010; Croft 2012) primarily focuses on the male; women are reduced to a physical embodiment of the quintessential ‘victim’. Muslim women are more likely to be talked about rather than included in a conversation about their lives as Muslim women in Britain.

The Context: Islamophobia, Orientalism and the Security Discourse

In understanding the experiences of Muslim women in this book, one needs, first, to examine the nature of Islamophobia that Muslims confront in their day-to-day lives. In attempting to define such a controversial contemporary phenomenon, it is crucial to investigate the historical context that contributed to its inception, and the existing realities that continue to mould and define its meaning (see Abbas 2004; Fekete 2009; Malik 2009; Allen 2010a). As Kumar (2012: 9) observes, ‘the history of “Islam and the West,” as it is commonly termed, is a story not of religious conflict but rather of conflict born of political rivalries and competing imperial agendas’. Drawing on Britain’s Imperialist history, Islamophobia is situated within an ideological Orientalist struggle, where ‘[a]t the heart of Islamophobia is […] the maintenance of the “violent hierarchy” between the idea of the West (and all that it can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Gender, Islamophobia and the Security Discourse
• 2. Muslims, South Asians and the Pakistani Community in Britain: Intersecting Security, Identity and Belonging
• 3. Securitizing the Muslim Female: Islamophobia and the Hidden Terrorist
• 4. Securitizing the Educated Muslim: Islamophobia, Radicalization and the Muslim Female Student
• 5. Securitizing the Ethno-Religious Identity(s): Exploring Islamophobia as Pakophobia
• 6. Challenging Islamophobia and the Security Discourse: Dialogue and the Muslim Activist
• 7. Conclusion: Gender, Islamophobia and the Security Discourse—Future Challenges
• Backmatter