This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

The uplift ideology of French Muslim leaders directly impacts the ways in which they respond to stigmatization. In the wake of rising Islamophobia, leaders of the UOIF encourage their coreligionists to react politely to stigma, stressing the value of nonconfrontational responses. For them, the destigmatization of Islam is best achieved through strict policing of Muslims’ conduct and constant attention to self-discipline. This anti-racist repertoire is aligned with color-blind republicanism, in a society where the social reality of Islamophobia is regularly denied and which regards group-based claims-making with suspicion. Correspondingly, UOIF leaders tend to distance themselves from contentious means of action, such as legal action or direct protest, and chastise what they consider a victim mentality. Once again, their approach is primarily guided by pious considerations. Practicing the Prophetic model of patience and perseverance (ṣabr) is part of their effort to fashion pious subjectivities. However, this approach remains costly. Constant self-regulation exacts a psychological toll on individuals while the promotion of behavioral exemplariness tends to obscure power structures, teaching worshippers to police their behavior rather than question postcolonial hierarchies.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

This chapter argues that throughout history many religions have proved themselves capable of sparking and fueling hostility toward outsiders and even toward people in the same faith who are viewed as unacceptable for one reason or another. We examine recent manifestations of extremism in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, explaining that analysts often disagree about the extent to which religious beliefs and institutions are causally important. Key terms such as religious extremism, fundamentalism, radicalization, and terrorism are defined, noting the crucial importance of maintaining a distinction between the religious extremist and the extremely religious. Though we suggest researchers face many methodological challenges, we explore a broad range of empirical studies on related topics. The chapter also reviews theory and research on why and how people become religious extremists. We further draw on the psychology of radicalization, arguing that nowadays most scholars believe that there are cognitive and behavioral processes at work. Some people may move directly to carrying out terrorist deeds without acquiring much group ideology or religious belief.

‘Islamophobic discourse’ refers to the systemic and widespread negative attitudes, beliefs and narratives surrounding the Islamic religion and Muslims. In Australia, Islamophobia has been constructed in media and political spheres, and manifests through everyday experiences of discrimination for the Muslim community. Islamophobia is often characterised by the construction of stereotypes and disinformation that operate to promote fear and mistrust towards Muslims and the Islamic religion, and features Muslims as threatening and disloyal. In addition to Islamophobic discourses and the resulting negative attitudes, Islamophobia has become deeply embedded across societal institutions, and the government has addressed ‘terrorism’ as a priority. This includes education and is evident through the de-radicalisation and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies that have been rolled out in some schools.

Based on immersive and extensive participant observation across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin, this chapter focuses on the mediating role that Muslim undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. As intermediaries, undertakers guide minority families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes structuring the transitions from life to death. In reconciling competing sets of administrative and cultural norms, they preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments of sociocultural integration in contemporary Germany. Undertakers teach lessons about the state to minoritized citizens but also offer lessons to the state about its own citizenry, often by countering negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany.

Salman Rushdie’s work has exponentially engaged with questions of separatism, terror, and terrorism in an aesthetic mode that draws on certain Orientalist and neo-Orientalist tropes. Taking account of geopolitical and local contexts, this chapter focuses on how Rushdie in fiction and nonfiction has responded to separatism, terror, and terrorism at local, national, and global levels. At the core of this discussion is an analysis of Rushdie’s engagement with Kashmir, from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown and Joseph Anton. By bringing postcolonial critiques of Orientalism into conversation with recent developments in world-systems analysis, the chapter traces the ways in which Rushdie’s representation of the wider geopolitical consequences of terrorism and state-led terror helps to make sense of the war machine of empire in ways that are sometimes obfuscated by Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a secular hero of free speech.

Since 2001, the British state has increased its powers of surveillance for the purposes of countering terrorism. Much of this has been through expansions of the powers of police and security services to engage in covert surveillance and access the personal data of those suspected of involvement in terrorism. Alongside this, however, the last decade has also seen the development of more diffuse practices of monitoring and surveillance as part of efforts to identify and provide support to those deemed ‘vulnerable’ to being drawn into terrorism. Under Prevent, the UK government’s strategy for preventing violent extremism (PVE),1 much of the responsibility was initially placed on the police and on the communities identified as having particularly high levels of vulnerability, which in practice meant Britain’s Muslim communities.2 Subsequently, however, responsibility for PVE has increasingly been shifted onto a broad swathe of professionals engaged in the delivery of public services, including social workers, youth workers, health-care workers, prison staff, school teachers, and college and university lecturers.3

The chapter discusses corpus–linguistic challenges and possibilities involved in exploring Hate Speech linked to different constructions in Danish and German. Compiled especially for the XPEROHS–project, grammatically and semantically annotated corpora of Danish and German Twitter and Facebook posts enable qualitative and quantitative exploration of individual word forms or lexemes as well as constructions, understood as conventionalized, non–compositional form-meaning pairings. The chapter illustrates and explains various corpus–linguistic strategies applied to the XPEROHS–corpora and presents their results. Furthermore, we discuss prominent grammatical constructions used to denigrate certain groups like foreigners or Muslims in German and Danish. These include, for example, the I am no racist but… construction, which only superficially signals a balanced standpoint using a highly formulaic introductory phrase. Another construction that works similarly in German and Danish is the alleged (+ ADJ) + NOUN–construction (as in the alleged refugees) in which the adjective supposedly reverses the meaning of the noun. However, though closely related, the two languages do not share all constructions. This is exemplified by the German oh–so + ADJ + NOUN–construction (as in the oh-so-peaceful Muslims), that negates a positive characteristic indicated by the adjective in an ironic way.

This chapter begins from the historical conjecture that, at the level of social and political geography, globalization is best defined by the practical and symbolic parcellisation of social and political space, not through metaphors of borderlessness. Such parcellisation is epitomised by the proliferation of actual enclaves zones such as business parks, gated communities, refugee camps and export processing zones. They also have their fantasy versions, such as the so-called No-Go Zones that, political activists and commenters have alleged, represent areas of effective Muslim secession from secular states such as Britain and France. The chapter considers empirical and theoretical evidence for the break-up of global social space. It concludes by showing how these spaces become important formal and thematic topoi in contemporary literary works by J. G. Ballard, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. Other authors discussed include John Berger and Joseph O’Neill.

A contemporary anti-slavery movement has emerged in response to the diverse array of forms of forced labour that proliferate in the twenty-first-century global economy. The movement has encouraged survivors to speak out about their experiences of enslavement and to work as activists in a new abolitionist cause. As a result, the genre of the slave narrative, so popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists, has reemerged as a form of protest literature. This article suggests that by documenting the very fact of enslavement in the 21st century, the new slave narrators collectively reveal the widespread failure of the promises of globalisation, even as they celebrate their emergence into it. Through these narratives, we are able to discern the true contours of globalisation, the radical inequalities that remain and are fed by the transnational flow of commodities, including but not exclusively labour, and the slavery that is endemic and even encouraged in these global transactions.