Written submission from De Montfort University and the University of Sussex (HCL0037)

We welcome the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee’s call for further evidence on Islamophobia. Our written evidence, detailed below, addresses each of the four target areas the committee seeks responses on: The current extent of Islamophobia in British society; the impact of official adoption of a definition of Islamophobia; the role of politics; and ‘intra-faith Islamophobia’. The focus of our evidence, however, is on the role of politics (Section 3, below).

Introduction and context

As with our recent written and oral submissions to another parliamentary inquiry on this matter - the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia[1] - the evidence presented here draws upon the initial findings of our current research with the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University in Leicester,[2] on ‘the intersectional politics of austerity and Islamophobia’, in addition to our recent peer-reviewed, published research on the politics of Islamophobia[3] and our broader expertise in this area as researchers working on race and racism, identity, security and terrorism / counter-terrorism.

1. The current extent of Islamophobia in British society

1.1 General evidence

Islamophobia is a pervasive form of racism in British society today. As Baroness Warsi famously put it, in many contexts in Britain today, Islamophobia ‘passes the dinner table test’. Numerous studies of Islamophobia demonstrate the systematic and structured nature of racism faced by British Muslims in the workplace[4], in education[5], in health,[6] prisons[7], on public transport[8], and online.[9] As we demonstrate in our evidence below, this is in part a result of the lack of an official definition of Islamophobia as a form of racism (see 2.1, below).

1.2 Specific research findings

While our current ‘small n’ qualitative study explores the depth, rather than the breadth, of experiences of Islamophobia in the UK today, our research participants have spoken of Islamophobic abuse and discrimination forming part of the fabric of their everyday lives. As one participant in our current research put it, with reference to the combination of online and offline Islamophobic abuse: ‘we experience this week in, week out, you know’. A different participant gave an example of being ‘at the shop and someone came in and started having a go at the shopkeeper for allowing people like me in their shops’ - she felt that this comment was specifically in relation to her wearing Niqab. This participant also spoke of experiencing abuse and discrimination ‘on the bus, in the street, with my neighbours, police themselves’. Another participant who noted that ‘I get Islamophobia quite regularly’ added that ‘I remember there were like four incidents in one night [...] I was in West London and I had to cycle back to East, to stay at a friend’s house. And going through town, like just in one night, I had people call me Taliban, Bin Laden, one guy came and ranted, threw a punch. Obviously, people were a bit drunk and it was a rowdy night anyway.  So those sorts of things are actually fairly common, like just comments and things like that’.

2. The impact of official adoption of a definition of Islamophobia

We concur with Akeela Ahmed MBE’s claim, in a Metro article following the publication of Islamophobia Defined (2018), that this specific definition could ‘save the lives of British Muslims’.[10] The very pervasiveness of Islamophobic racism in Britain today (see 1.1 above) is in part a consequence of the fact that many people do not consider Islamophobia to be racist - a perspective enabled and encouraged by a small number of influential politicians and journalists. This means that it is not just ‘a’ definition of Islamophobia that must be adopted if it is to have meaningful social impact; it must be the definition proposed by the APPG on British Muslims - or a variant thereof - that defines Islamophobia as racism. Any definition which falls short of this will have at best little-to-no impact, and at worst a negative impact (formally legitimising some forms of Islamophobia), on the lives of those who are subject to Islamophobic abuse, discrimination and hate crime.

Furthermore, the Race Relations Act (1965, 1976) outlawed discrimination on the "grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins". While the legislation was problematic in its own way[11] and discrimination against minorities persists, the RRA contributed to what Ambalavaner Sivanandan[12] described as a drive to shift attitudes. A definition of Islamophobia should primarily address the material discrimination faced by British Muslims across different sectors but it should also function as a form of public education. This is especially pertinent when considering the role of politicians in generating Islamophobic sentiment outlined in section 3.

3. The role of politics

3.1 General evidence

There are three dimensions to the role of politics in producing Islamophobia: the Prevent strategy, politicians espousing Islamophobic discourse, and the place of unaccountable think-tanks and their relations with politicians.

The first has been the general growth of counter-terrorism legislation and the specific role of the Prevent strategy in particular which overwhelmingly targets Muslim populations.[13] The impact of Prevent on Muslim life and on public attitudes towards Muslims has been devastating.[14] Prevent renders all Muslims potential terrorists in waiting who are to be surveilled and disciplined[15] through the Prevent Duty operating across public sector institutions. The adoption of the of the definition of Islamophobia advanced by the APPG on British Muslims would have serious implications for the design and implementation of Prevent. The second is the mobilisation of Islamophobic language by politicians positioning themselves for leadership of the Conservative party in order to appeal to right-wing and far-right sentiments. For example, Boris Johnson described Muslim women in niqab as ‘letter boxes’ and ‘bank robbers’. Sajid Javid’s tweet regarding ‘Sick Asian Paedophiles’ and his order for research to be carried out into the ethnicity of child exploitation gangs are examples of ‘dog whistle’ politics. Given the overarching context of the way ‘Muslim rape gangs’ have become central to far-right mobilisation, Javid’s comments are all the more disturbing in their nod to such rhetoric. The third is the relationship between some politicians and unaccountable think-tanks in advancing Islamophobic discourse in public life about Muslims. We are especially concerned by the work of Policy Exchange[16] and the Henry Jackson Society [17]

3.2 Specific research findings

Two examples from our research findings speak directly to the political dimensions of Islamophobia today. We therefore outline these examples in some detail here. First, in May 2018, just weeks before Boris Johnson’s Telegraph calling niqab-wearing women ‘letter boxes’, a participant in our research told us ‘as we were leaving the train station, a guy called my wife a letter box, because she wears the niqab’. Another participant, as mentioned above, told us that someone ‘had a go’ at a shopkeeper for serving her, ‘because I wear the niqab’. Meanwhile, when a video emerged in late 2018 of a group of people burning an effigy of Grenfell Tower, those people had attached images of female figures in niqab - presumably to represent the hijab-wearing women and girls who died in the fire and whose images had appeared in the media at the time - Grenfell victims like Farah Hamdan, Nura Jamal, and the 12-year-old Firdaws Hashim.  

Figure 1. Still from footage of Grenfell effigy-burning, depicting a niqab-wearing figure at a window in the burning tower.

One effigy-burner can clearly be heard to laughingly say: ‘Look at all the little ninjas, getting it at the minute!’, as the camera focuses on a figure at a window. Another replies: ‘That’s what happens when they don’t pay their rent!’. Again, these views reflect the lived experience of politicised or ‘ideological’ Islamophobia reported by our research participants. In an interview a few months before the effigy-burning, a participant had recounted an occasion when ‘a bunch of drunks came by and start shouting at my wife, calling her a ninja, calling her the ‘n’ word, calling her… they’re both ‘n’ words but the other ‘n’ word’.

What these two cases illustrate is the way in which Muslim women are dehumanised in the public sphere, and the connection between allegedly mainstream political discourse - written by a prominent MP and former Secretary of State, published by a national daily newspaper - and the everyday hate speech and violence experienced by British Muslims, and Muslim women in particular. 

4. ‘Intra-faith Islamophobia’ [We note that this item appears to have been removed from the inquiry terms of reference in January 2019]

4.1 General evidence

The existence of a sectarian politics of hate between some Muslim individuals, groups and movements beyond question. But such intra-faith conflict is not Islamophobia and conflating the two issues is misguided. We explain why through specific research findings below.

4.2 Specific research findings

Participants in our current research project have responded to research recruitment campaign that asked for participants who had experienced ‘any discrimination or abuse in the last two years that you felt was Islamophobic or anti-Muslim’. While our study consists of a small number of depth interviews, rather than a major survey, not one respondent we have interviewed has mentioned discrimination or abuse suffered from other Muslims or people they perceived to be Muslim. In other words, our understanding is not only that the problem of intra-faith discrimination, abuse and hate crime is qualitatively different to Islamophobia, but also that it is quantitatively different; the scales of these two qualitatively different phenomena also render them incomparable. Whereas intra-faith hostility is confined to the comparatively small sections of the British population that identify as Muslim, Islamophobia, as we have shown above, is a widely held, increasingly ‘normalised’ form of racism. The vast majority of discrimination, abuse and hate crime targetting Muslims and people perceived to be Muslims is directed at them by non-Muslims. We are further concerned that the issue of intra-faith conflict may be mobilised as a political tool aimed at undermining political change in relation to recognising Islamophobia as a form of racism, by suggesting that belief / faith is the real source of tension, and criticism of which should be protected by rights to freedom of speech. In this sense, while intra-faith conflict among Muslims, including British Muslims, is a very real problem and one that should be addressed, it is not one that should fall within the purview of this inquiry, and certainly not one that should be exploited for political ends to derail the recognition - based on near-unanimous expert opinion and rigorously-produced research and evidence - that Islamophobia is indeed racism.

We hope that the committee finds this evidence to be of use, and would welcome the opportunity to contribute to oral evidence sessions, or further calls for written evidence, in relation to this inquiry.

January 2019