A pernicious anti-Muslim hostility in the UK and US
For the right, Islamophobia is the only thing it has left
Today Hussein Kesvani of the Trashfuture podcast and author of Follow Me Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims joins us to write about how Islamophobia is no longer just a piece of the Western right's playbook but its entire animating principle.
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For the right, Islamophobia is the only thing it has left
by Hussein Kesvani
For the past few years I’ve tried to avoid writing about what the “Muslim experience” in the West is like. Partly to avoid my perspective – male, South Asian, cishet – inadvertently speaking on behalf of others. But, if I am to be honest, it was largely because the people who would ask were really fucking weird about it. I suppose a more accurate term would be Islamophobic, a phrase that, while accurately describing much of today’s political discourse, is also ignored and denied by its proponents.
In 2019 I published my first book, an exploration of Muslim identity through the lens of social media and internet culture, wherein I attempted to argue that the Muslim experience, which had often been essentialized, presented as foreign and therefore treated with suspicion, was complex and multifaceted. This wasn’t a revolutionary take, because, well, all people are generally just like that.
The book received more attention than I had expected, and so I’d hoped that my thesis was starting to resonate. I also hoped that after decades of British leaders attempting to manage and surveil Muslim populations with shady, ambiguous and unworkable social policy under the guise of combatting extremism – known in the UK as “PREVENT” – people in government, think tanks and policy-making positions would reconsider their priors. Instead, as I sat down for interviews with established newspapers and radio shows, I found myself being asked the same set of questions: How did I “avoid the lure of extremism?” Was I ever tempted to join ISIS? Was I the embodiment of a liberal Muslim, one who posed less of a threat to the country I lived in?
It was a bizarre, absurd line of questioning. Sadly, it was also fairly common among other Muslim writers, artists and creatives I knew, people who were putting out work that explored their identities and sense of place in the world. At the time we’d talk about it privately, worried that even mentioning Islamophobia as a term, in public, would ostracize us, and prevent us from being able to continue making something of a living from our work.
It’s important to note the precedent that led to this kind of interrogation of Muslims becoming normalized. In 2015 the then Conservative prime minister David Cameron announced an expansion of the UK’s PREVENT duty. The counter-extremism program would no longer just focus on instances where Muslims supposedly posed a physical threat to public safety – i.e. affiliation with a proscribed terrorist group – but would rather shift its focus to instances of “non-violent” extremism too. The program faced little public scrutiny, but was popular enough in policy circles to help shape US counter-extremism policy and its approaches to American Muslim communities. Among the British mainstream media, there was relatively little interest in this dramatic change, its implications on freedom of speech or freedom of worship, or its effects on democratic participation. Few among Britain’s political lobby, a class of journalists whose work is largely driven by access, had even bothered to ask what Cameron had actually meant by signs of “indirect” radicalization.
The obscurity of this change, alongside the general ambivalence toward it, gave license to a network of non-governmental organizations, think tanks, media outlets, talk show hosts – a structure that the writer Nathan Lean has referred to as the “Islamophobia Industry” – to define what “non-violent” forms of extremism were. Sometimes it could refer to devout Muslims who were hesitant to have physical interactions with the opposite sex. In the same breath it could also refer to those marching against Western military intervention in the Middle East, or joining a Palestine solidarity campaign on a university campus. As definitions broadened, and PREVENT expanded its surveillance on Muslims in Britain, the industry that justified this treatment became more prominent. This was particularly true on social media, where it was now easy to gain a modest platform peddling Islamophobic conspiracy theories, and if you were lucky, a semi-regular slot as a rent-a-gob, whose duty it was to define, and redefine, the Islamic menace. Not a bad supplementary income if you’ve got rent due.
All of this has made Islamophobia both a billion dollar industry and a lucrative, reliable, political strategy, particularly for a flailing political right who, for the past decade, has relied on the proliferation of bizarre culture wars in order to maintain its relevance. In Britain the latest iteration of this comes in the form of the Parliamentarian Nick Timothy, a significant figure in what remains of the Conservative party, currently serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. While Timothy had once presented himself as a sensible, moderate conservative, he has spent the past few weeks complaining about Muslims who had marked the end of Ramadan with a public prayer in the centre of London – an event that has taken place for over a decade – declaring it an “act of domination” against ordinary British people who, I guess, were on their way to buy a Marmite flavored vape. Timothy’s language is far from novel of course. It echoes a pernicious anti-Muslim hostility expressed brazenly in the United States as well among Republican politicians who face an uncertain future, having once again entered a deeply unpopular foreign war. Republican congressman Keith Self, for one, said that “Islam is on the march and seeks world domination.” His colleague Andy Ogles posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” And Randy Fine said “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. “Deport them ALL,” he added.
Speaking to Muslim family and friends who have seen a marked rise in anti-Muslim hostility and attacks, both in the news and in their personal lives, all while existing on an internet where anti-Muslim content, misinformation and Islamophobic AI slop have become so common as to be unremarkable, a common sentiment emerges: Yes, we’ve been dealing with Islamophobia for a long time, and for many of us who grew up in the shadow of 9/11, it has lurked in the background of our formative years. But this time something feels different. We’re now dealing with an Islamophobia that’s far more abstract, fixated on Western civilizational collapse as an opportunity to instill racial purity, and far more sinister in its intentions. Its key influencers and figureheads, backed by millions of dollars in dark money and cryptocurrency, have taken to calling for the return of concentration camps and mass human trafficking under the guise of deportations, all accompanied by hacky AI hallucinations depicting crusades and civil wars. Indeed you’d be hard pressed to watch or listen to any right wing podcast or media outlet of late and not find that pretty much every conversation they have – be it on the economy, on healthcare, or even on pop culture, comes back to their singular fixation on the existence of Muslims. (That is when they take a break from fearmongering about trans people.) Islamophobia isn’t just a feature of Britain’s Conservatives or the Republican party, part of a package to sell endless austerity and open markets to predatory capital, it now occupies the entirety of right-wing political thought.
It’s unclear how this will play out as a political strategy, as both Republicans and Conservatives face elections in coming months, and are relying on anti-Muslim rhetoric to detract from declining poll numbers. In Britain there have been recent examples of Islamophobia failing to yield significant results when put to electoral tests, such as in the Manchester suburb of Gorton & Denton, where they rejected a candidate for the right-wing Reform party known for his scaremongering on Islam and Muslims in the UK.
But are election results really the best way to measure this? At one point, I naively believed it to be so – that democratic participation was a leveler, and that Muslims participating in this process, voting against the populist right, also protected them.
Now having spent the past couple of years watching endless atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, and the efforts made by parties on both the left and the right to deny these crimes, to criminalize protest, and to shut down people who remind us that those under the rubble are people too, it has also made me rethink what Islamophobia actually is. That the rhetoric that has been used to undermine and at times criminalize Muslim life in the West is not dissimilar from that used by American and European politicians to justify mass slaughter and to legitimize genocide. The Islamophobia that prevails in the West is one that argues that any kind of public participation – be it prayer, or by voting – for Muslims is inherently suspicious and actively undermining concepts of the Western world. It doesn’t take much to expand that further in suggesting that any kind of Muslim presence represents an existential danger. In this view perhaps Muslim life should not exist at all.
Which is to say that Islamophobia is not just a quirk of the right. We have to acknowledge that it’s sewn into the fabric of the contemporary West itself – a political structure, with its own epistemology, lucratively funded, maintained and vociferously defended. Anti-Muslim politics has become a sharp tool – one that can be utilized to punish Muslims for participating in public life, while also feeding the narrative of the West’s victimization at the hands of so-called “invaders.” As the Guardian’s Nesrine Malik has put it, Islamophobia is the central node of a “militarised white supremacy nexus” with adherents occupying the hallways of power, and its most ardent believers in the White House, across the European parliament, as well as in the highest echelons of media and global finance.
Dismantling this structure is a gargantuan task – one that won’t be solved by writing books, by posting, making reaction videos or debating whether a Muslim deserves to be considered a human being. It certainly can’t be voted away. Anyone serious about combatting anti-Muslim prejudice will need to recognize it as a guiding ideology, bankrolled by big tech and venture capital, and sold to politicians as the only way left to maintain their positions of power.
So then where should we begin? Perhaps by refusing to indulge the right in its semantic games, false equivocations, and pseudo-intellectualism that rationalizes, and often valorizes, the dehumanization of Muslims at home and abroad, championing hatred and violence against them. Instead it is worth looking at figures like Zohran Mamdani, who by directly referring to Islamophobia as anti-human politics, recognizes it for what it actually is. Not just as a scourge that degrades politics and culture, but a symptom of a deeper moral decay, one in which there will never be enough people to strip of their humanity in order to keep the market running. It just happens to be our turn this time.
Hussein Kesvani is a journalist and producer based in London. He is a co-host of the Trashfuture podcast, and was nominated for the Orwell Prize in 2020.
I think I switched all the s's to z's.
Happy tax season! As an independent writer I am preparing to receive my annual fucking. So if you ever wanted to pick a time to subscribe to help your old pal Luke pay off the Tax Man it would be greatly appreciated. Here's one about how good it feels paying for all the shit we do as a country!
Luke O’Neil
It never feels good sending off money to the federal government around this time of year but it has never felt as bad as it does today. I know I have paid to produce so much suffering throughout my entire life but there was always a plausible deniability baked in. Like how they put blanks in one of the firing squad rifles. Could be my money is going to school books or cancer research you could sort of lie to yourself before. But now there are no books being purchased and no research is being done.
I wonder how long it will take for the fruits of my specific labor to be processed into a neighbor’s anguish? Watch as this brutal machinery transforms the written word into abductions. Something like bureaucratic sublimation. I don’t know if they know how to track that sort of thing and if they ever did they must have fired everyone at that particular agency by now anyway.
I guess they're going to the moon or near the moon as we speak which is always pretty cool. Here's another one from We Had It Coming about moons I don't believe I've shared in here before.
Following the Supreme Court's decision this week to overturn a Colorado law banning conversion therapy I though it might be good to reshare this recent Hell World yet again.
Luke O’Neil
Receiving gender-affirming care was like pulling teeth. My doctors grew visibly chagrined at my mother pointing out various flaws with my too-feminine yet too-masculine body, and her discussing with them how if I received the treatment I needed, I would never have a “normal” body again. We tried hormonal treatments for the first time when I tested for abnormally low estrogen, much to my frustration. To my mother’s disappointment, my identity did not change.
When she took me to a “shaman” – a white man named Steve, who rented a portion of an office building for his “healing services” – to connect me with my “feminine side,” I realized that what I was experiencing was some kind of fucked up, faux-kindly attempt at conversion therapy without my mom being branded as a parent who took their child to conversion therapy. I was assured that if Steve’s attempts to make me whole again did not work, my mother would finally meet me with acceptance.
During those services I sat in silence for hours while Steve prayed over me. I was told to clear my mind and focus on my inner “feminine energy.”
Instead I seethed. All the while taking occasional peeks to make sure he wasn’t doing anything fucking weird. It was all pretty fucking weird!
I've been thinking about this one by Sam Thielman too lately for some reason.
Luke O’Neil
American law, it seems to me, exists to create a condition of constant titillation for people whose material needs are never unmet, but whose appetites have been teased into a state of ungovernable sadism by sloganeering and advertising that promises a return to a world that never existed and never will. For you it is merely your life; for them it is content, something to send giggling to their friends in the group chat or watch with satisfaction on the news in between car commercials. Let that show the stuck-up girl at the office, the barista who rolled her eyes at you, the ranting homeless man who lives under the overpass. Providing this sort of satisfaction is now the aim of our entire federal government. They offer signing bonuses and lowered standards to whatever pathetic slob will make a foreigner cry for the camera. Just one more freeloader exiled from the Kingdom of Heaven. If they keep this up, soon there will be nobody left here but the true citizens, and surely then it will all be made Great Again.
Don't make me press the button again.
Say what you will about him but he has indeed long made it all very plain. Doing us a service if you think of it a certain way.
You may remember this one from last week.
I beat the charges baby! 100% innocent. The haters said it would never happen. I thought you would all want to know that.
I like my Guns dot com newsletter like I like my San Diego 2nd wave emo bands.
Kind of a long walk for that one. OK goodbye.