A critically acclaimed analysis of anti-Muslim racism from the
sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in a fully revised and
expanded second edition
In this incisive
account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the
history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War
on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best
understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An
innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia
argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism,
which in turn sustains empire.
This book, now
updated to include the end of the Trump’s presidency, offers a
clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the
United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of
ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing.
The matrix of anti-Muslim racism charts how various institutions—the
media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university,
the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere—produce and
circulate this particular form of bigotry. Anti-Muslim racism not
only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority
countries who become the targets of an endless War on Terror, but for
Muslims and those who “look Muslim” in the West as well.
With a new foreword
by Nadine Naber.
