Radio ReOrient 13.9: “Everyday Islamophobia,” with Peter Hopkins, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat Daas

Summary

Podcast Summary: Radio ReOrient 13.9: “Everyday Islamophobia” with Peter Hopkins

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Radio ReOrient 13.9
Host(s): Claudia Radiven, Chella Ward, Saeed Khan
Guest: Peter Hopkins
Date: December 12, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode of Radio ReOrient explores the concepts, impact, and structural underpinnings of Islamophobia, drawing from Peter Hopkins' latest book, Everyday Islamophobia. The conversation critically addresses how Islamophobia manifests in daily life, policy, education, politics, and global contexts. The hosts and guest engage in a nuanced discussion about mainstreaming, definition debates, and the effectiveness of current countermeasures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rethinking “Everyday” Islamophobia

• Broadening the Definition:

  • Peter Hopkins challenges the perception of “everyday Islamophobia” as only mundane, trivial incidents. He argues for an understanding that connects interpersonal encounters with larger, structural and global networks of anti-Muslim prejudice.
  • Quote:
    • “It's not just this everyday thing... It's also interconnected with broader global politics, things that people say on the news, politicians... It's created a whole network of issues and factors.” (Peter Hopkins, 02:48)

• Structural Interplay:

  • Islamophobia is both an interpersonal and a structural phenomenon. Microaggressions and individual acts are inseparable from institutionalized policies and societal narratives.
  • Quote:
    • “It doesn't happen in isolation or echo chambers.” (Chella Ward, 03:54)

2. Peter Hopkins’ Personal Academic Journey

• Background Influence:
  • As a white, non-Muslim, Scottish researcher, Hopkins was shaped by his schooling, diverse classmates, and a radical religious studies curriculum that explored Islam alongside other worldviews.
  • Discrepancy between the peaceful, charitable aspects of Islam learned academically and the negative media narratives sparked Hopkins’ critical interest in the field.
  • Post-9/11, the absence of scholarship on young Muslim men led Hopkins to focus his PhD research on this group.
  • Quote:
    • “I was really struck by... how different the narrative was on the ground, in the street... This is a religion of peace... and then there was what I was hearing... in the mainstream news.” (Peter Hopkins, 04:18)

3. Policy as a Vector of Islamophobia: The Case of PREVENT

• Surveillance Culture:
  • The British government’s PREVENT strategy and similar policies institutionalize suspicion, especially within educational settings and frequently target Muslim students and communities.
  • Hopkins recounts experiences of institutional surveillance, increased monitoring of Muslim student groups, and routine scrutiny justified under the guise of safety.
  • The proliferation of paperwork and administrative burdens within academia is seen as a manifestation of these policies.
  • Quote:
    • “It might seem quite trivial and low level, but... there's a lot of monitoring and surveillance going on.” (Peter Hopkins, 08:56)
    • “They end up with this sort of layer of surveillance that I think is just unhelpful and... it just shouldn't happen.” (Peter Hopkins, 10:40)

4. Transnational and Global Dimensions

• Policy Borrowing and Global Networks:
  • Islamophobic policies aren’t isolated; countries replicate each other’s counterterrorism strategies. For example, UK’s PREVENT draws on Dutch models, and similar methods are deployed in China against Uyghurs.
  • Far-right, Islamophobic ideas propagate rapidly via social media and international networks, influencing high-profile acts of violence and policy formation worldwide.
  • Quote:
    • “You end up having this sort of transnational almost network of sharing bad policy... it's almost like all these different countries are... copying each other.” (Peter Hopkins, 13:23)
    • “People can just share a set of blog posts that are really explicitly Islamophobic and they can be shared really widely around the world.” (Peter Hopkins, 13:23)

5. The Battle Over Definitions

• Endless Debates as Distraction:

  • Politicians and institutions avoid addressing Islamophobia directly by endlessly debating definitions—whether to use “Islamophobia” or “anti-Muslim hatred”—thus deflecting from actionable change.
  • Such definitional ambiguity contributes to the normalization and mainstreaming of Islamophobia, allowing perpetrators to claim plausible deniability or invoke free speech.
  • Absence or ambiguity in official documents serves as a form of silencing and erasure.
  • Quote:
    • “We just seem to be in this endless cycle of debate and definitions... To me, it's like a crystal clear example of Islamophobia in action.” (Peter Hopkins, 17:55)

• Mainstreaming of Far-Right Narratives:

  • Hostile rhetoric regarding asylum seekers, refugees, and “the other” enters mainstream politics, with both right-wing and centrist parties amplifying far-right talking points.
  • Quote:
    • “Far right ideas have increasingly found their way into mainstream narratives and politics and discussion... the mainstream that are doing it.” (Peter Hopkins, 20:45)

6. Limits and Obstacles in Countering Islamophobia

• Structural Hindrances:
  • While grassroots initiatives, educational toolkits, and counter-narratives exist, their efficacy is limited so long as structural mechanisms (such as the “Islamophobia industrial complex”) remain entrenched.
  • Changing entrenched institutional attitudes, especially those shaped by decades of policies like PREVENT, is a significant challenge even if policies are formally abolished.
  • Quote:
    • “You have to stop prevent-like thinking... There's a whole generation of people that have been trained for like 20, 30 years in this way of thinking.” (Peter Hopkins, 24:17)

7. Islamophobia, Citizenship, and Political Participation

• Impact on Political Life:
  • Islamophobia influences Muslims’ engagement with citizenship and politics. It can both spur activism and political participation due to anger, or, conversely, suppress these out of fear of being regarded with suspicion or as a threat.
  • Shifts engagement into community-based activism versus formal political channels.
  • Quote:
    • “Some young people were really angry about Islamophobia and it almost motivated them to become more political... But there was others who, Islamophobia essentially silenced them.” (Peter Hopkins, 28:10)

8. Reflections and Roundtable Discussion

• Critique of “Microaggressions” Focus:

  • Hopkins’ treatment reveals the inadequacy of focusing solely on interpersonal “microaggressions” or “hostility,” which fails to address structural and historic dimensions.
  • The debate over terminology minimizes broader systemic injustices and can be a conscious form of distraction, similar to arguments about etymology.
  • Quote:
    • “Hostility, hatred, microaggressions seem to fail to capture the broader structural and systemic dimensions of Islamophobia...” (Chella Ward, 31:05)
    • “All this endless conversation about the term Islamophobia is a kind of distraction tactic. The real function of racism is to prevent you from actually doing the work.” (Radio Reorient Narrator, 33:59)

• Islamophobia as Historiographical:

  • Reducing Islamophobia to present-day acts misses its historical roots—how it has been used to justify violence, disenfranchisement, and denial of rights to Muslim populations globally.
  • Quote:
    • “It makes it something that's only presentist... It stops us from seeing all the ways that... Islamophobia is historiographical.” (Radio Reorient Narrator, 33:59)

• Good Muslim/Bad Muslim Binary:

  • Saeed Khan references the construction of binary “good” vs. “bad” Muslim identities as a means for powerful actors to assert control and marginalize communities.
  • Referencing political events (e.g., visits to the White House) and Mahmood Mamdani’s work.
  • Quote:
    • “For Muslims, it's absolutely personal. And you see how this has played out... Hopkins is providing us with a template... to locate the current expression of Islamophobia... as this larger narrative vis a vis power.” (Saeed Khan, 37:04)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “What I've tried to do is to propose a definition of everyday Islamophobia... it’s not just this everyday thing that happens at a bus stop. It's interconnected with broader global politics.” (Peter Hopkins, 02:48)

• “The absence there is that you just don't have a definition of Islamophobia. So... it's sort of rendered invalid and not significant.” (Peter Hopkins, 17:55)

• “These policies... even though they don't work... still get shared and you end up having this sort of transnational almost network of sharing bad policy.” (Peter Hopkins, 13:23)

• “People can just share a set of blog posts that are really explicitly Islamophobic and they can be shared really widely around the world.” (Peter Hopkins, 13:23)

• “It’s been shown in so many studies that [PREVENT] doesn't work and it creates more harm than good, but it kind of continues to happen.” (Peter Hopkins, 08:56)

• “Hostility, hatred, microaggressions seem to fail to capture the broader structural and systemic dimensions of Islamophobia...” (Chella Ward, 31:05)

• “All of this endless conversation about the term Islamophobia is a kind of distraction tactic... The real function of racism is being distraction, preventing you from actually doing the work.” (Radio Reorient Narrator, 33:59)

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Important Segments (with Timestamps)

• [02:48] - Hopkins on rethinking “everyday” Islamophobia and the need for a substantive definition
• [04:18] - Hopkins’ personal and academic background shaping his interest in Islamophobia
• [08:56] - Detailed discussion of PREVENT and surveillance in educational institutions
• [13:23] - The transnational sharing of Islamophobic policies and media narratives
• [17:55] - The definitional debate and its role as a form of silencing and the mainstreaming of Islamophobia
• [24:17] - Countering Islamophobia: structural obstacles and the limits of grassroots initiatives
• [28:10] - Islamophobia's effect on political participation and everyday citizenship among Muslims
• [31:05] - Roundtable reflections on the limitations of focusing on microaggressions and narrow definitions
• [33:59] - Structural and historiographical analysis of Islamophobia, and the distraction of definitional debate

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Tone and Language

The conversation is scholarly yet accessible, sometimes passionate, and shaped by a critical decolonial perspective. Participants often use firsthand examples and reference recent political events, academic debates, and activist interventions. The tone is urgent, serious, and pointedly critical of policy and political inertia.

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Summary for Non-Listeners

This episode provides an in-depth exploration of how Islamophobia is woven into everyday life and public policy, and how efforts to combat it are hobbled by policy inertia and endless debates over definitions. Peter Hopkins emphasizes that “everyday” discrimination isn’t trivial but part of systemic structures reinforced by global policy-sharing, media narratives, and state surveillance—especially visible in programs like PREVENT. The conversation contends that focusing solely on definitions or interpersonal acts is a distraction from recognizing and dismantling the structural and historical roots of Islamophobia. Ending this podcast, listeners are left with both a deeper understanding of everyday Islamophobia’s reach and an appreciation for the urgent need for structural change.

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Book Mentioned:
Everyday Islamophobia by Peter Hopkins

Upcoming:
Special issue of ReOrient on Everyday Islamophobia (2026)

Transcript

[Marshall Poe]

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[Peter Hopkins]

Foreign.

[Claudia Radovan]

Listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. In this episode, we were joined by Peter Hopkins to discuss his work and most recent book, Everyday Islamophobia.

[Chella Ward]

We were able to discuss a range of issues spanning from mainstreaming of Islamophobia through increased far right politics, to the sharing of Islamophobic counterterror policy between different countries.

[Radio Reorient Narrator]

Peter Hopkins is a professor of Social geography at Newcastle University and his interests center upon issues of social inequality and justice, with a lot of his research focusing around the intersection of youth, migration and asylum, race and religion and gender.

[Saeed Khan]

This was a wide ranging conversation on the issue of Islamophobia and how we research it. So without further ado, let's listen in.

[Claudia Radovan]

Welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts today are myself, Claudia and Amina, and we are joined by Peter Hopkins. Thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. We were hoping that you could talk to us a bit about some of your more recent work on everyday Islamophobia.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, thanks, Claudia. So I've just published a book with that exact title, Everyday Islamophobia. And really what I was hoping to do with the book is that I find it unsatisfactory when people talk about everyday Islamophobia because it tends to be seen as this sort of very mundane, everyday form of Islamophobia, the kind of things that are said at the bus stop or in a supermarket. And it's seen as not as significant and not as important and not as like large scale as some of the more sort of global and transnational forms. And for me that's really unsatisfactory because I think they're all interconnected. So what I've tried to do is to propose a definition of Islam, of everyday Islamophobia, and it kind of outlines more substantive factors. So it's not just. It's not just this everyday thing that happens at. It's also interconnected with broader global politics, things that people say, you know, on the news, politicians. It's created a whole network of issues and factors and it's not just about that one encounter. So that's really what I've tried to do in outlining what everyday Islamophobia is and how it works.

[Chella Ward]

That's really fascinating, Peter, because I think you're completely right. It is very much a structural as well as interpersonal phenomenon. It doesn't happen in isolation or echo chambers. One of the things I quite like about the book is that you discuss your position and kind of yourself within it. And I was wondering if you could perhaps share with us how you came to write this book.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, that's interesting. So I get asked about this a lot because I'm a white Scottish person who's not a Muslim. So I got asked what kind of drew me to. Into this topic. I think it was quite a gradual kind of development, if you like. So in the. At the time when I was at school in Scotland, in the sort of, you know, let's say early 1990s, I was at the school that I attended, the secondary school I attended was basically half Scottish Pakistani Muslim and half sort of white Scottish. There was a bit more diversity than that, but that's roughly how it panned out. An interesting thing in Glasgow is that Glasgow at the time had a very small black population. It's quite different from a lot of the other UK cities in terms of that kind of mix of ethnicities. It was basically Scottish, Pakistani Muslims and white Scottish people. So in some of my classes I was in the minority. I remember, I think my maths class there was four white kids and everyone else was Asian, basically. So there was that. And the other thing was I was one of the geeks that studied religious studies, or I think at school it was called Religious Moral and Philosophical Studies. And we had a really amazing teacher who's just retired as being the deputy head. But the curriculum at the time was really radical. I mean, I'd love to find out who wrote it. So we ended up studying Christianity and Marxism, feminist theology, and we did a whole module on Islam as the world religion. That was the world religion we studied. So we went into it in a lot of depths. And this is like higher, you know, not quite a level, but a similar kind of, you know, level of difficulty. And we went into all the issues to do with Islam, the different practices and the different five pillars. Did a special project with the Hajj, you know, nothing Katan. So two or three damn questions on it. So I was really struck by what went then and how different the narrative was on the ground, in the street. And I just thought, this doesn't add up. This is a religion of peace and there's all these really interesting things and they donate to charity and there's equality and all these things we learned. And then there was what I was hearing, sort of in the mainstream news sort of thing. So then I studied geography, but I was most interested in social geography. And then I ended up working in and studying the community in Glasgow where a time when a lot of the Scottish Pakistani Muslims lived. And so I ended up doing a dissertation around that, and it kind of evolved from there. And then the thing that kind of, I think, was the final thing when I started my PhD, which was going to be about Scottish Asian youth culture, 911 had just happened, and the late Claire Dwyer, who ended up being Max Daniel from a PhD, she'd written a lot of stuff about young British Muslim women. And I was like, why is nobody writing about young Muslim men? And so I ended up doing PhD in that. And a part of that was about racism, Islamophobia. I've always been very interested in that and kind of had that through. So it's a kind of. I suppose there's been a series of events that have led me into researching this, and then I've always been very interested in it and it annoys me how the community is misrepresented and there's lots of false narratives and incorrect information circulating. So I've kind of. I'm always banging the drama about those. Those sorts of issues. So that's a bit of a whirlwind tour, 25 years of development.

[Claudia Radovan]

No, I think there's a lot of interesting points to pull on there, a lot of threads to sort of draw on. I think what you said about the differing narratives is a really really important point and I think it's wonderful that you came to writing about this essentially through education in the first instance as well, through a more, a more rounded education on the topic. I think you mention in your book about some of the more kind of structural forms of Islamophobia around policy and something that we discuss quite frequently on this podcast or we end up discussing is the prevent policy and how that's contributed to mainstreaming or, you know, further instituting Islamophobia in so many quarters, particularly education. You know, we've spoken about prevent more generally about the circumstances around Trojan Horse, about some of the more really horrendous referrals. I just thought it'd be interesting to hear a bit more about everyday Islamophobia in relation to prevent and some of the kind of associated policies as well.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it's interesting because if you don't know about it, you don't see it happening, but when you do, you notice things more and you see that, oh, there's a. Why is the university risk manager or whatever their title might be at this meeting? Of course I know because I work in this area and I think, well, they'll be in charge of prevent and they'll be keeping an eye on things and monitoring things. So I think there's quite a lot of stuff like that that's been happening for quite a long time now. So even when I worked at Lancaster University in 2005, 6 there the, I think it was the university registrar had themselves added to the Islamic, the student Islamic society mailing list. And you know, this person wasn't in any of the other student mailing lists, but they were on the mailing list of that group, you know, and it's just things like that. Of course they would say, oh, they're just keeping an eye and they just want to make sure everything's okay. And it would all be presented like that. But actually, you know, it's a form of surveillance and you know, one specific group of students has been monitored and surveyed in a way that the others aren't and they can just go on with what they're doing. So, you know, there's a lot of things like that, but it might seem quite trivial and low level, but it's actually there's a lot of monitoring and surveillance going on. And you know, I'm always amazed when I tell students about this because they're always really stunned because they don't realize this. Even just recently I was. There was a. There was a kind of encampment at the Acasi University and they were getting lectures to come and speak to students. And I was asked to go and speak of Islamophobia. And as I was there, the university manager and some other people walked around, were walking about and I said to students, I said, oh, do you see what's happening here? So there's the person that's in charge of prevent the university and they're just coming around and you know, keeping an eye on things, you know, so there's things like that that you, you know, and you know, that person's got a lot of work to do. They don't need to be doing that, you know, it's such a waste of resource then it doesn't, it doesn't work. It's been shown in so many studies that it doesn't work and it creates more harm than good, but it kind of continues to, to happen. And even just the whole sort of monitoring of speakers. So like education institutions are supposed to monitor external speakers and like keep a spreadsheet or whatever of who's speaking out, like lectures or coming from outside, all these sorts of things. So it creates all of this work. It's an extra workload and you know, more paperwork and it really, it doesn't work. And it's been shown not to work, you know, so that's some of the ways that I think that we see it kind of operating. And of course, depending who the prevent officer is or whatever, it can be quite pernicious and it can be literally about, you know, watching the brown student in the computing lab writing their essay and they end up, I'm just going to keep an eye on them. I mean, I've heard stories like that as well. And you're just like, well, it's just a student doing the essay. Why you're not looking at the white students, but you're looking at him because he's brown, that type of thing. So you end up with this sort of layer of surveillance that I think is just unhelpful and well, it's not fair at all. It just shouldn't happen.

[Chella Ward]

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's that state externalizing of responsibility that's happening through these processes and places of education no longer become places for critical development as you say, they become spaces for surveillance and the kind of further maintenance of this suspect community. I've also seen reading some of the recent media outputs, even trade unions being targeted by this and dissenting voices prevent has become a means of scrutinizing even our trade union activism within the UK context. So I think, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's definitely a pernicious tool that is being employed across the board and normalized through it every day. Islamophobia. One of the other things I quite like in your book, Peter, is the way in which you draw in beyond the UK policy context and you look at sort of the specific local, but also the transnational globalizing nature of everyday Islamophobia. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, thanks. It's interesting. So even with stuff like counterterrorism policies, quite a lot of them are shared between countries. So I think, I can't remember if it's the prevent policy, but there was one of the policies that was like founded in the Netherlands. The UK copied it and then the Chinese have copied it as well in terms of their treatment in the Uyghur community, you know, so these, these policies, even though they don't work and they've been shown in lots of research not to work and there are alternatives, you know, they still get shared and you end up having this sort of transnational almost network of sharing bad policy. You couldn't make it up, could you? So you. So it's almost like all these different countries are sort of copying each other or saying, oh well, look, the model in the US works quite well. Why don't we do this in Australia or New Zealand or whatever? And they end up having a sort of transnational network of like policy formation. But we see that not just in policy, we see that in just sharing of Islamophobic ideas, particularly through the media is a key platform around that. And we get. People can just share a set of blog posts that are really explicitly Islamophobic and they can be shared really widely around the world. And we see some of the kind of really high profile Islamophobic incidents by like Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand. They, they read a lot of these blog posts normally coming from the US and it informed their sort of, you know, agenda, if you like, and they quoted these people and they're in their, and their sort of manifestos I think they called them. And you know, so you see that kind of global sharing of, of ideas and the people also, you know, like Geert Wilders visiting Australia and things like that. So you get these, these political figures or public intellectuals or whatever who have this global platform and they get all expenses paid, trips to whatever to talk about Islamophobia and to spread hateful messages and somehow they managed to get through border control and whatever. So I think with all these networks and layers of sharing, transnational sharing of Islamophobic images, text, blogs, social media posts, and it's, you know, and it can very quickly be spread really, really fast. And that's, to me, that's probably one of the most difficult things to challenge. You know, so a country could change its policy on counterterrorism or, you know, have a more inclusive approach to something, but there is still this really fast network of sharing globally, you know, social media posts or blog posts. And if you've got the knowledge and they know how in the networks, you can do it really fast and it can just go to, like, millions of people, like in the click of a button.

[Claudia Radovan]

I think that's a really good example, particularly what you mentioned about the use of prevent methods in East Turkestan against the Uyghur communities. That's something that we've spoken about quite a lot on the podcast. And as you say, it's as if it's not bad enough, but it's used here to the detriment of its victims, for want of a better word, it's now propagated elsewhere as well. I also really, really thought it was important what you said about this kind of mainstreaming of Islamophobia. And in the UK right now, the Labour Party has once again drawn upon the issue of the Islamophobia definition, something that received a great, excuse me, deal of attention from the APPG for British Muslims and other quarters as well. The Labour Party previously held that definition and now there's. There's talks again to say, no, we're not going to use Islamophobia, we're going to use anti Muslim hatred. Another committee has been set up, and so on and so forth. Do you think that that kind of lack of clarity around a definition of Islamophobia has contributed to that kind of the problem with the mainstreaming? Because there's always that kind of, I'm not being Islamophobic, this freedom of speech. I'm allowed to say this, but then we see, you know, issues around that. We see the, you know, bigger incidents like the pogroms that happen in the UK in August 2024. Do you think that that kind of lack of clarity actively contributes to the issue of everyday Islamophobia?

[Peter Hopkins]

That's a great question, because I hadn't really thought of the issues with the definition being directly linked to the mainstreaming issue. But I think we are so on the definition, I'M really tired of debating the definition. I'm really sick of it. I mean, you know, academically, yes, we want to work with good definitions, you know, and if you've, you know, most people who submit a journal article and get peer review comments, one of the reviewers will pick up your definitions and want you to be clearer about the terms you're using and have clarity around your terminology. Fine, let's have clear terminology. But we just seem to be this endless cycle of debate and definitions and there's lots of different definitions out there. Take your pick. I don't really care what you call it. Call it Islamophobia, call it anti Muslim racism. To me they're the same thing, you know, whatever, I don't really mind, but I think this is a really good example of Islamophobia in operation and it's almost a form of silencing, you know. So in, in the book I talk about Islamophobia not just being about active like hate crime and discrimination and stigmatization. Islamophobia can also operate through absences and silences. Also the absence there is that you just don't have a definition of Islamophobia. So you might have other documents on your, on your website defining antisemitism or defining and you know, sexism or you know, the equality actor and all the rest of it, but you don't know the definition of Islamophobia. And so by its absence it's sort of rendered invalid and not significant, you know, so I just think they should just define it and move on and address the issue. And I just amazed that they keep. And it's the same people, it's some of the same people that are involved in it, like don't agree the recent thing and people were consulted about that, but we've not been told what's happening. And now apparently it's with government and they're waiting to see if they're going to accept it and it's like, well, why, why wouldn't you accept it? And if you wouldn't accept it, just accept one of the previous seven. So I think it's a really good, I think it's a really, to me it's like a crystal clear example of Islamophobia in action. It's like we just, we just won't accept it. On the mainstreaming thing, I think that the issue they are, is around the ways in which really quite far right, far right ideas have increasingly found their way into mainstream narratives and politics and discussion. You know, so like at the Moment. You wouldn't really need to look very far to find mainstream news coverage about asylum seekers or refugees or boats or whatever, Denny's, whatever you want to call them. And that's a believer. We don't ever. Some people come in, but it's not a major issue, but it's seen as like the biggest issue as possible. Right? And rather than talk about the really important issues like the nhs, possible waiting list, childcare cost, minimum wage, living wage, transport costs, whatever else that's important to people, it costs to get a train and a bus to work, all of those things. They keep focusing on the irrigation issue and, and it's just giving it a massive platform and it's the mainstream that are doing it. So fine, Nigel Farah, imagine his cronies are always going to be saying stuff like this, but it mean that the mainstream, and by that I do mean Conservative and Labor, because they're, they're. I mean, the mainstream is quite a broad area. They are still talking about these debates and still platforming them. So one of the worst things I think that happened was when Rishi Sunak was standing to try and be reelected and failed. And his main statement on his on the. The PO was stop the balls. That was his one message. Imagine you're in charge of the UK and you're trying to be re elected and you've got all these issues, you know, Covid post, Covid stuff, nhs, you get waiting list, you get everything. And I could go through everything. There was so many issues and that's the one thing you stand on and you're trying to be the major elected person. Like, you know, so I think shows you the, the problem that we've got. And I can hear some people think conservatives aren't mainstream, they're white wagon. It's like, yeah, they're right wing, but they're. If normally, if they get elected, they're towards the left of the right. See what I mean? Anyway, so we've got this issue around mainstreaming, but it's not just the politicians, the public intellectuals, certain academics do it. I think we are. The issue of mainstreaming, the definition comes in as you get academics who think they've been really clever by asking about the definition and, and I've got colleagues like this and I've been in lots of platforms like this where people like, you know, academics that have been really clever. What do you mean by Islamophobia? I know. Could you say a bit more about that? And da, da, da. And really what they're doing is they're mainstreaming Islamophobia because they're mainstreaming whole set of ideas that this might not be a valid term and it might not not be a real thing. Actually it is. And we know there's lots of other definitions. I still remember going to the meeting in Brussels, but we're handed a sheet and it had like definition of Islamophobia on it. It had, you know, the running we trust in the apb, the M definition and whatever. And I just think we'll take the peck why we talk about definition. So I think that's maybe where the mainstream issue and the definition come together and to reinforce each other.

[Chella Ward]

Yeah, absolutely. I do think you're right. Excuse me. In that it's a lot of distraction going on and it continues to legitimize and normalize Islamophobic ideas in the very kind of ignorance of the phenomenon. And I know hate crime data, et cetera, is very much limited and it just gives us a snapshot that this is the biggest area of kind of racist interpersonal interaction and grow growth, unfortunately that we're seeing.

[Claudia Radovan]

So.

[Chella Ward]

Absolutely, I agree. And I think, yeah, many worked in is on the focus studies. We all have those moments where we sit in meetings and we kind of just. I think there's nothing else we can do but just sort of roll our eyes and just feel exhaustion that we are still having these debates time and time again. One of the other things I thought was really interesting in the book, kind of following on from mainstreaming was some of the stuff you've mentioned around countering Islamophobia. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, it's interesting because there's lots of people working to counter Islamophobia and there's like great initiatives like, you know, educate against Islamophobia and there's, you know, toolkits on how to counter it and you know, counter narratives and, you know, lots of, lots of different approaches. You know, this. And there's some great stuff like grief factors. I really enjoyed dreaming about some of that stuff in Canada and after the, the incident in London and Ontario and, you know, so there's all of those. But the thing, it's really hard to write about the counter because in the end I feel that all these initiatives are only going to get so far unless we basically abolish the systems, the structural systems and reinforce it. So, you know, so in the book I've set up the Islamophobia industrial comp. Complex and if that wasn't. They are, I Think they're making lots of money out promoting Islamophobia and writing blog posts and getting paid six figure salaries doing so and there was less of it over there and that didn't exist. If we didn't have PREVENT and other counterterrorism measures and other countries, if that wasn't there either, then I think a lot of these initiatives would have more impact. So going into schools and doing educational initiatives or whatever would have you probably get a lot more purchase. And one of the most interesting things I read around the issue of PREVENT was around it's not just about getting rid of prevent, it's almost getting rid of the thinking with some part of it. And thing is there's a whole generation of people that have been trained for like 20, 30 years in this way of thinking. And you know, so even if they get rid of Prevent and brought in some other policy that was more suitable, the people that are in the job, the current PREVENT officers or whatever role they're in, those people who are still trained think like that. It's a bit like trying to get a school teacher who's seen to be really good at the job, who's taught for 25 years to completely change their approach. It would be really hard. And so that has to be a lot of work done to. I think the quote I use in the book is to stop prevent like thinking because there's people that are trained and very well versed in that and it's just a part of their. And butter. So I think that, so I try to emphasize in the book about the need to, to remove the structural issues, but then the, the more grounded everyday actions with, to have more impact sort of thing. But I do think it's really hard because of the structural issues. Like that's the, those are the key things that really stop a lot of progress.

[Claudia Radovan]

I think there's, I think the point that you made about prevent light thinking is a really important one and it's something that we've discussed a lot on the podcast as well about how PREVENT is based on certain logics, on colonial racial logics that position the other as dangerous, as a threat, as something that needs eradicating. In the book, do you go into any particular detail about the relationship between Islamophobia and citizenship as well? Is that something that you looked at a lot in your research? I suppose that one of the more recent examples is the Nationality and Borders bill, which when it was announced, I think the statement was that it made potentially precarious the citizenship of about 6 million people in the UK. And the fear was obviously that with all the rhetoric that you mentioned about stop the boats and the threat from Muslims, from immigration, that this, this policy would be levied very much at these kinds of vulnerable communities, these already minoritized communities. So I was wondering if you'd looked at kind of citizenship in, in the context of everyday Islamophobia.

[Peter Hopkins]

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I frame it like that quite, but there is, I do, I do refer to some work around the ways in which and Islamophobia can shape how people engage in politics. You know, so it's more, it's more a sort of everyday citizenship and everyday political participation rather than like sort of policy lens on it. In some work in Scotland that we did, we found that we spoke to young people, we did sort of interviews and group discussions with young Muslims about the ways in which they engage with politics or not. And we found that Islamophobia had, there was a double response or a two sided response. Some young people were really angry about Islamophobia and it almost motivated them to become more political. They wanted to be elected, they wanted to, you know, join, you know, join political parties and you know, become a local councillor or you know, whatever it was. And they became quite active and politically engaged. But there was others who, Islamophobia essentially silenced them. And they were worried about if they were too political they would be seen to be a problem. Almost like they'd been radicalized if they expressed strong views sort of thing. And so for some of those young people, they just didn't want interview with politics with their capital privy politics. So they would engage more in community work or volunteering or they join local activist groups that went in the formal political sphere. So we saw a shape in sort of citizenship in those ways. Of course it's still great that they're doing like community based work or volunteering or joining Amnesty International initiatives or whatever. So there was quite an interesting. But it was shaped by example and it shaped their sort of everyday, you know, experiences and negotiations of citizenship, if you like.

[Chella Ward]

That's really interesting, Peter, that sort of echoes some of the work that I've done in the francophone European context in France and Belgium. But also there's been newer stuff recently about the extent to which Muslims participate in their citizenship or their kind of their citizen duties and then the accusations of entryism. So we're kind of, you know, Muslims are stuck between this, this rock and a hard place. And I think, yeah, you very clearly elucidate a lot of that for us in in the book, but I think we've kind of taken up plenty of your time. Wanted to thank you once again, Peter, for joining us today. And for listeners, the book Everyday Islamophobia by Peter Hopkins is now out and unavailable for you to read.

[Radio Reorient Narrator]

You're listening to Radio Reorient, the decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. This is Radio Reorient exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with.

[Peter Hopkins]

Saeed Khan, Claudia Radovan Hizamiyeh and me, Chella Ward.

[Chella Ward]

Wow, that was a really fascinating chat with Peter there on his forthcoming book. I feel like we could have gone on talking for quite some time and some of the stuff that I thought was really interesting that came up in our conversation was on the one hand, we have this notion of everyday Islamophobia and actually in many ways, so many of us have been working with this. It's not necessarily groundbreaking, but the book is so incredibly thorough in picking up just that, those nuances. And that conversation really highlights the nuances and the kind of national but also global context within which we're working, particularly like the sort of notion of the microaggressions and how there is quite a lot of emphasis within sort of everyday Islamophobia on all of that. But also it kind of got me thinking about some of the potential shortcomings of this and thinking about the shortcomings of microaggressions in relation to the work around the discussion of the definition. Sorry, of Islamophobia going on at the moment where we have words like hostility or hatred being argued to be potentially more suitable a fit. I think that we're kind of falling into the same sort of problem. Hostility, hatred, microaggressions seem to fail to capture the broader structural and systemic dimensions of Islamophobia and rather really placing it on those individuals and the individuals interacting.

[Claudia Radovan]

I think that's a really important point and it's one that Peter spoke about really well in our, in our conversation. Once again in the uk, we have yet another discussion and debate about the definition of Islamophobia. And it's, it feels like there's so much effort being put into rendering this to an individual problem, trying to render Islamophobia as an individual pulling off a Muslim woman's headscarf or the use of particular, the slurs. And I think what this does, is it. It's a continued effort to reduce Islamophobia to. This is just occasional individual acts of, like you said, hostility or hatred. Which ignores the fact that globally, and we've spoken about this on a number of episodes globally, we can see these family resemblances through different state driven acts of Islamophobia, whether that's through counterterror policy or whether counter terror is used as the pretext for enacting horrendous acts of violence and prejudice against Muslims in some cases, as we've spoken about previously, enshrined into policy into law. And this, this focus on definitions and changing it and trying to call it anything but Islamophobia, it seems to be reinforcing that not just in the uk, but globally.

[Radio Reorient Narrator]

I think he makes that point really well, you know, in the book too, where he makes the point that all of this kind of endless conversation about the term Islamophobia is a kind of distraction tactic. Right. Or the way that Toni Morrison would talk about, you know, the real function of racism being distraction, preventing you from actually doing the work. And I really feel like in the UK at the moment, we are really locked in to being drawn into these conversations about this word with people saying ridiculous things like phobia in Greek means fear. And so, you know, and I mean, that's wholly ridiculous. First of all, the word phobos in Greek has never just meant fear. But anyway, even if it did, you know, nobody makes that complaint about homophobia, for instance, or xenophobia. Those are not words that are incomprehensible because they happen to contain, you know, etymological Greek roots. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But within this big distraction tactic that is etymology is also, as you say, a kind of narrowing of what the term is allowed to mean. I think you're absolutely right. You know, both of you have kind of said this is actually about a reduction of our understanding of the structural. I think I would reflect that back out into the conversation about racism. Right. The reason why the all Party parliamentary group defined Islamophobia as a type of racism in what is often known as the people's definition. Right. The idea of having a straightforward definition of Islamophobia, the reason for doing that is because we already know what racism is. There's already been, you know, decades of work to define racism. That's not to say that there, there is no racism or there are no racists. Of course not. But there has been work. So to put Islamophobia into that work that has been done and it seems like this attempt to redefine Islamophobia as a kind of interpersonal hatred is not just a diminishing of our understanding of Islamophobia. It's actually a diminishing of our understanding of structural racism more generally. And the other really important thing I think it does is it turns Islamophobia into something that is not historical. Right? It makes it something that's only presentist. This is only about the things that people do to each other now in the present. It stops us from seeing all the ways that, for instance, Islamophobia is, you know, historiographical. It's crucial to the writing of state histories, for instance, that are organized against the Palestinians or the Uyghurs in East Turkestan or Muslim minority populations in India or Bosniak Muslims. I mean, there are all sorts of Muslim populations who have had tremendous amounts of very murderous Islamophobia enacted upon them. And that Islamophobia, sure, it, it was. It was caused by or. Or it was manifested through violence, but it was also in a way of writing history that meant that Muslims did not have a claim on the lands in which they lived. And we miss all of that landsc of the way that Islamophobia is enacted through the writing of history. For example, if we think about it only as a kind of interpersonal aggression.

[Saeed Khan]

I mean, I think it's a really important point because in some ways, what everyday Islamophobia allows us to do is make it sort of the fixed reference point to the changes that have happened historically when it comes to power. And what we find then is this question, are Muslims the new golem, or are they just simply the old golem reconstituted? What seems to change is not just those in power, but those who aspire to be in power and sidle up to them. And I wonder that. I mean, from the Godfather, it said, you know, it's not personal, it's strictly business. Well, it is, except that for Muslims, it's absolutely personal. And you see how this has played out just recently with two prominent Muslims visiting the White House. One is Mayor Elect Zoran Hamdani, and the other, of course, just the day before, was Crown Prince from Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman. And it's interesting to see some of President Trump's strongest supporters excoriate Mamdani and yet now seemingly lionize and be permissive and deferential to MBS being in. In the White House. Which, of course, then brings up Zoran's father's wonderful book, Good Muslim Bad Muslim this by Mahmoud Mamdani so you wonder who's the good Muslim and who's the bad Muslim? Or should we be saying is it a choice between good Muslim, better Muslim, or is it bad Muslim and worse Muslim? This is, I think, a way that the etymologies and the ways that we approach everyday Islamophobia become very helpful when we see these kinds of examples playing out in real time. And I think that Hopkins is providing us with a template that can be used at any time, but more importantly, being able to locate the current expression of Islamophobia that we can see as being this larger narrative vis a vis power.

[Claudia Radovan]

Without a doubt, Peter Hopkins book has given us a great deal to think about, and I have no doubt we'll be referring to it considerably. It's also worth mentioning that Reorient will be producing a special issue on Everyday Islamophobia due to be released in 2026, and we'll certainly look forward to seeing some of the contributions there. Thank you very much to our listeners for listening in, and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Radio Reorient.

[Peter Hopkins]

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