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Radio ReOrient Season 13 Round up, hosted by Saeed Khan, Amina Easat Daas, Marchella Ward and Claudia Radiven
00:49:27
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
B
Foreign. Listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. My name is Chella Ward. I'm joined by my co hosts, Claudia Radovan, Amina, Isaat Das and Saeed Khan. Today we're going to be doing a little bit of a roundup. You are probably already aware that we're sort of in between seasons of Radio Reorient at the moment. So we'll be doing a roundup of our previous season, and we'll be telling you about a few of the things that are going on in the Reorient universe further afield. This has been a season where we have been talking about a number of different things. Like many of the Radio Reorient seasons, it's been varied, but there have been common threads across the season. And one of those common threads has been the question of resistance and ways of countering things like global Islamophobia, but also the interconnected Islamophobic genocide of the Palestinians, for example, and other forms of injustice. We've heard from scholars, we've heard from activists, we've heard about the way that this global Islamophobia plays out in different communities around the world. We had an episode about the persecution of the Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan, for example. So we've been looking at this question of genocide and resistance in a number of different ways. And we've also been thinking about some of the broader political manifestations of that Islamophobia, for instance, in anti migrant prejudice narratives around refugees, broader racisms too. So this has been a really, really exciting season and we're really grateful to all the guests that have joined us. The one thing that I did want to just point out is that we are recording this episode and I was very aware of it, as I said, that this season has been one where we talked about resistance. We're recording this episode, many of us at least, or most of us in terms of the co hosts from the uk. And we're recording it in a moment when eight hunger strikers in the UK pre, pre charge, pre trial hunger strikers in UK prisons are at very serious risk of dying as a result of their treatment in UK prisons. These are political prisoners, part of a group that's become known in the UK press as the Filton 24. So these are people who took action against the genocide of the Palestinian people in particular by targeting the factories of Elbit Systems, an arms manufacturer that has been enabling and supplying the genocid of the Palestinians. So I can't get out of my head what a relevant, but in a, in a frightening way relevant week this is for us to be recording the episode that will be the roundup of our series about resistance and the episode in which we're going to be thinking a little bit about how that global Islamophobia is inflecting the treatment of those Filton 24 political prisoners and also that their hunger strike. And I suppose I wanted to start by thinking about the Islamophobia that those young people are experiencing. Now when I say Islamophobia, I don't mean that all of those prisoners are Muslim, that they're certainly not, although many of them are. But it makes me think about the way that the logics of Islamophobia play out on those who are Muslim and also those who are presumed to be Muslim. And this is something that we see often in pro Palestinian activism, certainly circles where those who are pro Palestinian are often assumed to be Muslim, their cause is assumed to be Muslim and they can be victims of Islamophobia even if they are not themselves Muslims. And you know, that makes me think about the fact that, you know, that that very first victim of Islamophobic hate crime that was narrated as if it was in revenge for 911 was a Sikh man. His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi. And he was murdered because the person who murdered him presumed him to be Muslim and therefore kill killed him, so called in in revenge for 9 11. So one very important aspect of Islamophobia is that it racializes Muslims. That's to say, it makes Muslims in a sense of people, whether they're Muslim or not. It racially marks them as Muslim in order to subject them to violence or discrimination or persecutions that are Islamophobic in nature, whether they're Muslim or not. And that makes me think about a number of the different ways that, that we've been discussing Islamophobia in the course of this season.
- [06:18]
C
Well, I think that this is one of the big debates I would suggest, as to where do we locate Islamophobia. Is it an exceptional phenomenon or is it a continuum? Is it something that shares commonality with other historically located situations? When I think about the plight of these hunger strikers, it immediately makes me think of people like Bobby Sands and the Irish who gave their lives in British custody for essentially the same objectives of self determination, freedom, dignity during, during the so called troubles. And what it shows then is how Islamophobia is not only a manifestation in some areas of imperialism, but it, it goes both ways. Islamophobia informs imperialism and imperialism informs Islamophobia phobia. And so tactically speaking, you see the purveyors of Islamophobia operating from the same impetus and with in many cases the same objectives. And so there is, I suppose, a certain kind of bespoken narrative of Islamophobia vis a vis Muslims. But we've seen these tactics by, by power structures deployed before and again for really the same reasons.
- [07:48]
D
I think likewise said, it really does seem very reminiscent of that period in the 80s. And it's interesting, I saw very recently the peace wall in Northern Ireland, the ironically named Peace wall, the kinds of solidarities that are shown in Ireland on the republican side, if you like the artwork that's speaking to particular issues in the world right now, such as Palestine, Sudan, Congo. Something that I was less aware of was that on the other side of the wall, on the loyalist side of the wall is a lot of artwork dedicated to obviously Ulster volunteers, but also the IDF as well. So it's very interesting to see that it's, I suppose young people today call it saying the quite apart out loud, that kind of stark contrast between loyalties between these opposing sides, that the people that were subject to imperialism in Ireland very much have that kind of empathy with other colonized nations. I think it's a very unnerving time to be living in that. We're seeing history essentially repeating itself again. I think the longest hunger strikers during the troubles that were imprisoned at longcash, we're talking 73 days, 71 days for some of them. We're now at a stage of over 50 days for some of the Filtum 24, which it is a very sad thing to see. And it's also, it draws our attention again to those solidarities globally between different persecuted groups.
- [09:37]
B
Yeah, I was thinking about that too, Claudia, in thinking about that connection between Irish movements for independence and against occupation and the Palestinian liberation movement. And I think sometimes people struggle to understand the various different aspects or the different things that the Palestinian liberation movement is that it is at the same time anti colonial Islamist, you know, a liberation movement, but also a movement that is rooted in Muslimness without necessarily only being composed of Muslims. This is often a mistake that is made on all sides of talking about Palestine is to presume that all Palestinians are Muslim, which of course they aren't. But all Palestinians are at this current juncture of world history, Muslimized. Right. And we know that because we know that, you know, when Zionist officials, as part of their archaeological, the archaeological arm of their occupation and this is something that, you know, I'm by training a classic. I've been keeping a close eye on the way that archeology is functioning as the UN Special Rapporteur to Francesca Albanese has said, as the ideological scaffolding of genocide and archaeology, you know, really is doing that at this particular moment in time. But one of the forms that that takes is, you know, var Zionist ministers digging usually on occupied land that they have absolutely no right to dig on, but digging in the ground and finding coins that come from the early history of Palestine that have Hebrew letters on them, for example, and then presenting this as some kind of gotcha argument to say, you know, see, Israel was always here, Israel has always existed. Which, you know, what that really is is a kind of reassertion of ethnonationalism. Right. It's the assumption that a state that is only as old 1948 has this pre history and it's doing that anti Semitic work of collapsing Judaism with, you know, this occupation project called Israel. And it's also retrojecting this identity or, or Jewishness as an identity into a distant past so that Jewishness is then forced to serve this ethno nationalist idea of Israel that invents a fairy tale of ancient Israel to, to justify its. Its col and its occupation of Palestinian territory. And I think what's interesting about the Muslim in that context is, you know, I started by saying all Palestinians are not Muslim, but Palestinians are Muslimized. The way that that Muslimizes Palestinians is it forces Palestinians in kind of similar ways to the ways in which, you know, it. It forced Irish movements against occupation. It forces them to be in opposition with ethno nationalism, right? It defines this ethno nationalist idea of a state from which the Muslim is excluded and excluded historiographically, by which I mean excluded, by the way we tell the story of history, right? We try to say that this ethno nationalist state entity has some kind of ancient history, you know, that comes from before the time when there were Muslims, right before in a kind of pre Islamic time. But it also obviously excludes them in racist ways, in political ways. And that makes me think about all the types of ethno nationalism that we've encountered in this series. I mean, you could say that you could see that same ethno nationalist project operating, you know, on behalf of China in East Turkestan. And I think you could see it in a number of the anti refugee and anti migrant narratives that we've been analyzing this season too. It seems to be that Islamophobia as a feature of ethno nationalism and Muslimness as that position that contests ethno nationalism politically and historiographically. That seems to me to be a really important dimension of Muslimness in the present moment.
- [13:41]
E
Really thinking about that as well, and sort of the, the, I guess that that is very much the cornerstone of most nationalist myth making, right? The idea of this pure nation untainted. And here the Muslimness is doing the tainting. And I think that very much in, in the case of Palestine, it is that collapsing of the Palestinian identity as a singular musl. But also it really relates for me to some of the other things we've spoken about in this season of how even sympathizing with Muslimness draws you into the sort of the reach of kind of creeping Islamophobia. I was also thinking about some of the themes that came up in this series around kind of refugees and the deserving refugees and the undeserving refugees and the idea that those kind of heralding from presumed Muslim nations, etc, become the undeserving. And we see then this overlap of the kind of nationalist argument with broader patterns of xenophobia, the immigration debates, particularly in the UK context, but arguably a broader and wider field where Muslimness is kind of seen outside of the realms of humanity. And therefore Muslim refugees or Muslims in sort of state of crisis are not deserving of support or any sort of welcome the UK context. And that very much like the situation in Palestine, the situation in the UK functions through numerous sort of Islamophobic devices.
- [15:17]
B
I think you're really right, Aminah, to point out that connection between the way that refugees and migrant people can be Muslimized and the way that Palestinians are Muslimized. And in both cases, what you've got is a group who are Muslimized because they are pushed outside of those racist boundaries of ethno nationalism. And just as everyone's talking, I'm sat here thinking about whether this is actually something specific about the way that reorient and, you know, the. The reorient universe thinks about Muslimness, right? Muslimness as something that is not contained by ethno nationalist ways of understanding the world, as something that is not limited to kind of ethnic markers or belonging to particular kinds of geographies, but as a political position, which is also a historiographic position. That's to say, it's the position that Muslims are put into by a particular Eurocentric way of telling story of history, that story that. That we've been talking about. And we use the case of. Of, you know, that. That project called Israel. The way that. That tells itself, this kind of ancient fairy tale about its own existence, that's very much a story that we see replicated around the world in ways that historiographically, not just exclude the Muslim from ethnonationalism, but also make the Muslim, in a sense, make the Muslim ontologically. And I think the fact of asking those political questions, ontological questions, epistemological questions, questions about how we know stuff about the world, the fact of asking those kinds of questions about Muslimness, I think, is. Is something quite specific to reorient as a project. And it's an exciting time for Reorient as a project. As I kind of lay out there, a few of the things that I think this project certainly helps me to think about, although no doubt that everybody has other things that reorient helps them to think about. But as I lay out a few of those things, I think about how much I'm looking forward to our program of events. Inshallah coming up this summer, we're going to be having the summer program which will give us a kind of extended period of time in which we can really dig into some of these questions and some of these issues. We'll also have the Critical Muslim Studies Conference as well to be able to meet with people, scholars from all around the world who are interested in these sorts of questions. And I'm really struck hearing Radio Reorient this season and just thinking about all of those different questions that are opening, opening up through the conversations that we've had and that will continue to open up through those events that are, that are coming up. Insha'. Allah.
- [17:51]
C
Well, I think one of the factors about Radio Reorient is that it does not exist in a vacuum. And it is important to understand the context of what has been transpiring over this past year. There are several tectonic shifts that are happening, and Radio Reorient has been, I think, very adept at approaching them with the proper context and the depth of study. I think of, for example, this idea of the nation state. Not all nation states were founded on the idea of sameness. That's a very Westphalian model. But the United States, for example, was really an exception to that. And I say was because I think it really is past tense in some ways. The United States has caught up with its 5 to 8 hour time difference from Europe to now be a country where the debates really are about trying to make it something that it never was. Essentially white and essentially Christian, at least in its narrative. The idea of it being a nation of immigrants is now confronted with hostility and contempt toward migration itself. And perhaps one of the watershed moments that we can see of this past year was the election of the first Muslim as mayor of the largest city in the United States, that being New York City and that being Zoran Mamdani, and the kind of everyday Islamophobia that has come to the fore and either and even other forms of Islamophobia that have come into specific relief. And I would argue that it has also brought forth some very intriguing lines of demarcation to antisemitism as well, in fact, making it very confusing, showing then that, for example, Mamdani spending Hanukkah with the actor and thespian Mandy Katinkin and his family, and having so many other members of the Jewish community coming to his support, as well as that of many Orthodox Jews within New York City, for whom the values are not something that's happening thousands of miles away, but something more grounded to the local than to the global. And it's something to then go ahead and consider that as we look at Islamophobia and how it is deployed, keeping focus on both its specificities as well as its generalities, because as the ground is shifting underneath it, it's important to go ahead and make sure that, that we don't use an old model of Islamophobia that we updated in the same ways that we update our phones.
- [20:43]
D
I think that's a really important point to draw on as well. Said. And it was certainly highlighted by the election of Mamdani. And that's the issue of everyday Islamophobia. And that's certainly something that came up quite a lot for us, especially in the latter part of season 13. We had the opportunity to speak to Peter Hopkins about his latest book, Everyday Islamophobia. And we also, you know, the long anticipated special issue of the Reorient Journal will be coming up in the new year as well, early in 2026, which will be focusing on everyday Islamophobia. But I think, you know, it's quite an important term and we did discuss this a lot this season, especially with the issues around the definition of Islamophobia, which, you know, it's a term that's contested globally. You know, it's people either lurch between saying the word is wrong or phobia is a psychiatric term. Don't, you know, use that for something that's a mental illness that people can't help for something that they can. Or people say Islamophobia is deserved, which is one of the more kind of extreme views. Or people say, as the UK government seems to be saying of late, that we should actually be calling it anti Muslim hate and hostility, which, you know, throughout this season we've made clear that, you know, that's quite intentional in a way, isn't it? This constant distraction about the term Islamophobia, about the definition of Islamophobia, has proven to be a really helpful distraction. You know, it becomes wrapped up in discussions about legality and how much you can police a particular type of behaviour. And I think it'll be very interesting in the new year in 2026 to see where that discussion goes, whether it just continues to be used as a distraction from actually combating the very real, the very horrifying experiences of Muslims and in the UK in particular, will it, you know, will it be used as a means to basically just shift the focus back to interpersonal racism and violence? Will it be used to focus on, for example, the use of a slur or the pulling of a hijab, rather than looking at the very real institutional issues, especially with the latest conversations about citizenship, which once again put a huge number of people, a huge number of Muslims in the uk, it continues to make their citizenship precarious, risky and removable as well.
- [23:29]
B
I think you're right, Claudia, to point out that we are at risk of losing our structural understanding of Islamophobia right in these conversations that are around. Should we call it anti Muslim hatred? Should we call it even? I think anti Muslim hostility is the one that's being floated now in the UK government even more ridiculously. And all of these, you know, as you, as you rightly pointed out, I think are really all about trying to roll back the clock on the last few decades of learning about structural racism that that has been happening and trying to roll back the clock on the way that Islamophobia was being meaningfully understood as a kind of structural racism that was not just interpersonal, but could also be carried out by states, for example, as well as by other kinds of organizations and institutions. And that obviously that project of understanding that structural dimension of Islamophobia has been a really, really important part or really closely aligned with the project of reorient through the work of Salman Saeed and Abdul Karim Vakil, who were involved in the current definition of Islamophobia in the uk often called the people's definition, which defines Islamophobia as a kind of racism. And that's, I think, what we're at the risk of losing. But the thing that I wanted to jump in and point out is that for me, this has been this moment in which we're in, or this moment in which this season has been running in has been a moment of deliberate redefinition or I would maybe prefer to say impoverishment of words and language. I feel like we are living in a world where increasingly fascism is expressing itself through deliberate attempts to redefine language, to remove our right to use language, to take things that mean something and kind of hollow them out of meaning. And we could talk about that. There are a number of different words. I mean, this week we have seen the banning by certain police forces of the phrase globalize the intifada, which is being explained using the very spurious, ridiculous explanation that intifada is in somehow relate is in some way related to the political violence that took place at Bondi Beach. So the idea is that the word intifada is kind of by definition anti Semitic, which of course is a complete erasure of the entire history of the word. I mean, this is a word in Arabic that is used of huge numbers of different kinds of anti colonial uprising, including uprising by Jewish people against Nazi occupation occupiers at Warsaw. So the idea of saying this is a word that means Anti Semitic violence is itself anti Semitic, right? Because it erases that very important history of Jewish resistance against the Nazis in particular. But it's also a kind of fascist land grab that's being made on a word. Right? We're being told what a word means by people who are not there in the context in which the word is pronounced, who want to conflate and avoid event where the word was not pronounced, with an entirely different tradition, you know, of. Of using that word, and who also want to, you know, deliberately misinterpret this word in order to criminalize a liberation movement, that's to say, the Palestinian liberation movement. And I think we need to be so alert to the way that words at the moment are being completely hollowed out of meaning. And a part of our job as. As academics or as intellectuals has to be, I think, to. To. To find that meaning, to hang on to that meaning in those words, to explain those different meanings and the different usages of words so that we're not at risk of. Of losing them to the kind of fascism that wants to reinterpret words.
- [27:28]
C
I think it would be dangerous to limit this process to just fascism. Liberalism has gone ahead and hijacked terminology for centuries. Ask anyone who comes from a colonized part of the world. So when we look at this idea of knowledge is power and terminology, I think we need to be intellectually honest to see how it's deployed. And this season we had a very excellent meditation of that in looking at Islamophobia in the academy and to see how this is one of the battlegrounds, so to speak, of it happening. And when we're talking about the structural understanding of Islamophobia, I think it's important to understand the structural transformation, barring in part from Habermas, of many of the institutions in an unprecedented way, we find that the Western liberal project of modernity itself is moving through different contortions of its own professed structures and being done so with complete complicity and with complete impunity. So Islamophobia operating within that vessel requires us to then understand how the ground is shifting underneath this project, to see then how Islamophobia is adapting or is being adapted to that reality.
- [28:50]
E
I also think it's quite interesting coming back to the idea of language, but then also the liberal project, in a sense, that criminalizing intifada, the word for uprising or the resistance, is part of this broader project of sort of demonizing and criminalizing Arabness within the broader frame of Islamophobia. Right. If you criminalize Arab identity, you start to make exceptional or outside of the limits of humanity, the Arab Muslim identity. And I think that that's an important aspect. I think it's really interesting as well said that you're talking about the sort of the liberal project. And as we were talking, I was also thinking about the, on the one hand, the sort of the liberal hijacking, of course, and the mainstreaming of all of these ideas through, through projects such as the reworking of the definition, et cetera, or perhaps the busy work that's going on there. But also we've seen as this season has played out, the hijacking of, or the reappropriation of Christian identity as well, to further some of the Islamophobic goals, particularly in the US context, as in the more far right nationalist context, the reappropriation and in the uk, indeed, the reappropriation of Christian, supposedly Christian norms, etc to further externalize Muslimness. So it's like we've got the sort of so many different lenses and so many different layers through which Islamophobia is becoming normalized. You can't really turn one way or the other without seeing that Muslimness is being problematized across the board.
- [30:33]
B
I'm thinking about that, Amina, about what you said there about Arabness. I'm wondering whether what's actually happening with those Arabic terms is they're becoming sort of Muslimized, perhaps even more so than Arabized. Because I'm thinking about the way that the terms in Arabic that seem to be problematic seem to be those that are associated either on the one hand with resistance or on the other hand with Muslimness. I'm thinking about, you know, that woman in France who, who was arrested because she said assalamu alaikum to her neighbor. You know, she didn't say marhaba or, you know, other other kinds of Arabic words. It was specifically that this was seen to be a Muslim greeting. I think that that was problematic. And I'm thinking about how what you're saying there about the reappropriation of, of those kind of white Christian positions kind of sits alongside a deliberate attempt to diminish what Muslimness can be. And I think this is an aspect of Islamophobia that we've talked a little bit about this season, but I think we probably will talk more about in the future. And for me, it relates to the hollowing out of meaning of the term Islamism. You know, I said a little bit earlier in our conversation that the idea that the Palestinian liberation movement is an Islamist movement is quite difficult. You know, for, for certain liberals and, and certain secular folks to, to fully understand. But I think it's also difficult for certain constellations of Muslimness and maybe I would use the word Kamalist constellations of Muslimness to understand because in a world where, where, you know, states express themselves through a kind of liberal secularity, the idea that Muslimness would be at the heart of a political movement for liberation and that that would be not a politics grafted on to Muslimness, but a politics that comes out of, is an expression of Muslimness in itself. I think that is very difficult for, for a secular world order to grapple with, but I think it's really important that we do try to understand it. I mean, you know, the term Islamism, until relatively recently in the history of the world, it was used pretty frequently simply to refer to Muslims, right? So the idea that Muslimness is something political, does something political in the world isn't just a kind of religion and listeners won't be able to see this, but I'm using air quotes for the word religion to indicate that this is the Eurocentric construct that, that gets imposed onto Islam. That idea I think is, is being squashed by a deliberate hollowing out of the term Islamism. And we're seeing, particularly in places like, I'm thinking about France in particular, this kind of panic being driven around Islamism, this big report, you know, that, that came out recently about the Frere Musulman, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a kind of, you know, deliberate attempt, attempt to force Muslims not to talk about Islamism or to be worried about speaking about Muslimness in a political way. And I suppose that's on, on my brain in particular at the moment because we went with a little delegation of, of reorienters. We went to a conference in Paris relatively recently, a conference, the forum, held by a political space called Les Bas Malcolm X, the Malcolm Mex space, which is a kind of conglomeration or kind of working together of a number of different groups. The part Des Indigen, La Republique Argens Palestine Perspective, Musselman Laligue, Pan African Houmoja and La Brigade Pan Africa Palestine and also Cage International. So a number of different organizations that come together under this heading, Les Bas Malcom X, the Malcolm X space, to try to think through these kinds of broader anti colonial, colonial political questions about Muslimness and, and Islamism, you know, was something that, that we discussed, or certainly I discussed, I said an awful lot about it to try to counter this hollowing out of the term because that hollowing out the term is also a hollowing out of Muslimness as something political and meaningful in the world. And I think that's an important aspect of Islamophobia.
- [34:56]
C
Of course, the irony is not lost that in France, even the most secular French will say use the phrase phrase Inshallah as a kind of a cultural quip. So I think agency plays a big role in people saying who has the right to define and who has not the right to define certain terms.
- [35:14]
D
I think that's a really interesting comparison. I wanted to actually talk a little bit. It was brought on by a conversation I had recently on somebody else's podcast I know, very disloyal, or rather their radio, about Islamophobia online. And one of the that just what you said about inshallah in France, it just brought to my mind the videos about the use of Yallah in Israel and how that is in fact not apparently an Arabic phrase that then takes us into conversations about hummus and falafel as well. And we simply do not have the time for that today, but perhaps another day. This thing about Islamophobia online, I think has been really interesting. The conversation I had was about are people now more happy to be Islamophobic in public rather than just online? And that really struck me. And this conversation was born from a Guardian article, I think, which involved a conversation with Aqeelah Ahmed, who was also involved with the people's definition of Islamophobia. And I thought this was very novel, the idea that people are not, not comfortable being Islamophobic in public, because I think they've been comfortable with that for quite some time. And I would say that the business of Islamophobia online, the thing that I see in relation to all these really brilliant points that I think have been made so far, this kind of demonization of Muslims, this determination to make it clear that there cannot be a political Muslimness, because if it involves Muslims, it must be to do with terrorism, it must be to do with extreme interpretations of faith, it must be to do with abuse of women or abuse of children, the grooming gangs, it must be to do with a security threat. And there's this constant fear factor being developed almost on a factory level scale of making sure that people are perpetually afraid of Muslims, even when there are incidences of, let us say, in the uk, grooming that involve white British individuals. There is nowhere near the kind of outrage or demonstrations of fear given to those examples. And being a prolific doom scroller myself, see it whenever there is an incident that does involve a Muslim or somebody that before they're named is perceived as Muslim, there are always those comments, usual suspects. Or it's the something that, you know, a number of comments that I cannot articulate here because they're appalling. But it's always that kind of rhetoric of it's the usual suspects. This is what we expect. We expect it to be Muslims. We expect to not concentrate on the crime itself. It has nothing to do with the crime itself anymore. It's about the faces and the people and the names attached to those crimes. And it's very reminiscent. It's not a new thing. We know this isn't new. Stuart hall spoke about this extensively with the image of the black mugger. If we look at the kind of dialogue around criminality in America, the constant attaching it to blackness or associating it with Latinx communities. If you go back even further, the kind of association with the anti war movements, this constant demonization in the uk, you can go back to the Troubles. The constant association of Irishness with violence and terrorism, separatism. This isn't new. It's the same playbook. It's just being reused in very, very well. It's not new ways, it's repetitive ways. But the determination is always to demonize Muslims, to dehumanise them, to ensure that people view them in a particular way.
- [39:21]
E
Absolutely. I think that's really interesting point you make there, Claudia. I was thinking about the normalization of the word inshallah in the French context, but also thinking about the Spanish vernacular that ohala exists as a word word, as a kind of bona fide Spanish word that actually comes from inshallah and the Muslim period in Spain. So it's widespread. Muslimness in languages is kind of very much. Or Arabic influence in language is very much there. I was also thinking about the kind of Muslimness is political and really thinking about research that I've done, but also coming back to Saeed's points about Zoran Mamdani. And so when we have have Muslims entering the political sphere, right. We've reached that point where people are so comfortable with their public Islamophobia. It's not restricted to online. Of course, you're entirely right in saying that, Claudia. You've kind of got that this sort of the suspect and the kind of demonization, the suspicion that Muslims who enter the political sphere are treated with. And we've reached that point where that is entirely normal. And I think in my own research I found that there's such a degree going the other way and thinking about how Muslims themselves deal with this, those in the political sphere, that there is a great deal of self censorship that goes on as well. So Muslims are now kind of increasingly, and I would say observing that for the past 10, 15 years, increasingly cautious in describing the way in which their Muslimness shapes or orients their political participation, action, et cetera, their resistance, or indeed the everyday politics type stuff they do, whether that's kind of local, no bridal ways or schools or whatever it might well be that they're involved in in the political state. People don't talk about it. So there is that other side and the costs that this sort of mass dehumanization of Muslimness are bringing and that constant treating Muslims as a kind of homogenous suspect community. And I think part of all of that plays into the flattening out of Muslimness and viewing Muslimness as one, one singular thing that is the Islamist angle, the side that should be treated with suspicion and so on and so forth that then normalizes these processes of the debate where you have the focus on the interpersonal, the reluctance to recognize racialization within the new UK definitional context. So it's kind of all very much interrelated and themes that we've continued to discuss throughout the season here on Radio Reorient.
- [41:59]
B
I always think there's something almost hopeful. This sounds like a very perverse thing to say now, but there's something almost hopeful about that kind of very macabre, frightening progression of Muslimization into communities that get further and further away from what's conventionally understood as Muslimness. Right. So what I mean by that is when pro Palestinian demonstrators who are white women, you know, in their 80s, not Muslim, maybe they're vicars or whatever it is we've seen with the arrest of, of the Palestine Action demonstrators, we've seen a number of these cases where, you know, people have been arrested under the Terror act who don't fit the bill, let's say, of how many people are, are programmed to imagine a so called terrorist. But as that process of Muslimization increasingly engages with further and further communities or communities of that get further away from the conventional imaginary of Muslimness, what happens is the resistance to Islamophobia grows and it diversifies and it becomes the idea of resisting Islamophobia becomes something that all communities are involved in because all communities begin to understand more and more that they too could be on the receiving end of Islamophobia. And what that does is it helps us to understand how Islamophobia is at the moment operating as a kind of grammar of the colonial world order. And it helps us to understand that standing against Islamophobia is actually standing against all of those injustices that are the product of, of European imperialism and, and colonial projects. And so it does the work of linking up the pro Palestinian liberation struggle with all of the other struggles, you know, against European colonialism, of which Zionism is of course a glittering example. So I think, you know, this is an important way to reframe Islamophobia, you know, as being something that is structural, that relates to a colonial world order, that is also the grammar of injustice in the world today. There are many, many other things that we could talk about as you can hear. Inshaallah. We will not be short of topics for the next season here on Radio Reorient, but I think we probably should should draw this roundup episode to a close for now. We will be back insha' Allah with another new season of Radio Reorient before too long. But if you want to be engaging with these questions around resistance and these kind of bigger epistemological political questions, there are a number of places that you can find us. In the meantime. You could, for example, take a look at the Reorientations blog. That's a place where we put short public facing pieces of writing that help you to understand things that we've encountered in our research or in public life. So it provides kind of analysis, intellectual analysis, but that analysis that isn't just for academics, that that's for everybody. You could take a look at the call for papers for the Reorient conference. You could take a look at the information around the Critical Muslim Studies summer program that we've already mentioned that is coming up. You could keep an eye out for the special issue of the Reorient journal. That's an academic journal, but it's an open access journal so you will be able to have access to it. You could also follow us on social media. We are at Ms. Reorient on Instagram. You can also find us under the Critical Muslim Studies project on Facebook and we're also on Blue sky and Twitter. So we hope to see you at some point soon. This has been an episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts have been Amina Isaat Das, Saeed Khan, Claudia Radvan and me. Chell Award. We're so, so grateful to all of our guests for joining us this season and we're really grateful to all of you for listening too. We'll see you again Inshallah, very soon. Until then, thank you ever so much for listening and assalamualaikum.