Racialization and Religion: Making Sense of Islamophobia in Europe

This paper will consider some of the key issues and evidence concerning hostility to Islam and Muslims in contemporary Europe – something described as Islamophobia.  The core argument is that we should not understand Islamophobia by isolating it from other forms of racial discrimination. To this end the paper supports Goldberg’s (2009) insistence that in addition to comparativist methodologies employed in the study of race and racism, we also need relational methodologies. That is to say that where the former compares and contrasts, the latter also seeks to connect. Conceptually this means drawing on ideas of race and racialization, and empirically highlighting the relationship between Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in particular.