S Sayyid. Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 52, Issue 5, 2018.
In a speech delivered on 14 June 2017, Lubomír Zaorálek, the Czech foreign minister, was reported to have said that the history of colonialism had radicalized the Muslim population; therefore, those European countries that had been involved in colonizing Muslim lands needed to accept responsibility for causing violent extremism. I want to draw out three points from Zaorálek’s speech. First, he does something that most western politicians have refused to do: that is, link the past of European colonialism with the present of the Muslim question. Second, Zaorálek dismisses any responsibility that countries like the Czech Republic might have for the current Muslim influx since they were not involved in the European colonial enterprise. Third, he is a politician with a history of hostility towards Muslims, including demands to restrict Muslim refugees. Zaorálek’s views can arguably be partly explained by the situation of Muslims in the Czech Republic. Official estimates make it the country with the smallest Muslim population in Europe, numbering perhaps no more than 3,000 out of a total population of just under 11 million. Many senior Czech politicians are, however, despite these small numbers, prone to indulging in Islamophobia. For example, there was the spectacle of Miloš Zeman, the Czech president, urging his citizens to arm themselves as protection against a possible ‘super-Holocaust’ perpetrated by (radical) Muslims refugees. Seen in this context, Zaorálek’s views are not idiosyncratic but overlap with similar views that seem to circulate more broadly.
The argument that only countries with direct colonial empires have any responsibility for postcolonial migration into the European Union is one of the dividing lines between the regions that constitute Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The problem with this argument, however, is that the colonial enterprise is also intrinsic to the formation of the identity of Europe, because the assemblage between modernity and colonialism is a central component of what it means to be European. Europeanness is modern, and one of the main expressions of modernity is colonial expansion. For example, during the Polish Second Republic there were a number of organizations (Polish Flag, Maritime and River League) that advocated Polish colonies be established in South America and Africa. It is not, therefore, a straightforward matter to disaggregate the colonial from Europeanness. Nor is it the case that only European countries with colonial empires (Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Russia, Denmark and Italy) were involved in the global colonial enterprise. The European colonial order may have been divided nationally, but it was unified racially. This is why the postcolonial question is at the heart of Europeanness and, as I demonstrate, crucial to any understanding of the role of Islamophobia in East Central Europe.
This article is not an ethnographic or an empirical study of incidents of hostility and cruelty to Muslims or those who are mistaken for Muslims in East Central Europe, or indeed an attempt to write a history of Eastern Europe or Europe. Rather, it is a conceptual narrative that explores the relationship between Islamophobia and the reconfiguration of contemporary Europeanness. It innovates a reading of Islamophobia in terms of world orders, state formations and transnational cultural identities. The central contention of the article is that the cultural, socio-economic and philosophical conditions attendant on the ‘decentring of the West’ produce a crisis of European/white identity. What does it mean to be white and European in a world that appears increasingly post-western? It is this crisis of Europeanness that provides the context for the production of Islamophobia. While these concerns may appear to be rather abstract, they inform the occurrence of Islamophobia and the shape of how it is experienced. Theoretically, the article is informed by and contributes to a dialogue between discourse theory and decolonial thought, as it pertains to the development of Critical Muslim Studies, Islamophobia Studies and more broadly sociologies of racism. Substantively, the account this article presents sees Islamophobia not as a set of problematic prejudices, but rather as an attempt to construct European identity within a postcolonial conjuncture in which the West is decentred. What follows, then, is an account of how Islamophobia is not just about what happens to Muslim minorities but rather how the national majorities in East Central Europe imagine themselves as Europeans.
Whatever the specificities and peculiarities of the Czech Republic, or the context of Zaorálek’s remarks, their intelligibility comes from being part of a broader discourse on Islamophobia. This article addresses the inflexion of Islamophobia in the East of the European Union. The social sciences are dominated by a methodological nationalism that is an analogue to the development of and investment in nationalist historiographies as part of a state’s nation-building project. The effect of this focus is that any phenomena that do not fit within the boundaries of an existing nation-state are difficult to analyse or comprehend. Islamophobia has a global range; it may be generated locally but it circulates globally and is inflected both regionally and nationally. While the focus of much analysis tends to be within national jurisdictions, which may make sense in devising measures for amelioration, it makes less sense with regard to understanding the phenomenon itself. It is important, therefore, to clarify first what is meant by Islamophobia and to analyse its operation.
The analysis of Islamophobia
Islamophobia is a form of racism, in which the constitutive antagonism is directed at manifestations of Muslimness. These manifestations may vary depending on the local and regional context. Islamophobic experiences may include a range of actions (including violence against property and persons, verbal abuse and micro-aggressions, demonization both common and expert) that seek to deny Muslim agency. (The focus on Muslims, however, does not mean that Islamophobia has to be redescribed as Muslimophobia or some such circumlocution. Such attempts to replace the category of Islamophobia pass off semantic criticism as conceptual critique.)
The theorization of Islamophobia that I want to use is one that sees the phenomenon not as a set of attitudes, media representations or psychological processes, but rather as a form of governmentality. I define Islamophobia as the attempt to deny Muslim agency with reference to a westernizing horizon. Islamophobia is the systematic regulation and disciplining of Muslimness by reference to a westernizing horizon. By a westernizing horizon, I mean the assemblage of practices, protocols and values that project the future in terms of either explicit (that is, named) or implicit westernization (that is, where the West is not actively named but displaced). By Muslimness, I draw attention not to a fully formed Muslim identity but rather a process of identification by which a Muslim subjectivity is articulated. In this conceptualization, both Muslimness and westernization are extended metaphors often contested but still deployed; they are not an exact summary of features of fully constituted objective entities. What constitutes westernization or Muslimness is dependent on the interaction of local, national and global contexts. At certain moments, westernization may easily be rendered as a metaphor for modernization. In other contexts, Muslimness may be no more than a convenient place-holder for an ‘alien presence’, and include those who are not Muslims but may appear to be so, such as turbanned Sikhs. This lack of precision arises from the ways in which Muslimness and westernization are floating signifiers without fixed and stable signifieds. It is the articulatory practice that does the fixing of signifieds. At the heart of Islamophobia is the conviction that the antagonistic nature of Muslimness necessitates its regulation and disciplining. Islamophobia arises in situations in which the demands for Muslim autonomy are perceived as interrupting the future direction of a society away from becoming modern and prosperous: in other words, becoming western. Muslim autonomy need not be conceived of in narrow terms, in which Muslims specifically demand forms of self-governance at an institutional level. Muslim autonomy can refer to the way that a reasonable accommodation can be made for expressions of Muslimness in public settings: for example, the ability of Muslim communities to build places of worship, to practise halal slaughter, to provide religious instruction, to have effective channels for redress. Thus, Muslim autonomy can be provided by overt campaigns for political representation or mobilization but also by the opening of social and cultural spaces within a nation-state for the expression of Muslimness. What ‘westernizing horizon’ means in the context of East Central Europe is crucial to any understanding of how Islamophobia circulates in that region.
Tropes of Islamophobia circulate along specific discursive terrains that channel, select, speed up or slow down particular expressions. This global spread of Islamophobia is not merely a consequence of the infrastructure of surveillance and securitization put in place under the rubric of the war on terror; it is also a function of the way that the relational logic of racism manifests itself. That is, what is the relationship between the multiple occurrences of Islamophobia in a variety of settings?
It is possible to identify a number of distinct circuits along which chains of particular Islamophobic tropes might circulate with greater or lesser ease. These circuits can be consolidated into separate theatres where Islamophobia is performed. There are four such theatres that exercise a degree of ‘strategic selectivity’ in relation to the articulation of various iterations of Islamophobia. The first theatre of Islamophobia is that of Muslimistan, that is, those territories in which the Islamicate is socially or politically dominant. In these countries, both the quest for Muslim autonomy and the exercise of Muslim agency present a direct challenge to political authority. The political order in Muslimistan is dominated by Kemalism and, in these cases, Muslim agency is overdetermined by quests for the unravelling of absolutism and greater accountability. (‘Kemalism’ refers not only to the transformations ushered in by the authoritarian rule of Mustafa Kemal in the wake of the destruction of the Ottoman order but rather a global project to westernize Islamicate societies and communities by articulating modernization as westernization.) Other iterations of Kemalism include political leaders such as Reza Khan, Nasser and Suharto.
Second, there is the theatre formed in countries where the Muslim presence has been contemporaneous with the early modern formation of these polities. Countries like Russia, India, Thailand and China are examples of this second theatre of Islamophobia. In these cases, demands for autonomy by Muslims raise an existential threat by reactivating the moment of the formation of the polity. Muslim demands for justice are often represented in these theatres as being claims for secession.
The third theatre of Islamophobia is present in countries where the Muslim presence is described as recent and entirely alien; these countries are mainly western plutocracies. The Muslim demands for autonomy have become the surface of inscription for the crisis of white supremacy. Muslims and ‘immigrants’ have become equivalent. Trump’s travel ban, for example, is a testimony to this logic, as large Muslim populations are found among African Americans who are not ‘immigrants’. In this theatre, the discourse on Muslims is dominated by the ‘immigrant imaginary’. Immigrants are constituted neither as complete citizens nor as complete ‘foreigners’. Muslims as immigrants are able to express certain aspects of their identity but at the same time are denied the social and cultural capital of complete citizens.
The fourth theatre of Islamophobia is where the actual Muslim presence is minimal or invisible; the problematization of Muslim identity is vicarious based on the virtual absence of Muslims. Many of the countries of Latin America and parts of Africa and northeastern Asia can be included in this group.
These four theatres provide the four distinct contexts for the problematization of Muslim identity and the ways in which Islamophobia may be deployed. They define configurations of space providing distinct terrains in which a series of overlapping tropes are mobilized in the performance of Islamophobia. These theatres are transnational; they are unified not by spatial contiguity but by performative resemblance. The four theatres of Islamophobia are products of the processes and legacies of European colonial world-making. Islamophobia operates through these four theatres, providing the ‘structural selectivity’ by which types of tropes are harnessed in specific narratives. Like other forms of racism, there is a family resemblance in the categories by which Islamophobia is enunciated and experienced. The demarcation of these distinct spaces in which Islamophobia is performed is to be found in the distinction between postcolonial and postnational formations of national majorities and ethnic minorities. The process of building a national majority around which the enveloping infrastructure of the state can be established means the simultaneous construction of ethnically marked minorities. Without minorities, the idea of a majority loses its significance. Postnational ethnically marked populations are those that find themselves as contingent historical factors excluded from the processes in which isomorphic relationships between peoples, territories and governments are established. These are the communities that do not cross national boundaries; instead, those lines cross them. Postcolonial ethnic minorities are those that are formed in the wake of the implosion of white supremacy. In the literature on immigration to Western Europe, much emphasis is given to the various European colonial empires providing the infrastructures for the transfer of populations from ex-colonies to the various national metropoles (such as from the Anglophone Caribbean to Britain, the Maghreb to France and so on). This conception of European colonial empires seen through a national prism undermines the degrees to which they were all part of a global racial order. The meaning of what it meant to be European in the nineteenth century was increasingly overdetermined by the ideas and practices that were inscribed through the racial-colonial order.
There are three important points here. First, European colonial empires were racial states. Second, the European-centred world system was a racial-colonial order, not just a system of unequal socio-economic exchanges. And, third, the unravelling of the global racial order that can be described as white supremacy has implications for what kind of European identity is possible without the power, prestige and prosperity that the global institution of whiteness has provided. Migration from the global South (in its various iterations) is a product of the postcolonial weakening of white supremacy. White supremacy is therefore not merely a set of prejudices or attitudes but constitutive of the world economically, culturally and socially, as well as militarily and politically.
The theorization of Islamophobia that is being deployed here is one in which it is seen as part of the colonial ordering of the world and its unravelling, rather than a perennial feature either in Islamicate history or a response to the war on terror. This theorization is based on an engagement with the literature that has emerged on the shape of the European colonial order, critical race theory and decolonial approaches. The argument that this article sets out is a contribution to the development of a theory of Islamophobia in global rather than national or local terms.
East Central Europe as a theatre of Islamophobia
Islamophobia’s relationship to Europeanness is central to understanding the way in which politicians, think-tanks and media organizations articulate their visions of a future that to many appears to be post-white. To those for whom it is impossible to dis-articulate whiteness from white supremacy, the weakening of white privilege and the demands for justice appear as existential threats to their being rather than just their privileges. The significance of East Central Europe arises from the way in which these countries are both vulnerable in their Europeanness and the most strident in their claims to it.
In the theatres of Islamophobia, East Central Europe is located on the cusp of the postnational and postcolonial. The Muslim presence is neither absent, nor recent; what makes it appear so is the historiographical emphasis in narrating the nation undertaken by political and cultural elites in the region. Except for the Iberian peninsula and Sicily, the East of the European Union is a region that has the oldest and most significant engagement with the Islamicate. These complex interactions have ranged from periods of convivencia to periods of intense open conflict, and all points in between. The punctuations of convivencia and conflict do not have an overarching logic but reflect contingencies and often local circumstances and contexts. In some of the Visegrád countries, such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, the Muslim presence pre-dates or is simultaneous with the formation of these states (or their early modern precursors), thus clearly marking out the Muslim presence as postnational. In other parts of the region, like the Czech lands and the former German Democratic Republic, a case can be made that the engagement with the Islamicate is more postcolonial, the product of contemporary immigration. The relationship of the Islamicate and East Central Europe, however, cannot just be read from the age and size of Muslim minorities in these regions. Islam was recognized as one of the four religions during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795). Islam has been recognized legally as a religion in Hungary since 1916. The evidence of the constitutive impact of the Islamicate on Eastern Europe is found in folklore, national myths, legal provisions and epic poems. Many of the regions of East Central Europe have witnessed half a millennium of geopolitical interactions between the Habsburgs and Ottomans. Therefore, it is not clear that the figure of the Muslim is a stranger to East Central Europe, even though currently the countries of the Visegrád Four are characterized by very small Muslim populations. Given the broader impact of the Islamicate on the region, Islamophobia is not just about discrimination against Muslims and expressions of Muslimness; it is as much about political discourses that foreclose the possibility of imagining East Central Europe as heterogeneous in favour of national narratives of white homogeneity. Islamophobia, by attempting to erase or displace the Islamicate and thus the contingency of particular configurations of state-civil society relations, becomes one of the means of producing a society based on xenophobic exclusions and fear of the future.
The question arises, then, as to whether the history of the formation of East Central Europe provides a distinct stage for the articulation and circulation of Islamophobia? The variety of the regional contexts of Eastern Europe would seem to suggest that repertoires from all four theatres could be in play. Islamophobia is the surface on which anxieties of social cohesion, national security and the relationship between the nation and the world are written. This is not due merely to the machinations of the billionaire-fuelled Islamophobia industry, or to the random quest for a post-Cold War enemy to keep the military-industrial complex ticking over; nor is Islamophobia the byproduct of the war on terror. Rather, the emergence of Islamophobia is linked to the transition from a world order that is centred on the idea of the West to a one that is becoming post-western. Islamophobia is a response to the decentring of the West, which refers to a complex network of processes that have disarticulated the relationship between the universal and the western. One of the major effects of decentring the West has been the emergence of white revanchism or the rise of political positions that see in the advances of antiracist struggles a loss of white privilege rather than the achievements of social justice. White revanchists are animated by the desire to reverse the gains made by the multicultural alignment. White revanchism can range from soft versions, in which politicians demand one-sided accommodation of postcolonial ethnically marked populations, to more fierce versions, in which dreams of rolling back the process of decolonization and the establishment of pure white space become key.
Islamophobia in East Central Europe arises from the way in which the signifiers of Islam serve to reactivate a sense of the contingency of the inclusion of East Central Europe as an authentic part of the western patrimony. It is Europeanness that determines the character, extent and depth of what is considered to be Europe because Europe is not a geographical or even a cartographical entity but a project. The inclusion or exclusion of East Central Europe from what is deemed to be Europe cannot be settled by ostensive definitions. The ‘essence’ of Europe is provided by the spatial fixing of hegemonic accounts of Europeanness. The position of East Central Europe has, for the most part, been marginal to these accounts of Europeanness, so much so that accounts of what is European are rarely fleshed out by experiences from this region (such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a model of a multifaith political entity). To understand Islamophobia and how it operates within the precincts of what can be described as East Central Europe requires a conceptual analysis of the relationship between Europeanness and Eastern Europe. Such a theoretical analysis rests on an investigation into the imagined geography of the East that constitutes East Central Europe as an example of a social landscape that needs to be westernized so that it can be truly European. One way of describing such collective efforts of imagining and knowing the non-European is to call it Orientalism.
Europe unveiled: Orientalism and Islamophobia
In our everyday language, we tend to think of Europe with a degree of precision that is belied by the history of its constitution. Europe is most commonly presented as a continent. This geographical fiat is seen as unremarkable, and thus the geography of a European identity is constructed. There is no Africa, no Asia and no America except in the cartography that was inaugurated by the European colonial enterprise. The three main literate complexes of what we now unproblematically call Asia (that is, the societies that are associated with the river systems of the Tigris-Euphrates, Indus-Ganges and Hwang Ho-Yangtze, respectively) had little sense of their commonalities in comparison to Europe or other continents. There was no ‘Asia’. Similar arguments could be made about Africa; as far as we know, the commonalities that constitute Africa are based on the valorization of the contrast between it and Europe, rather than any indigenous recognition of its continental coherence or geographical unity or social homogeneity. The global colonial order that was established because of the European project of world-making rested on the primacy of the difference between European and non-European. This is a difference that was set up and maintained as a violent and violating hierarchy of the West over the Rest. This world-making project had, along with its military, economic and cultural dimensions, an epistemological aspect. The production of knowledge about non-Europeanness not only provided the intelligence to carry out conquests and occupations, but it also fired the imagination that allowed such endeavours to be dreamed up in the first place.
Orientalism is a discursive formation that governs the production of authoritative statements that constitute a distinct Orient as the site at which what is the implied plentitude of the West is given coherence by contrasting it with the lack of the Orient. Orientalism is a discourse (in that it contains both linguistic and extra-linguistic elements) by which a systematic (that is, non-random) relationship is established between an open-ended series of differential elements so that they are organized to form a frontier between the West and the Rest. Orientalism occurs in different registers (academic, cinematic, journalistic, novelistic and so on). The ‘Orient’ of Orientalism can be found in video games, television series, policy documents and, of course, the Internet. Edward Said defined Orientalism as being characterized by: an ontological difference, a style of thought, an academic discipline and a collective means of coping with the Orient. One of the central claims made in Said’s critique of Orientalism was that it represents an explanation for the exercise of European imperial power over the Orient.
Much to the chagrin of its adherents, Orientalism has come to mean not so much an academic discipline but an extended apologia for systematic cruelties and inequities associated with the European colonial enterprise. There is little doubt that the Orient, as it appears in Said’s work, is primarily focused on examples of and concerns with the ‘Middle East’. Ever since Said’s account of Orientalism took hold, however, there have been various projects to expand the range of areas and topics covered by the discourse of Orientalism. Studies of the ‘Yellow Peril’, for example, demonstrate Orientalism in non-Islamicate formations. Since the ‘Orient’ of Orientalism is determined by contrasting what is considered to be western, rather than any substantive permanent quality, it designates not so much a place but rather a place-holder: a residual category for what is considered to be external to Europe. The Orient is therefore the constitutive outside Europe. Hence it is possible to find the Orient in the pre-Columbian ‘Americas’, in African civilizations and, of course, it is possible to find the Orient in Asia. It is also possible to find the Orient in Eastern Europe, including East Central Europe. For the Orient marks the frontier, or the edge, of Europe as a proper name. Eastern Europe is the other Europe. In such a conceptual cartography, East Central Europe, along with rest of Eastern Europe, is at best a borderland, a liminal ground on which Europeanness was threatened and on occasion penetrated by the Orient but never fully consumed by it.
An understanding of Islamophobia in East Central Europe requires navigating a transition from Orientalism to Islamophobia. It is the case, as AbdoolKarim Vakil shows, that Said’s preface to the 1985 edition of Orientalism contains one of the earlier instances of the use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ in the English language. This is twelve years before its use in Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. It is, however, important to differentiate between the two concepts. Orientalism does not have to be centred on the idea of the Orient as constituted by the presence of the Islamicate, as the development of a rich literature has shown. What distinguishes Islamophobia from other forms of racism is precisely its focus on the Islamicate. If the social sciences and the humanities have emerged as Kuhnian ‘normal science’ by which the world is comprehended, then Orientalism shapes the normality of this normal science by representing the abnormal contrast. As such, the primary concern of Orientalism is with the policing of the Eurocentric episteme. Islamophobia’s focus is the disciplining and regulation of Muslimness. Islamophobia relies on Orientalism to flesh out its tactics and technologies of discipline, but I would argue (at least on this occasion) that its emphasis is on the political rather than the epistemological. Islamophobia is a form of governmentality that directs societies towards a westernizing horizon, where the identity of the West is made possible by its contrast with the Islamic.
East Central Europe’s path to a westernizing horizon is, however, fraught and complicated, shot through with ambivalence and infelicities. This is a consequence of the way in which Eastern Europe’s relation to the West has been (and continues to be) contested. In Eastern Europe, two ideologies are in play: an insistence that it is integral to Europe and a recognition that its history may be considered as supplementary to the formation of the West. Eastern Europe, as a manifestation of the Orient, is in tension with narratives that see it as a producer of Orientalism; that is, its contrast with the real Orient (located further to the east or south). The assumption of westernization requires the recognition that society is not western in the first place, which only makes sense through an Orientalist-inspired reading of Eastern Europe. This dialectic between westernization and de-Orientalization has some common features associated with the first theatre of Islamophobia: in Muslimistan, political projects that sought to westernize could only do so by agreeing that their societies were Oriental. Thus, de-Orientalization required a prior concession to Orientalism. East Central Europe’s intensity of Islamophobia is therefore an index of its anxiety about the western identity of the region. Islamophobia in East Central Europe must be understood existentially rather than representationally. In other words, a focus on the psychological, mediatic and ethnographic accounts of Islamophobia can very quickly lead to a cul de sac of culturally essentialist explanations, and thus obscure the political and foundational relationship between Islamophobia and East Central Europe. Islamophobia flourishes in the Visegrád Four not because these regions are not as socially progressive or multicultural as parts of Western Europe, but rather because the articulation of Islamophobia buttresses the Europeanness of this other Europe. For example, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, has made many statements to the effect that the Visegrád countries are defending Christian Europe. The idea that cities in the European Union have been overtaken by Muslims and become lawless ‘no-go areas’ for Whites or the authorities is a common theme in the discourse of white revanchism (see also the article by Ivan Kalmar in this issue).
Islamophobia among the East Central Europe countries shares a family resemblance one can find throughout this region, a limited set of tropes that act as floating signifiers quilting political discourses in the process: radicalization, failed multiculturalism, anti-democratic, Islam as mediaeval, Islam as misogynist, death cult/violent religion, barbarians, invaders, sexual predators, criminals, terrorists and radically alien. None of these elements is unique to East Central Europe. What is different is that many of the grand transformations that have cleared the ground for the institutionalization of Islamophobia on a global scale occurred in the East of the European Union.
First, the demise of the Soviet alternative to western hegemony at the end of the Cold War also destroyed the very idea of an alternative. The ending of Communist rule in Eastern Europe became a metaphor for the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama argued. But then the failure of history to end became manifest in the scandal of Islam. The Muslim demands for autonomy could be read as the persistence of a mediaeval past, the barrier to future progress. In the regions of East Central Europe, the figure of the Muslim became associated with unrealized westernization and incomplete national liberation. East Central Europe was the real authentic Europe that had preserved its whiteness; Islamophobia was not just a form of scapegoating but a rejection of non-Europeanness from the body of the authentic European, thus, the means by which post-Communist national identity was consolidated.
The antipathy towards expressions of Muslimness (whether they take the form of mosques, halal food or the hijab) is a mechanism for shoring up the idea of the West as destiny. East Central Europeans’ embrace of Eurocentrism occurs at the moment when Eurocentrism is increasingly under stress. The choice of Islam and Muslims as the antagonistic-other—that is, the figure that subsumes, in itself, the traumatic kernel that prevents East Central Europeans from being a fully realized harmonious and prosperous part of the western patrimony—is not purely arbitrary. The figure of the Muslim encompasses all the attributes of what the West seems to reject: misogynist, racist, violent and so on. That is, western narratives of itself are increasingly reliant on articulating the Muslim as the figure that represents the very impossibility of the West being equal to itself. The inability of the West to live up to its own version of what it should be is explained by the scandal of the Muslim presence, both geographically and temporally. The crisis of social cohesion in the West has become explicable by reference to the existence of a Muslim presence that prevents the full closure of these societies around core liberal values. The failure of liberal values is externalized on to the surface of Muslim bodies rather than something intrinsic to liberalism itself. This externalization cannot cause but bewilderment, grief and unsettlement, as well as resistance from Muslims.
When Zaorálek (the Czech foreign minister) associates the assertion of a political Muslim identity as a consequence of western colonialism, he articulates the foundational indeterminacy at the heart of East Central Europe: apart from the West and a part of the West; apart from colonialism, but a part of the violent hierarchy that sees Europe as morally, culturally and intellectually superior to Muslimistan; apart from the decision to permit Muslim refugees into the European Union, but a part of the bulwark against Europe losing its identity; apart from the decadent multiculturalism and liberalism of Europe, but a part of the axiomatic belief in Europe as the home of the free and tolerant. Islamophobia in the East of the European Union is a response not only to the indeterminacy of the region but that of postcolonial Europeanness itself.
Postcolonial Europeanness and the spectre of Islamophobia
The contribution of this article rests on the way it mobilizes literatures and insights from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds about the ‘formation of the western world order’ to construct an argument about the entanglements of Islamophobia and Europeanness. As can be seen from the above, this is not a survey of incidents of Islamophobia in the Visegrád region. Neither is it about specific reasons why, for example, Slovakia remains the only country in the European Union that does not permit even one mosque. Nor, indeed, is it an attempt to write a history of Islamophobia in post-Communist East Central Europe. There are many studies that do excellent work cataloguing Islamophobia in East Central Europe; what this article does, however, is draw on and extend a theory of Islamophobia that is based on the relationship between decolonial thought and the study of the Islamicate. This approach shifts the analysis of Islamophobia from the ontic to the ontological and, in doing so, it discloses how Islamophobia is not just the way in which minuscule Muslim minorities are subject to discriminatory practices by institutions and authorities in the Visegrád region, but rather how national and European identity is being reconfigured in East Central Europe. The disclosure is not empirical and descriptive but rather conceptual and constitutive. Islamophobia in this context emerges as the crisis of Europeanness inscribed on Muslim bodies.
What is it about the question of Europeanness now that makes insisting on the Muslim question one of its most vocal expressions? To answer, or perhaps address, the questions of why the Muslim question and why now, I place the formation of European and national identity in a postcolonial context. That is, the horizon is opened by a decentring of the West not only geopolitically or economically but also culturally and philosophically. East Central Europe, in its various permutations—historical and cultural—provides an excellent platform to study the impact of the postcolonial on Europeanness. The East Central European experience of the postcolonial is inflected through a history of imperial articulations and peripheralizations that demonstrate not only the contingency of the idea of Europeanness but also its imbrication with the Orient.
This article then is an analysis of the ways in which Islamophobia interacts with the prospect of the decentring of Europe. The significance of this conceptualization of Islamophobia arises from the recognition that Islamophobia cannot be understood by enumerating instances of ‘mis-representations’ of Muslims and Islam, whether in the media or in speeches of public figures. Islamophobia is not really about what Muslims do or what Islam is, but rather national anxieties about a loss of identity. Such an approach points to the necessity not just of adding East Central Europe to list of the sites where Islamophobia is to be found, but rather explaining—while the patterns of Islamophobia and its tropes are fairly familiar—not their configuration but their occurrence in specific contexts. This article contributes to developing a theory of Islamophobia that shifts the analytical focus from the study of ethnically marked minorities to unmarked national majorities. East Central Europe illustrates that it is not the presence of Muslims but rather thte need to shore up national identities in the contemporary world order that explains the frequency and intensity of Islamophobia. The relationship between the emergence of Islamophobia and the crisis of Europeanness is exemplified by the way white revanchism has taken hold in East Central Europe. The persistence of Islamophobia and its entrenchment in public discourses throughout the region point to the ways in which it cannot be simply understood as an expression of prejudice. The virtual absence of substantial Muslim minorities demonstrates the inaccuracy of accounts that see in various forms of racism a causal relationship between the presence of racially marked populations and racism’s occurrences. Islamophobia is not about the numbers of Muslims or the actions of some Muslims. Islamophobia in East Central Europe, as elsewhere in the West, is about whether it is possible to imagine a western identity in a post-western world not as a terrifying prospect but as a liberating future.