The Denial of Islamophobia in Four Acts
Translated by Julia Bosson
Last winter, I gave a lecture on Epistemes of Islamophobia at the University of Toronto. Let me get one thing out of the way immediately: I do not view Islamophobia as a pathological fear that lurks within individuals and can be triggered at any moment. Rather, I am talking about Anglo-American scholarship, which conceptualizes Islamophobia as a form of racism. This includes institutional racism directed at Muslims or those who are categorized and treated as Muslims based on their (assumed) origin, appearance, or name. However, Islamophobia also encompasses shared and publicly reproduced affects toward Islam as a discursive tradition, as ethics, morality, and practice. It is therefore not insignificant to name “Islam” in this form of racism.
In my lecture, I highlighted the gaps in academic and political debates on Islamophobia and called for more in-depth exploration. What remains hidden when we look solely at the immediate present? What systems of classification and forms of knowledge have enabled Islamophobia to become embedded — sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly — in institutions, routines, and perceptions? How does the security regime shape political practices that mark certain bodies as risks, scrutinize them closely, and govern them repressively? And under what (geo)political conditions does security, as a dispositif, gain momentum and expand its reach? Finally, I also addressed the divide that has opened up between the now-established field of research (Islamophobia Studies) and the silence from the political sphere. Where does this stubborn refusal to acknowledge Islamophobia as a real and life-threatening problem come from?
To keep things from getting too theory-heavy, I also sprinkled in concrete examples — mostly from Germany. And the more of these I included, the more I generated reactions of “seriously?” from the lecture hall. Actually, it was primarily a conceptual talk, but in the end, all the comments and responses could be boiled down to a single question: What’s wrong with Germany?
I felt a bit like a bad ambassador. But that’s okay. Afterwards, as I returned to my apartment in Toronto, a glance at German newspapers pulled me back to Germany, at least in thought. An interview with the outgoing mayor of Neukölln, the SDP politician Martin Hikel caught my eye. It was titled “I can still walk along Sonnenallee.” I skimmed through it and got caught on two terms: “the virulent antisemitism in Neukölln” and “anti-Muslim racism.” Martin Hikel stated, for the record, that he found the term “anti-Muslim racism” inappropriate.
To be more precise:
Hikel said: “In my opinion, this term implies that criticism of Islamist structures and ultra-conservative rites can be labeled racist relatively quickly.”
“Furthermore, racism and religion-based discrimination are two different things, even though both phenomena, of course, constitute attacks on the individual dignity of human beings.”
“However, we record significantly more antisemitic than anti-Muslim attacks in Germany. In Berlin alone, around 2,500 antisemitic attacks were recorded in 2024, compared to just under 650 anti-Muslim attacks.”
And finally, Hikel summed it up: “What I can say for certain: I may be a fan of intellectual debates over terminology, but they don’t help anyone if citizens — including and especially migrants, who themselves suffer from these phenomena — don’t know what I’m talking about.”
In a 2024 report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany ranked second only to Austria in levels of “anti-Muslim discrimination” among EU member states.
One response might be: As early as the 1990s, the British Runnymede Trust Report documented and analyzed Islamophobia as both widespread in society and institutionally entrenched. That was long before terrorism in the name of Islam had reached global proportions. In a 2024 report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany ranked second only to Austria in levels of “anti-Muslim discrimination” among EU member states. And we could cite many, many more figures, data points, and facts to demonstrate that Islamophobia is widespread in German society, has been steadily on the rise, and is systemically embedded — quite independently of what Muslims do or do not do.
But because Hikel would almost certainly refute such objections and findings, we need to understand more precisely how he does so. For what Hikel is doing here is not merely a denial of racism. It is the reproduction of racism through denial in four acts. And because Hikel is by no means alone in this — he is, at best, merely assembling elements of an established and ever-recurring discourse — we need to examine the mechanisms of racism through denial step by step. So let’s zoom in and out.
Act 1: Appeasement: “Religion is not race”
Appeasement is part of the basic repertoire of racism through denial. The claim is that racism is exaggerated, that at most it exists on the far right, or that people affected by it do not do enough themselves to counteract the hostility directed at them. Hikel perpetuates Islamophobia through appeasement when he says that “religious discrimination” is not “racism.” Here I would like to ask: Do threatening letters sent to mosques bearing swastikas and signed “NSU 2.0” fall under “religious discrimination”? Is it “religious discrimination” when naturalization tests with ideological questions are tailored exclusively to immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, as was the case with the “Muslim test” in Baden-Württemberg from 2006 to 2011? I would like to ask Hikel where, exactly, racism begins for him and why it is decoupled from “religion.” I suspect he is falling prey to a common misconception. Because “religion” is assumed to be something other than “race,” “religious discrimination” cannot be racism. Religion, according to this line of thinking, is a free choice and not innate. It can be adopted as well as discarded.
This fails to recognize that Muslims in Europe can renounce their religion as much as they want and yet they are nonetheless sorted and classified according to (assumed) origin, name, or ancestry. No matter how hard they may try to make themselves invisible as Muslims, they are still addressed as Muslims even when they condemn Islam. In the process, religious and cultural differences are treated as natural characteristics. Moreover, religion — its permissible practices, its boundaries, its ways of life — is also shaped by racializing logics. This is clearly evident in the debates about Islamic bodily practices that have flared up periodically in Europe for decades. These debates follow a monotonous choreography that stubbornly persists. Practicing Muslims in particular remain subject to the scrutinizing gaze of state institutions and the media — even when they express their commitment to liberal, democratic, and constitutional principles. They are hyper-visible, yet at the same time invisible in their diverse individualities.
Muslim religiosity is repeatedly labeled as exceptional, while dominant religions are simultaneously regarded as normal and unproblematic. The entrenched ubiquity of Christianity in European public spheres, in comparison, is rarely addressed, let alone scandalized. In Germany, this imbalance carries particular weight. Here, Christian institutions have been able to secure a largely unquestioned place in the political landscape and in the public sphere. Not every religious community, therefore, enjoys the privilege of being regarded as normal, harmless, or removed from politics, and thus able to remain below the radar of politics, media, and academia. It is not visible religion per se that is seen as a threat to liberal ideals of the separation of religion and state or of privatized faith. Rather, certain traditions and practices are dragged into the spotlight through the constant generation of discourse.
This is by no means new. A look at history shows that race and religion emerged in tandem as modern categories of order. The idea of “world religions” took shape in the 19th century in the context of European imperial expansion. It established a hierarchy. At the top stood a supposedly tamed, secularized Christianity as the epitome of refined civilization; at the bottom were those religions considered political, unruly, or insufficiently secular: Judaism and Islam. Both were linked through the figure of the “Semite” — a category that conflated language, religion, and race, as shown in the work of Gil Anidjar. What today appears neutrally as “religion” is thus an epistemic formation with a long history of racialized distinctions.
The widespread denigration of Islamic practices — “ultra-conservative rites,” as Hikel calls them — and the supposed need for reform may therefore be based not so much on Europe’s “Islam problem” as on traditional patterns of hierarchy. It is noteworthy, at least, that Germany was already engaged in numerous debates about Jewish practices at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries — such as ritual slaughter or male circumcision. In their dynamics and semantics, they bear an uncanny resemblance to current controversies surrounding Islamic bodily practices. “Ritual issues” gained momentum at precisely the moment when “Jewish emancipation” had reached its peak. Permeated by racist undertones, they became a lens through which to delineate the nation’s internal boundaries as both a biological and religious community.
Historicist racism helps explain, at least in part, why debates about Islam in Europe today so often revolve around the question of whether Muslims are sufficiently modern, sufficiently liberal, or sufficiently compatible with secular ideals of an internalized and privatized religion.
The body of the (Jewish) Other, marked by its traditional rituals, served as a foil to advance narratives of rational, reflective, and de-ritualized “religion” and to steer Judaism onto the path of reason following the Protestant model, as Leora Batnitzky argues. Even the more benevolent liberal voices called for overcoming embodied Jewish practice, or at least for transforming it in such a way that it would conform to notions of “good religion,” or even qualify as “religion” in the modern sense.
Theo Goldberg describes this variant as “historicist racism.” In this tradition, characteristic of liberal thought, non-white, non-European, and non-Christian populations are classified as undeveloped historically, yet potentially capable of development. Their status of “underdeveloped” legitimized colonial rule and, with it, profound interventions into ways of life and practices that were labeled as backward, primitive, and harmful and therefore subjected to discipline. According to Goldberg, this variant of racism provided the theoretical foundation for both colonial expansion as well as the governance of minorities within European nation-states.
Historicist racism helps explain, at least in part, why debates about Islam in Europe today so often revolve around the question of whether Muslims are sufficiently modern, sufficiently liberal, or sufficiently compatible with secular ideals of an internalized and privatized religion. These political appeals draw on historically rooted Christian-secular formations that continue to exert influence to this day — even when this past was buried after 1945 and merged into a supposedly fraternal tradition within the newly invented “Judeo-Christian West.”
Islamophobia is therefore part of a classification regime in which race and religion are intertwined. Hikel, too, perpetuates a hierarchy when he attributes “ultra-conservative rites” exclusively to Islam and assumes “good” (progressive) religion as an unspoken Christian norm.
Act 2: Shift: “The struggle is against Islamism, not Islamophobia”
Another variant of racism through denial is Hikel’s claim that groups affected by racism invoke criticism of racism to dismiss criticism of Islam. This trope, too, has long been part of the standard repertoire of Islamophobic discourse. In the aftermath of the 2015 “refugee crisis,” for example, Bassam Tibi wrote that the term Islamophobia had been coined by the Islamic Republic of Iran “to nip any critical discussion of Islam and Islamism in the bud.” This myth circulates across the political spectrum. In the same article, Tibi laments how much, as a “civilized Syrian,” he is disturbed by the “slum Arabic” that he had been hearing on the streets of Germany since 2015. With a simple extrapolation, Tibi also invokes a population replacement thesis common in ethno-nationalist circles. He prophesies an impending Islamic-Arab “Eurabia,” lumping together a variety of issues — refugees, migration, class, language, religion, and gender (“headscarf Islam”).
Or let us recall the report published in the summer of 2023, Islamophobia: A German Assessment. The mere fact that it took the racist terror attack in Hanau in 2020 for such a study to be commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior at all — nearly three decades after its British counterpart, it should be noted — speaks for itself. More remarkable, however, was the public response. Large segments of the political and media establishment focused on neutralizing the findings rather than seriously engaging with them. They seized upon the one “Islamist” whose experiences with racism were discussed in the report.
Even more striking, however, is how little attention the 400-page long report received at all, even though it examines nearly every aspect of political and social life — from the police and schools to the political party landscape. In the foreword to the first edition, then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser writes, “the time has now come to seriously engage with the recommendations of this report.” Faeser also demonstrated just how serious she was by failing to show up on the day the report was presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
In the updated version, her foreword has disappeared. To date, there has also been a striking silence concerning the report’s many concrete recommendations. The volume is turned down, in other words, when politicians assert how acute the problem is or when they — like Hikel — say they perceive “a high level of sensitivity to the issue of racism. And that’s a good thing.” Expert commission after expert commission. Recommendation after recommendation. Tick. Checked off the list.
But because “Islamism” is considered the greater threat and because Islamophobia has become so widespread and normalized, the narrative is quickly realigned. “Islamism” takes center stage, while Islamophobia fades into the background. For decades now, the academic landscape has been grappling with questions of how best and (for the most part) responsibly to understand “Islamism.” Especially when it comes to attempts at definition, approaches often clash. There is consensus, however, among those who go beyond what Werner Schiffauer calls “security knowledge” and do not get bogged down in semantic refinements: Islamist movements can only be understood within the (geo)political and material conditions that give rise to them. In this sense, like all other social or political movements, they are not only dynamic but often also a response to global social inequalities and oppression, as Arun Kundnani argues in his 2015 book A Decade Lost: Rethinking Radicalisation and Extremism.
However, there is a distinctive feature of “Islamism” that is often overlooked in political debates or concise definitions. No other political movement clothed in religious language has triggered a “global war on terror” led by the United States. The context of “Islamism” therefore also includes surveillance, state violence, and wars with far-reaching and disastrous consequences.
With the category of “legalistic Islamism,” virtually any Muslim practice becomes suspect as soon as it is publicly visible and legally asserted.
Now, as a politician, Hikel may not have the time to grapple with complex analyses. But he should know that “Islamism” also functions as a stigmatizing term in Germany’s media and political discourse. As mayor of Neukölln, he should also represent the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian populations and therefore handle such weighty labels with caution instead of simply taking their meanings for granted. And he should know that “Islamism” has become an incredibly elastic category.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution employs the term to encompass everything from terrorist groups like ISIS to what it calls “legalistic Islamism.” The latter refers to organizations or individuals who make use of fundamental rights such as freedom of religion or equality. They are declared wolves in sheep’s clothing because they allegedly have nothing else in mind but to insidiously Islamize society. With the category of “legalistic Islamism,” virtually any Muslim practice becomes suspect as soon as it is publicly visible and legally asserted.
The “Contact and Documentation Center for Confrontational Religious Expression” in Neukölln, operated by the association Democracy and Diversity (DeVi) and responsible for preventing Islamism, classifies students as engaging in “religious practice with confrontational intent” when they “quickly gather for group prayer in a busy, central location at the school in order to draw public attention to their religious practice through prayer.” According to a teacher interviewed for the association’s brochure, behavior is also considered “confrontationally religious” when “boys do not want to shower naked with other boys.” This reminds me of Jens Spahn, who is bothered by the fact that “Arab musclemen” shower in their underwear at his gym “because they are embarrassed to be naked.”
In his foreword to the brochure, Hikel praises DeVi’s work and also advocates for a “reporting system” for such “confrontational forms of religion.” The spectrum of “Islamism” thus stretches from Islamic piety — “ultra-conservative rites” — to Islam-based terrorism. With such a rubber-band concept, any Muslim can ultimately become an “Islamist.”
Research on Islam is not spared from this regime of suspicion either. Consider the Islamophobia researcher Farid Hafez. During “Operation Luxor” on November 9, 2020, in Vienna, heavily armed police officers stormed his apartment, woke his young children from their sleep, and took him away as if he were the leader of a secret commando unit rather than the writer of scholarly essays. Or let us recall the more recent case of the historian John Tolan. He came under suspicion of guilt by association because he spoke at conferences between 2019 and 2022 that a journalist from Le Figaro accused of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. A single loosely strung-together rumor can be enough to publicly discredit decades of meticulous research in a single stroke.
In France, the term Islamogauchisme has been haunting the feuilleton and ministries for years. It has become a political specter that can haunt anyone who speaks critically of the French state’s increasingly ruthless policy toward Islam. In Germany, too, the term “Islam-Linke” is now in circulation as a vague polemical denunciation.
Since October 7, the cyclically flaring “fight against Islamism” has gained momentum once again, fully unleashing its bellicose rhetoric. In this mode of combat, the state also decides who should fight the “creeping poison of ideology.” This is how Christoph de Vries, Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of the Interior, put it when he recently reshuffled his “Islamism” task force. The same de Vries who grouped immigrants along an “integration scale,” with “Russians of German descent” at the top and “Turkish migrants and those, in recent years, from the Arab world” at the very bottom. The same de Vries who, at a panel discussion on “political Islam,” pitted the idea of a “genuinely German people” against the reality of an immigrant society. The same de Vries who successfully complained because the expert report Islamophobia. A German Assessment described him as a bridge-builder to the AfD.
These people explain Islam to German politicians and the public as if it were a capricious subject that walks and talks, that sometimes grows, sometimes shrinks, sometimes rages, sometimes infiltrates, sometimes remains silent.
It is hardly surprising that de Vries’s strike force consists primarily of people who openly express their aversion to Muslims and Islam. These include retired professors who have found a new arena for action. Or regular talk show guests like Ahmad Mansour, who received 9 million euros in funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for his project “Israel-related antisemitism and Islamist radicalization in German schools,” even though external expert reviews had deemed the project scientifically and ethically “not worthy of funding.”
These people explain Islam to German politicians and the public as if it were a capricious subject that walks and talks, that sometimes grows, sometimes shrinks, sometimes rages, sometimes infiltrates, sometimes remains silent. At once an actor and an amorphous mass, it lags sedately behind a Christianity imagined as modern and tamed. They are well-suited to serve as experts favored by the state precisely because the knowledge they provide is reductionist. Their knowledge is not meant to make sense of complex reality, but to stabilize power relations. It lends itself to governing population groups deemed suspect.
It is noteworthy, by the way, that since October 7, even movements with no connection to Islam whatsoever have come under suspicion of Islamism. The Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution Report from 2023, for example, lists student protests in solidarity with Palestine at Berlin universities under “Islamism.” On what grounds? It classifies them as part of an “anti-Israeli boycott spectrum” and therefore deems them “unconstitutional.” Where exactly the connection to Islam is hidden here, and why a boycott against a distant state facing charges of apartheid and genocide at the International Court of Justice is supposed to count as an attack on the German constitution, remains the secret of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Act 3: Hierarchization of Racisms – “(Imported) Antisemitism Is Worse Than Islamophobia”
This brings us to the third act of racism through denial — another shift. In Hikel’s case, this manifests in the claim that “antisemitic attacks” outweigh “Islamophobic” ones. I don’t really want to engage with such hierarchies at all. Too often they go hand in hand with rankings of lives. Moreover, antisemitism and Islamophobia have intertwined historical formations that converge in the figure of Europe’s “Semitic enemy,” as Anidjar argues. Not least, the 2019 Halle attack demonstrated how interchangeable Jewish and Muslim bodies can become in the crosshairs of racist violence. Yet Hikel is evidently not interested here in how forms of racism intertwine. Instead, he employs a divide-and-conquer tactic.
It is by no means coincidental that Hikel links his comparison to the context of protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He draws his figures on “Islamophobic attacks” from the reporting center CLAIM Alliance. The figures on antisemitism, in turn, come from the Research and Information Center on Antisemitism (RIAS). When politicians like Hikel or other public actors cite such figures without context, they appear to be a truth set in stone. Upon closer inspection, however, these surveys are based on entirely different premises, methods, resources, and economy of visibility. They do not measure the same thing. They do not reach the same audience. They do not even operate within the same epistemic field.
Antisemitism in Germany is tracked by a nationwide, institutionally-backed reporting system; anti-Muslim racism, on the other hand, is tracked solely by project-based structures that are scattered, financially precarious, and — as Hikel himself implies — are often politically discredited.
We must also ask what counts as an “antisemitic incident” according to RIAS. Due to its opaque methods and dubious counting practices, this reporting center has repeatedly come under criticism. RIAS, for example, recently counted a lecture by the Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann as an “antisemitic incident.” His offense? On Holocaust Remembrance Day, he warned against processes of fascistization — including in Israel — and declared “Never again!” to be valid for everyone. Terms such as “settlement colonialism,” “apartheid,” or “ethnic cleansing” also end up in RIAS’s registry — in the same category as vandalism at Jewish cemeteries and Nazi salutes by neo-Nazis.
In the name of Germany’s historical responsibility toward the State of Israel, this externalized form of antisemitism — as a problem attributed to the Other — is sanctioned more harshly than all other forms.
In line with German Staatsräson, RIAS frames the mere description of Israel’s state violence in terms of international law as antisemitism. Data generated in such asymmetrical landscapes does not reflect indisputable truths but rather produces political effects. Anti-Muslim racism therefore remains underrepresented because the scope of what is classified as antisemitism is continuously illuminated and expanded, and this expansion is directly linked to suspicions of Islamism.
The conflation of Islamism and antisemitism goes hand in hand with the widespread claim that Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are the perpetrators of the “new antisemitism.” In the name of Germany’s historical responsibility toward the State of Israel, this externalized form of antisemitism — as a problem attributed to the Other — is sanctioned more harshly than all other forms. These racialized groups are addressed collectively and are collectively under suspicion. Following this playbook, Robert Habeck, in his much-cited address to the nation “Israel and Antisemitism,” uniformly labeled the pro-Palestinian protests in Berlin after October 7 as “Islamist.” He also called on Muslims to distance themselves more clearly from the “actions of Hamas” and from “antisemitism,” and threatened them with punishment and deportation should they fail to make this sufficiently apparent. Interpellated in this manner, those targeted can do or not do whatever they want to prove the contrary. The stigma attaches itself to them in the moment politicians like Habeck address them publicly as a collective subject.
Let’s imagine that, after years of documented massive violence against Palestinians, politicians were to call on all Jews in Germany to distance themselves from the crimes of the Israeli occupying power. For good reason, there would be a huge outcry. Or let’s imagine a politician had appealed to all “critics of Islam” in Germany to condemn more vehemently the car attack by the self-confessed Islamophobic doctor from Saudi Arabia at the Christmas market in Halle in 2024. Instead, German newspapers asked precisely these “critics of Islam” for their analyses. Ahmad Mansour, for example explained the perpetrator’s motives to the public. In doing so, however, he did not take Islamophobic violence seriously as such, but rather placed the attack within a familiar explanatory framework: origin, socialization, authoritarian thought patterns.
Displacement creates realities and points of intervention
Neither Islamism nor antisemitism are therefore neutral categories, but rather — and above all — political labels based on a logic of suspicion. Hikel’s deflections, redirections, and diversions are also speech acts. They enact what they pronounce. They generate collective fear and loathing. And they create risk groups that merge into a homogeneous mass: Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs, and all who show solidarity with them. Racism through denial works by redirecting attention from the danger of racism toward the danger of the Other, thereby tacitly reproducing racism on an institutional level.
This follows a logic similar to genocide denial in the case of Gaza and is closely linked to it. Here, too, public attention is diverted from Israel’s decades-long occupation, oppression, and ongoing annihilation of Palestinians toward the enemy of “Western civilization.” And in both cases, there is a correlation: the more brutal Israel’s actions and the more clearly they violate all principles of international law, the more vehement the diversion. The less racism can be denied at the core of institutions — and the less it can be relegated solely to the far-right fringe — the more repressive the struggles against this internal enemy become.
Speech acts are therefore more than mere repeated stigmatization. They have material consequences. They reinforce the border regime. They normalize deportation plans.
However, this shift not only creates new realities and opportunities for intervention but also tangible incentives. The intertwined struggles against “Islamism” and “antisemitism” shape which knowledge becomes politically actionable, and which does not. They are reflected in funding mechanisms for education and research and shape what is considered relevant expertise. Above all, knowledge that can be exploited for security policy purposes is rewarded. The current prominence of certain experts, programs, and task forces is, in this sense, no coincidence, but rather an expression of a political interest in knowledge that intertwines prevention, security, and control.
Speech acts are therefore more than mere repeated stigmatization. They have material consequences. They reinforce the border regime. They normalize deportation plans. They reshape citizenship law. They enforce commitments to Staatsräson. The constant invocation of the threat fuels the security apparatus, which scrutinizes, maps, and sorts “risk groups” in all walks of life according to degrees of danger: periphery, surroundings, environment, hotbed, breeding ground. The effort to counter these threats can at any time shift into a repressive-punitive “carceral” mode.
When groups affected by racism are collectively lumped together in this way and held jointly liable for what individuals do or fail to do — or even what they could do — in the name of an affiliation attributed to them, their protection against racism becomes conditional. It becomes contingent. Their safety depends on changeable conditions: behavior, distancing, declarations of loyalty — from Iran and Palestine to Neukölln. Those addressed in this way become subject to deportation, expatriation, and persecution.
Act 4: It’s Racism, Stupid.
And so we return to Hikel and the fourth act. It will be very brief. Like any other form of racism, Islamophobia can be understood as an institutionally supported and unequal relationship that places people in hierarchies along lines of “race” and “religion,” carrying material consequences. Such a perspective forces us to examine the power relations that enable and perpetuate racism. This also includes the question of who is granted the authority to interpret and speak about Islamophobia. When Hikel says that he himself likes “intellectual debates over terminology” but that they are not understood by “migrant citizens,” he is repeating exactly the epistemic paternalism that reinforces such power relations. Here, I’d like to call out to Hikel: It’s not that hard. Try listening to “migrant citizens” for once, instead of passing judgment on them and declaring them stupid.
Aftermath
I’ve been back in Germany since spring. There are many events I could list that would be relevant to this essay, for example, the attack in Memmingen on May 1, in which the perpetrators threw balloons filled with blood at the entrance of a mosque and placed a pig’s head on the crescent moon; or the attack on an Islamic center in San Diego on May 18, in which three people were killed; or the genocidal fantasies of a CDU member from Krefeld, who, in a video released on June 17, called for the “gassing of Muslims.” I could also highlight the gap between the gravity of these events and the strikingly matter-of-fact, if audible at all, way they were treated by the media and politicians.
Instead, I find myself wondering what Martin Hikel might have to say about all of this. A possible answer emerged a few days later: On June 19, Hikel hosted the kickoff event for the “Neukölln Dialogues for Integration.” The first topic was: “The Muslim Brotherhood in Berlin: Recognizing the Strategies of Political Islam — Strengthening Freedom and Democracy.” The invited panelists — including representatives from DeVi — seemed to be largely in agreement. Hikel summed up this consensus once more in a subsequent interview with the RBB: The problem with discussing anti-Muslim racism, he said, is that it distracts from the problem of “political Islam”…
Selected Bibliography
Gil Anidjar, Semites. Race, Religion, Literature (2008).
Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (2011).
Farid Hafez, Wie ich zum Staatsfeind erklärt wurde: die „Operation Luxor“ und der Kreuzzug gegen den „politischen Islam,“ (2024).
Robin Judd, Contested Rituals. Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1843–1933, (2007).
Arun Kundnani, A Decade Lost: Rethinking Radicalization and Extremism, (2015).
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, (2005).
Elayne Oliphant, The Privilege of Being Banal. Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, (2021).
Birgit Rommelsbacher Wie christlich ist unsere Gesellschaft? Das Christentum im Zeit alter von Säkularität und Multireligiosität, (2017).
Werner Schiffauer, “Sicherheitswissen und Prävention”,” in Handlungs empfehlungen zur Auseinandersetzung mit islamistischem Extremismus und Islamfeindlichkeit, (2015).
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “The French Origins of ‘Islamophobia Denial’” 54/4, 315–346 (2017).
