UK anti-Muslim violence: How killing in Gaza enables attacks in Gloucester
According to a UK-based watchdog that monitors Islamophobia, there was a 73 percent rise in Islamophobic assaults last year.
The watchdog, Tell Mama, attributed the rise to the normalisation of Islamophobic rhetoric in political discourse, along with the spread of far-right conspiracies like the “Great Replacement” theory.
In common parlance, Tell Mama suggests that because British politicians and the far right are saying Islamophobic stuff, British Muslim people are being attacked on the streets.
While there is nothing untrue about this assertion, it is entirely inadequate as an explanation for one key reason: it contains the discussion of this issue to UK politics, rather than highlighting the connections between Islamophobic street violence in Britain and other attacks on Muslim life around the globe.
Taking a view of Islamophobia as a transnational project, I believe the rise in UK incidents last year can be explained by locating it within a global racial architecture, which gives permission for Muslim people to be injured or killed.
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Another term for Islamophobia is anti-Muslim racism. This signals an understanding of Islamophobia as a form of racism, as opposed to personal prejudice and bias against those who inhabit the social margins.
The term also recognises that the way in which Islam and Muslims are stigmatised as the “Other” implies something inherent and essential about Muslim populations, in the same way that eye colour, nose shape, IQ and hair texture are taken to imply racial differences.
A global system of death
We see this in narratives of honour killing, female genital mutilation, and polygamous/child/terrorist/forced/cousin marriages. Muslims are turned into a racial category and assigned inferiority.
They are racialised as premodern, anti-feminist and anti-civilisational. More importantly, they are identified as an ideological and ontological threat to whiteness that must be managed or eliminated.
It is worth noting that anti-Muslim racism is much more than the racialisation of Muslim people. It is a social system in which Muslim people’s life chances are reduced through exclusions in education, employment, housing and healthcare.
It is a system in which Muslim people face life-threatening violence: lynchings, assaults on the streets, torture, denationalisation, targeted drone killings, and political abandonment, as in the case of asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy vessels.
It would thus be appropriate to understand anti-Muslim racism as a system that exposes Muslim populations to both slow and imminent death.
But while it might be tempting to see this type of anti-Muslim death-dealing as specific to local or national politics, such a view is blinkered. As the racialisation of Muslim people as threats to be eliminated circulates globally via the “war on terror”, we are reminded that anti-Muslim racism has worldwide dimensions.
Indeed, anti-Muslim racism was foundational to the very making of the current global order, which scripted Muslim people, along with Black and Indigenous people, outside the universal category of humanity, in order to define itself through the terms of equality, democracy and sovereignty.
Returning to this foundation allows us to locate anti-Muslim racism in a long history of western death-dealing involving the transatlantic slave trade, settler-colonialism, racial violence and elimination.
Authorising death
To fully understand the 73 percent rise in anti-Muslim racial violence on UK streets last year, this phenomenon must therefore be reinterpreted through a transnational perspective of anti-Muslim death-dealing.
Such violence is driven by the racist alarmism that British Muslim people are waging a “demographic jihad” against Britain through increased birthrates and acts of terrorism. In other words, central to anti-Muslim violence on UK streets is the view that Muslim people are a threat to be contained.
This view is shared by the polite classes of British society and enshrined in Prevent, the UK counter-extremism policy that has been in place for two decades. Importantly, this view is also installed in dozens of countries around the globe through policies and legal instruments ostensibly aimed at combatting extremism and terrorism.
Only when we recognise this transnational dimension can we begin to explain the rise of anti-Muslim UK street violence
Even more critically, it is a view that authorises the erasure of Muslim life around the world, such as in Palestine, China and Myanmar.
We can thus draw a line that begins at the stabbings, vicious beatings and crowd-ploughing vehicles on UK streets, and crosses national boundaries to connect with the lynchings, paramilitary raids, vigilante violence, CIA black sites, immigration detention centres, refugee camps and plastic bags containing the remains of Muslim bodies around the world.
In short, UK anti-Muslim street violence is part of a transnational constellation of death-dealing forged through a shared racial vision of Muslim people as a threat to be eliminated.
Only when we recognise this transnational dimension can we begin to explain the rise of anti-Muslim UK street violence. Death in one context authorises death in another. Death in Gaza gives permission to kill and injure in Gloucester.
We saw this most vividly last summer, after the horrific stabbing of children in Southport by a non-Muslim person. The subsequent violence and destruction directed at British Muslim property and life was consistent with the savage obliteration of Muslim life and life-sustaining infrastructure in Palestine.
Unless and until we take a transnational perspective of anti-Muslim death-dealing, our explanations for the rise in anti-Muslim racial violence on the streets, across national contexts, will appear oblivious to the global architecture of Muslim death that sustains and reinforces this very violence.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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