Keynote on Islamophobia in China by Dr. David Stroup. Time and Place: June 21, 10.00-11.00. Professorboligen, Karl Johans gate 47.
On the first day of the INTERSECT Conference on Global and Transnational Flows of Islamophobia, Dr.David Stroup from the University of Manchester will hold a keynote on Islamophobia in China. Everyone who wishes to attend the keynote must register beforehand.

Time: Wed. June 21, 10.00-11.00.
Place: Professorboligen, Karl Johans gate 47.

REGISTER HERE!

CLICK HERE for the full conference program

Call for papers: Global and transnational perspectives on Islamophobia

Abstracts must be received by 1 March 2023. Send abstracts to Professor Torkel Brekke on the following e-mail:

torkelbr@oslomet.no.

Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be asked to provide a full paper by 1 May 2023.

Conference dates: 21 and 22 June 2023, Place: University of Oslo, Norway

Organizers: Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX, University of Oslo) and MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society.

Call for paper abstracts

The last decades have witnessed a rise in anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiments and practices across the world. This is sometimes expressed in traditional media and in social media and it sometimes takes the shape of discrimination and surveillance by authorities. Concerns over Islam and Muslim practices (like female veiling, halal slaughter, and public religiosity) have become a prominent feature of public debate in Europe and North America. Importantly, however, Islamophobia is not confined to the ‘West’. On the contrary, anti-Muslim sentiments are high in other parts of the world as well, for instance in Hindu and Buddhist societies in Asia. In existing research, the global and transnational aspects of Islamophobia have received too little scholarly attention, and are mostly treated as parallel, local phenomena. However, Islamophobia travels across borders and between contexts in various ways.

The research project INTERSECT was started in September 2019 in order to gain new knowledge about global and transnational dimensions of Islamophobia (https://www.intersectingflows.com). The conference 21 and 22 June 2023 marks the end of this large project. The aim is to take stock of current research about global and transnational perspectives dimensions of Islamophobia and point the way forward for new research. We therefore invite abstracts from researchers across the world working on these issues in various academic disciplines.

Deadlines and important dates:

Abstracts must be received by 1 March 2023. Send abstracts to Professor Torkel Brekke on the following e-mail: torkelbr@oslomet.no. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be asked to provide a full paper by 1 May 2023.

Participants are expected to address issues like the following:

• In what ways is Islamophobia a global phenomenon?

• What are the relevant historical legacies of anti-Muslim bigotry globally, including the pre-modern world?

• To what extent and in what ways does Islamophobia travel across regional and national contexts?

• What means and technologies enable the global and transnational flows of Islamophobia?

• What are currently the most important theories and methods in the study of Islamophobia?

• Is Islamophobia an academic field of its own? Should it be? Or is Islamophobia best studied within traditional academic disciplines?

“The scientification of Islamophobia: the case of WikiIslam”

Göran Larsson and Torkel Brekke

In this article, we introduce a concept of scientification of Islamophobia by looking closely at the case of a website called WikiIslam and at the way this website and its contents are used by other websites and by individuals in a complex global ecology of knowledge production and consumption regarding Islam and Muslims. We are making two claims in this article. Firstly, we believe that some Islamophobic activists and milieus in the Western world work to anchor prejudice against Islam and Muslims in what they see as scientific arguments about the nature and history of Islam. Secondly, we argue that the website called WikiIslam has emerged as an important point of reference and source of knowledge for the scientification of Islamophobia. We base these claims on an analysis of internet traffic to the pages of WikiIslam combined with a close reading of the articles written and curated by WikiIslam. However, our study of WikiIslam is only a limited case study of larger developments that merit further research.

“Memeifying fascism: on chan digital culture and the production of intersecting antisemitism and Islamophobia”

Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson

Researcher, Center for Extremism Research: Right-wing extremism, hate crime and political violence

In this presentation I examine how the anonymous users of the imageboard site 4chan /pol/ produce and promote fascist violent imaginaries online. I suggest that the echo chamber structure of /pol/, where core conspiracy theories and memes are amplified and reinforced inside a closed, transnational milieu, while for some users are sources of counterculture, trolling and lulz, lends itself to violent cyberfascism.  Based on analysis of memes and threads produced between the Christchurch terror attack in March 2019 and the Bærum terror attack in September 2019, I suggest that intersecting antisemitic and islamophobic enemy images are integral to the great replacement conspiracy theory. Moreover, intersecting cyberfascism inform target selection and calls for accelerating violence against Jewish and Muslim minority communities. 

Postponed to 2021: “Telling the Truth about Islam — Ex-Muslims and anti-Muslim Narratives”

Göran Larsson

Professor, University of Gothenburg

“Flows of Islamophobia in Transatlantic Far Right Digital Publics”

Bharath Ganesh

Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Groningen

Islamophobic discourse plays a fundamental role in garnering attention for far right parties, leaders, and social movements online. Islamophobia is ubiquitous in far right political communication in this geography: actors in far right digital publics consistently portray Muslims as a threat to Western culture, as violent criminals, and incapable of respecting European values. These racist tropes in far right political communication flow between North America and Western Europe. Imaginaries of “no-go zones” in European cities, representations of Muslim men as sexual predators, and nonsense fears of “Islamisation” drive transatlantic far right political communication today. The flow of these tropes depends upon sociotechnical systems, including social media platforms, alternative media and extremist influencers, populist radical right politicians, and distributed networks of users united in a transnational white racial project. By drawing on recent publications focusing on the far right on Twitter and ongoing work on far right spatial imaginaries, this talk will explore the discursive and affective flows in far right digital that reinforce racist constructions of nationhood and whiteness in North America and Western Europe.

“Burning the Qur’an: Blasphemy, Free Speech and Hate Speech in Norway”

Sindre Bangstad

Research Professor, KIFO/ Institute for Church, Religion and Worldview Research

"Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?" asked Judith Butler in a 2010 essay. For over a year now, towns, cities and suburbs throughout Norway has seen a highly theatrical 'free speech ritual' in which leaders of the racist far-right fringe group SIAN or Stop The Islamisation in Norway engage in racist hate speech against Muslims in Norwegian town squares, and immigrant-dominated suburban areas, and engage in public desecration of the Qur'an by means of burning, spitting on, and tearing out pages of the Qur'an. Norway abolished its blasphemy paragraph by an act of Parliament in 2015, but SIAN leaders have already been convicted of criminal violation of Norwegian hate speech laws in 2019. The current 'free speech ritual' in which SIAN engages is inspired by similar rituals pioneered by the far-right and racist party Stram Kurs and its leader Rasmus Paludan in Denmark, and has drawn widespread international media attention in countries such as Turkey and Pakistan. Based on extensive contacts and interviews with local Muslims, municipal officials and civil society actors that have sought to prevent polarization and radicalization as a fall-out from a public Qur'an-burning by SIAN in the Southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand on Nov 16, 2019, Sindre Bangstad will present preliminary findings from an ethnographic study conducted under the auspices of the INTERSECT project on this matter.

“How can we explain the different patterns of globalization in antisemitism and Islamophobia?”

Torkel Brekke

Professor, Oslo Metropolitan University and Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo

This talk starts with a question that has received too little attention. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both global in the sense that we can observe them in many different places, but Islamophobia has a more global appeal and reach than antisemitism. The talk proceeds in the following way.

Firstly, I discuss the tendency for comparative research to foreground similarities between antisemitism and Islamophobia. An important reason for this focus is the idea that in modern times ethnic and religious groups undergo processes of racialization. This means that there are cultural and economic forces at work in the modern world that make it plausible and convenient for majority populations to see minorities as races. This perspective has been widely applied to understand both antisemitism and Islamophobia in their own rights and to look for similarities between the two. I believe that this racialization perspective has given too much attention to similarities where we should be more interested in differences. I am interested in the attributes of the two that facilitate their spread across national and cultural boundaries.

Secondly, I introduce the theory of cultural models as a potential perspective to help us better understand these differences. This is an approach to culture developed by scholars concerned with finding the right methodological tools to study beliefs that underpin human action. Cultural models consist of interconnected cultural schemas. A focus on cultural schemas and models makes us aware of the cognitive aspects – the belief parts – of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Cultural models can be found in the minds of persons and may be accessed with methods such as interviews and ethnography, but they are also manifested in public cultural expressions, like art and literature. I am looking at antisemitism and Islamophobia as cultural models that appear similar but are made up of more basic cultural schemas that are fundamentally different. 

Thirdly, I argue that antisemitism and Islamophobia globalize in different ways because antisemitism – properly defined – is a cultural model that cannot be separated from its Christian origins. It is well known that modern times saw the emergence of what is normally called “scientific antisemitism”, which sees Jews as a race in line with scientific racism in general. However, even when the language of God, Christ, and blood libel are taken out of antisemitism, the theological, or more precisely the eschatological, elements in antisemitism remain. Christian eschatological ideas are at the core of antisemitism in a strict sense - this is not the case for Islamophobia.  

Fourthly, I suggest that the comparison of Islamophobia to antisemitism as cultural models makes it easier to understand an important aspect of the globalization of Islamophobia in our time. Islamophobia is not one thing but many. Islamophobias have emerged in a number of very different cultures over centuries. The question we are researching when we study Islamophobia as a global phenomenon is not primarily how Islamophobic themes spread from one place to another, although this can obviously happen. The more important question is rather how Islamophobias that have emerged as cultural models in different national contexts get into contact, how they overlap and how they converge. The globalization of antisemitism is the spread of one relatively coherent cultural model from one place, i.e. Christian Europe. The globalization of Islamophobia is the global convergence of different Islamophobias. This calls for research methods in the study of Islamophobia that pay attention both to the concepts and beliefs that become global and those that by their nature do not travel but stay local. 

Lecture by Professor Iselin Frydenlund for Religion and Politics seminar series, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo