Islamophobia is a rather new term in scholarly fields but it is an old concept (Cesari 2009; López 2011, 569). All the variants of Islam and Muslims were perceived as a threat in Europe from its arrival in 7th century to at least second half of the 16th century (Said 2003, 59, 75) after the decisive bottle by Lepante as a turning point meant the irreversible retreat of Islam and Muslims from Europe. In the Renaissance period, the process of othering the Muslims and Islam [mainly – and rather undistinguishably – Ottomans or Persians] in an old continent was not any more based primarily on fear or the “true believers and infidels” divide, but the European perception of Islam transferred into civilizational differences emphasizing both “our” ancient Greek period and Hellas contrary to “them” labeled with the adjective “barbaric”, a notion typical for early modern literature (Lewis 1993, 25). Similarly, Maria Todorova describes “English images of the Turks during the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries were ones of tyranny, arbitrariness, extortions, slavery, piracy, savage punishments, and Christian ordeals; they were also images of strangeness and a diatribe against Islam” (Todorova 2009, 90). The forthcoming era of Enlightenment founded on anticlericalism and a critique of religion further worsened the image of Islam in Europe. In that age, the decaying Ottoman Empire heavily contributed to the shared view in Europe of its despotic character, “the unreformability of the Muslim religion, afflicted with fanaticism and bigotry” (Todorova 2009, 76). Similarly, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the stereotyping image of “the mythical Orient” with the widely shared anti-Arabic and anti-Islamic prejudices further strengthened by the clashes between Arabs and Zionism, as Edward Said famously argued in his book
Edward Said’s critical view on the widely accepted image in the West, which associated Islam with negative stereotypes fully conformed to emerging postcolonial and postmodern theories aimed at the deconstruction of European grand narratives and its conviction of (whether former colonial or newly neo-imperial) supremacy over the rest of the world. Nevertheless, I assume that two remarks shall be emphasized for the development of the issue in the subsequent two to three decades after Said’s invention of orientalist discourse – first, events which shaped Islamophobia (though the term was not properly conceptualized yet by then) at grassroots level and, second, the scholarly debate on the Islamophobia phenomenon seriously considered from the late 1990s. It is beyond the scope of this
First, in the West, the
Second, from the scholarly point of view, western academicians did not start to elaborate on the Islamophobia phenomenon seriously before the 1997 report titled
A rather large amount of studies related to Islamophobia issued in the West has been debated among scholars. They can be categorized into the three fundamental areas of time, space and social groups (Bleich 2012, 182) to which, as I am convinced, debate on the accuracy of the term Islamophobia shall be added.
First, and rather paradoxically, there have been discussions focused exclusively or predominantly on the term Islamophobia. Basically, these publications are aimed at two fundamental areas: on elaboration of the better definition of Islamophobia than there are available so far; or, on scholarly suggestion aimed at more precise terms which can encompass the phenomenon on the expanse of the unappropriated word Islamophobia (López 2011, 556, 557). Apart from that, context also matters as the texts broadly busy with definition are commonly investigating relation either to
Second, texts linked to the time dimension are analysis of Islamophobia and its manifestations in different historical epochs from the early mediaeval time until the contemporary age “beyond terror” (Tyrer 2013). Apart from the already mentioned seminal work
Third, as for the space dimension, there have been numerous texts published focused on macro- or micro-level issues. Concretely, texts are aimed at e.g. the global or international environment (Morgan and Poynting 2012), at the Western (Green 2015; Hardy and Mughal and Markiewicz 2017) or at the European – here predominantly intended as western European – realm (Fekete 2009; Renton and Gidley 2017) and further at case studies focused on countries strongly prioritizing the U.S. (Love 2017; Ernst 2013; Ali 2012; Beydoun 2018) and western European countries, predominantly the U.K. (Jackson 2018; Abbas 2011) to focus on regional or local issues (Jackson 2018; Al-Natour and Morgans 2012). Apart from the publications related to case studies, a number of comparative texts were published (Cesari 2011; Cherribi 2011) or publications with chapters regarding numerous western countries (see e.g. Esposito and Kalin 2011).
Fourth, texts analyzing social groups in relation to Islamophobia could be further differentiated into various subcategories across social strata, e.g. the European extreme right (Zuquete 2008) or youth culture (Bakali 2016; Ramberg 2004).
Apart from these four ground areas of research on Islamophobia, there shall be also mentioned that the dramatic 9/11 terrorist attacks aimed at symbolical global targets and its direct medialization encouraged the media to actively participate in the construction of the “Islamophobic Industry“ (Lean 2012), fostering the “culture of security” and the spreading of “moral panic” deepened Islamophobic trends in the West. The spectacular 9/11 events and the subsequent “War on Terror” transformed the Islamophobia phenomenon from a domain exclusively reserved to populist radical right parties into a larger political mainstream in the West (Mudde 2007, 84) and belonged to a decisive cause, triggering the securitization of states’ political agendas (Mudde 2013, 9). At the same time, analogously and logically, social scientists intensified their research interest on Islam specially with linkage to the terms radicalism and terrorism which enabled the constitution of a new filed of research. In parallel, a rising number of security analysts and think-tanks started to produce numerous publications on Islam and Muslims in relation to Islamic terrorism, Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda (Lean 2012; Öktem 2011, 155–156).
Nevertheless, as Serdar Kaya rather courageously asserts, valuable research on Islamophobia had not emerged before 9/11 (Kaya 2015, 452). He further claimed recently that vast majority of the texts related to that phenomenon remain “single or comparative country case studies”, while the “more systematic and quantitatively driven cross-country studies on anti-Muslim prejudices are less common, and the systematic studies that also include the country-level factors are almost exceptional” (Kaya 2015, 452). This is debatable or even disputable for western scholars, however, his criticism can be fully applied to the scarce number of academic works on Islamophobia issued so far in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
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As for the CEE context, apart from Russia, post-Soviet areas and the Balkans, there was scarce evidence of scholarly interest and literature on Islamophobia there until recently. Ivan Kalmar commented on the very recent situation as follows:
Although the severity of the Islamophobia evidenced in the response of the political leaders and the public in CEE was recognized everywhere, very little academic research had immediately been done on it either in the East or in the West. It is in order to remedy this situation that I applied for and got a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to investigate the phenomenon. When we held a preliminary meeting in Prague in 2016, it was quite difficult to find scholars engaged with the issue (Kalmar 2018: 97).
However, as Kalmar further asserts, the situation has changed rapidly since. The advent of the “migration crisis” in CEE at around the middle of 2015 impacted, firstly, rhetoric exercised and policies exhibited by local political elites, secondly, public debates, and thirdly, logically, also attracted the attention of the social science scholars who finally started to contribute texts on the issue of Islamophobia. However, for readers limited to the accessibility of texts written in English For those who can read books written in the Czech language see e.g. by Ostřanský, Bronislav (ed.). 2018.
To sum up, in the still under-researched field of Islamophobia in CEE there is a demand for a more “in-depth” analysis of both case studies and cross-national comparisons which can be achieved through scholarly collaboration.
I assume that the three articles in this special section of the JNMLP peer-reviewed journal would contribute to bridging the existing lack of texts on the issue and would support better understanding of Islamophobia in the CEE realm.
First a text with comparative ambitions encompassing the Eastern European perspective (nevertheless, despite of the used notion “Eastern”, countries analyzed here may be surely considered as “Central” European also) in general will be introduced. Gert Pickel from Leipzig University and Cemal Öztürk from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in their article titled
Second, Vladimír Naxera and Petr Krčál from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen contributed to the debate with the text titled rather emotionally
immigration which both represent “the absolute largest threat to contemporary Europe.” Though having analyzed only the Czech President Miloš Zeman, Naxera and Krčál argue in a similar vein to Gert Pickel and Cemal Öztürk (see the first text of the special section), where in both texts there is a clear link between CEE leaders and the principles used by right-wing populists in Europe. Interestingly, in-depth analysis of Zeman’s frequent use of the term “security” during his first presidential mandate revealed another aspect – his changing relationship with Russia. Initially, it was perceived as a threat (“although in the beginning of his presidential function, he labeled Russia as a security problem on several occasions”), Zeman later gradually shifted his approach to relativize Russia as a security threat to the point that he ceased to consider it as a source of danger completely.
Third and finally, Ľubomír Zvada from Palacký University in Olomouc in the Czech Republic contributed to the special section with the text called