Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims [Paperback]

Stephen Sheehi (Author), Ward Churchill (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2011

Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims examines the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West following the end of the Cold War through GW Bush's War on Terror to the Age of Obama. Using "Operation Desert Storm" as a watershed moment, Stephen Sheehi examines the increased mainstreaming of Muslim-bating rhetoric and explicitly racist legislation, police surveillance, witch-trials and discriminatory policies towards Muslims in North America and abroad. The book focuses on the various genres and modalities of Islamophobia from the works of rogue academics to the commentary by mainstream journalists, to campaigns by political hacks and special interest groups. Some featured Islamophobes are Bernard Lewis. Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, David Horowitz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their theories and opinions operate on an assumption that Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, suffer from particular cultural lacuna that prevent their cultures from progress, democracy and human rights. While the assertion originated in the colonial era, Sheehi demonstrates that it was refurbished as a viable explanation for Muslim resistance to economic and cultural globalization during the Clinton era. Moreover, the theory was honed into the empirical basis for an interventionist foreign policy and propaganda campaign during the Bush regime and continues to underlie Barack Obama's new internationalism. If the assertions of media pundits and rogue academics became the basis for White House foreign policy, Sheehi also demonstrates how they were translated into a sustained domestic policy of racial profiling and Muslim-baiting by agencies from Homeland Security to the Department of Justice. Furthermore, Sheehi examines the collusion between non-governmental agencies, activist groups and lobbies and local, state and federal agencies to in suppressing political speech on US campuses critical of racial profiling, US foreign policy in the Middle East and Israel. While much of the direct violence against Muslims on American streets, shops and campuses has subsided, Islamophobia runs throughout the Obama administration. Sheehi, therefore, concludes that Muslim and Arab-hating emanate from all corners of the American political and cultural spectrum, serving poignant ideological functions in the age of economic, cultural and political globalization.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Stephen Sheehi's Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims is a brilliantly synthetic work; a gift to all who struggle to understand the anti-Muslim sentiment so pervasive in contemporary America. In a richly detailed yet accessible manner, Sheehi tackles post-Cold War American Islamophobia in all of its complexity, weaving together its liberal and neoconservative strands, and illustrating that we must interrogate it not as a problem of "prejudice" or "misunderstanding," nor as a debate about Islam itself, but as an ideological paradigm used to structure and justify U.S. policies, both domestic and international." --Natsu Taylor Saito, author of Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law.

"Sheehi's analysis of Islamophobia as an ideological formation brings a much needed dose of fresh air, and analytical clarity, to the burgeoning field of research on how the a deep-seated psychological fear of Islam and Muslims has been produced and circulated to enable not merely war, but a globalized militarism of historically unprecedented scale that most Americans have come to take for granted as necessary and inevitable in the post-September 11 world. A worthy update of Said's seminal discussion of Orientalism and one that leaves few players in the contemporary foreign policy establishment, in particular so-called liberals, unscathed." --Mark LeVine, author of Why They Don't Hate Us and Heavy Metal Islam

About the Author

is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina. He is author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity and The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography forthcoming from Princeton University Press,. He has published in journals such as International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The British Journal of Middle East Studies, Discourse, Critique, The Journal of Arabic Literature, and The Journal of Comparative South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Clarity Press (February 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932863671
• ISBN-13: 978-0932863676
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #23 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > Treaties

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