BSA Socrel Study Group

Islamophobia, when acknowledged as a form of racism, is habitually thought to be limited to the west with questions of identities, personal prejudice, securitisation and governance often dominating the conversation. Further, throughout academic literature, much work remains ahistorical where the entanglements of anti-Muslim racism with what Quijano had termed the global ‘colonial matrix of power’ of the ‘modern’ world often go unexplored. Nevertheless, more recently, some work has begun to identify Islamophobia’s global nature, and, to a lesser extent, its presence within Islamic communities (Hafez and Bayrakli 2019).  Seeking to engage this emerging conversation, my work over the past years has sought to specifically document, explore, and theorise Islamophobia as a form of racism within the Arab world, addressing a significant gap across fields and theorisations. For my PhD, this has specifically been through a study of the Muslim hijabi’s lived experiences in Lebanon, where I ha