During the political regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), public knowledge in India has been tarnished with political colors. The BJP has used the color saffron, which is closely associated with the Indian National Flag, as a sociopolitical tool to signal patriotism, nationalism, indigenization, and decolonization. However, the government’s policies and messages focus on the self-profiting mechanisms of Hindutva ideology. According to the BJP, the notions of pre-colonial knowledge systems and patriotism are only related to the Hindu religion. Thus, public knowledge in India has been politicized through “saffronization”: the color saffron, rightwing political ideologies, and religious fundamentalism combine to create false beliefs about Indian history and culture, which then inspire and excuse hate and crime.

This paper analyses the ethnic penalty by focusing on the racialization of labor market outcomes beyond the migrant penalty. An illegitimate statistical or taste-based discrimination can be revealed specifically by distinguishing migrants into ethnic groups. Accordingly, ethnic penalty based on five different ethnic groups was estimated through the difference in employment and job quality with respect to natives. The analysis was conducted at the country and European average levels using 16 European countries under a framework of ethnic penalty processes in the labor market. According to the analysis, Eastern Europeans were the most prominent ethnicity regarding higher employment across the 16 countries, although they were mostly posited in unskilled jobs. Migrants from the Middle East and North Africa were shown to be subject to a double penalty in both measures, and the penalty tendency was much clearer for females. Asians and South Americans showed the least penalty, while sub-Saharan Africans were revealed to hold an in-between position.

While there is literature on ‘populist securitisation’ and on the ‘securitisation of Islam’, the possibility that some populists may desecuritise Islam is not sufficiently explored. Left-wing populist parties have demonstrated solidarity towards Muslim minorities in Europe through a discourse based on inclusionary rhetoric and deconstruction of the securitising narratives promoted by mainstream and populist right-wing parties. However, their attitude towards Islam can be ambiguous. This paper argues that left-wing populists tend to desecuritise Islam. However, desecuritisation happens in ways that do not always accommodate Muslims’ religious freedoms. This happens because the driver of the left-wing populist desecuritisation of Islam lies in the left-wing thick ideology surrounding populism and not in the populist thin core. I illustrate this argument through the case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. Through a discourse analysis of texts from 2009 to 2022, I show that Mélenchon has predominantly desecuritised Islam. While his desecuritisation is populist, it has not been truly emancipatory for Muslims. Although a more committed fight against Islamophobia has emerged since 2019, Mélenchon’s ideological attachment to laïcité hinders a full rearticulation of French political community based on genuine recognition of Muslims’ religious freedoms.

Although there is increasing academic attention for the rise of Animal Advocacy Parties (AAPs), existing accounts overlook their emergence in the context of the politicization of race and religion. This contribution deploys Rancière’s political thought combined with a critical race theoretical lens to analyze the project of the leading AAP after which most international sister parties are modeled: the Dutch Party for the Animals. We find that the party on the one hand disrupts the anthropocentrism characteristic for the Dutch social and political order but on the other hand affirms and contributes to the policing and racialization of Muslims. This became most apparent in their proposal to ban unstunned religious slaughter. We demonstrate that this proposal was part of the party’s general inability to recognize the contemporaneous logics of race and religion. This leads us to conceptualize the party’s project as a colorblind, or in non-ableist terms, color-evasive animal politics.

Islamophobia, along with other forms of alt-right discourse and hate speech, is a well-documented phenomenon in the Euro-American world. Despite increasing scholarly attention in the West, however, research on Islamophobia in authoritarian regimes is more limited. Using content analysis of key online Islamophobic accounts, this paper shows that there are two distinct types of Islamophobic narratives in the Chinese cyberspace: a “confessional” narrative attributed to Uyghur authors, and a warning narrative specifically for Han readership, cautioning them about the hidden dangers posed by the Hui. This paper explores how these Islamophobic pieces share a Han-centric gaze where the Han, the majority-dominant group in China today, are placed in both a saviour role in terms of the Uyghurs, and a victim role as underdogs coming under attack from the Hui. The successful assimilation of the Hui has led to suspicion and narratives of betrayal, despite state efforts to promote Hui assimilation as a successful example of ethnic harmony. Whereas the Uyghurs are welcomed and accepted as long as they are willing to admit Han superiority, the Hui are rejected based on their perceived threat to Han dominance.

The neoliberal enterprise of NGOs has transformed the left-leaning politics of the political theatre movement in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Commencing in the 1980s, this theatre acted as a vibrant movement of the Left, challenging the brutal military dictatorship of General Zia. At a later stage, its politics changed to the neoliberal politics of NGOs, giving way to economics and the agenda of international donor organizations of the Global North. This article demonstrates the turn-around of theatre company Ajoka’s recent production Saira aur Miara (2019) and focuses on the production’s politics, together with its text, design, and performance modes in aesthetic terms. A materialist and context-specific political approach examines to what extent class struggle and leftist ideas inform this company’s ideological imaginings and how much it has moved away from its original political position. It indicates the tensions and contradictions that have been created during this change and because of it.

How do White Americans evaluate the politics of belonging in the United States across different ethnoreligious identity categories? This paper examines this question through two competing frameworks. On the one hand, given the salience of anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States, we consider whether White Americans penalize Muslim immigrants to the United States regardless of their ethnoracial background. On the other hand, Muslim identity is often conflated by the general public with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ethnoracial identity. We argue MENA-Muslim identity should be understood through the lens of intersectionality. In this case, White Americans may penalize MENA-Muslims immigrants to the United States more than Muslims from other ethnoracial groups. We test these two frameworks through a conjoint experimental design wherein respondents are asked to evaluate immigrants and indicate to whom the United States should give a green card—signaling legal belonging—and how likely the immigrant is to assimilate into America—signaling cultural belonging. Although White Americans believe White Muslims may assimilate better to the United States relative to MENA-Muslims, race does not moderate how White Americans evaluate who should be allowed to belong in the United States.

This article analyzes stereotypes of Muslims that have recurred in Sinhala literature over the past seven centuries. This temporal span includes (1) a precolonial time when Muslims were a curiosity in Sinhala poetry as rich traders, wild men, and seductive women; (2) an early colonial time when the Portuguese and Dutch displaced more Muslims into the island interior, and Sinhala authors increasingly wrote of them as religious others akin to Tamils; and (3) a late colonial time when British policies forged religo-racial political categories in the decades leading up to the anti-Muslim pogroms of 1915. Each case is also connected to postcolonial instantiations or transformations of these typecasts. This history therefore eschews linear narratives of change to show the recurrent tendencies of social reasoning through stereotyping, past and present.

This article explores how Christian theology has historically contributed to the modern ideology of Islamophobia. After arguing that contemporary popular and political Islamophobia has its sources in replacement theology, theological supersessionism, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, Christian-Islamic polemics, Orientalism, and modern racism, it seeks to reorient Catholic theology by undoing and unsaying this discursive and political harm. Constructively, the relatively novel genealogy of Islamophobia this article tentatively traces is based on three discursive moves: linking (1) replacement theology/supersessionism with medieval anti-Islamic theology, (2) the latter to Orientalism, and (3) the previous two to Islamophobia. These three discursive moves are possible because they were and remain sustained by supremacist theologies begotten by replacement theology/supersessionism. The article draws from theories of ideology and social imaginaries to recognize that the words, symbols, narratives, and metaphors that constituted a Christian theology of Islam since the seventh-century emergence of the Islamic tradition cannot be subverted merely by forgetting or ignoring them; they cannot be unlearned merely by learning “positive views” of the Islamic religious traditions (from Muslims, scholars, or both); they cannot be undone through a religion-blind, apolitical theology of religions that rejects nothing that is true and holy in religions; finally, they cannot be dismantled even by a Catholic theology of Islam that cherishes specific beliefs and practices in common with Muslims. It concludes by beginning to construct a Catholic theology of interreligious praxis intended to dismantle and disrupt Islamophobia today. This praxis-oriented theology is grounded in a Christian conception of restorative justice and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. At the core of this proposal is the assertion that theologies of the past remain the politics of the present. If Catholic theology has shaped the sociopolitical ideology and structure of Islamophobia today, then an anti-Islamophobic Catholic theology must be political; otherwise, it will remain ineffective in undoing the political harm it has produced.