Islamophobia, Antisemitism and the Struggle for Recognition: The Politics of Definitions

Tariq Modood, Professor at Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol

Islamophobia and antisemitism are two forms of racism that have much in common. The racialisation targets not just a religion or religious group but what is better understood as an ethnoreligious group. The ways that Jews and Muslims oppose such racism increasingly involves the building up of an identity which, like most contemporary equality movements, does not simply reject the one attributed to them by their enemies but a positive replacement. Such positive conceptions can become oppressor identities, as is the case of certain Islamist identities fostered by the likes of Isis or with a Jewish identity centred on Israel. Moreover, the politics of defining these racisms is tied to competition about anti-racisms prioritisation. This should be based on an empirical evaluation of the scale of the respective racisms (and not on an essentialised hierarchy). Unfortunately, in the case of Islamophobia and antisemitism today, there is a willful empirical blindness, and the prioritisation is taking place on the basis of which victim group is more influential and has more influential friends. Finally, we must be able to critically talk about groups like Muslims and Jews, about Islam and Israel, without being dismissed as Islamophobes or antisemites. For this to be the case, ‘talk about’ must become ‘talk with’: the character of the criticism must take a dialogical form. I conclude by including a sketch of five tests for distinguishing racialisation from dialogical criticism.

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Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and the co-founder of the international journal, Ethnicities. He has held over 40 grants and consultancies, has over 35 (co-)authored and (co-)edited books and reports and over 350 articles and chapters. He was awarded a MBE for services to social sciences and ethnic relations in 2001, was made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) in 2004 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. In 2022 he was ranked in the top 20 UK cited scholars in Politics, Law, Sociology and Social Policy. His latest books include Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019), Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2^nd ed; 2013); and as Special Issues co-editor, with T. Sealy, Beyond Euro-Americancentric Forms of Racism and Anti-racism (Political Quarterly, 2022) and Global comparative analysis of the governance of religious diversity (Religion, State and Society, 2022). He has a You Tube Channel and his website is tariqmodood.com