American intellectuals and cultural gatekeepers exported anti-Muslim views globally without naming the phenomenon Islamophobia

Evidence

Another recent book is Fear of a Muslim Planet: Global Islamophobia in the New World Order, published in 2021 by Skyhorse and written by Arsalan Iftikhar. Unlike the vast majority of texts within the (broader) field, Fear of a Muslim Planet is intended for a general audience. The author is a Muslim American pundit with ties to an academic think tank (Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative). The book is written very accessibly, perhaps even excessively so, as some of its arguments would benefit from being tethered to legal, political, or anthropological analysis. In some regards, Fear of a Muslim Planet echoes Hamid Dabashi’s masterful book Brown Skin, White Masks, published in 2011 by Pluto Press. Columbia professor and public intellectual Dabashi makes the case that American intellectuals and cultural gatekeepers functioned as global ambassadors and exporters of anti-Muslim views without explicitly calling it “Islamophobia” or “global Islamophobia.” Iftikhar’s book, published more than a decade later, is unique in that it directly takes on Islamophobia as a global phenomenon with the aim of reaching general audiences. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1830

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the stated reading purpose: the reader reads Iftikhar alongside this book, and this passage situates Iftikhar’s Fear of a Muslim Planet as the general-audience global synthesis the reader is seeking.
• DEFINE: Explains how Dabashi’s earlier framework of American cultural gatekeepers exporting anti-Muslim views anticipated the explicit ‘global Islamophobia’ framing Iftikhar later champions.