British Islamophobia runs on willed amnesia about colonial history

Evidence

In Britain, with its much longer history of contact with Muslim peoples—including the experience derived from colonialism—a willed historical amnesia fed by politicians and the media prevents a more nuanced understanding of Islam, its different strains and multiple histories. We see instead something much closer to what Sherene Razack, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, terms “race thinking,” where prejudice becomes naturalized in the interests of existing social relations via phrases such as “British values,” indicating kinship and common origins, to which the Muslim “outsider” is required to adhere but from whose “insider” benefits he or she is always excluded. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 41

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines Arendt/Razack’s ‘race thinking’: prejudice naturalized via kinship-and-origin discourse demanding adherence while denying insider benefit. Naming this gives the reader a tool to distinguish contesting from reinforcing fiction.
• QUESTION: Could ‘race thinking’ as Morey defines it (adherence demanded, belonging denied) be the precise mechanism by which Naqvi’s Home Boy — a novel of British Muslims — either contests or quietly reproduces Islamophobia?
• ADDENDUM: The ‘insider benefits always excluded’ structure parallels the immodesty-panic dynamic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — outsiders are condemned for the very codes they are barred from fully adopting.

Related

• British Islamophobia mobilizes race thinking that admits Muslims formally yet excludes them (similarity 0.90)
• The postcolonial describes a world condition rather than a theory or identity (similarity 0.80)
• Imposing an American black-white antiracism model on Britain obscured distinct Asian struggles. (similarity 0.79)
• Attempting to homogenize the Muslim diaspora is itself a tactic of Islamophobia (similarity 0.79)
• Countering Islamophobia requires interrogating the construct of Westernness itself. (similarity 0.79)
• Postcolonialism’s secular roots create a blind spot for Islam (similarity 0.78)
• British prejudice shifted from biological racism to cultural discrimination against Muslims. (similarity 0.78)
• Britons in India refashioned inherited Islamophobia to serve colonial governance needs (similarity 0.78)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.78)