French Islamophobic sentiment is spatially concentrated in the stigmatized banlieues

Evidence

I felt that, wholly, during that stretch I spent in the City of Light, where the warmth of Saint-Denis pulled me in while the far more celebrated lights and towers and avenues on the other side of Paris looked upon me with scorn, suspicion, and then pushed me away. Away, into the Arab and Muslim ghettoes on the outskirts of the city, in the belly of the banlieues where I saw people who looked and believed like me and who saw me as far from the form of a terrorist. I was far from it all, in that moment in Saint-Denis, just far enough to see those Eiffel Tower lights and feel what freedom might be like in a France crusading against Islam. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 788

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing chapter on quotidian Islamophobia in France stemming from colonial logics of assimilation and difference.