Islamophobia’s main engine has shifted from scholarship to populist politics

Evidence

In the age of social media, when grotesque stereotypes of Muslims circulate widely, the main enemy is, perhaps, no longer Orientalist scholarship and its policy effects on the ground, but the quick-fix populism peddled by politicians. The year 2016—in which the Brexit vote in Britain saw a spike in anti-Muslim hate crime and the U.S. presidential election was won by a candidate running on an explicitly Islamophobic platform—appeared to many as the moment when something fundamental shifted in modes of knowledge production and circulation. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 520

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in Hamid’s and Naqvi’s post-9/11 fiction, which Morey frames as contesting precisely the populist Islamophobia this passage identifies as dominant.