Islamophobia Studies Journal
The Islamophobia Studies Journal (ISJ) is a bi-annual publication that focuses on the critical analysis of Islamophobia and its multiple manifestations in our contemporary moment. ISJ is an interdisciplinary and multi-lingual academic journal that encourages submissions that theorizes the historical, political, economic, and cultural phenomenon of Islamophobia in relation to the construction, representation, and articulation of “Otherness.” The ISJ is an open scholarly exchange, exploring new approaches, methodologies, and contemporary issues.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
Islamophobia in Canada has reached deadly proportions. In recent years the country has been rocked by two unprecedented attacks against Muslims. The first took place at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec in Quebec City on January 29, 2017, killing six men after evening prayers. The second attack came four years later, on June 6, 2021, in London, Ontario, where four members of a Canadian Pakistani Muslim family were intentionally mowed down by a truck and killed. Both deadly attacks took place at the hands of White nationalists. Adding to the death toll, in 2020, a caretaker at a Toronto area mosque was stabbed to death by a man linked to a neo-Nazi death cult.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
There are many more debates about Islamophobia’s racist dispositions in a Muslim-majority society, but the way these dispositions are exercised would be better studied if the fundamental causes were addressed first. Any form of racism can be defined as premeditated acts of degradation, humiliation, and hatred that occur in the context of everyday or regular actions. In previous centuries, racism was limited to phenotypic characteristics such as skin color, hair color, and eye color, but in today’s age of image, phenotypes have been transformed into body extensions such as clothing, resulting in a new type of “racial bias” directed at those who appear to be different from the rest of society. Turkey stands out above many other Muslim countries in terms of culture, traditions, and history, as one of the few superpowers to have ruled over a vast territory without being colonized at any point in its history. The transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the social fabric was forced to transform into a new pattern. By showing, representing, and projecting Islam as a specter of reactionary forces, it was alleged it may be eradicated from people’s daily lives. Islam was labelled a public enemy, along with anything that reminded people of it; women were singled out for their outer clothing standards. The self-proclaimed emancipators were able to save and free women from their oppressors by portraying them as meek and backward. Some people in Muslim-majority nations may be treated differently solely because of their phenotypical physical distinctions, which could be termed racism and eventually lead to Islamophobia.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
Islamophobia, as a constructed term and a field of academic research, is undergoing a positive transformation and growth with all types of publications focusing on the subject. For the term’s circulation, a basic google search of Islamophobia garners millions of entries covering an expanding spectrum of topics and research areas, not all positive or constructive, which is to be expected and only affirms the expanding nature of the field. Moreover, the term, which for a while existed on the margins in alterative publications, often passed over or explained using different words, is central to media coverage of Muslims, is included in policy circles discussions, and is a mainstream concept. On the academic front and, more precisely, over the past three to five years, the number of scholars, academic institutions, and research centers that have embraced the term and organized panels, conferences, and courses is expanding daily. Islamophobia studies expansion, inside and outside of academia, has translated into a steady flow of cutting-edge books, published articles, specialized reports, and diverse data from all the corners of the globe. Also, every significant professional academic association has included papers, panels, and special round table discussions on Islamophobia, which illustrates this transformation and the adoption of the term and all the entanglements associated with it.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
This special issue does the unfortunate but critical work of updating, for Media Studies, the new digital strategies Islamophobia deploys as it seeps deeper into contemporary digital culture. The collection asks very specifically how digital platforms are intertwined with contemporary tactics and strategies of anti-Muslim racism. Too often the technological circulation of hate is imagined to be a collateral sort of compromise for marginalized communities who also find a simultaneous sense of agency via empowerment, pleasure, or resistance in new media forms. Media and Cultural Studies can enliven the intersecting moment of when an ideology meets a new medium. In other words, new media forms are often examined for how they “other,” reflect, represent, amplify, mediate, carry, or transmit a message. In the case here, the message is one of Islamophobia. And thus, there is the impossible tension that is hard to reconcile that the very same medium that empowers marginalized communities is also the same medium that intensifies Islamophobia and transmits it further, faster and faster, across the darkest and deepest corners of the Internet. Nevertheless, when you are in the business of detecting anti-racism, you must be trained to read across a range of media forms—each of which demands a complex understanding of the techno-logics of the form in question. Thus, one should read this volume as a whole with this in mind. There are hidden insights here that indicate that representation from one medium to the next is never simply a matter of just ideology or agency but, rather, a matter of technology.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
If viewed accurately, “I can’t breathe,” the final plea of George Floyd, is the most painful and apt summation of the colonialization effects, with death, destruction, and erasure visited upon people of the Global South no matter the geography they inhabit and the immediate connection to the immigration-refugee crisis. The daily news gives the impression that what has taken place in Minneapolis, Minnesota—the killing of George Floyd by police—is an isolated event that is disconnected from history, be it domestic or international. But one can’t approach the topic of Blacks in America without beginning with Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic, which commenced multiple genocides against the Indigenous people in the New World and across the globe. Furthermore, European genocides in the New World brought about the market-driven slave trade that witnessed snatching millions of Africans from their homes, lands, and families and shipping them as commodified cargo for a trading route that lasted almost 300 years.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
“Send her back” is the new racist theme introduced by Trump’s supporters in the aftermath of his recent bigoted Twitter attack on four Congresswomen (Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York). The chant took place during a 90-minute campaign rally in North Carolina, which witnessed Trump doubling down on his earlier attacks and stoking the crowd into a despicable racist frenzy.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
The Islamophobia Studies Journal (ISJ) is a bi-annual publication that focuses on the critical analysis of Islamophobia and its multiple manifestations in our contemporary moment. ISJ is an interdisciplinary and multi-lingual academic journal that encourages submissions that theorizes the historical, political, economic, and cultural phenomenon of Islamophobia in relation to the construction, representation, and articulation of “Otherness.” The ISJ is an open scholarly exchange, exploring new approaches, methodologies, and contemporary issues.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
The string of right-wing political parties gaining the upper hand in elections across Europe and now joined by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election points to a much bigger phenomenon: the collapse of the neoliberal economic and political order. Consequently, focusing on each election outcome across Europe and the U.S. misses the overall global picture and the economic, political and social trends that are at work, which are transforming the world as we know it. Debating the massive influx of immigrants from the global south and from war-torn countries, loss of jobs and decline in income levels in the global north and the rapid demographic shifts caused by them masks the real causes behind them.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
The election results in the U.S. and Europe over the past few years should be seen as a distorted response to the global crisis. Attempts to solve the problem by building walls, increased deportation and making immigration or human movement more difficult addressed the symptoms and not the real causes behind the crisis. Also, promising to bring back manufacturing jobs and massive infrastructure spending will create the illusion of problem solving since the underpinnings of the real crisis will not be touched. Furthermore, President-elect Trump has already ushered to the financial sector his readiness to remove whatever weak regulations that were put in place after the 2008 financial sector collapse.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
The way to evaluate and approach the American Muslim community in the current period should be approached within a prison-prisoner lens. Here, the ability to move around and enjoy privileges should not be confused with freedom, equality, constitutional rights, and dignity in the full sense of the word. Let us be honest for a moment and detail the Muslim predicament in today’s America: a community subject to structured governmental control, surveillance, entrapment schemes, guilt by association, and punitive measures instituted to elicit “correct” conduct and proper political and religious speech. Take for example, the levels of intrusion into Muslim religious space, whereby the government admits to deploying informants and monitoring leaders within these institutions. Religious freedom becomes vacuous if government intrusion is constant and presumption of guilt without evidence is how the Muslim community is regulated and controlled. The introduction in the US of CVE programs and Prevent in England are symptoms of the prisoner-prison relationship. The key question: What other community in the US has such programs to prevent and counter-extremism?

Islamophobia Studies Journal
Clearly, the recent events in Europe, U.S. and the Muslim World have brought renewed attention to Islam and the status of Muslim citizens and immigrants in the West. For some, the idea of Islam and the West are an odd coupling that don’t belong to the same category and are structurally set on a constant course of conflict. Terrorist events in Europe and extreme violence perpetrated by ISIS is paraded as exhibits A-Z to illustrate this incompatibility between Muslims, as adherents and holding an affinity to Islamic faith or a mere expression identity formation, and ‘the West’, as an undifferentiated homogenous category. The voices clamoring to offer unvarnished ‘expert’ views on a supposed clash of civilization are many but for the most part belong to a well-connected body operating within a broader Islamophobic network and a strategy centering on cherry picking contemporary and historical facts to support a predetermined ideological position.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
This second issue provides a collection of articles that broadly engage the continuing problem of Islamophobia and the global anti-Muslim phenomenon while anchoring the publication in a theoretically and empirically grounded framework. While no one thread ties all the articles together, this issue attempts to further our collective knowledge about Islamophobia and its various manifestations through academic and community-based research. We hope this issue will foster further research and engagement in academic institutions and in civil and human rights organizations with the intended goal of ending racism in all its forms, Islamophobia included.

Islamophobia Studies Journal
This inaugural edition of the peer-reviewed Islamophobia Studies Journal is an attempt to forge the bonds for strengthening our commitment to justice, to be accountable and responsible for the work that we produce, and more importantly, to focus our passions – the basis of the human condition – as we strive to work in our collective and related projects for justice.