The Commercialization of Islamophobia: Capitalizing on Apprehension
Keywords:
Islam, islamophobia, Muslim, linguistics
Abstract
Islamophobia, the irrational fear, prejudice, or hatred towards Islam and Muslims, has become a pervasive issue in contemporary society. While historical roots of Islamophobia exist, its commercialization has emerged as a distinct phenomenon in recent years. This article explores the commercialization of Islamophobia and its implications, shedding light on how various actors capitalize on apprehension to further their interests. The study employs a literature review approach to analyze and understand the phenomenon, revealing how media, politics, and business exploit and profit from fear, stereotypes, and negative perceptions surrounding Islam and Muslims. The consequences of the commercialization of Islamophobia are profound, perpetuating discrimination, marginalization, and violence against Muslim communities. To counter Islamophobia effectively, collective efforts must be made to dismantle fear-inducing narratives, promote empathy, and foster a comprehensive understanding of Islam and Muslims.
References
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Hopkins, N., & Kahani-Hopkins, V. (2006). Minority group members’ theories of intergroup contact: A case study of British Muslims’ conceptualizations of “Islamophobia” and social change. In British Journal of Social Psychology (Vol. 45, Issue 2, pp. 245–264). https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48583
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Idliby, R. T. (2014). Burqas, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Being Muslim in America. St. Martin’s Publishing.
Kasiyarno, K. (2022). When American Values Unite Jews and Muslim in the United States. IJISH (International Journal of Islamic Studies and Humanities), 5(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.26555/IJISH.V5I2.6721
Kilvington, D., Hylton, K., Long, J., & Bond, A. (2022). Investigating online football forums: a critical examination of participants’ responses to football related racism and Islamophobia. Soccer and Society, 23(8), 849–864. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2022.2109801
Lean, N. C. (2019). The debate over the utility and precision of the term “Islamophobia.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Islamophobia (pp. 11–17). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351135559-2
Leeuwen, T. van. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. Wiley Online Library.
Mamdani, M. (2002). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 766–775. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.766
Mamdani, M. (2005). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Pantheon.
Mapes, N., White, A., Medury, R., & Dua, S. (2019). Divisive Language and Propaganda Detection using Multi-head Attention Transformers with Deep Learning BERT-based Language Models for Binary Classification. ACL Anthology, 103–106. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-5014
McLaughlin, M. M., Ahmad, S. S., & de Mamani, A. W. (2022). A Mixed-Methods Approach to Psychological Help-Seeking in Muslims: Islamophobia, Self-Stigma, and Therapeutic Preferences. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 90(7), 568–581. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000746
Mothes, M. (2022). Writing as Antidote: Muslim Writers Resist in Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic and Banthology. In American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (pp. 247–267). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7_11
Mukhammadsidiqov, M. (2021). Problems of Escalation of Religious Xenophobia in the ERA of Globalization. Central Asian Journal of Literature, Philosophy and Culture, 2(12), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.47494/CAJLPC.V2I12.267
Olonisakin, T. T., & Adebayo, S. O. (2021). Xenophobia: scale development and validation. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 39(3), 484–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2020.1853686
Powers, P. (2015). The Philosophical Foundations of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 1(2), 18–34.
Rana, J., Alsultany, E., Deeb, L., Fadda, C., Khabeer, S. A., Ali, A., Daulatzai, S., Grewal, Z., Hammer, J., & Naber, N. (2020). Pedagogies of Resistance: Why Anti-Muslim Racism Matters. Amerasia Journal, 46(1), 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2020.1761278
Reny, T. T., & Barreto, M. A. (2022). Xenophobia in the time of pandemic: othering, anti-Asian attitudes, and COVID-19. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 10(2), 209–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2020.1769693
Sardar, Z., & Davies, M. W. (2010). Freeze framing muslims: Hollywood and the slideshow of western imagination. Interventions, 12(2), 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2010.489698
Solopova, V., Scheffler, T., & Popa-Wyatt, M. (2021). A Telegram Corpus for Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Online Harm. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 7(0). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.32
Sufi, M. K., & Yasmin, M. (2022). Racialization of public discourse: portrayal of Islam and Muslims. Heliyon, 8(12). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e12211
Swami, V., Barron, D., Weis, L., & Furnham, A. (2018). To Brexit or not to Brexit: The roles of Islamophobia, conspiracist beliefs, and integrated threat in voting intentions for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. British Journal of Psychology, 109(1), 156–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12252
Tahir, H., & Safdar, S. (2022). Cultural similarity predicts social inclusion of Muslims in Canada: A vignette-based experimental survey. Frontiers in Psychology, 13(11), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973603
Tarasheva, E. (2020). Hate Speech or Divisive Language. Yearbook of the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2, 79–94. https://doi.org/10.33919/flcy.19.2.5
Topolski, A. (2018). Good Jew, bad Jew … good Muslim, bad Muslim: “managing” Europe’s others. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(12), 2179–2196. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1391402
van Dooremalen, T. (2021). How happenings do (not) turn into events: A typology and an application to the case of 9/11 in the American and Dutch public spheres. British Journal of Sociology, 72(3), 725–741. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12847
White, A. I. R. (2020). Historical linkages: epidemic threat, economic risk, and xenophobia. The Lancet, 395(10232), 1250–1251. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30737-6
Zempi, I., & Awan, I. (2017). Reply to reviewers for ‘Doing “Dangerous” Autoethnography on Islamophobic Victimization.’ In Ethnography (Vol. 18, Issue 3, pp. 393–395). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138117723651
Ahuja, K. K., & Banerjee, D. (2021). The “Labeled” Side of COVID-19 in India: Psychosocial Perspectives on Islamophobia During the Pandemic. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11(2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.604949
Ali, I., Asif, M., Hamid, I., Sarwar, M. U., Khan, F. A., & Ghadi, Y. (2022). A word embedding technique for sentiment analysis of social media to understand the relationship between Islamophobic incidents and media portrayal of Muslim communities. PeerJ Computer Science, 8, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.7717/PEERJ-CS.838
Arghavan, M. (2020). Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist versus Suicide Terrorist Necropolitics in Homeland and Syriana. European Journal of American Studies, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.16223
Armijos Bravo, G., & Vall Castelló, J. (2021). Terrorist attacks, Islamophobia and newborns’ health. Journal of Health Economics, 79, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102510
Aslan, R. (2005). No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. Random House.
Baker, R. W. (2015). One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds: Spirituality, Identity, and Resistance Across Islamic Lands. Oxford University Press.
Bastug, M. F., & Akca, D. (2019). The Effects of Perceived Islamophobia on Group Identification and Acculturation Attitudes. Canadian Review of Sociology, 56(2), 251–273. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12245
Earle, C. (2015). Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, and the Nation: The “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Problem With Tolerance. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 12(2), 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2015.1008529
Esposito, C. (2010). The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation. Journal of Phonetics, 38(2), 306–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2010.02.002
Esposito, J. L. (2018). Islamophobia and radicalization: Roots, impact and implications. In Islamophobia and Radicalization: Breeding Intolerance and Violence (pp. 15–33). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95237-6_2
Esposito, J. L. (2019). Islamic Movements, Democratization, and U.S. Foreign Policy. In Riding the Tiger (pp. 187–210). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429304835-9
Gottschalk, P., & Greenberg, G. (2008). Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Rowman & Littlefield.
Gottschalk, P., & Greenberg, G. (2013). Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear. In Islamophobia in America (pp. 21–51). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290076_2
Gottschalk, P., & Greenberg, G. (2019). Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment: Picturing the Enemy. Rowman & Littlefield.
Haque, A., Tubbs, C. Y., Kahumoku-Fessler, E. P., & Brown, M. D. (2019). Microaggressions and Islamophobia: Experiences of Muslims Across the United States and Clinical Implications. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 45(1), 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12339
Herlambang, W. (2015). Kekerasan Budaya Pasca 1965: Bagaimana Orde Baru Melegitimasi Anti-Komunisme Melalui Sastra dan Film. Margin Kiri.
Hopkins, N., & Kahani-Hopkins, V. (2006). Minority group members’ theories of intergroup contact: A case study of British Muslims’ conceptualizations of “Islamophobia” and social change. In British Journal of Social Psychology (Vol. 45, Issue 2, pp. 245–264). https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48583
Huang, J., & Liu, R. (2020). Xenophobia in America in the Age of Coronavirus and Beyond. In Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (Vol. 31, Issue 7, pp. 1187–1188). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvir.2020.04.020
Hunt, B., Wilson, C. L., Fauzia, G., & Mazhar, F. (2020). The Muslimah Project: A Collaborative Inquiry into Discrimination and Muslim Women’s Mental Health in a Canadian Context. American Journal of Community Psychology, 66(3–4), 358–369. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12450
Idliby, R. T. (2014). Burqas, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Being Muslim in America. St. Martin’s Publishing.
Kasiyarno, K. (2022). When American Values Unite Jews and Muslim in the United States. IJISH (International Journal of Islamic Studies and Humanities), 5(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.26555/IJISH.V5I2.6721
Kilvington, D., Hylton, K., Long, J., & Bond, A. (2022). Investigating online football forums: a critical examination of participants’ responses to football related racism and Islamophobia. Soccer and Society, 23(8), 849–864. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2022.2109801
Lean, N. C. (2019). The debate over the utility and precision of the term “Islamophobia.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Islamophobia (pp. 11–17). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351135559-2
Leeuwen, T. van. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. Wiley Online Library.
Mamdani, M. (2002). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 766–775. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.766
Mamdani, M. (2005). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Pantheon.
Mapes, N., White, A., Medury, R., & Dua, S. (2019). Divisive Language and Propaganda Detection using Multi-head Attention Transformers with Deep Learning BERT-based Language Models for Binary Classification. ACL Anthology, 103–106. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-5014
McLaughlin, M. M., Ahmad, S. S., & de Mamani, A. W. (2022). A Mixed-Methods Approach to Psychological Help-Seeking in Muslims: Islamophobia, Self-Stigma, and Therapeutic Preferences. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 90(7), 568–581. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000746
Mothes, M. (2022). Writing as Antidote: Muslim Writers Resist in Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic and Banthology. In American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (pp. 247–267). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7_11
Mukhammadsidiqov, M. (2021). Problems of Escalation of Religious Xenophobia in the ERA of Globalization. Central Asian Journal of Literature, Philosophy and Culture, 2(12), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.47494/CAJLPC.V2I12.267
Olonisakin, T. T., & Adebayo, S. O. (2021). Xenophobia: scale development and validation. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 39(3), 484–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2020.1853686
Powers, P. (2015). The Philosophical Foundations of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 1(2), 18–34.
Rana, J., Alsultany, E., Deeb, L., Fadda, C., Khabeer, S. A., Ali, A., Daulatzai, S., Grewal, Z., Hammer, J., & Naber, N. (2020). Pedagogies of Resistance: Why Anti-Muslim Racism Matters. Amerasia Journal, 46(1), 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2020.1761278
Reny, T. T., & Barreto, M. A. (2022). Xenophobia in the time of pandemic: othering, anti-Asian attitudes, and COVID-19. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 10(2), 209–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2020.1769693
Sardar, Z., & Davies, M. W. (2010). Freeze framing muslims: Hollywood and the slideshow of western imagination. Interventions, 12(2), 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2010.489698
Solopova, V., Scheffler, T., & Popa-Wyatt, M. (2021). A Telegram Corpus for Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Online Harm. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 7(0). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.32
Sufi, M. K., & Yasmin, M. (2022). Racialization of public discourse: portrayal of Islam and Muslims. Heliyon, 8(12). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e12211
Swami, V., Barron, D., Weis, L., & Furnham, A. (2018). To Brexit or not to Brexit: The roles of Islamophobia, conspiracist beliefs, and integrated threat in voting intentions for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. British Journal of Psychology, 109(1), 156–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12252
Tahir, H., & Safdar, S. (2022). Cultural similarity predicts social inclusion of Muslims in Canada: A vignette-based experimental survey. Frontiers in Psychology, 13(11), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973603
Tarasheva, E. (2020). Hate Speech or Divisive Language. Yearbook of the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2, 79–94. https://doi.org/10.33919/flcy.19.2.5
Topolski, A. (2018). Good Jew, bad Jew … good Muslim, bad Muslim: “managing” Europe’s others. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(12), 2179–2196. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1391402
van Dooremalen, T. (2021). How happenings do (not) turn into events: A typology and an application to the case of 9/11 in the American and Dutch public spheres. British Journal of Sociology, 72(3), 725–741. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12847
White, A. I. R. (2020). Historical linkages: epidemic threat, economic risk, and xenophobia. The Lancet, 395(10232), 1250–1251. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30737-6
Zempi, I., & Awan, I. (2017). Reply to reviewers for ‘Doing “Dangerous” Autoethnography on Islamophobic Victimization.’ In Ethnography (Vol. 18, Issue 3, pp. 393–395). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138117723651
Published
2024-03-24
How to Cite
Nasrullah, R., Prayogi, A., Lukman, F., & Parmin, P. (2024). The Commercialization of Islamophobia: Capitalizing on Apprehension. Islamic Research, 7(1), 76-84. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.47076/jkpis.v7i1.233
Section
Islamic Education, Culture, and Social Interaction
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