Overview

European Governments have developed, for the last two decades, a series of legal and policy interventions that locate Muslims as “problematic” and “dangerous” subjects to democracy. From the Netherlands comprehensive action programme to combat jihadism, to the British Prevent Strategy against extremism or the most recent French bill Supporting respect for the principles of the Republic, all these interventions revolve around a common theme: Islam as “a scandal” in the Western project - in S. Sayyid’s words. In this conversation with Houria Bouteldja and S. Sayyid, we will debate some of the current and historical contours of Islamophobia, understood as a politics to make Muslim political subjectivity illegitimate or, as Houria Bouteldja has pointed out, to turn them into “beggars” in a democracy that rests on oppression and barbarism.

Bio notes

Houria Bouteldja
Houria Bouteldja is a decolonial thinker and militant living in France. She was one of the founding members of the Parti des Indigènes de la république (Party of the Indigenous of the Republic) in 2005. She has published several theoretical and strategic texts on issues such as decolonial feminism, racism, political autonomy and alliances, Zionism and State philosemitism in France. She is the co-author, with Sadri Khiari of Nous sommes les indigènes de la république (Éditions Amsterdam, 2012) and author of Whites, Jews, and Us. Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love (MIT Press, 2017).

S. Sayyid
S. Sayyid is Professor of Social Theory and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds. Sayyid develops his work in the areas of Critical Muslim Studies; the analysis of Islamophobia and racism; historical and relational macro-sociology. He is the editor of the academic journal: ReOrient and author of A fundamental fear (Zed Books, 1997, 2003, 2014); Recalling the Caliphate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), co-editor with Abdoolkarim Vakil of Thinking Through Islamophobia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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