Twenty years after publishing their report, Islamophobia – A Challenge for Us All, which helped popularise the term ‘Islamophobia’, the Runnymede Trust has published a follow-up report to mark its anniversary entitled Islamophobia – Still a challenge for us all.
The defining feature of this report is its assertion that Islamophobia should be thought of as anti-Muslim racism.
This understanding of Islamophobia thus takes into account its nature as a phenomenon embedded structurally within institutions on both a local and national level (in line with the UN’s definition of racism), instead of seeing it simply as an attitude, as the original report did. The motivation for this redefinition is the recent rapid increase in Islamophobia; a 2016 Pew Research Center report stated that 28% of those in the UK view Muslims unfavourably.
.... It has been argued that the report’s updated definition of racism accounts for criticism of the old definition, which presented a ‘monolithic’ concept of Islam and Muslims, and which incorrectly understood the nature of the phenomenon of Islamophobia. However, it is also argued that the 2017 report essentialises Muslim identity by failing to deconstruct and question the categories of religion and race, and still fails to grasp fully the way in which Islamophobia permeates society. [Euro-Islam.info] Read more
