In this insightful narrative, leading scholar of Islamophobia, Deepa Kumar, retells the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar argues that Islamophobia should be understood primarily as racism rather than religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia makes the case that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn reinforces empire.
This book, now updated to include the end of Trump's presidency, offers a clear and concise explanation of how Islamophobia operates in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a set of ideas taking various forms: liberal, conservative, and far-right. The landscape of anti-Muslim racism maps how various institutions - media, think tanks, foreign policy, academia, national security, and the legal arena - produce and circulate this particular form of malice. Anti-Muslim racism has dire consequences not only for people in Muslim-majority countries, who become targets of an endless War on Terror, but also for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West.
