Publication Date
2020
Publication Title
Public Law & Legal Theory
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the role of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse in North American and European ‘illiberal’ parties, movements, and ideologies. Its first aim is to situate those deployments in a longer history. Occidental engagements with Islam and Muslims, including anti-Islamic tropes, long predate the emergence of liberalism, let along illiberalism. It should not be a surprise that liberalism as it emerged in the nineteenth century partook of such ideas. Contra some theorists, however, I argue that there is no strong evidence that anti-Islam was constitutive of liberal theory or early practice. Rather, it was in the second half of the twentieth century, as mass migration from Africa and Asia to Europe and North America came to be viewed through a fraught geopolitical lens, that various conflicts emerged over ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration.’ These precipitated today’s perceived (if not actual) juxtapositions between Islam and liberalism. It is out of these disjunctions that the current anti-Islamic discourse of illiberal political formations emerges. Such illiberal deployment of Islam hence reflect an extension and modification of liberal political discourse. Ironically, at the extreme, they are transformed into justifications of mass murder and violent ethnic cleansing. The history of antiIslamic conceptions in illiberalism hence illuminates the unintended and paradoxical trajectory of political ideas.
Number
751
Recommended Citation
Aziz Z. Huq, "Illiberalism and Islam", Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, No.751 (2020).
