ABSTRACT
During the 2000s, the intellectual ¿eld played a determinant role in the development of Islamophobia in Italy1. Beyond the public declarations of numerous right-wing political leaders opposed to multiculturalism regularly proclaiming the moral inferiority of Islam, and a level of popular and institutional hostility towards Muslims that constitutes a record for Western Europe (EUAFR 2009), we ¿nd in Italy the mobilization of cultural producers behind an intellectual Islamophobia. Highly publicized journalists/writers – such as Oriana Fallaci and Magdi Allam – as well as the intellectuals of Berlusconi’s party, numerous prelates and academics close to the Catholic Church, and several of their secular conservative colleagues, have contributed to legitimate and reinforce an anti-Islamic Zeitgeist that has developed and reinvented the assortment of stereotypes (Bourdieu 1991, Bourdieu and Boltanski 1976: 61) about the ‘migration question’ and generated a speci¿c xenophobia against Muslims.
