ABSTRACT
A highly moralized rhetoric of good and evil has become increasingly strident in Western political discourse in the last decade or so, not just as a result of the ‘war on terror’ but also in the wake of the resurgence of social and political conservatisms and their critique of the moral relativism of liberalism and multiculturalism. It has asserted a hardening of boundaries between good and bad, between law-abiding citizens and wrongdoers, endemic to a global culture of fear. The emergence of what is often referred to as ‘Islamophobia’ has become inextricably bound to this rhetoric. Islamophobia, as the intensi¿cation of long-standing anti-Muslim prejudice amounting to a widespread hostility in the west, is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. As the Runnymede Trust (1997) report in the UK indicated, it comprises quite diverse elements: ‘closed’ perceptions of Islam as monolithic, static, radically different, inferior, aggressive, manipulative, anti-Western, and so on. Yet this signi¿cant report says little about the decidedly moral dimensions of this hostility. Similarly, even though, as Gottschalk and Greenberg (2008: 1067) suggest, ‘morality’ is central to the dominant Western depiction of Islam and Muslims today – in particular the dual focus on Islam as morally militant and Muslims as sexually insatiable – there has been surprisingly little discussion of this aspect. Indeed, Said (1978: 166) showed many years ago that the assumption of the ‘seemingly perverse morality’ of ‘Oriental life’ was fundamental to Western colonial discourses.
