ABSTRACT
It has been argued that there are at least two sources of hostile attitudes toward Muslims in Europe. The first is located squarely in contemporary agendas of terrorism and counter-terrorism (and associated anxieties that may fuel a securitisation of ethnic relations more broadly). The second, it is stated, has been inherited from an ideological-historical relationship with the Orient, one that is intertwined with legacies of imperialism. Neither dynamic is discrete and both can be seen to overlap in the public discourses of a variety of European nation-states. In this chapter we argue that the implications of sources of hostility are best understood through registers of race and racialisation, an argument the authors have previously pioneered within the Islamophobia studies field. With a case study focusing on the discursive mobilisation of Islamophobia, we show how and in what ways registers of race and racialisation are best suited to understanding Islamophobia as a contemporary social and political development.
