ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a broader context of anti-Muslim racism in Sweden, Europe and the West in the last few decades. Relevant anti-Muslim discourses and imaginaries are mapped and identified with the help of recurrent tropes and motifs in the cases reported to the police and gathered in Brå’s statistics of Islamophobic hate crimes. The concept of scales and rescaling is used to show how we need to understand European and national scales to be able to attend to the meanings, workings and effects of these concrete acts of violence. The chapter discusses the Mohammed cartoons controversies, veil affairs and the ‘war on terror’ as significant for articulations of anti-Muslim racism. It also shows how the issues of migration and integration become central to how Muslims are defined in some nationalistic projects and in the emergence of a specific European project—the European Union. One of the points made is that acts of anti-Muslim racism interpellate some bodies and some subjects in particular ways. Apart from introducing these contexts, the chapter also aims at presenting the kind of reading of the material that will be developed in this book.
