Very often people wonder why my primary research interest over the last two years has focused on Islam, then I decided to post this note on why and how I started a project on this topic

Much of the inspiration for this project arises from my own experience as a member of a minority. Like many students, I became interested during university study in contextualizing my life within the broader social and theoretical paradigms to make better sense of it. In so doing, my personal interest is only incidentally about Islam. This thesis is in fact more an account and exploration of the limits and problems that relate to the formation of all  public opinion in Europe on issues, such as tolerance and respect for cultural differences and how  rejection of these occurs. On the other hand, I am strongly convinced that the European public debate on Islam is an important example, indeed a case study,  that can reveal not only that toleration is always under siege, but also how irrational fears of the Other does continue to dominate the lexicon we call political debate.

I began this research project in New York in  late 2005, when public opinion was already shaped by world-shaking events that directly involved Muslims after the 9/11 tragedy, the attack on Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and the bombings in Madrid and London. In that year, I still remember a shocking interview with the Italian journalist, Oriana Fallacci, in the Wall Street Journal: “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty” (Fallaci, 2005: xx).

That interview was nothing new, as in 2001, during the aftermath of the global anxiety about terrorism, Fallacci attacked Islam from the front page of the most important Italian daily newspaper on the basis of an easy equation and a dangerous one: All Arabs are Muslim, all Muslims are Islamists, all Islamists are terrorists; thus the Arab-Muslim civilization, which is embedded in religious fanaticism is the major enemy of Western civilization whose superiority does not need to be proven any longer. It was a deliberate case of anti-Islamic upsurge, based on the same processes of stigmatization and dehumanization that characterized many ideologies of last century.

However, what was worse in terms of this re-emergence of intolerant execration was how the media quickly echoed the many public calls for discrimination against all Muslims in many Western countries. In this context of growing media concern, some opinion- makers have presented Europe as a socially weak society and predicted that Europe was condemned to become an Islamic colony called “Eurabia.” According to Carr (2006: 4), the worst case of “Islamicization” prophecy describes the Europe of the future as a place where “Christians and Jews will become the oppressed minorities in a sea of Islam.” Thus, what began as a bizarre conspiracy theory soaked by dangerous political fantasies has become an intellectual respectability through media visibility of narratives elaborated on by elite intellectuals and well-known newspaper columnists (among many, see Ye’or, 2001; Lewis, 1995, 2003; Fallacci, 2006).

Today, almost ten years after Fallacci’s pamphlet, the situation is no better. Fear of Muslims and resentment toward them has upturned to an extremely alarming level. What was only the aggressive prejudice of a journalist and certain small circles of journalists, scholars, and religious leaders has now become the widespread opinion of many Europeans. Today, Europe faces a new threshold in its radicalization against Islam, which has become a more generally violent aversion to the diversity that does lie within this very visible group of immigrants. Where fear arises, discrimination and self-preservation soon follow, ironically in this case, for both groups, thereby feeding more discord and lack of understanding or the desire to try and understand.  In other words, it is the fear of the minority that causes a lot of this change and the fear of losing one’s own identity or even being harmed by the radical minority that has raised some concern and the political change in large part.

Certainly, Europe is not facing any apparent or immediate Muslim conquest, but paradoxically “Fallaci & Friends” are right in saying that Europe is changing. The post-war goal of a European political and social community based on tolerance and multicultural policies is dissolving as quickly as the sun melts ice on a warm winter day. The new context is dominated by frequent political appeals from public authorities to return to the traditional moral values of a long  idolized Christian and Western culture or to renounce the road to  multiculturalism in favour of nourishing fear and suspicion of a target population.

Thus, the problem is not only populist movements or violent groups, but rather certain mainstream political leaders, which in most European countries, are backed by “common-sense” language and advocate at least some of the  ideas opposing more immigration and Islam. The freedom to blame immigrants for their social exclusion or the support of repression and forced assimilation is their right in a democratic society of course, but what is wrong is that most of these political currents base their power and influence on mistrust of the rather mysterious Other that is a categorized “group”. These feelings bring these politicians a reward in votes – but those votes can be transformed into real hatred and actual violence.

For all these reasons, in the last few years, I have collected European political speeches to study and try to comprehend how Muslim immigration is debated and opposed throughout the public sphere and  understand the role of  the European media in echoing so simultaneously the many public calls against Islam that too often go beyond simple  national and linguistic differences.