Description
Despite the prevalence of anti-Muslim discrimination in parts of Africa, the two predominant conceptualisations of Islamophobia are problematically Eurocentric and, as a consequence, tend to pay little attention to manifestations of the phenomenon in the African continent. On the one hand, the cultural racism model which defines Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism focuses on the racial experiences of non-white immigrant Muslims―especially immigrant Muslims of South Asian and Arab ancestry and physical appearance―in Europe and North America. On the other hand, globalist models tend to theorise Islamophobia as a form of racism manufactured in the West by way of European colonial capitalism and orientalism and exported willy-nilly to all parts of the non-Western world after the gruesome 9/11 terrorist attacks on American territory and the Global War on Terror. In both accounts, Euro-American histories of imperialism are routinely posited as the starting point for the analysis of Islamophobia across all continents including Africa. That various manifestations of Islamophobia have their unique histories, sources, and contours that cannot―and should not―be reduced to the history of Europeans in Africa is generally circumvented in favour of grand narratives that prioritise Eurocentric epistemologies. In this article, I problematise these hegemonic interpretations of Islamophobia from an African perspective. Drawing on collective memory literature and focusing on ethnic conflicts in Nigeria―the African state with the largest Muslim population―I retheorise and reformulate Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism embedded in varied and various collective memories of groups’ power contestations that inexorably differ from one local context to another.
