International Executive Committee of the League for the Fifth International, 6. July 2024
The rise of anti-Muslim racism
There are today around 53 million Muslim believers in Europe, with around one third of those in Russia, and six million in the European parts of Turkey. In the EU, there are around 16-20 million, about 3.5 to 4 per cent of the population, albeit with significant differences between the countries. Almost half live in France and Germany with four to five million each, while the Baltic and Eastern European states count only a few hundred or thousand at most. In the UK there are 3.9 million (6.5 per cent). In the United States, the population is estimated to number 3.5 to 4 million (1.1 per cent).
Despite these huge differences and the very different origin of the Muslim populations in these countries, the last decades have seen a significant change in the form of racism experienced by Muslims, which gives anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia a specific character. Since the turn of the millennium, anti-Muslim racism has become a dominant form of racism in most imperialist countries, in particular the United States and Europe, where we see the rise of right-wing forces warning of the danger of ‘Islamisation’ of the West, along with an increase in violence and attempts to curtail religious freedoms. The rise of anti-Muslim racism is not simply a backlash to the increase in Islamist terrorism post-9/11 but is part of an ideological justification for the policing of the Muslim population and the West’s destabilisation of the Middle East from 2001.
Ideological development
In medieval and early modern Europe there was discrimination and wars against Muslims and different Islamic Empires. This varied in different times and places but included the crusades, the expulsion of the Muslims from southern Spain and the sacking of Grenada. Numerous references to racist slurs survive in the literature of the time, e.g. Shakespeare. This form of racist prejudice had much in common with the contemporaneous antisemitism and was based on defence of Christendom and Christian ideology.
In Russia, the expansion of the Tsarist empire made different Muslim peoples subject to colonisation and Russification. In the Balkans, a part of the population was Muslim for centuries and its fate became tied to the national struggles and wars between the empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In France and Britain the Muslim populations are the result of the colonisation of parts of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, though large scale immigration came during the period of decolonisation. In the United States, the Black Muslim population has been subject to racism and chauvinism for decades from its emergence in the 1960s.
Whilst a large component of the periods of immigration to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s were Muslims, the racist oppression and stigmatisation they faced was quite distinct in different countries. In Germany, the racism faced by Turkish (or Kurdish) labour immigrants was directed against their nationality rather than their beliefs. In Britain anyone of South Asian origin, including Sikhs and Hindus, was stigmatized by racists as ‚p***‘, sharing colour-oppression with black African and Caribbean immigrants. Of course, even during this time, we could observe an imperialist and racist (‘orientalist’) ideology, justifying the imperialist dominance of the Arab and ‘Muslim’ world by the ‘West’.
However, after the Cold war, the global situation changed. The US set out to ‘reorder’ the world and make its hegemony permanent. This was given ideological expression in a series of racist ‘popular’ books like Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations and in publications trying to outline US (and Western) imperial strategy, like Brzeziński’s No Rivals.
These put forward strategies for the US to prevent the other allied or hostile powers (EU, Russia, China, India) developing into global imperialist rivals able to challenge US world hegemony. Unlike the allied rival European powers, the others are presented not only as economic and military rivals, but also as culturally distinct states. However, there is a further ‘clash of civilisations’, or ‘potential rival’ which both refer to—Islam.
Islam is neither an economic entity, nor a nation or a federation of nations. It is not a rival for global power. But it serves well as a global enemy, which is both internal and external. Whilst in the 1990s and beyond Huntington’s overt racist fabrication—expressed as the ‘clash of civilisations”—was always an ideology of an extreme imperialist wing, and an inspiration for the far right, and while Brzeziński and his school of thought was one imperialist ideologue challenged by others, the turn of the century brought a decisive turn in imperialist policy.
The 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for declaring the ‘war on terror’—a war directed against a ‘new’ kind of enemy, one justifying a policy of permanent interventions in order to reorder the Middle East (and the wider world). Naturally, this also included an ‘enemy within’. Anti-Muslim racism become a racist ideology, which served to justify both imperialist interventions against ‘Muslim terrorists’ (as in Afghanistan) as well as more surveillance and racist stigmatisation of the Muslim population in the imperialist countries.
Components of racism
This required the construction of Islam and ‘Islamism’ as a uniform entity: a homogenous, dangerous, barbaric (uncivilised) enemy, a backward quasi-‘race’ and culture, which could not be integrated into modern, democratic (Western) society. In this construction, Islam is not only distinct from Western civilisation and other religions (in particular Christianity), but the religion and the culture based on it is also unchangeable and incompatible with a supposed ‘democratic culture’. Internal differences within Islam, e.g. Shia and Sunni, or the necessary distinction between Islam and Islamism (i.e. political Islam), as well as its different forms are all secondary. Indeed, for anti-Muslim racism, all talk of different forms of ‘Islamism’ is seen as an attempt to distract people from recognising Islamism’s ‘essential’ evil.
Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia naturalise ‘the Muslim’ into an unchangeable thing. As with all idealist constructions, this is necessary in order to characterise people of different nationalities and even beliefs (indeed also non-believers) as ‘Muslim’. In the course of this process, anti-Muslim racism is not only directed against religious sympolities and practices, but at the same time racializes people on the basis of their skin colour or origin and assigns them to the racialised category ‘Islam/Muslim’. The result is that anti-Muslim racism can be directed not only against Muslims, but also against those who appear to ‘look Muslim’, as evidenced by the attacks on Sikh men after 9/11, or against those who come from a nation with a majority Muslim population but do not practice it. It is therefore completely wrong to mistake anti-Muslim racism for mere over-zealous ‘anti-religious’ or ‘anti-clerical’ sentiment.
Another component of this specific form of anti-Muslim racism (hereafter ‘Islamophobia’) is the women’s question. Despite the fact that the European and American conservative parties and their ideologues were the fiercest critics of feminism and women’s rights in the 1960s and 1970s, they nevertheless extracted from it tools for use against the Muslim immigrant communities, which are stigmatised as ‘more backwards’ towards women, with specific features singled out and elevated to a different status. For example, policing women’s dress, so-called ‘honour killings’ etc, when the policing of women’s dress and femicide is equally prevalent in western societies, even if it takes a different form. The elements of an oppressive patriarchy in Islam (many of which it shared with traditional Christianity and Judaism) but which the bourgeois revolution, secularism and bourgeois women’s movement had relegated to private life or personal beliefs, were pressed into service with the aim of ‘otherising’ Muslim communities and estranging them from progressive movements, especially the left.
The purpose of anti-Muslim racism
Anti-Muslim racism has become a key ideology of the western imperialist powers. It has integrated and sharpened other factors, which gave birth to it.
Firstly, the racist and nationalist immigration policies and divisions of the labour markets. The US and former colonial powers have long-established racially segmented labour markets and a policy towards racially oppressed which is designed to reinforce their oppression. A similar pattern applies to those imperialist states who have seen a massive increase of labour immigration in the decades since WW2. The expansion of German capital (and others) would have been impossible without millions of immigrant workers from Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and, in particular, from Turkey. The state policy was openly directed towards non-integration of those workers who were only to work as ‘guest workers’. Even though many of them eventually integrated into the working class, they are still subject to forms of segregation. The same applies to millions of refugees in more recent decades.
Secondly, racism and chauvinism are used to divide the working class politically by binding the labour aristocracy, and through them wider sections of the working class and lumpenproletariat, to support for imperialism’s wars of conquest abroad and repression at home. The social democratic and Labour parties and the trade union bureaucracy are indispensable in corralling this support for imperialism. This also applies to mass reformist parties of Stalinist origin. Other, campist, ‘left’ forces are inconsistent, opposing the ‘war on terror’ for example, but turning a blind eye to the brutal repression in Chechnya and of the Uighurs.
Anti-Muslim racism combines discrimination against immigrant workers with their racist branding as ‘Muslims’ and therefore a danger. This racist propaganda which has been spread both by mainstream conservative, liberal or even right-wing reformist bourgeois parties and politicians, has been widely taken up by growing right-wing, populist, far right or and fascist parties. According to various surveys, a growing part (and in many counties a clear majority) of the population of the EU agrees with the opinion that ‘Muslims cannot be integrated into European societies’.
The far right and fascists take up the labelling of the ‘alien’ character of Muslim culture and link it to racist conspiracy theories like the so-called ‘Great Replacement Theory’, orchestrated by liberalism and the cosmopolitan intelligentsia in order to marginalise and eventually replace the white population with Muslim immigrants. This reactionary ideology is now a textbook of the far right in Europe and the US (and in a certain way also in Russia). It takes up the mainstream imperialist ideology and radicalises it to the extreme, justifying a policy of sealing off a whole number of countries to (Muslim) migration (Hungary, Poland, Romania, Baltic states), calling for the sealing off of the European borders and, in extreme cases, for the ‘re-migration’, i.e. expulsion of millions. This constitutes the overt, far right, racist form of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, which is growing and expressed in an overt völkisch and racist form.
That most of the European governments (and the EU as well as the Biden administration) present on the other hand a supposedly liberal, ‘reformist’ brand of Islamophobia, corresponding to the needs of capital for selective migration, must not blind anybody to the fact that all forms of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism are racist ideologies, serving to oppress immigrant and refugee workers, as well as ideological cloak for ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the semi-colonies or support for the Zionist state.
The situation of Muslims in Europe
Most of the Muslims in the EU are part of the working class, and, in their majority, constitute a section with lower income, and higher rates of insecure and precarious jobs. The employment rate of migrants of Turkish origin in Germany, from North Africa in France or from Pakistan or Bangladesh in Britain—the three countries with the highest numbers of immigrant labour—is 15–40 per cent below the national average. In all countries, migrants and Muslims (insofar as separate data exist) have a significantly higher rate of unemployment than the working class average.
In the labour market, Muslims face systematic forms of discrimination both as migrants and as Muslims. In a number of European states legislation exists against discrimination at work. Agreements e.g. to ensure Halal food at work are usually found in large scale enterprises or in the public sector. These are generally the result of legislation and of agreements between trade unions or workplace representatives and employers. They generally do not exist in smaller capitalist companies or in petty bourgeois enterprises.
Despite some limits on open discrimination, most immigrant workers report discrimination at work. Most of them face open or hidden discrimination when job-seeking and in education. This leads to Muslims (and the racially oppressed and immigrants generally) being overrepresented amongst the worst paid part of the working class and of the sub-proletariat. This division of labour is constantly reproduced and reinforced.
In several countries, a large immigrant (and Muslim) petty bourgeoisie has emerged, concentrated in trade and small shops. Likewise, although layers of the intelligentsia, of public sector workers, of a labour aristocracy and even capitalists, developed as part of the cross-class Muslim community, these layers are smaller compared to the average of society.
During the last years, the political and ideological influence of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois layers and the intelligentsia over the Muslim (and migrant) population has increased. This is the result of (a) a systematic oppression, stigmatisation and ghettoization; (b) a crisis of leadership within immigrant sectors where the petty bourgeois left and Stalinist forces have become much weaker in the last decades; (c) the chauvinism of the reformist and bureaucratically dominated labour movements; (d) the increase of anti-Muslim racism within society, including the working class after a period of relative decline. This is expressed in the growth of the far right and the shift to the right in the bourgeois parties, including most of the bourgeois workers’ parties.
In response, the more traditionalist or even reactionary petty bourgeois or bourgeois forces within the migrant and Muslim communities have been able to grow and strengthen their influence. While this influence is real, it is far from stable, and must not be overstated.
In all countries there remain leftwing, radical petty bourgeois, or organised working class forces leading and influencing sectors of the Muslim and immigrant population. Indeed, important sectors of immigrant workers and youth have become more politically active; they are less attracted to, even critical of, the ‘older’ migrant organisations and parties in their communities. In addition, there is a substantial section which is politically fluid, but nevertheless seeking radical answers to the racism and exploitation they suffer at the hands of imperialism.
The Middle East and the North African countries, where most Muslim migrants come from, are ridden with crisis, wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions, imperialist interventions, and Zionist oppression. These communities are directly affected by the effects of these developments—whether as refugees driven from their homes or as immigrants who lose their friends and relatives.
Given that the European imperialist governments, their allies and institutions, are part of their problems and often directly or indirectly responsible, Muslim people are also ‘identified’ as a potential or actually protesting or resisting part of the population in Europe. Therefore, they and many other immigrants are subject to special state surveillance. Many of their organisations have been banned or are under constant surveillance. They are subject to ever more racist laws, restrictions of residence, of special laws, if they want to acquire citizenship.
This alienation has led to a tiny number of occasional acts of individual terrorism. Typically, these acts of violence are aimed at cultural, rather than political targets and the perpetrators have slender if any links with Islamist organisations. They represent acts of desperation, caused by imperialism’s vastly more deadly acts of terrorism in the Middle East and racist oppression in the West.
The reactionary nature of these acts is borne out by the reactionary consequences of them: rise in racism; further restrictions on democratic rights; and more ‘anti-terror’ laws, which are subsequently employed against the labour, ecology and pro-Palestine movements. We stand against all these restrictions and proscriptions of political and cultural organisations. While we do not support individual terrorism, neither do we support the (capitalist) state’s moral or political right to prosecute. J’accuse—you are the real terrorists.
Religion and the left
In Europe, anti-Muslim racism has developed a supposedly ‘democratic’ or secular form. It is now commonplace for liberals, reformists, greens and even ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ forces to advocate bans on (Muslim) religious dress in public or the workplace, couching this straightforward attack on freedom of religion as a ‘defence’ of the separation of church and state.
The labour movement must reject all such demands and defend the right of Muslim women to choose their dress. In this way, the workers’ movement can demonstrate to the migrants and religious minorities that it is the only genuine and consistent defender of (bourgeois) democratic rights. Socialists’ defence of the right to free observation of religion goes hand in hand with the struggle against the enforced observation of religious morality codes/dress, etc. imposed on women and youth. Our principle is the individual freedom to observe or not observe, free from control by the state or the family.
The bourgeois-democratic right to freedom of religion consists of two parts: (a) the separation of church and state, and (b) the right to religious observation (i.e. to establish religious buildings, religious preaching, instruction, dress and so on) and the right to irreligion. Freedom of religion is a task of the bourgeois democratic revolution. In most European countries this has been achieved constitutionally in full; in some (e.g. the UK) only in part. In many of the countries from which Muslim-heritage people, or recent immigrants originate, freedom of religion is either non-existent or, where it is a formal constitutional right, is nevertheless heavily circumscribed by the prevailing ideological hegemony of religious leaders.
Freedom of religion, like other rights, exists to protect minority groups from attacks by the majority. Because it protects the freedom to believe and not to believe, it is not a ‘privilege’ for believers, but a collective protection. Likewise with other rights that flow from this protection, e.g. the right to have special dietary provision in schools or workplaces. To attack these rights in the name of ‘separation of public and private’ is to confuse the state with the ‘public sphere’. To ban religious dress or forbid religious observation (prayer rooms, diets, etc.) would have the effect of (a) imposing by force the dominant ‘culture’ (whether that is secular or otherwise) and (b) actually to reinforce the grip of religious community leaders over the most oppressed sectors by forcing women out of public spaces, children out of mainstream education and so on.
The construction of anti-Muslim racism as a specific ideology of imperialism (adapted and repurposed elsewhere e.g. by Hindu chauvinists), goes hand in hand with outlawing visible displays of religious observance in public space. It was the creation of the ‘Muslim’ as an ‘enemy within’ which culturally stands outside the boundaries and norms of western ‘civilisation’ that permitted the ruling class to start depriving Muslim believers of their religious-democratic rights, and to submit Muslim-categorised people in generally to disproportionate and racially profiled surveillance and repression.
The attacks by bourgeois democratic regimes on religious dress in public, far from constituting a ‘defence’ of secularism, are actually an attack on freedom of religion. These attacks on ‘freedom of conscience’, one of the fundamental ideological-democratic pillars of the bourgeois revolution, expose the reactionary and degenerating character of bourgeois democracy.
The conclusion of this long term erosion of democratic rights in the name of ‘special measures’ to target an ‘especially dangerous’ enemy can be seen in the UK, where the ‘Prevent’ programme has been extended to cover all forms of domestic ‘extremism’ including the left and pro-Palestine movement.
Therefore, revolutionaries always and everywhere defend the fullest and widest expression of the right to freedom of religion, including where possible, by encoding these rights in the constitution.
Exploitation and social oppression within racialised communities
The need to struggle against anti-Muslim racism should not blind us to the economic exploitation and social oppression within racialised communities. The development of class stratification within the oppressed communities necessarily goes hand in hand with the exploitation of labour. This reinforces the social oppression of women, LGBT+ people, and youth within the community; competition for jobs, public services, housing etc, sharpens religious and racial antagonism vis a vis other immigrant/religious communities.
Where social democracy supports wars against Muslim countries or movements, or introduces reactionary laws, there can develop attempts to form populist parties, based on concessions to these dominant strata within the immigrant communities, for example: tight restrictions on abortion; special, religious schools or restrictions on the teaching of LGBT+ questions, or even support for Muslim bosses against Muslim workers’ strikes. This was the case with Respect in the UK and may again arise in relation to the Gaza movement there. Where centrist forces are involved, we criticise their abandonment of the principle of class political independence.
The racist segregation and the marginalisation of immigrant communities enforce those. The dominant strata within the racially oppressed—in the case of Muslim communities both the economic, social and religious dominant forces—demagogically present any attacks on their privileges and exploitation as an attack by the dominant bourgeois culture.
The workers’ movement must reject this and working class, revolutionary and progressive forces within the immigrant community must organise to expose this fraud and the reactionary role of this strata. Whilst these conflicts may often take also religious expression, they are, in the final analysis, forms of class exploitation and social oppression.
Against sexism, homophobia, transphobia, women’s and youth oppression we fight against all reactionary and oppressive forms—be it dress codes, forced marriages, physical and sexual violence. We equally oppose the right-wing rhetoric of the war against the ‘clans’ as what it is: racist propaganda used to criminalize migrant communities. Thus, we defend the right to wear hijabs, niqabs and burqas and oppose all laws against them, while at the same time we fight for the right for women to freely choose what to wear. We also defend the right to practice religion, for example in schools, while at the same time fighting against mandatory religion lessons or any other rules imposed like shariah laws.
Our principal method of mobilising women and youth to fight against social oppression is as part of a working class women’s movement and a revolutionary youth organisation. Just as in the labour movement and all other oppressed movements, we defend the right of the oppressed to organise caucuses, to receive training in self-defence and to create labour movement supported self-defence organisations of the women, LGBT+ persons and youth against violence.
Against the threat of violence, extortion and exploitation by ‘criminal’ networks in working class communities, we fight for labour movement and working class self-defence organisations.
Against the ‘illegality’ and driving underground of migrant labour, smuggling, sex work, etc., we fight for papers and equal rights to work for all.
But the most important aspect to address the marginalisation of Muslim workers, is to combine the struggle against racism with a struggle against all forms of social oppression (within and from the outside) and to raise the struggle for the immigrant workers for their own class interests.
This is the best way both to drive a wedge between the petty bourgeois and bourgeois leaders of the ‘community’, be they religious or not, and the working class. This includes the unionisation of all these workers and struggle for wages and conditions covered by general agreement. Given the passivity of the trade union bureaucracy and reformist leaders and, in many cases, the social-chauvinism of the ‘native’ working class and the labour aristocracy in particular, a systematic campaign is required to win Muslim and other migrant workers and refugees into the trade unions en masse, including a conscious policy to make the labour movement socially and culturally inviting and the right to caucus for the racially and socially oppressed.
The struggle against oppression and exploitation within the ‘community’ is a necessary part to win the working class and the progressive sections of the Muslim and immigrant intelligentsia to the struggle against racist and all forms of oppression and exploitation.