Abstract
This chapter examines the trope of the ‘cryptic’ and the form of the cryptographic as key elements in contemporary social discourse about Muslims in ‘western’ societies. These tropes gather together liberal social anxieties about Muslims and the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism amongst the general Muslim populations residing within western, multicultural states. The ‘cryptic’ is looked at in a historical frame tracing a genealogy from US anticommunism to European antisemitism.
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Notes
- 1.
Corroborated by the ruling of the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) on 26 March 2016. See BBC Online. 2016. ‘The Sun’s UK Muslim “jihadi sympathy” article “misleading”, Ipso rules’. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35903066. Accessed 1 February 2017.
- 2.
The well-documented discrimination experienced by Muslims while flying is one such instance where such free-floating signifiers are signs taken for danger (Khaleeli 2016). Other instances include a Muslim child, aged 7, reported by his school to police under the Prevent obligation for bringing a piece of brass (believed to be bullet) into school (Pidd 2016); another, aged 8, for wearing a t-shirt on which was inscribed the name ‘Abu-Bakr al-Siddique’ (one of the four ‘rightly guided’ Caliphs revered by Sunni Muslims) because it was believed to be a reference to the Islamic State leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi; a child, aged 4, reported by his teacher because he drew a picture of a person holding a cucumber that his teacher misheard as “cooker bomb”; and a teenager questioned by police for borrowing a book on terrorism from his local public library: these and several other instances have been highlighted in a report on Prevent’s consequences by the Rights Watch UK organization (Bowcott and Adams 2016).
- 3.
There is a difference between the idea that a government has been infiltrated at the highest level—Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, for instance, was seen to be a crypto-communist by some in the anticommunist movement—and the idea commonly put forward in relation to Muslims that western governments have, as a result of multiculturalism, relativism, political correctness and such like, become docile and supine in the face of Muslim interests.
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Mondal, A.A. (2018). The Trace of the Cryptic in Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and Anticommunism: A Genealogy of the Rhetoric on Hidden Enemies and Unseen Threats. In: Yaqin, A., Morey, P., Soliman, A. (eds) Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71309-0_2
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