Islamophobia at the Local Level: The Case of Dudley Mosque

Abstract

Tracing the representations of Muslims during the planning stages of a proposed mosque in the West Midlands town of Dudley, this chapter demonstrates how dominant national discourses of community cohesion and counterterrorism were rearticulated in a local context to represent Muslims as both a violent threat and a threat to local and national identities. The chapter shows how Islamophobia works to exclude Muslims from local spaces while simultaneously reprimanding them for failing to integrate, and argues that these representations are key to understanding how Islamophobia operates as a cultural racism. By focusing on Islam as determining of all Muslim behaviour, local Islamophobic opposition coalesced around the potential violence and disorder that a new mosque could bring to the town and ultimately thwarted Muslim action.