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The New Nationalism and its Relationship to Islam

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Diversity and Contestations over Nationalism in Europe and Canada

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ((PSEPS))

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the “new nationalism” in Norway contributes to set or alter national and nationalist boundaries through actively “othering” Muslims, who have come to feature as threats to a whole range of issues including the sustainability of the Norwegian welfare state, gender equality, LGBT rights, liberalism and secularism and freedom of expression. The chapter draws on Ruth Wodak’s notion of “politics of fear” and seeks to show how this manifests itself in the discourse of the Norwegian Progress Party, a junior government partner since October 2013. This type of rhetoric on Islam and Muslims is not distinctive to Norway but figures centrally in the manner in which, for instance, the Danish People’s Party also pursues a politics of exclusion through fearmongering.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By Islamophobia, I mean to refer to what Mattias Gardell has defined as “socially reproduced practices and aversions against Islam and Muslims which attack, exclude and discriminate against Muslims upon the basis that they are, or are assumed by others to be, Muslims, and associated with Islam” (Gardell 2011: 17, my translation). The first recorded academic usage of the term has been traced back to two French West Africanists, Maurice Delafosse and Alain Quillien, in 1910. The first academic usage in English is found in Edward Said’s article “Orientalism Reconsidered”, first published in 1985. The term was popularised and entered into common usage through the UK Runnymede Trust Report on Islamophobia: “A Challenge for us All” in 1997 (López 2011).

  2. 2.

    The, to date, most extensive study of this is Fangen and Vaage (2014). See, also, Bangstad (2016a) for an updated study of Progress Party anti-Muslim rhetoric since 2011.

  3. 3.

    A survey from 2005/06 found that Norwegian-Somalis reported more discrimination with regard to employment and housing than any other group of non-Western immigrants to Norway (Tronstad 2008). A survey from 2012 demonstrated that applicants with Norwegian-Pakistani sounding surnames were 25 per cent less likely to get called in for employment interviews by Norwegian employers when their qualifications and employment were the same as that of “ethnic” Norwegian applicants (Midtbøen and Rogstad 2012). A report from the Oslo Police on hate crimes reported to the police in the Oslo Police District, which has Norway’s only Hate Crimes Unit to date, found that, out of 40 reported hate crimes in 2015 where a victim’s real or ascribed “religion” was the reported bias motive, 35 of the hate crimes involved Muslims as victims (Oslopolitiet 2016).

  4. 4.

    The Rushdie affair refers to the global crisis unleashed by the publication of the Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988. Islamists in Britain and elsewhere rushed to declare the novel “blasphemous” and to demand its banning in numerous countries. In February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamist regime in Iran, issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and called for his assassination. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for many years; the novel’s Japanese and Italian translators were assassinated; and Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, the first in the world to bring out a translation of the novel and central to the international campaign in support of Rushdie , narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 1994. A good early overview of the Rushdie affair is provided by Ruthven (1990), whereas Rushdie’s own account is provided in Rushdie (2012).

  5. 5.

    A survey commissioned by researchers at the University of Oslo under the CoMRel Research Group funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NRC)’s SAMKUL Programme and conducted by TNS Gallup in 2015 found close to 50 per cent of respondents agreeing that Islam “in part” or “fully” represents a threat to Norwegian culture. Professor Knut Lundby, personal correspondence, 25 June 2015.

  6. 6.

    A copy of the letter that Hagen alleged to have received is available at http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/05/25/nyheter/politikk/frp/siv_jensen/carl_i_hagen/27336391.

  7. 7.

    Verdens Gang (VG) is Norway’s second biggest print newspaper in terms of circulation and the most widely read newspaper among Progress Party voters.

  8. 8.

    Document.no is a Norwegian online magazine, which proclaims itself to be Christian conservative and critical of Islam.

  9. 9.

    In a cabinet reshuffle in December 2015, MP Sandberg was designated as the new Minister of Fisheries. As a function of Sandberg being allocated to this post, he hardly makes any public statements on immigration, Muslims and Islam anymore, but limits himself to verbal attacks on Norwegian academic marine biologists who do not adhere to the strictures of the billion dollar marine aquaculture industry in Norway.

  10. 10.

    Tajik is a former Minister of Culture for the Labour Party 2012–2013, the first ever cabinet minister of Muslim background in Norway and the current chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Justice. She is the second child of a Pakistani-Afghan migrant labour migrating couple who arrived in Norway in the 1970s, and is known for her vocal opposition to Salafi-jihadism. For more on Tajik, see Bangstad (2015).

  11. 11.

    See http://www.dagbladet.no/2014/08/23/nyheter/politikk/innenriks/samfunn/ulf_leirstein/34934708 for this. Hadia Tajik describes herself as a Muslim, albeit not a “Muslim politician”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. KIFO – Institute for Church, Religion, and Worldview Research, Oslo, Norway

    Sindre Bangstad

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  1. Sindre Bangstad
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    John Erik Fossum

  2. CNRS, Sciences Po, Paris, France

    Riva Kastoryano

  3. Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Birte Siim

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Bangstad, S. (2018). The New Nationalism and its Relationship to Islam. In: Fossum, J., Kastoryano, R., Siim, B. (eds) Diversity and Contestations over Nationalism in Europe and Canada. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58987-3_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58987-3_11

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