Religious Extremism, Islamophobia and Reactive Co-Radicalization

Religious Extremism, Islamophobia and Reactive Co-Radicalization

The following is a paper written for MUIS Academy's Islamic Discourse Engagement held on 12 April 2016.

Full paper on Religious Extremism, Islamophobia and Reactive Co-Radicalization.

Abstract of the session:

It seems today that a new form of religious extremism has emerged, one which paradoxically portrays itself as being a counter to another – the ostensibly ‘initiating’ – extremism perceived as a real and imminent threat. In response to contemporary Islamist violence, whether threatened or enacted, aimed at Western societies, many such ‘target’ societies have experienced an upsurge in various forms of reactionary rhetoric and violence, with Islam and Muslims as the target.

Islamophobia names not just an attitudinal stance, it applies also to sets of exclusionary or negatively reactive actions, and it most often draws on religious roots and imagery. As an expression of a generalised ‘fear of Islam’, Islamophobia manifests as a form of religious extremism, even terrorism, every bit as abhorrent and problematic as the Islamist extremism that ostensibly provoked it.

In this session, Prof Pratt discusses ‘reactive co-radicalization,’ as a denominator of exclusionary reaction to the rising presence of Islam within secular, albeit nominally Christian, western societies. To what extent is reactive co-radicalization an apt perspective for understanding contemporary instances of religious terrorism and political violence born of Islamophobia? How might this contribute to and inform the contemporary understanding of Islamophobic reactions to ISIS and allied Islamism and, in so doing, address the problem of a spiral of increasing communal violence evidenced recently in Australia?