Mainstream figures have been enabling anti-Muslim racism, creating the ideal conditions for the rise of hard-right political parties

Five years ago, many Muslims wondered if the prejudices they faced were set to fade away. The “war on terror” was dwindling in prominence, and new enemies such as Russia seemed to be displacing fears of Islamic terrorism. Yet Britain’s Islamophobia has only intensified since then. A poll published in July found that two out of five Britons believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society. Earlier in the summer, it was reported that more than half of Muslims in Britain had personally experienced anti-Islam prejudice in the last year, and a quarter in a public place.

The evidence of a worsening climate for Muslims has been mounting since two summers ago, when racist riots erupted across the UK, targeting mosques and asylum hostels. Watching videos of those events, I was disturbed by the parents who brought their young children to watch while mobs attempted, with apparently murderous intent, to break into the buildings. It was not only hardened far-right activists but a much broader cross-section of British society that was willing to participate in racist violence directed at Muslims or asylum seekers assumed to be Muslim.

Arun Kundnani is editorial director of Monthly Review Press

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Dr. Samaiya Mushtaq’s book “A Beautiful Patience: A Memoir of Marriage, Motherhood, and a Mission to Gaza” pulls readers into the story of her husband, Dr. Mahmoud Sabha, who went to Gaza on multiple medical missions – and takes us along on her own journey, struggling with fear, guilt, motherhood, and more. In this episode, […]

The post [Podcast] Faith, Motherhood, and the Call to Gaza | Dr. Samaiya Mushtaq appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad

Twenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “Habibi City”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”

Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.

Western feminist silence over Palestine. Jon Elmer on Iran’s attacks at sea. Ali Abunimah on Britain’s sham sanctions.

As Muslims win historic victories, experts describe rise in anti-Islamic sentiment that rivals post-9/11 climate

Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington.

El-Sayed – or “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed”, as Tuberville called him on X – was a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America”, he claimed.

Israel engineering “silent starvation” in Gaza by blocking entry of 65 percent of required food supplies.