Secularism, Islamophobia and the politics of religion

Abstract

There are moments when a single flash of lightning lights up the night sky and illuminates the whole landscape below which was previously shrouded in darkness. Such was the moment when Michael Brown was shot by a US cop in Ferguson, Missouri on 9 August 2014. And such was the moment when photographs appeared of armed police forcing a Muslim woman to disrobe on a French beach. It both illuminated and encapsulated in concentrated form the whole offensive against Muslims that has been waged by French politicians and the French state, not just for the last year or so but for the last twenty years.