The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/ Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System

The first part of this essay discusses Islamophobia as a form of racism in a world-historical perspective. The second part is a discussion of Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism. The third part is on Islamophobia as Orientalism. The fourth part is Islamophobia as epistemic racism, while the final part is an example of this using the case of European Islamic Philosopher and Theologian, Tariq Ramadan. It is argued that Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people is not only manifested in the labor market, education, public sphere, global war against terrorism, or the global economy, but also in the epistemological battleground about the definition of the priorities in the world today. The essay then briefly introduces the contributions of each scholar gathered in this issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (Walter D. Mignolo, Farish A. Noor, Thomas E. Reifer, Abdulkader Tayob, Manuela Boatcã, and Madina Tlostanova) and elaborates on how they have attempted in different ways to address some of the issues raised above. The volume, of which this is an introduction, is the result of an international conference on The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Islamophobia that was organized by the authors at the Maison des Sciences de l\u27Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 2-3, 2006