The New Crusades
Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"The New Crusades is an intersectional milestone. It lucidly illustrates how converging systems of subordination, power, and violence related to Islamophobia are experienced across the globe."—Kimberlé Crenshaw, from the foreword
"A profound wake-up call."―Publishers Weekly
"Insightful and disturbing."―Library Journal
The first book to examine global Islamophobia from a legal and ground-up perspective, from renowned public intellectual Khaled A. Beydoun.
Islamophobia has spiraled into a global menace, and democratic and authoritarian regimes alike have deployed it as a strategy to persecute their Muslim populations. With this book, Khaled A. Beydoun details how the American War on Terror has facilitated and intensified the network of anti-Muslim campaigns unfolding across the world. The New Crusades is the first book of its kind, offering a critical and intimate examination of global Islamophobia and its manifestations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and regions beyond and in between.
Through trenchant analysis and direct testimony from Muslims on the ground, Beydoun interrogates how Islamophobia acts as a unifying global thread of state and social bigotry, instigating both liberal and right-wing hate-mongering. Whether imposed by way of hijab bans in France, state-sponsored hate speech and violence in India, or the network of concentration camps in China, Islamophobia unravels into distinct systems of demonization and oppression across the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape. Lucid and poignant, The New Crusades reveals that Islamophobia is not only a worldwide phenomenon—it stands as one of the world's last bastions of acceptable hate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wayne State University law professor Beydoun (American Islamophobia) delivers a moving history of Islamophobia and how it has been remade by the "War on Terror." Enriching his study with autobiographical elements, Beydoun describes his childhood in Detroit and tells the story of how his mother's decision to start covering her hair in public helped her "turn a page toward becoming the woman she wanted to be" to illustrate the absurdity of Western countries insisting that Muslim women must be "saved" from wearing the hijab. Among other injustices, Beydoun examines the 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, the scapegoating of Indian Muslims for the Covid-19 pandemic by the country's Hindu nationalist government, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and reeducation camps for Uyghur Muslims in China. Though he covers vast swaths of geography and history, Beydoun consistently highlights the human cost of Islamophobia, profiling a young man in Palestine "shaken by fear" and a Somali Muslim refugee in Kenya whose sight is restored after she was blinded by cataracts. He also highlights his friendship with a veteran of the war in Iraq to illustrate the forces that drove working-class whites into the war on terror and how interpersonal relationships can repair the damage wrought by prejudice. Sweeping yet intimately detailed, this is a profound wake-up call.
