Whiteness, Religion, and Secularity: Islam and Muslims in Europe

Whiteness has been framed as a defining feature of a ‘racialized modernity’ (Hess 2007). Europe’s relationship to Islam and Muslim populations is longstanding, reaching back to Muslim occupation of Iberia, the Crusades, and the later colonization of the Middle East and North Africa. However, post-war immigration from predominately Muslim countries casts the definition of whiteness into relief in new ways. Whiteness has shifted from its origins in religious holy war and forced civilization through Christianization to a process of hierarchization rooted in secular modernity. Understanding how whiteness operates in the context of Muslim mobilities gives us the opportunity to critically examine the underpinnings of whiteness and its perceived epistemological adversaries. I argue that the transformation of valued knowledge away from religious ways of knowing toward Enlightenment-rooted secularity was pivotal in defining whiteness and continues to give it power. This gravitation toward what I term controlled and controlling rationality positioned groups with different epistemologies outside the boundaries of whiteness. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by mainstream Europe’s views of Islam and Muslims but is also endemic to how whiteness positions other groups with different ways of knowing the world, like indigenous groups or other minorities that adhere to traditional worldviews.

This research is motivated by the question: How is whiteness implicated in the problematization of religious—and specifically Muslim—ways of being?