Beyond Religion: A Reading on the Muslim Presence in the Brazilian System of Racial Inequalities

The last decades have shown a substantial increase in the Muslim presence in Brazil, characterized by voluntary immigration, the acceptance of refugees and conversions across the country. This growing presence is accompanied by a rise in manifestations of symbolic and material violence directed against national Muslim communities, events commonly categorized as "Islamophobia”. While internal research on widespread Islamophobic violence has focused on identifying and condemning its various expressions, the underlying causes of national Islamophobia remain insufficiently explained. Diverging from established European interpretations that link Islamophobia to systematic movements of racialization, Brazilian debate understands it as a product of ignorance and intolerance toward a voluntarily chosen religious identity, thereby neglecting deeper explanations of its origins and perpetuation. Proposing a new perspective on this scenario, I suggest that Brazilian studies’ common interpretations on Islamophobic violence are constrained by the socio-historical development of a particular national racial classification scheme, marked by the ideology of racial democracy and the rejection or underutilization of race as an analytical category for clarifying internal dynamics of inequality. As a result, Brazilian political and intellectual debate fails to address these movements of exclusion and oppression as expressions of a broader system of segregation, thus ignoring the possibility that new racial categories may find a safe place in the Brazilian landscape of inequalities. Following this, all possible solutions are limited to claims for an eventual acceptance of "difference", echoing and validating the complete absence of institutional policies to fight the problem at a macro-social level. Though Brazilian racial order has been built upon black slavery’s legacy and is detached from colonial enterprises in predominantly Muslim territories, new pathways emerge for understanding the country as a potential new actor in a transnational context that relies on the racialization of Muslims to justify the creation and maintenance of a "legitimate" domination.