Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia in Austria as historicist racism

Abstract

This paper examines discourses of liberal Islamophobia in Austria, analysing interviews with journalists from national newspapers, magazines and TV station. Using a theoretical framework that combines a Gramscian analysis with methods of discourse analysis, it identifies “temporalization” as an effective discursive mechanism in the construction of the Muslim “Other” as a “folk devil”. It argues that liberal Islamophobia works as a historicist racism, which allows differently positioned subjects to invest into, and reproduce, a mythical space of representation where the Muslim “Other” figures as a “devil from our past”, embodying everything Austrian society has supposedly done away with in the years of political reform after 1968.

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Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia in
Austria as historicist racism
Benjamin Opratko
To cite this article: Benjamin Opratko (2019) Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia
in Austria as historicist racism, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42:16, 159-176, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2019.1635258
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1635258
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Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia in Austria
as historicist racism
Benjamin Opratko
Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
ABSTRACT
This paper examines discourses of liberal Islamophobia in Austria, analysing
interviews with journalists from national newspapers, magazines and TV
station. Using a theoretical framework that combines a Gramscian analysis
with methods of discourse analysis, it identifies “temporalization”as an
effective discursive mechanism in the construction of the Muslim “Other”as a
“folk devil”. It argues that liberal Islamophobia works as a historicist racism,
which allows differently positioned subjects to invest into, and reproduce, a
mythical space of representation where the Muslim “Other”figures as a “devil
from our past”, embodying everything Austrian society has supposedly done
away with in the years of political reform after 1968.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 November 2018; Accepted 14 June 2019
KEYWORDS Islamophobia; historicist racism; Austria; hegemony; Stuart Hall; Muslims; liberalism
This paper seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of contemporary
Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism,
1
in Europe. More specifically, it examines
articulations of anti-Muslim racism that have recently been termed “liberal
Islamophobia”(Mondon and Winter 2017, 2162), “post-liberal racism”
(Tsianos and Pieper 2011), “identity liberalism”(Lentin and Titley 2011, 121)
or “enlightened Islamophobia”(Hafez 2013, 128). This is a kind of racism
articulated around the “Muslim question”(Norton 2013; Vakil 2013), which
constructs the Muslim as an insufficiently progressive and emancipated, “illib-
eral Other”(Lentin and Titley 2011, 121).
Drawing on a “Gramscian”approach to the study of racism pioneered by
Stuart Hall (1986; Hall et al. 1978), this contribution posits an alternative to cur-
rents within Islamophobia studies relying on agential, instrumentalist or inten-
tionalist analytical models of racism (cf. Opratko 2017). Such an approach asks
how particular racisms become part of popular “common sense”and analyses
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, trans-
formed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Benjamin Opratko benjamin.opratko@univie.ac.at @bopratko
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2019, VOL. 42, NO. 16, 159–176
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1635258

how racisms effectively construct a cross-class consensus. This theoretical
framework is laid out in the first part of this article. In sections two and
three, I present an analysis of original data gathered from 18 interviews con-
ducted with editors and journalists from 11 major national media outlets in
Austria. Combining the theoretical framework with methodological instru-
ments developed in the field of discourse analysis, I argue that the meta-
phor of the folk devil can help decipher the ongoing and cumulative
production of the Muslim as “Other”in the discourses analysed. More
specifically, the Muslim Other figures as a haunting presence from “our
past”, embodying what Austrian society has supposedly done away with
in the years of political reform after 1968. In section four, the paper offers
a theoretical reflection of these findings. Building on David Theo Goldberg’s
notion of “racial historicism”(Goldberg 2002,74–97) and Stuart Hall’s
interpretation of racism as “mythical space”(Hall 1992; Laclau 1990, 61), I
argue that a specifically historicist racism allows differently positioned sub-
jects to invest into, and reproduce, Islamophobia in its liberal variation. Con-
cluding, I discuss how an analysis of the production of the Muslim Other as
a“devil from our past”allows wider reflections about the social and political
conjuncture in which this articulation takes place, connecting it with the
ongoing scholarly debate of today’s“Muslim question”in Europe.
Reconsidering “Gramsci’s relevance”: racism and folk devils
The case for a “Gramscian”analysis of racism was most forcefully put forward
by Stuart Hall. From the late 1970s onwards, he argued for “Gramsci’s rel-
evance for the study of race and ethnicity”(Hall 1986). In “Policing the
Crisis”, a collectively authored study of the “mugging panic”in 1970s
Britain, we find a Gramscian analysis in action, and one that, although not
singularly occupied with the question of race, provides some invaluable
insights and tools for any critical analysis of racism (Hall et al. 1978). The see-
mingly marginal phenomenon of petty street crime –the stick-ups, often per-
petrated by black youth in English cities’poorest areas, that became referred
to as “muggings”–were used as an entry point for a conjunctural analysis (Hall
et al. 1978, 18). Hall and his colleagues argued that an authoritarian “cross-
class consensus on crime”existed (Hall et al. 1978, 139), internally structured
by a number of “core images”or discursive “elements”that they distilled from
their analysis of newspaper articles, letters to editors, and statements by poli-
ticians, police officials and judges. The widely shared interpretations of
mugging, and crime more generally, were hegemonic: they formed a frame-
work of common sense. This framework was constructed around the
mugger as “folk devil”–a term adopted from Stanley Cohen’s“Folk Devils
and Moral Panics”(Cohen [1972]2011). Originating in the sociology of
crime and deviance, a moral panic is generally defined as “an episode,
160 B. OPRATKO

often triggered by alarming media stories and reinforced by reactive laws and
public policy, of exaggerated or misdirected public concern, anxiety, fear, or
anger over a perceived threat to social order”(Krinsky 2013, 1). At the
centre of such an episode is usually a figure blamed not only for the scanda-
lized acts themselves but seen as posing a threat to social order as such.
Although the “folk devils”originally studied by Cohen were predominantly
white youth, he pointed out similarities to “racial stereotyping”:“Thus Jews
are intrusive, but also exclusive; Negroes are lazy and inert, but also aggressive
and pushing; Mods are dirty and scruffy, but also slickly dressed; they are
aggressive and inflated with their own strength and importance, but they
are also cowardly.”(Cohen [1972]2011, 56). For Hall and his colleagues, the
moral panic surrounding the figure of the “mugger”in 1972–73 “fits in
almost every detail the process described by Cohen”(Hall et al. 1978, 17).
But they go beyond Cohen’s perspective by integrating the concept of the
folk devil in a Gramscian conjuncturalist analysis, where representations of
the Other as “folk devil”play an important role in the universalizing of a par-
ticular, class-specific outlook, forming “the basis for the myth of a single,
English kind of thought”(Hall et al. 1978, 156). By organizing their hegemony
and establishing a common sense that allows subjects from different socio-
economic backgrounds, both dominant and subaltern, to “make sense”of
their daily lives within a shared framework of “Englishness”, the leading
social forces are able to forge a “basis for cross-class alliances”(ibid., emphasis
in original). This, in turn, is seen as contributing to sustaining an “order of
cohesion”of the social formation as such (Hall et al. 1978, 204, emphasis in
original). Insofar as racist ideologies fulfil a similar role, we should understand
them as contributing to the delicate balance of consent and coercion through
which political power operates, and which Gramsci called hegemony. This
forces us to consider the concrete articulations, the production of tropes,
metaphors and codes that structure the forms of racism that underpin a par-
ticular historic bloc (cf. Hall et al. 1978, 162).
To summarize, Hall insists that to understand a specific form of racism, “we
would have to begin by investigating the different ways in which racist ideol-
ogies have been constructed and made operative under different historical
conditions”(Hall 1980, 341–2). As part of common sense, racist divisions
between “us”and “them”, become “practical”, orienting collective behaviour
and underpinning practices of inclusion/exclusion. Crucially, the “Other”pro-
duced by racism is not just “out there”, Hall insists: “The devils do, indeed, have
to be summoned”(Hall et al. 1978, 162, emphasis in original). Therefore, if we
understand Islamophobia as a modality of racism, we need detailed analyses
of its precise ideological operations, of the systems of meaning it establishes,
and of its operative categories and metaphors. It is to the ways in which the
figure of the “Muslim Other”is summoned as a “folk devil”in a specific spatio-
temporal context that I turn now.
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 161

Analysing anti-Muslim racism in Austria: context and
methodological considerations
Recent years have seen a small surge in academic interest in Islamophobia in
Austria (Bunzl and Hafez 2009; Cherribi 2011; Dautovićand Hafez 2014;
Fürlinger 2013; Hafez 2009,2010a,2010b; Hödl 2010; Krzyzanowski 2013;
Muftić2012). Most publications focus on what Mondon and Winter (2017,
2158ff.) call the “illiberal”variations of Islamophobia, especially the far-right
“Austrian Freedom Party”(FPÖ). However, my interest is in the articulation
and reproduction of Islamophobia by agents considered –and considering
themselves –as liberal, non- or anti-racist. This is necessary for understanding
the broad appeal of contemporary Islamophobia across political fault lines
and well beyond the far-right (Cakir 2014,15ff; Leibold and Kühnel 2003,
113), and its becoming part of a wider “common sense”. It is also relevant
to understand the political strategies of the “illiberal”FPÖ, which has strategi-
cally adopted some liberal-feminist arguments in efforts to present itself as
a defender of (Austrian, non-Muslim) women against “patriarchal”Islam
(cf. Mayer and Sauer 2017; Mayer, Ajanovic, and Sauer 2014; Sauer 2017).
More recently, liberal varieties of Islamophobia have also become politically
effective on the left of Austria’s political spectrum. Examples include
support by Austria’s Social Democratic Party for the controversial “Islam
law”in 2015, which has been described as “institutionalized Islamophobia”
(Dautovićand Hafez 2014, 54; cf. Hafez 2017) and, in 2017, for a law
banning the wearing of the full-face veil in public (cf. Hafez 2018,55–7). In
the same year’s national elections, a group led by former long-standing
Green MP Peter Pilz that had formed just two months earlier, entered the
Nationalrat. In their election campaign, the “Liste Pilz”campaigned against
the supposedly growing influence of “political Islam”in Austria. Pilz himself
published a book, titled “Heimat Österreich”(“Homeland Austria”), reprodu-
cing anti-Muslim stereotypes and denying the existence of Islamophobia
altogether (Pilz 2017, 85). For Pilz, to “defend”the Austrian Homeland is to
defend “our liberal culture”, and particularly women’s rights: “The basics of
our culture are rights and duties. The right of men and women to be
treated equally establishes the duty to respect women’s rights. Those who
do not want this can leave”(Pilz 2017, 85).
2
To investigate the reproduction of anti-Muslim discourse “in the name of
liberalism”(Gustavsson, van der Noll, and Sundberg 2016), I conducted 18
interviews between February and September 2014. The respondents were
journalists working at 11 different news media outlets in Austria (seven
daily newspapers, two weekly magazines, two TV broadcasters). All of the
respondents identified as “Austrians”, and none of them as Muslim. The guide-
line-based interviews were semi-structured, offering space for the informants
to freely narrate and associate. They were asked to speak about their
162 B. OPRATKO

experiences when dealing with topics related to Islam and Muslims in their
daily work, about how they understand their own professional role in covering
these topics, and about their personal views on some of the most widely dis-
cussed topics related to Islam.
The decision to do qualitative interviews with journalists follows from
reflections on the theoretical framework sketched above. From a “Gramscian”
perspective, journalists fulfil a specific role in the struggle over hegemony:
They can be considered as “minor”organic intellectuals (Demirović2007,
35), acting as popularizers and mediators, translating different elements of
hegemonic leadership into languages of common sense, and shaping it in
complex and contradictory ways. But they are also embedded in hegemony
as “functionaries of the superstructures”, as Gramsci put it: “‘administrators’
and divulgators of pre-existing, traditional, accumulated intellectual wealth”
(Gramsci 1971, 12, 13). My methodological hypothesis is that analysing the
“common sense”of such “minor”intellectuals offers a window into hegemo-
nic elements in the present conjuncture, and thus an entry point into the
analysis of actually existing relations of hegemony.
Following Stuart Hall’s advice to “start […] from the concrete historical
“work”which racism accomplishes”in the field of meaning and representation
(Hall 1980, 52), the analysis of the interviews seeks to identify and interpret
discursive mechanisms, and explain how they operate in the historical
context of the present conjuncture. The aim is to identify (a.) the ways in
which the Muslim “Other”is constructed as a “folk devil”; (b) the “shared fra-
mework”around the “Muslim question”, and the experiences, struggles and
contradictions articulated with it; and (c) structural similarities to other
forms of racism.
In the following analysis, I focus on one specific discursive mechanism of
anti-Muslim discourse that can add to an integral understanding of liberal Isla-
mophobia. I argue that one of its peculiar features is the way it interpellates its
subjects –those it includes in the imagined community of “Us”as well as
those it excludes as the Muslim Other –through the discursive mechanism
of temporalization.
Among us, from another time: Muslim devils from our past
In this section, selected passages from the transcribed interviews are presented
and discussed in order to shed light on one specific discursive mechanism,
which emerged as particularly conspicuous in the course of interpreting the
material. This is the mechanism I call “temporalization”, which involves the dis-
cursive relegation of the figure of “the Muslim”to a constructed, Eurocentric
past. For the analysis, I identified linguistic elements that operate as temporaliz-
ing markers: references to historical events, periods or personalities; adjectives
and adverbs attributing a certain temporality to their objects, such as
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 163

“traditional”,“archaic”,“regressive”,“modern”or “progressive”; and modal par-
ticles signifying temporal distance, such as “already”,“not yet”or “still”.
Afirst example is in the following quote. The journalist discusses controver-
sies in public debates commonly associated with Islam. His first reaction is to
refer to “the role of the woman in society”(Interview 1, m); from there, he pro-
ceeds to what he sees as different “images of the family”in different religions
and cultures:
3
I take it for granted that a kind of liberal image of the family is already estab-
lished in Austria. And Muslims are, in societal terms, in terms of numbers, cer-
tainly less liberal. And that means …and not only in relation to questions of
homosexuality. There it is certainly extreme. I am convinced that even
Muslims that call themselves liberal are very likely to reject that, and –I mean,
not in a militant way, I can’t accuse all of them of being violent –but they are
certainly more explicit, more vehement in their rejection [of homosexuality]
even than conservative circles in Christian society. (Interview 1, m)
The first thing to notice here is the temporalizing marker “already”,whichfunc-
tions to distinguish between an “Us”–“Austria”, which has “already established”
a“liberal image of the family”,and“Them”. It is clear that the referential mech-
anism of constructing a binary difference is linked to a predicational mechanism
of evaluating the two groups differently (cf. Reisigl and Wodak 2001,44):thata
“liberal image”is something desirable, while its “rejection”is discursively linked
to “violence”(even though the respondent immediately qualifies his statement
–he can’taccuse“all of them”). Here, the term “liberal”does not designate a
political camp within society (as opposed to “conservative”or “socialist”)but
is used to describe Austrian society as a whole. What is crucial here is the
implicit historical reference, which comes up frequently in a number of inter-
views, to the liberalization of social norms regarding family, gender and sexu-
ality in the 1970s. Invoked by both male and female respondents, this
production of “non-coevalness”(cf. Fabian [1983]2014) of Muslims and non-
Muslims works through the idea that “here”–designating Austria, or, some-
times, Europe –some norms have “already”been established, but only for
“us”.“They”, while living among “us”, have yet to go through this process.
The next statement, taken from a different interview, confirms the coupling
of this particular mechanism of historization with the theme of Muslim “imma-
turity”. The journalist was asked what he believes to be reasons for the increas-
ing prominence of the “Muslim question”in public and political discourse. Very
quickly, he relates this to questions of gender and sexuality:
We have achieved quite something, this generation of the so called 68ers, and
now all of a sudden some people come again and say, no, no, that headscarve
thing is alright, and I’m the one choosing the boyfriend, and if I can’t choose the
boyfriend then I’ll stab the woman. And we speak about that openly. And that
has nothing to do with being on the right, but with being very far on the left!.
(Interview 2, m)
164 B. OPRATKO

Here, the respondent summons the theme of a “historical achievement”and
directly connects it to a subject: “We have achieved quite something”. He also
makes clear who he excludes from this “We”:“these people”, referring to
Muslim immigrants. In this case, the “achievements”are linked to a specific
historical marker when calls himself and “his generation”the “68ers”. Signifi-
cantly, in both interviews, the respondents link the topics of gender and sexu-
ality with violence. The achievements of feminism and sexual liberation, and
by extension the safety of women and LGBT persons, are seen as threatened
by those who have never learned the lessons of these struggles. Hence, the
temporalization of Muslims produces not just difference through (temporal)
distance, but at the same time a sense of threat and fear through (spatial)
proximity.
Later in the same interview, the theme of a gendered Muslim “threat”
emerges even more forcefully. Asked how he understands his own role as a
journalist in this context, he responds:
Well, one of our jobs is to inform people, isn’t it? And I don’t mean in the sense of
infotainment, you know, a little news and a lot of haha –no, you can actually …If
you write it often enough, perhaps someone will think twice, perhaps a woman
will think twice before she decides to marry, say, an Iranian. Not because he’s
necessarily a bad man, but because his mindset is just completely different,
and then it might well happen that she ends up locked up at home, or that
she will be beaten because she wants to see her friends. I don’t say everyone
is like that, but it’s much more common than here. And people should know
that. I mean, you can play a game of water polo against crocodiles, if you feel
like it. But you should know before that they are crocodiles. (Interview 2, m)
Here, the construction of a “folk devil”again operates through combining the
temporalization of “the Muslim”with the construct of a threatening spatial
proximity. It is a textbook example of a “folk devil”: An inherently violent,
male figure threatening “our women”. The second passage makes it very
clear that Muslims –or, more precisely in this case, Muslim men –are rep-
resented as inescapably locked in their backwardness, as it has become part
of their very essence: They cannot escape their “mindset”. Muslim men are
just what they are, like a prehistoric reptile preying on the guileless.
Again, the folk devil is not just dangerous because, as a simplistic interpret-
ation of these statements as “cultural racism”would suggest, he is seen as cul-
turally “different”. The peculiar obsession with it, I contend, has to do with its
representing not the strange, but the all-to familiar. As Tyrer (2013, 76) notes,
“racism works by attempting to increase social distance precisely because it is
felt in proximity”. The Muslim folk devil is a haunting presence, because it
stands for “our own”past, or rather for practices the respondents want to
see relegated to the past. This is made clear by statements such as the follow-
ing, taken from an interview with a female journalist. She is careful to reject
any simplistic or culturalizing argument. During the interview, she repeatedly
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 165

explains her desire to overcome dualistic representations of Muslims versus
Non-Muslims and to contribute to a “normalization”of the topic, emphasizing
commonalities between Muslims and Non-Muslims, and focusing on social
issues rather than religion. However, while rejecting culturalist dichotomies,
the following segment does reproduce a temporalized Muslim “Other”:
I would rather talk about patriarchal structures than about religion. Because
these patriarchal structures exist in Christianity just as much. And I grew up in
the 70s in the countryside, I know all of this totally well, these interferences
from the church and all that …I’m a child of the Kreisky era. I liberated myself
exactly from this, with this collective dream of equal opportunities for all. And
by moving from the countryside to the city. And a lot of the things I see in
Turkish families now, I know them from my own childhood. (Interview 3, f)
Her claim that she knows “all about this”, referring to patriarchal structures
present in Muslim families and communities, is supported by invoking a
narrative of individual and social liberation, in which personal and political
histories are interwoven into one History. Where the previously discussed
respondent invoked the “68ers”as a historical point of reference, here it is
the “Kreisky era”. Bruno Kreisky served as Bundeskanzler (Head of Government)
from 1970 to 1983 and oversaw a period of post-1968 progressive reforms,
including the liberalization of penal law, de-criminalization of abortions
and of homosexual practices. The reference to Kreisky invokes experiences
of personal emancipation, especially concerning gender norms and sexuality.
The discursive mechanisms described so far bear some similarities with
phenomena described by other scholars as “enlightened fundamentalism”
(Fekete 2006)or“eurocentric Islamophobia”(Jackson 2018). However, these
analyses focus on the shift from “racial”to “cultural”justifications for the
discrimination of Muslims (Fekete 2006, 7) and its spatial dimensions, where
“Islamophobia emerges from a cultural anxiety generated by the notion
that previously Western spaces are being undermined by the presence of
Muslims”(Jackson 2018, 145). The temporal dimension, which is crucial to
the material analysed here, does not receive similar attention. Two other pro-
minent concepts introduced recently to describe the mobilization of feminist
and pro-LGTBQ tropes in anti-Muslim discourses seem to connect more
directly with the analysis presented here: “femo-nationalism”(Farris 2012,
2017; cf. Hark and Villa 2017) and “homo-nationalism”(Puar 2007;2013; cf.
Ahmed 2011; El-Tayeb 2012; Haritaworn 2015; Petzen 2012). While not directly
concerned with temporalization, they do acknowledge this dimension at least
in passing (Farris 2017, 138–44; El-Tayeb 2013). However, the two approaches,
which are quite different from one another, come with additional problems.
Sara Farris’political-economic explanation of femo-nationalism rests on the
claim that Muslim women are included in femo-nationalist discourses because
of the growing demand for care and domestic workers in Europe: “The useful
166 B. OPRATKO

role that female migrant labor plays in the contemporary restructuring of
welfare regimes and the feminization of key sectors of the service economy
accounts in a significant way for a certain indulgence by neoliberal govern-
ments and for the deceptive compassion of nationalist parties towards
migrant women (and not migrant men).”(Farris 2012, 194) As Muslim
women make up significant portions of female migrant care laborers, and
“play the role of a synecdoche for the European stereotype of the female
immigrant”, Farris argues, they are being instrumentalized by far-right
parties who “co-opt feminist ideals into anti-immigrant and anti-Islam cam-
paigns”(186f.). This argument is based on a number of debatable assump-
tions. First, it generalizes the position Muslim women tend to take in the
division of (care) labour. Second, it misreads the far-right’s instrumentalization
of feminist discourses as a genuine “compassion of nationalist parties towards
migrant women (and not migrant men)”(194). And finally, Farris does not
explain why femo-nationalism takes the form of a specifically anti-Muslim dis-
course. In contrast to the explanation offered by her, Muslim women’s role as
immigrant care workers play no role at all in the interviews conducted for this
study. In fact, in Austrian far-right anti-Muslim discourse, Muslim women are
frequently denigrated because they supposedly do not perform “useful”
care work: Norbert Hofer, the current leader of the FPÖ, asked his supporters
during his campaign for the Presidency of Austria in 2016: “Has anyone of you
ever seen a Muslim working in the care sector, who is willing to perhaps
change our elderlies’diapers? I don’t know any.”(cit. in Die Presse, November
16, 2016).
In contrast to Farris’Marxist-feminist concept of femo-nationalism, analyses
of homo-nationalism mostly draw on Deleuzian theories of assemblage and
affect (Puar 2013). They do not share the shortcomings identified in Farris’
work on femo-nationalism. However, we encounter a different problem
here. Analyses of homo-nationalist revolve around color-coded articulations
of racism, where homo-nationalism “serves to naturalize the whiteness of
dominant gender and sexual politics, and the ways in which these have
often been complicit in colonial and racist projects”(Petzen 2012, 99, my
emphasis). But in the versions of Islamophobia discussed in this article, we
do not find colonial and color-coded versions of racism. Whiteness does not
play a role in the statements analysed above. Even if we accept that a critical
concept of “whiteness”is not necessarily linked to phenotype or skin colour,
it’s analytical power derives from its construction as a racial category.
However, I suggest that we need to take the reality of “racism without
races”seriously. As I have argued elsewhere, Islamophobia can function as
“a racism which is genuinely and literally one ‘without races’, i.e. operating
in different, and sometimes historically older, registers of othering, hierarchi-
sation and exclusion –such as the civilised versus the barbarian”(Opratko
2017, 80). The othering of Muslims as, for example, intrinsically homophobic
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 167

(cf. Haritaworn 2015) does not, in our case, constitute a white subject, but a
progressive, tolerant, free and civilized –in short: liberal –subject. This is
important, not least because it might be precisely the decoupling of colo-
nial/color-coded attributions from anti-Muslim racism that allows agents to
participate in the reproduction of liberal Islamophobia. In other words, only
the fact that it does not have to identify itself as white enables the liberal
non-Muslim subject to invest symbolically, affectively and materially into
anti-Muslim racism. Finally, I claim that the temporalizing dimension in
liberal Islamophobia is much more significant here than in both Farris”and
Puar’s accounts. When the journalist quoted above says that she knows “all
about this”, she does not refer to actual Muslim families living in Austria
today. What she does know “all about”is patriarchal structures that she, as
a Non-Muslim Austrian, has supposedly left behind her. Her emancipation is
a completed act: “I liberated myself exactly from this”. The Muslim Other
remains trapped in the Non-Muslim’s past. It is this structure of argument
that allows people self-identifying as liberal, feminist or progressive –even
“very far left”, as the respondent in interview 2 represented his own position
–to invest in anti-Muslim discourse.
The temporalization of “the Muslim”works not only via references to
“1968”,“Kreisky”or other signifiers for “emancipation”, but can flexibly incor-
porate a variety of different historical markers. The following quote, from a
catholic conservative journalist, indicates as such. It is part of a longer
passage in which he reflects on what he sees as the main differences
between Christianity and Islam. In this context, he states:
That process is now going on within Islam, where they learn to be just one part,
and not being one hundred percent right in everything …And yes, that’san
eternal problem, for Christians too! Our religion is, in my opinion, in our
opinion, salvation and the ne plus ultra, but I still accept the fact that other
people practise other religions. We cannot solve this completely. We have
learned that somehow, painfully, the hard way [“wir haben viel auf die Mütze
bekommen”–“we got slapped on our heads a lot”], and now the Muslims are
learning it the hard way [“are getting slapped on their heads”](Interview 4, m)
While the topic of “liberality”does play a role here as well, the dominant his-
torical point of reference is not “1968”, but European secularization. “That
process”, as the respondent calls it, is represented as a “painful”one –a
claim amplified by the metaphor “auf die Mütze bekommen”–“getting
slapped on the head”–but one he sees as completed as far as Christianity
is concerned. The figure of the Muslim as a subject of the “not yet”–in this
case, as having not yet learned the lesson of secularization –emerges as an
element in the common sense of a more traditional, Christian intellectual.
Another element of the discursive mechanism of historization is the open
or latent fear of falling back in time. This can be illustrated by segments
from another interview. Reflecting on the role media should play in covering
168 B. OPRATKO

what he called “culture clashes”earlier in the interview, this journalist
becomes observably agitated, speaking louder and with stronger Viennese
dialect than before:
And that’s my personal point! We are reviving –no, we are not reviving, there is
now, suddenly, in our society, which painstakingly struggled so much to dis-
tance itself from …from a totally authoritarian society, authoritarian upbringing,
from xenophobia, from anti-Semitism, and now we have all of this all over again!
We have to start again, from the very beginning, with a significant part of the
population now! This is something that makes me a bit desperate. As
someone who fought against prejudice, against authoritarian thinking …and
fought, in part at least I think, successfully, in my segment at least, in the
segment of middle-class [bürgerliches] Austria …and now all of this is coming
back! Yes, now we have it all again, these, these slogans on the street, and
this worshipping of an authoritarian leader [“Führer”] again. That is a little trou-
blesome. (Interview 5, m)
Two significant historical points of reference emerge in this segment. One is,
again, the post-68 era, in this case represented as a struggle of “our society”
against authoritarianism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism; the other one,
closely connected to the first, is Nazism and the Holocaust. The first is pre-
sented above all as a struggle against the legacy of the second one. The func-
tion of the “Muslim Other”is, again, to refer to the invasion of the past into the
present: “We”have defeated fascism and its legacies, but now “they”are
bringing it back –and, as he puts it, “we have to start all over again”. The refer-
ence to the “Führer”at the end of this quote is particularly interesting. The
interview was conducted days after Recep Tayyib Erdoğan spoke in front of
a large crowd in Vienna, a visit that also provoked a protest march organized
by Turkish and Kurdish opposition parties and organizations. Large parts of
media coverage was predicated on the idea that “the Turks”were dragging
their conflicts onto Austria’s streets. If we read the passage carefully, the
link drawn between Erdoğan and Hitler is not so much a statement about
the Turkish President, but about those who voice their support for him on
the streets of Vienna. He starts by claiming that “all of this is coming back”
and uses the phrase “again”two times in the following sentence, referring
to a return of Austria’s Nazi past. It doesn’t seem far-fetched that the
“slogans on the street”and “worshipping of a Führer”, alludes to the historical
event, very present in Austrians’collective memory, when Hitler declared Aus-
tria’s“Anschluss”to the German Reich on March 15th 1938 in front of hun-
dreds of thousands of cheering supporters on Vienna’s Heldenplatz. It has
been frequently noted in Islamophobia Studies that one important effect of
Islamophobia in Europe, especially in German speaking countries, is the
symbolic displacement of Antisemitism, singling out Muslims as bearers of
contemporary Antisemitism (Attia 2013,12ff.; Müller-Uri 2014, 120ff.). This
observation can be integrated into the broader context of the temporalization
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 169

of the Muslim Other and related to the construction of the Muslim as a folk
devil from our past. Not having learned the “lessons”of the Holocaust,
Muslims represent the threat of a return of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism
–and thus the danger of society as a whole falling back into “their”time,
which is at the same time “our”past. This topos can be further illustrated
by the next and final example. This journalist mentions that when it comes
to topics such as a possible ban of Islamic veiling, “this is not a question of
lower class, upper class, middle class, but I think this is …in principle, this is
of interest to everyone”(Interview 6, m). When asked why, he continues:
Because it [support for a ban] is precisely not just based on xenophobia, but also
on the question: Do we have a part of the population, did we get a population,
through migration, that sets us back in our striving for a better, more emanci-
pated society? That’s the big question in the more educated layers of society,
and it is also something I discuss with friends. (Interview 6, m)
Here we find the threatening presence of the non-coeval Muslim Other in its
clearest form. Again, the temporalizing markers are obvious –the Muslim
migrant population “sets us back”–as is the historical reference: In this
case, Austria’s history of migration. The fact that the “backwardness”of
Muslims is not only “elsewhere”–in what is often revealingly, as if it were a
distant planet, referred to as the “Muslim world”–but, crucially, within “our
society”, adds a specific element to the historization of Muslims. Because
“they”are “among us”–oscillating, as Tyrer (2013, 41) remarks, between
“invisibility”and “hypervisibility”–the construction of temporal difference
implies not just a logic of colonial pedagogy, in which the Other is to be
raised into modernity, but also the existential threat of a reversal of modernity
itself. That Europe –“our civilisation”–might descend back into the darkness
of barbarianism. The Muslim folk devil threatens, through its sheer presence,
to displace “our society”into the timeframe of the Other; to make “Us”coeval
with the sexist, homophobe, anti-Semitic, violent, in short: barbaric Other. The
folk devils summoned in contemporary liberal Islamophobia are, it turns out,
the devils from “our”own past.
Historicist racism and the dream life of a culture
The logic of this ideological formation is similar to some versions of historical
and contemporary racisms, and quite different from others. Following up on
comments by Fatima El-Tayeb (2016, 45) and Vassilis Tsianos and Marianne
Pieper (2011, 120), I claim that the example of “racial historicism”can help
us make sense of contemporary liberal Islamophobia. David Theo Goldberg
(2002,2008) introduced this term to capture racist tropes which “conceived
of the non-European as historically immature in contrast to European
culture and ethos rather than as naturally inferior to Europeans and their des-
cendants”(Goldberg 2008, 163). While not identical, there are dynamics at
170 B. OPRATKO

work in contemporary discourse about Muslims and Islam which are strikingly
similar to racial historicism. Because they do not rely on the category of “race”
and do not involve a process of “racialization”(cf. Hund 2012), I prefer to use
the term “historicist racism”to refer to the discursive mechanism portrayed
above, rather than Goldberg’s original “racial historicism”.
4
In contemporary
hegemonic discourse about Islam in Austria, Muslims are interpellated as
not only immature, but as in a profound sense non-contemporaneous: As sub-
jects of the “not yet”. They are not yet where “we”have arrived, they have not
yet gone through “our”struggles, and, most importantly, they have not yet
learned the lessons of what are assumed to be the defining historical
“markers”that constitute the cornerstones of European civilization and/or
Austrian national identity. The Muslim Other is thus constructed as a folk
devil, abjected from what Morgan and Poynting, who introduced the
concept of a “Muslim folk devil”in Islamophobia studies, called “imagined
moral communities”(Morgan and Poynting 2012, 6). At the same time,
there is quite some variation as to which struggles and lessons exactly are
defining the boundaries of these communities. I interpret this as one mechan-
ism allowing the broad appeal of Islamophobia.
In her book on the “Muslim question”, Anne Norton (2013, 1) writes that
“[t]he Jewish question was fundamental for politics and philosophy in the
Enlightenment. In our time, as the Enlightenment fades, the Muslim ques-
tion has taken its place”. In this sense we can speak of the discourse articu-
lated around the Muslim Question as a “mythical space”. According to
Ernesto Laclau, a “mythical”space of representation functions “as a
surface on which dislocations and social demands can be inscribed. The
main feature of a surface of inscription is its incomplete nature”(Laclau
1990, 63). Here, this incompleteness emerges as an openness, allowing
actors with various histories, political allegiances, and class positions, to
“invest”into anti-Muslim narratives. At the same time, as Stuart Hall
argued following Claude Lévi-Strauss, the myths conjured up by racist ideol-
ogies give us “privileged access to the dream life of a culture”(Hall 1992,
15). The mechanisms of Othering that are constitutive of racist discourse,
he insists, involve more than just the construction of a “world of manichean
opposites: them and us, primitive and civilized, light and dark, a black and
white symbolic universe”(15). It is more complicated than that, because
they are also, at the same time, “mechanisms of splitting, of projection, of
defense, and of denial”(16) operating within the seemingly hermetical,
pure category of “Us”. In a myth, contradictions unresolved in real life are
reconciled in a phantasmatic representation, where real contradictions are
transformed into a dichotomy of opposites, and all that is undesirable, or
unbearable, is projected onto the Other.
We find in contemporary liberal Islamophobia an unspoken, mythical
premise. The representation of European struggles against (hetero-)sexism,
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 171

patriarchy, and authoritarianism, as a success story. The project of liberation is
constructed as completed, just as the story of the Enlightenment is presented
as a smooth process of emancipation from ecclesial authority, cleansed of its
racist, sexist and colonial entanglements (Dhawan 2014). This operates as a
“myth”in Hall’s sense. In historicist racism, the Muslim folk devil represents
that which the hegemonic narrative of individual and collective emancipation
cannot accommodate: the continued presence of sexism, patriarchal violence,
and authoritarianism in Austrian, European and “Western”society. The con-
struction of the Muslim folk devil as a devil from “our past”refers to the
impasse that struggles for political emancipation find themselves in today,
and projects it onto an external “Other”.
While the arguments presented here build on the analysis of a specific case
and distinct empirical material, they can contribute to a wider, international
debate on the nature and development of contemporary Islamophobia or
anti-Muslim racism. Following the Gramscian conjuncturalist framework of
analysis discussed above, we can treat journalists as minor organic intellec-
tuals, and their statements as indicative of current hegemonic relations.
This is particularly relevant as anti-Muslim historicist racism in the name of
emancipation and progress feeds into a wider discursive field, where author-
itarian political forces thrive on illiberal Islamophobia. The analysis of liberal
variants of Islamophobia is also a necessary element for developing a better
understanding of the recent rise of authoritarian populisms and the current
“authoritarian turn within neoliberalism”(Boffo, Saad-Filho and Fine 2018,
247). How liberal and illiberal Islamophobia interact in this process is a ques-
tion further research might address productively in light of the arguments
offered in this article.
Notes
1. I prefer the term anti-Muslim racism over the more common, Islamophobia’–
even though the latter has emerged as the most widely used and defining
term –to counter the, effect of exceptionalising Islamophobia by disarticulating
it from wider expressions or racism’that David Tyrer (2013, 22) has recently
lamented. However, as “there is no putting the genie back in the bottle”, with
the concept having “taken root in public, political and academic discourse”at
least in the Anglophone world (Bleich 2011, 1584), I will use “Islamophobia”
and “anti-Muslim racism”interchangeably, while stating that I consider Islamo-
phobia as a form of racism. For a detailed discussion of the relationship
between racism and Islamophobia, and an argument for the integration of Isla-
mophobia in a broad definition of racism, see Müller-Uri and Opratko (2016).
2. In a somewhat ironic turn of events, Peter Pilz had to give up his parliamentary
seat in November 2017, after several women publicly accused him of sexual
harassment.
3. All quotes are taken from interviews. Journalists and their employers were anon-
ymized. “m”or “f”indicate the respondent’s gender. The interviews were con-
ducted in German; all translations are mine.
172 B. OPRATKO

4. Goldberg (2008, 43) himself has argued that in today’s neoliberal capitalism, civi-
lity’, and the accompanying dichotomy of, savage’versus, civilized’, has become
“the genteel analogue of what earlier and elsewhere I have elaborated as the
expanding hold of racial historicism on modernizing racial imaginaries across
the globe”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: [DOC-
Stipendium] and by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Vienna.
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