Muslim and Dangerous: ‘Grooming’ and the Politics of Racialisation

Abstract

Contemporary Islamophobia, certainly since 9/11, has become globalised. In a characteristic interrelationship between the global and the local, there has accumulated a global stock of clichés, stereotypes and folk myths about the Muslim ‘Other’ to be drawn upon to inform common sense about local circumstances and local events. Ideological elements involving the racialisation of Muslims are electronically circulated internationally and virtually instantaneously, and this process can lend itself to a seemingly never-ending series of moral panic spirals in which the perceived deviance of Muslims is amplified. This chapter traces the playing out of just such a relationship between the global and the local in the case of demonising of Muslim communities that took place after public outrage following a case of ‘grooming’ and sexual violence centred on Rochdale in north-west England. One set of crimes by nine men became a focus point and a metaphor for the otherness—and indeed dangerousness—of Muslims, nationally and globally. Islamophobic moral panic has instilled fear and hopelessness in British Muslim communities, entrenching feelings of exclusion and alienation among an already ‘othered’ population.