Research has provided insight into ideas, agents and patterns of inequality associated with Islamophobia. Yet, we know less about why anti-Muslim racism is so virulent and persistent today. Focusing on post-unification Germany, we explore the broader function Islamophobia fulfils for society. We draw on a discourse analysis of statements by four public figures, the publicists Monika Maron and Alice Schwarzer, and the politicians Vera Lengsfeld and Beatrix von Storch; two of them are from Germany's former East, and the other two from the former West. We found little evidence of specific regional 'flavours' of anti-Muslim racism, but noted that the speakers' diverging positionality in re-unified Germany shapes their Islamophobic agitation. Our analysis shows how 'old' and 'new' Germans distinctly participate in recreating western identities as the unmarked norm. Anti-Muslim racism, we argue, plays an important role in everyday discursive acts of nation-building, and assists in justifying multi-layered patterns of stratification. Outward projections onto an 'Other', the 'enemy within', fulfil a key function: the integration of a highly polarized society, at least on the symbolic level. The collective in need of integration, our analysis suggests, may therefore not necessarily be the one that is the main target of such efforts.

Sind antimuslimische Diskurse Ausdruck einer aktuellen Form des Rassismus? Anhand von Fallbeispielen - darunter auflagenstarke Buchpublikationen, Zeitungsartikel, Webseiten und Zuschriften an muslimische Verbände - geht Yasemin Shooman den antimuslimischen Narrativen und ihren Funktionen nach. Sie untersucht die artikulierten Selbst- und Fremdbilder ebenso wie die Rolle historischer Bezüge und arbeitet das Repertoire dominanter antimuslimischer Stereotype und Topoi heraus. Die empirische Analyse trägt auch zur Theoriebildung in dem relativ jungen Forschungsfeld bei und zeigt, dass eine Rassifizierung religiöser Zugehörigkeit zu beobachten ist, die auf dem Ineinandergreifen der Kategorien Kultur, Religion, Ethnizität, Geschlecht und Klasse basiert.

Before the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik committed his attacks on 22 July 2011 in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, which left 77 people dead, he uploaded a manifesto of more than 1,500 pages onto the Internet and simultaneously sent it by email to more than 1,000 recipients. He thereby spread his worldview, which was greatly marked by his hatred of Islam and Muslims. The manifesto consists largely of extensive excerpts from internationally based anti-Muslim websites. Although Breivik's terror attacks are certainly an extreme case, it has been observed over the past few years that the World Wide Web plays a significant role in disseminating the sort of anti-Muslim thought that the perpetrator invoked.1 This also applies to mobilizing people in person, as the protest movement Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident, known by its German acronym PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West], which started in Dresden in October 2014, demonstrates. The group recruited its supporters primarily through social networks such as Facebook, and was able to put up to 25,000 demonstrators in the street.2Statements against Muslims ranging from the discriminatory to the openly hateful have been expressed in diverse political milieus. On extreme right-wing websites, such as that of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Muslims are attacked as the quintessence of the "other" and the epitome of the "foreigner." These extremists are to be distinguished from Islamophobic groups who offer a different justification of their similar attitudes toward Muslims in Europe. In contrast to right-wing extremists, they take an explicitly philo semitic and pro-American stance and pretend to approve of democracy and human rights. My article focuses on such groups, which can be classified

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