Muslim and dangerous : "grooming" and the politics of racialisation

Contemporary Islamophobia, certainly since 9/11 , has become globalised—at least in the ‘West’ (Morgan and Poynting 2012 ). 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. Globalised images and imagined civilisational clashes can thus swirl around the vortices of any number of quite local events and conflicts: a schoolgirl in a jilbab , halal products in a supermarket, the construction of a mosque or prayer centre, purportedly ‘extreme’ Muslim values in schools of one locality, anti-war protesters with long beards and long rhetoric, and so on. This chapter traces the playing out of just such a relationship between the global and the local in the case of the demonising of Muslim communities that took place after public outrage following a case of ‘grooming’ and sexual violence centred on one locality in north-west England . The authors were intent on researching Muslim communities’ experiences of the hegemonic exhortations to ‘integrate’ into British culture and British values, and their widespread castigation for supposedly refusing or failing to do so (Tufail and Poynting 2013 ). Our empirical investigation was by coincidence centred upon Rochdale , in the Greater Manchester area, at the very time when the media -driven outrage about the ‘grooming’ case hit the headlines. Consequently, every single one of our interviewees alluded, unprompted, to these events, the effects on their communities, of the way that they were represented, and their personal experiences of such ‘othering ’. 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.