Where's the moral in moral panic? : Islam, evil and moral turbulence

Greg Noble, George Morgan, Scott Poynting

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    ![CDATA[A highly moralized rhetoric of good and evil has become increasingly strident in Western political discourse in the last decade or so, not just as a result of the ‘war on terror’ but also in the wake of the resurgence of social and political conservatisms and their critique of the moral relativism of liberalism and multiculturalism. It has asserted a hardening of boundaries between good and bad, between law-abiding citizens and wrongdoers, endemic to a global culture of fear. The emergence of what is often referred to as ‘Islamophobia’ has become inextricably bound to this rhetoric. Islamophobia, as the intensification of long-standing anti-Muslim prejudice amounting to a widespread hostility in the west, is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. As the Runnymede Trust (1997) report in the UK indicated, it comprises quite diverse elements: ‘closed’ perceptions of Islam as monolithic, static, radically different, inferior, aggressive, manipulative, anti-Western, and so on. Yet this significant report says little about the decidedly moral dimensions of this hostility. Similarly, even though, as Gottschalk and Greenberg (2008: 1067) suggest, ‘morality’ is central to the dominant Western depiction of Islam and Muslims today – in particular the dual focus on Islam as morally militant and Muslims as sexually insatiable – there has been surprisingly little discussion of this aspect. Indeed, Said (1978: 166) showed many years ago that the assumption of the ‘seemingly perverse morality’ of ‘Oriental life’ was fundamental to Western colonial discourses. While a full-scale consideration of the moral dimensions of Islamophobia is beyond the scope of this chapter, I wish to make some contribution towards this by reframing the discussion of the moral panic around Islam in terms of an exploration of ‘moral turbulence’, the complexities of meaning, value and scale which render moral frameworks necessary but inadequate, and which foster the imperative towards the stabilizing of moral categories. This is evidenced particularly in the symbolization of the ‘Muslim’ ‘face of evil’, which functions to ‘fix’ evil as an identifiable physicality that is seen to reflect a deeper ‘truth’ of evil.]]
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationGlobal Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West
    Place of PublicationU.K
    PublisherAshgate
    Pages215-231
    Number of pages17
    ISBN (Print)9781409431206
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

    Keywords

    • Australia
    • Islam
    • Islamophobia
    • Western countries
    • ethics
    • moral panics
    • morality

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