The rise of far-right communities on digital platforms is a global crisis. Digital Islamophobia tracks far-right groups where they are a virtual and vicious threat, exploring how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Reconstructing this media ecosystem, Digital Islamophobia traces the reactionary political ideologies animating these groups through feminist data analytic techniques in a transnational study of German and American far-right, digitally networked users. This work illustrates far-right communities using data visualization techniques, identifies a taxonomy of user-types, analyzes themes and stories that motivate far-right users, and tracks the spread of linked forms of anti-Muslim sentiment, reactionary ideologies, and (mis)information. In doing so, Digital Islamophobia details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communities on Twitter and analyzing the content of their conversations, Digital Islamophobia provides policy-makers, researchers, and scholars with a potential road-map to stop them.

Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape-from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America. These granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of contemporary religious piety and practice. The book's authors examine an expansive range of digital multimedia technologies as primary “texts.” These include websites, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, online magazines and discussion forums, and religious apps. The contributors also draw on a range of methodological and theoretical models from multiple academic disciplines, including communication and media studies, anthropology, history, global studies, religious studies, and Islamic studies.

Muslims living in Western nations are increasingly facing overt hostility and even hate crimes, both in everyday life and in online interactions. This book examines the experience and effects of those hate crimes on the victims, their families, and their communities. Built on the first national study in the United Kingdom to examine the nature, extent, and determinants of hate crime against Muslims in the physical and virtual worlds, it highlights the relationship between online and offline attacks, especially in the globalized world. It prominently features the voices of victims themselves, which lend nuance to the accounts and make the reality of these attacks and their consequences palpable.

Cyber hate can take many different forms from online material which can lead to actual offline abuse and violence, cyber violence; cyber stalking, and online harassment with the use of visual images, videos, chat rooms, text and social media which are intended to cause harm. This book examines the case for current guidelines dealing with online anti-Muslim abuse and concludes that we require a new understanding of this online behaviour and the impact it can have on vulnerable communities. It is unique as it focuses on new technology in the form of social media and the Internet and explores the challenges the police and other agencies face when confronting anti-Muslim abuse in cyberspace. It also provides a critique of how people are targeted by online offenders and helps us understand online anti-Muslim behaviour in a much more detailed and comprehensive way by bringing together a range of experts who will examine this phenomenon and critically discuss why they think it has become so much more prevalent than it was before.

In the constant deluge of media coverage on Islam, Muslims are often portrayed as terrorists, refugees, radicals, or victims, depictions that erode human responses of concern, connection, or even a willingness to learn about Muslims. On Islam helps break this cycle with information and strategies to understand and report the modern Muslim experience. Journalists, activists, bloggers, and scholars offer insights into how Muslims are represented in the media today and offer tips for those covering Islam in the future. Interviews provide personal and often moving firsthand accounts of people confronting the challenges of modern life while maintaining their Muslim faith, and brief overviews provide a crash course on Muslim beliefs and practices. A concise and frank discussion of the Muslim experience, On Islam provides facts and perspective at a time when truth in journalism is more vital than ever.

In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a "war on terror" ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 alone did not create Islamophobia. This book examines the current backlash within the context of Islamophobia's origins, in the historic relationship between East and West. Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Choice Top Book of 2017 Confronting and combating Islamophobia in America. Islamophobia has long been a part of the problem of racism in the United States, and it has only gotten worse in the wake of shocking terror attacks, the ongoing refugee crisis, and calls from public figures like Donald Trump for drastic action. As a result, the number of hate crimes committed against Middle Eastern Americans of all origins and religions have increased, and civil rights advocates struggle to confront this striking reality. In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love draws on in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American advocates. He shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion. A unique and timely study, Islamophobia and Racism in America wrestles with the disturbing implications of these findings for the persistence of racism—including Islamophobia—in the twenty-first century. As America becomes a “majority-minority” nation, this strategic shift in American civil rights advocacy signifies challenges in the decades ahead, making Love’s findings essential for anyone interested in the future of universal civil rights in the United States.

“A civil but honest dialogue...As illuminating as it is fascinating.” —Ayaan Hirsi Ali Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem to be drawn to extremism? And what do words like jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, Sam Harris—a famous atheist—and Maajid Nawaz—a former radical—demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can find common ground and invite you to join in an urgently needed conversation. “How refreshing to read an honest yet affectionate exchange between the Islamist-turned-liberal-Muslim Maajid Nawaz and the neuroscientist who advocates mindful atheism, Sam Harris...Their back-and-forth clarifies multiple confusions that plague the public conversation about Islam.” —Irshad Manji, New York Times Book Review “It is sadly uncommon, in any era, to find dialogue based on facts and reason—but even more rarely are Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals able to maintain critical distance on broad questions about Islam. Which makes Islam and the Future of Tolerance something of a unicorn...Most conversations about religion are marked by the inability of either side to listen, but here, at last, is a proper debate.” —New Statesman

The Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas explores the emancipatory potential and pitfalls of digital platforms and how well or how poorly they reflect intra-communal diversities within South Asian diasporic communities. This book brings together an international network of scholars, both established and emerging, to explore South Asian diasporic communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. It is a comparative cross-national analysis of the intersection of digital technologies and South Asian diasporas. The book centres on three key themes: the ever-presence of digital spaces and the importance of exploring them as focal points for defining and contesting identities; an exploration of how ‘home’ is represented in and across South Asian diasporic communities; and intra-communal diversity in South Asian diasporic communities. The chapters show how digital spaces sometimes create unprecedented opportunities for diasporic communities to mobilise (multi)cultures, sexuality, race, and queerness within South Asian diasporic communities and to move beyond ‘Desi’ and ‘Brown’ as homogenising identifiers. The contributors also demonstrate that digital spaces can be and have been used to reassert internal hegemonies far from homelands. Examining the discursive meanings of South Asian-ness – ‘Desi’, ‘Brown’, ‘South Asians’– the book foregrounds how it is defined, performed, and contested through digital platforms, in ways that redefine the concept of diaspora in innovative, non-territorialized, polyphonic, variegated, and dialogic ways. A novel contribution to the intersection of global digital inequalities, digital cultures and the South Asian diaspora, this book will be of interest to a wide scholarly audience of digital media, South Asian diaspora, culture and ethnicity, race, and the politics of resistance and counter-hegemonic mobilisations.

-- The editors of this volume are mid- to senior-level scholars who each have significant publications on digital hate and extreme speech. The collection arises out of a conference which received EU funding to study the rise and spread of extreme speech in the digital age. -- Any good work on digital extreme speech would be useful in an era of right-wing nationalism, rampant racism, and online calls for violence. What makes this collection particularly significant, though, is its focus on expanding the conversation to encompass a more global outlook. In doing so, it encourages readers to have a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the Internet operates across the world. -- Methodologically and theoretically, it combines the lens of media anthropology and communication studies. This makes it a unique contribution to anthropology and communication studies, advancing as well growing scholarly interests in digital politics and online communication among sociologists, political scientists, international studies and development studies experts. -- The audience for the work is upper level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars working in global communications, new media studies, international studies, anthropology and sociology as it relates to media and the Internet, and political science. The work would also appeal to media activists, NGOs engaged in hate speech interventions and peacebuilding, and governmental and media organizations.