Read Merali’s review of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s excellent ‘Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia’.

First published in Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, 19 September 2019. Read the full article here.

There is so much to recommend Randa Abdel-Fattah’s book, it is difficult to know where to begin.  I also fear that, without a forensic chapter by chapter analysis, I will do an injustice and leave important aspects of this landmark work out.  I start, instead of this, with the overarching response it left with me.  Abdel-Fattah’s work  meticulously explicates what Islamophobia feels like – in all its visceral and emotional sense – for those who express / internalise this bias.  The journey of the book is one of understanding how people are literally affected not simply in an abstract cognitive sense – where bias sits in some part of the (sub)conscious – but with the viscerality of Islamophobia that has the power to create self-fulfilling cycles of agitation, relief, anger and action in those interviewed.

Read the full review here.