I am not the info desk for Islam and Arabs: the racialization of Islam and boundaries of citizenship

By bridging the discussions on critical race and critical citizenship studies, this paper asks how the racialization of Islam shapes the lived citizenship of minorities in the Finnish context. The study focuses on a group of Finnish citizens and residents who have backgrounds in southwest Asia. The 26 people in this group were asked questions about their lived experiences of citizenship and the role of religion in their experiences. The results indicate that regardless of the participants' religious identifications as Muslims or non-Muslims, their belonging was challenged through the mechanism of racialized gaze that framed them as strangers who do not fit into the epistemic community of whiteness. The study introduces the terms selective secularism and labour of explaining to reflect upon the mechanism through which the racialized gaze operates in everyday encounters. At times, some research participants resisted and contested the racialized gaze.