The politics of fear: what does it mean to those who are otherized and feared?

Islamophobia has, of late, created a tendency to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation of Islam that does not recognize and respect boundaries imposed by western geopolitics. This has been done by some to create and by others to generate a sense of exclusive unity that would separate all Muslims and make them into others within western societies. It is the contention of this paper that such calls both embody and ignore the diversities of Islam as understood and practised by its adherents. Furthermore by otherizing the entire community of Muslims in the West, the singular label of Islamism marginalizes and may even silence the vibrant contestations among Muslims about their faith and its teachings; these include questions posed by women who may be described as feminists. The attributes of Islamism, ascribed to the faith by public, the media and politicians in the West and adopted by some Muslims primarily as a politically unifying force, are very different from the fluidity and flexibility that has been a historic part of lived Islam. Many Muslims may well aspire to belong to the umma: people of Islam conceptualized as crossing ethnic, racial, geographical and political boundaries. But Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular do not wish to do so at the expense of being otherized and conforming to the negative stereotypes ascribed to them that mask their fluid identities and, in the case of white women, their close ties with their kinship networks. The multiplicity of Muslim's identities sits more easily within the permeable unbounded umma applicable to the global as well as the local without necessarily always privileging one or other identity.