Islamophobia has become the “defining mental state of the new Europe”, concentrated mainly in the image of the female Muslim immigrant. In a discourse mainly driven by feminists, writes Rita Chin, what began as the expression of concern for Turkish women and their problems in West German society became the articulation of boundaries between East and West, between feminist praxis and unreformed patriarchy. […] Since 9/11, efforts to construct a shared European identity have increasingly been conducted in a civilizational register. As part of the 2003 European opposition to the Iraq war, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and his French counterpart Jacques Derrida issued an urgent plea for a common European vision grounded in the shared heritage of Western civilization. The Italian author Umberto Eco’s contribution to this call included an inventory of core European characteristics based on the Enlightenment project of modernity. The initiative was an unself-conscious exercise in boundary drawing and cultural demarcation. Yet this public naming of values, traditions, and histories effectively marked the line much less between Europe and the United States (the effort’s ostensible target) than between Europe and its Muslim minorities. The security anxieties produced by 9/11 and its aftermath only exacerbated this inclination, explicitly transforming Muslims and Islam into the fundamental contemporary threat to European society and culture. “At the high tide of Europeanism, glued together by the so-called war on terror”, in short, “there emerged an in-turned and recentred pan-European, anti-Islamic racism.” More here.