Hargreaves, Julian and Iganski, Paul (2016) Islamophobia : reality or myth? PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This thesis examines the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ using statistical data from available large-scale social surveys. The primary aim of the presented research is to determine the extent to which available statistical data support or challenge assertions and conclusions concerning ‘Islamophobia’ found within recent scholarly and policy literature. It uses five large social survey datasets containing data collected and made available between 2006 and 2011. In total, these data relate to the reported attitudes and experiences of over 15,000 Muslim respondents in respect of crime victimization, discrimination and attitudes towards British society and the British state, and the reported attitudes of over 300,000 non-Muslim respondents towards Muslims and Islam. The central contention of this thesis is that available statistics challenge the scholarly literature in that they suggest a more nuanced and complex picture of Muslim victimization and discrimination than the one offered by the various conceptualizations of ‘Islamophobia’ within the literature. Although there is an expansive and expanding body of published research concerning British Muslim communities, ‘Islamophobia’, anti-Muslim discrimination and anti-Islamic sentiment, recent studies have been dominated largely by political, rhetorical or polemical writing, and by qualitative research designs that have used only small samples. This study of nationally representative survey data aims to make a contribution towards criminology and the social sciences by offering a large-scale quantitative study of ‘Islamophobia’ and British Muslim communities and the foundation of an evidence base for future research in this area.