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This paper contends that cultural destruction during genocidal campaigns is a dimension of genocide itself and is evidence of the intent to completely erase the targeted group from existence. It focuses on a powerful, yet under‐examined, form of cultural violence, namely the destruction of cemeteries and graveyards. My argument will be demonstrated through the localised case study of the town of Zvornik, Bosnia–Herzegovina, and the destruction of two Muslim cemeteries that took place there during genocidal campaigns against the Muslim communities of Bosnia–Herzegovina in the 1992–1995 war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores 'everyday' or 'vernacular' conceptions of Muslims, Islam and their relationship to 'British values'. Drawing on original data from focus groups in the East of England, it argues that the relationship is typically constructed around a series of binary pairings. Where Islam is held to be traditional, conservative, pious and outmoded, British values are seen as progressive, liberal, secular and modern. This opposition matters for three reasons. First, it is a contingent construction rather than reflection of realities; one that draws upon Orientalist tropes and militates against alternative ways of imagining this relationship. Second, it does important work at the vernacular level in explaining political dynamics, especially successful integration (because of British liberalism) and the failure thereof (because of Islam's traditionalism). Third, its predication on an essentialised claim of difference inflects even competing efforts to story the British values/Islam relationship which tend, we suggest, to reinforce the positioning of Muslims and their values as somehow beyond or external to Britishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades now and particularly during the 2020 presidential campaign, American conservatives have stressed the need to protect "religious freedom." Building on research documenting a connection between Trump‐support, a desire to privilege conservative Christianity, and perceptions that conservative Christianity is persecuted due to its anti‐LGT (lesbian, gay, or transgender) views, we theorise such factors were the ideological driving force behind prioritising "religious freedom" in the 2020 presidential election. Drawing on national survey data from just after the November election, we find Christian nationalism and perceptions of anti‐Christian discrimination are strong predictors that (1) Americans feel "religious freedom" was an important factor influencing their vote and (2) that they ranked it the single greatest factor influencing their vote. In contrast, the perception that LGT persons are not discriminated against also predicts viewing religious freedom as important, as does a perception of anti‐Semitism, but never perceptions of anti‐atheist or anti‐Muslim discrimination. Findings suggest conservative Christian supremacism, fear of (Judeo‐)Christian persecution and belief that LGT persons are privileged are ideological antecedents of votes for "religious freedom." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baker's work seeks to orientate studies of the Balkans around the idea of "race" - a notion that seems for her to "... almost always pass over the east of Europe and its state socialist past" (1). The Balkans is certainly entangled with global coloniality, as Baker argues, though not merely as its recipient but as its active incubator of racist thinking. Yet from border policies to architectural projects, the Islamic heritage of Balkans has been conceived by white European powers as within I their i sphere of influence that must be kept from pernicious outside influence (Rexhepi, [8], [9]). [Extracted from the article]

Diaspora networks are one of the key, but often invisible, drivers in reinforcing long‐distance nationalism towards the 'homeland' but simultaneously construct nationalist myths within their countries of residence. This article examines Indian diaspora supporters of Brexit and Trump in the United Kingdom and the United States who promote exclusionary nationalist imaginaries. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it analyses British Indian and Indian American users that circulate radical right narratives within the Brexit and Trump Twittersphere. This article finds that these users express issues of concern pertinent to the radical right—for example, Islam and Muslims and the left‐oriented political and media establishment—by employing civic nationalist discourse that promotes cultural nationalism. It sheds light on digital practices among diaspora actors who participate in the reinvigoration of exclusionary nationalist imaginaries of the Anglo‐Western radical right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014, observers of Chinese society have noted an upsurge in Islamophobic sentiment among China's ethnic majority Han. China's Muslims, in particular those who identify as Hui and Uyghur, report an increase in harassment, both online and in person. This Islamophobic backlash occurs in conjunction with retrenchments by the Chinese state on the right to practice religion. What gives rise to this increase in bigotry? This pilot study examines official discourse about Islam through an inductive analysis of the presentation of Muslims in China's state media. Using a process of constant comparative analysis, I examine the state media's portrayal of Muslims in the flagship newspaper, The People's Daily. Drawing from a sample of 70 articles published between 2014 and 2018, I argue that the party's depiction of Muslim minorities in China emphasizes ethnic rather than religious identities, while coverage of global Islam emphasizes Islam as dangerous and associated with extremism. I contend that such depictions carry the unintended consequence of arousing suspicions about China's Muslims among Han. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of India as the world's largest democracy is often lauded, but the re‐election of the overtly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 has increased concerns about the threat to India's multinational democracy and the rule of law. India is not the only democracy facing challenges related to majoritarian nationalism; there has been a worldwide rise in the language of majority 'rights' in democratic systems. The importance of analysing the extent to which the rights of majorities are being increasingly institutionalized within democratic systems has therefore increased. It is vitally important to identify whether tendencies toward ethnic democracy are increasing (and the conditions under which they do so). There may well be red flags that emerge in democratic systems, heralding the potential direction of travel. This article proposes a methodology to identify degrees of ethnic democracy using a combination of formal and informal measures and illustrates it by assessing India through an examination of anti‐Muslim policies and rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, much has been written about the growth of anti‐immigrant sentiment in Western countries. Propagated by the fastest growing party family, far right‐wing parties, there is growing support in Western populations in favour of scapegoating Muslim immigrants for economic, cultural and security problems. However, less has been written on how Muslim immigrants feel about their host country. What is their sense of belonging and identification with their country of residence? In this review article, we summarise the results of 29 studies that explicitly focus on questions of integration, national identity and sense of belonging of Muslim immigrants. The studies we review document a range of outcomes, varying from a low sense of belonging and attachment to the country of residence to extremely high integration levels and loyalty. It seems that most variation depends on the country of residence at the macro‐level and on their education at the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamist movements are often considered the epitomes of transnational movements; however, little is known about the concrete workings of their transnational ambitions. In investigating the evolution of Muslim activists in France from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, this article shows that their embrace of pan‐Islamic ideals initially conflicted with strong investment in (Arab) homeland politics. Later on, their engagement with a French Islam signalled less the emergence of a de‐territorialised, de‐culturalised Islamic identity than it did the assertion of new nationally bounded (French) attachments. Overall, the analysis sheds light on a stimulating puzzle regarding cosmopolitanism: the persistence of national forms of identification in movements that aspire to bypass national affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During the 1960s, the Yugoslav Socialist authorities gradually recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina's Muslims as a nation. Interestingly, in the 1940s, the Yugoslav Communist leaders refused to consider Muslims even as an ethnic group and saw them only as a religious community whose members had to designate themselves as Serbs or Croats. Why did the regime decide to recognise Muslims as a nation in the 1960s, whereas 20 years earlier they supported the opposite position? To understand the shift, this nation‐building process must be understood as the result of a dual dynamic on the federal and the republican level, where important changes occurred. At the federal one, the Communist authorities initiated a decentralisation process within the context of Yugoslav self‐management in the 1950s, which significantly reinforced the republic elites. This coincided with the resurgence of the national question in the whole of Yugoslavia. Simultaneously, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a new elite progressively rose to power in the 1960s and put the ‘Muslim question’ on the political agenda. This led to the gradual increase in status of the Muslims from a religious community to an ethnic group at the beginning of the 1960s and then to a nation at the end of the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the nationalist movement of the Muslim societies which authorized by transnational Islamism. It examines the revived forms of local nationalism that drive conflict among Muslim populations in the world. It also cites the national claims of the Muslims in the disputed territories of the international counterparts.

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to 'follow the law'. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ' Muslims', are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One approach within the Islamic camp treats Islam, which emphasizes overarching notions such as the ' Islamic brotherhood' and ' ummah', as incompatible with ethno-nationalist ideas and movements. It is, however, striking that in the last decades, several Islamic and conservative groups in Turkey have paid increasing attention to the Kurdish issue, supporting their ethnic demands and sentiments. Even more striking, the leftist, secular Kurdish ethno-nationalists have adopted a more welcoming attitude toward Islam. How can we explain such intriguing developments and shifts? Using original data derived from several elite interviews and a public opinion survey, this study shows that the struggle for Kurdish popular support and legitimacy has encouraged political elites from both camps to enrich their ideological toolbox by borrowing ideas and discourses from each other. Further, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists alike utilize Islamic discourses and ideas to legitimize their competing nationalist claims. Exploring such issues, the study also provides theoretical and policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Muslim conquest of the Holy Land from Christendom, the invasion of southwestern Europe in the eighth century, and the Christian struggle, ultimately unsuccessful, to regain the Holy Land from Islam in the Crusades dominated European culture, particularly its poetry, for centuries. From the Old French epic, The Song of Roland (c. 1100) to the Albanian epic, The Highland Lute (early twentieth century), a vast popular culture grew in European vernacular languages in response to Muslim invasions and conquests. This article attempts to elucidate in panoramic form a neglected area of nationalism. It argues that from the medieval period until the fall of the Ottoman empire, poetry was instrumental in the rise of European national identities, partly in reaction to centuries of ascendancy of Islam, which undermined the authority of the Pope, the universal Church, the Gospel and Latin. The defeat of the medieval Church opened the way to narrower, more national and cultural concerns, reflected in a cluster of vernacular European poetic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or 'Moors', who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy-four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long-standing external threats of ethno-linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro-Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of 'external' ethno-nationalist rivalries and 'internal' Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth-century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti-Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals and analyses the ethnic politics mobilised by a fast-growing Islamic movement, the Gülen movement, which emerged in the 1980s in Turkey and expanded to Central Asia in the mid-1990s. Following the micro-sites, where nationness is reproduced as an everyday practice, my ethnographic research in Almaty-Kazakhstan explored the emergent Islamic sensibilities for the nation and ethnic identity. Revivalist Islam has often been essentialised as incompatible with nationalism, since it has been widely associated with the Muslim community rather than nations and nation-states. I argue that this bias is facilitated and maintained by the deep division in the literature. Scholarly work on both Islam and nationalism are split into two opposing approaches, state-centered and culture-centered. The findings of the present study challenge the binary thinking that juxtaposes politics against culture and dichotomises ethnic and state-framed base of nationalism and nationhood. My major finding is that the Gülen movement has not only inherited the symbols and myths of descent from the founding fathers of the Turkish state, but it is also currently reproducing the related ethnic politics in cooperation with–not in opposition to–the secular states in the post-Soviet Turkic world. The study reconciles ethno-symbolic and state-centered approaches in explaining the convergence between Islamic and secular nationalism in the formation of ethnic politics in Almaty-Kazakhstan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several books on nationalism. "An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America," by Joann D'Alisera; "Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America," edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen; "The Politics of Multiple Belonging: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe and East Asia," edited by Flemming Christiansen and Ulf Hedtoft.