Dr Shaheen Kattiparambil, lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds writes a blog piece in https://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/
Extracts
On 9 March 2026, the Labour government unveiled its new social cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters, and on the same day, it also released its long-awaited definition of Islamophobia or what the government calls anti-Muslim hostility. The first document expands the infrastructure through which communities are monitored in the name of cohesion, security and integration. The second refuses the widely used term Islamophobia, replacing it instead with the narrower language of “anti-Muslim hostility”. Considered separately, each announcement may appear administrative. Taken together, however, they reveal a coherent political logic: racism against Muslims is conceptually narrowed at the very moment that the state expands the frameworks through which Muslim life is monitored and regulated.
[. . .] “cohesion” is not being framed simply as neighbourliness or equality but as something to be managed through risk metrics, institutional monitoring and counter-extremism infrastructure.
That matters because, in Britain, once cohesion is fused with extremism, Muslim life is almost always the space in which that fusion is operationalised. The paper states that extremism comes from multiple directions, but emphasises that Islamist extremism is a predominant threat, defining Islamism in sweeping terms, and then builds new systems for monitoring campuses, speakers, local tensions and integration. Even where Muslims are not named in every measure, the historical pattern of British policy means they are the community most likely to experience the downstream effects of these frameworks in the form of referrals, suspicion, compliance burdens and reputational scrutiny. That is not a speculative fear; it follows from the paper’s own decision to route cohesion through Prevent-linked mechanisms and university surveillance structures.
The conceptual shift from Islamophobia to anti-Muslim hostility must also be understood within this broader policy framework. Islamophobia names the racialisation of Muslims as a civilisational threat and directs attention to the institutional and political structures through which that racialisation occurs. By contrast, the term anti-Muslim hostility confines the problem to interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. Racism is therefore reduced to individual behaviour rather than structural power.
The danger is not only the expansion of surveillance but the gradual normalisation of a common sense in which Muslim life is encountered first through the language of risk. It is this dual positioning, recognition without structural accountability, that defines the contemporary governance of Muslims in Britain, where Muslims are acknowledged as victims of “hostility” even as they remain subject to marginalisation and securitisation as a suspect community. It is precisely this condition that Islamophobia was meant to name.
