The purpose of this essay is to investigate religious didactic research that could eventually be applied in a teacher’s various forms of teaching and education, so that islamophobia may be eradicated, which leads me to this essay’s question  How can religious didactic research be applied in religious education to combat Islamophobia in schools and classrooms?.  The research required for this essay has been found through various databases, such as Google Scholar, Swepub and ERIC via EBSCO. Through the selected research in this essay, I found that the research had intentions to combat questions and doubts regarding islamophobia in schools, which made it easy for me to choose them. Even though most of my research is established in several foreign countries such as Canada and  the United States, I find my research and their methods relevant to Swedish society as well. I believe my research is more than helpful for me as a yet to be teacher, but also for all the teachers out there. The research combined is able to give the tools needed for a teacher to at least reduce islamophobia in classrooms. Examples of how to do that will be presented in this essay. It is not unknown that prejudice and mockery are things that people have experienced throughout time and therefore I find that this subject is of huge relevance.

I detta SAG framförs huvudsakligen exempel på olika beprövade metoder som lärare kan använda sig utav för att reducera islamofobi i grundskolan och även på gymnasiet. Genom att eleverna utvecklar ett antirasistiskt tänkande leder det till att de också får ett bredare perspektiv på omvärlden. Den största orsaken till fördomarna om islam har sin grund i media som propagerar en negativ syn på islam. Metoderna visar tydligt att man kan minimera elevers fördomar om islam men dock krävs det mer forskning för att få fram metoder som kan tillämpas på olika didaktiska sätt.

This paper deals with how eight Syriac adolescents and young adults have experienced Swedish religious education (RE) in secondary and upper secondary school about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The study reveals that four of the eight respondents experienced tensions and conflicts between Syriac and Muslims students. Two of these respondents revealed experiences of witnessing Syriac students ostracising and subjecting Muslim students to offensive treatment (kränkande behandling). These tensions and conflicts must be understood in the light of the historical and yet ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Turkey. For the Syriacs, these tensions culminated in Seyfo (the Assyrian genocide) in the midst of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, four respondents experienced a frustration that Seyfo was not addressed in neither RE nor history, while the Holocaust is an obligatory part of the Swedish syllabus. Seemingly, this fact furthered these respondents’ frustration. Therefore the respondents argued that Seyfo must be addressed in Swedish RE. The experiences of RE that adressed Judaism in part tell stories of how it triggered anti-Semitic speech, on part of Muslim students and one teacher. The RE on Christianity was partly experienced as having a liberal secular post-Christian perspective as its vantage point. The way Islam was taught was experienced as romanticised, and also proved at times to be essentialist in regards to its perspective.

Rhetorical frames are used to support political agendas, define problems, diagnose causes, make policy judgments, and suggest solutions. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, politicians and media pundits used Islamophobia as a fear-mongering tactic to justify public policy formation. The purpose of this study was to analyze public discourse on Islamic terrorism in arguments advocating government surveillance, restrictive immigration policies, and other erosions of U.S. constitutional protections of its citizens. This study drew on the postmodern theories of Lakoff, Lyotard, and Said to critically examine U.S. political discourse on Islam and terrorism. Three conceptual rhetorical frames were examined: Clash of Civilizations, Endangered Constitutional Protections, and Islamophobia. The key research question asked how U.S. politicians and high-profile national news commentators used biased rhetoric to frame discussions of Islam and terrorism. This qualitative study used content analysis of 44 news reports of crimes that framed these incidents as Islam-inspired terrorism. Study findings suggested that defenders of the USA PATRIOT Act used a Clash of Civilizations frame that pitted Western freedom proponents against radical Muslim fanatics in struggles for social change. U.S. policy makers and news commentators described Islamic inspired terrorism as anti-American vengeance, Jihadism, and/or anti-Semitism to control national debates and information flow. Implications of these findings suggest that an alternative Islamophobic framing can be deployed to make biases explicit, quell anxieties of and about stigmatized groups, raise the self-esteem of the vilified minorities, and decrease the risk of terrorism.

The 'War on Terror' has been the longest ongoing conflict that the US has been involved in and shows no sign of ending in the near future. The threat of terrorism is something that the US government has continually warned the populace about prior to the start of the 'war on terror.' The the fear that the US places on terrorism focuses on Islamic extremism in particular and can be considered to be unjust. This leads to the understanding that the US takes part in Islamophobia because of its continuation of an unjust fear towards Islam. Islamophobia is an idea that has primarily been associated with individuals instead of the state or media. This thesis utilizes the work of Khaled Beydoun to show how the US has kept the idea of Islamophobia away from the state's sphere of responsibility while also creating policy that takes part in Islamophobia. Beydoun provides this thesis with new definitions for Islamophobia that allow for new conclusions to be made when the state is considered. This is combined with an understanding of how the media covers events and protects the state from the ideas of Islamophobia. The understanding of violence, as shown by Asad, created within the state influences this thesis greatly because of its connection to how the state reacts to attacks. The state has historically targeted minority groups as an "other" that can be targeted with policy and seen as a threat to the populace. This has allowed far-right groups who target minority groups to grow without being targeted by the state, these groups are allowed to continue their violence because it aligns with the states goals. This thesis looks to combine these ideas with case studies of different attacks in order to show how the US utilizes Islamophobia in counterterrorism policy. / Master of Arts / The United States has been involved in the 'war on terror' since the attacks of September 11, 2001. This has led the US to creating policy that has been meant to protect the populace from another attack of this caliber from happening. The policies that have been created have focused on targeting the threat of Islamic extremist violence. This thesis looks to show how the US has unfairly targeted Muslim populations with the policy that it has created, while other threats have grown without being addressed. First, it will be shown how Islamophobia is not something that can only be committed by an individual, as commonly believed. This thesis will utilize new definitions of islamophobia to highlight how the state can take part in islamophobia and how Islamophobia is kept from being associated with the state. This will be combined with a discussion of three different cases, as well as a discussion of how the US creates policies. The US historically created policy based upon the enemy that it had identified at the time, the current case being Islamic extremism. This targeting has generally been focused on minority groups while larger far-right groups have gone about without being targeted. Far-right groups grew in this time period because the state did not label them as a threat and they carried out violence against the targets identified by the state. This thesis will show how the state has allowed far-right violence to grow within the state and allowed it to become a part of the violence within the state while targeting minority groups that have smaller followings and pose less of a direct threat. It will look to show how the state has enabled this growth while continually focusing policy in another direction. Combining these ideas with the cases that are studied allow this thesis to answer, "how does the US utilize Islamophobia in counterterrorism policy?"

Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional threat narrative on Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization” of America by its tiny population of Muslim-Americans—a perceived threat sufficiently convincing that legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”? This dissertation takes these puzzles as its object of inquiry. Using a framework that conceptualizes discourses and their agents as fundamentally political, this study deepens the literature’s characterizations of this discourse as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on by examining how it functioned politically as a form of cultural politics, and how such political factors played a role in its expansion in the decade after 9/11. The approach is syncretic, blending Foucauldian genealogy with its emphasis on power, a more interpretive Bourdieuan relational sociology, and synthetic social movement theory. First, it examines the discourse at its macro-level, in the historical and structural factors that formed its conditions of emergence; specifically: 1) the culturally-resident political framing structure that rendered this discourse meaningful and credible; 2) the politically-relevant social-structural resources that rendered it influential; and 3) the more historically contingent or eventful political openings or opportunity “structure” that otherwise enabled, supported, or incentivized it. Then, it examines this threat discourse at its micro-level, biographically profiling three of its more influential polemicists, analyzing their strategies of cultural politics. The study concludes that this threat discourse functioned as a distinctive strategy by the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune site to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics. / Ph. D.

This thesis illuminates meaning(s) of religion in a Swedish radical nationalist context. The empirical study is based on a critical text analysis of author Jonas De Geer, key ideology producer of Swedish radical nationalism. The research questions concern how the publications of Jonas De Geer, during the period 1996-2016, address issues related to religion and Christian imagery. The primary aim of the thesis – to study how the concept of religion is understood, negotiated and used in a Swedish radical nationalist context – is enunciated through an examination of how identity and antagonists are construed through the notions of religion in the material, and how these concepts change over time. An applied text analysis, informed by critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, constitutes the methodological framework of the study. The empirical analysis suggests that Christianity and national identity are construed as intertwined and natural, while Judaism is portrayed as the primary antagonist. Additionally, Islam and modernist ideals are depicted as weapons used by Jewish influence to dominate the West. Drawing on these empirical implications, the study concludes that religion functions as a racist configuration in De Geer's symbolic universe.

SOBOTOVÁ, J. (2014): Islamofobie v Evropě: příklad Česka a Španělska. Univerzita Karlova, Praha, 153 s. The thesis is concentrated on problems which are connected with Islamophobia in Europe. Czechia and Spain have been chosen as model regions. The thesis is put to the theoretical-methodological frame of the new cultural geography and geography of religion. Islamophobia problems are examined from the view of majorities in non-Muslim states. The major purpose of the thesis is verification of three premises by the theoretical methods, research of literature and other professional sources, and empirical procedures, analysis of questionnaires and available datasets. First of all if level of Islamophobia is lower between young generation or elder generation; then if higher level of knowledge about Islam (theology, history, etc.) allows lower level of Islamophobia or if it is valid in the opposite way; and thirdly if it is higher level of Islamophobia in Spain or in Czechia because of the more frequent contact with Muslim culture and society, or if it holds true in the opposite way. Interesting results have been found out during the analysis of questionnaires. These results were verified existence of two different types of Islamophobia. Key words: Islam, Islamophobia, immigration, acculturation,...

The essay aims to study how Islam is presented in the teaching and how these representations are interpreted based on Edward Said's theory of Orientalism and Mattias Gardell's theory of Islamophobia. Said's theory is based on a "we" and "them" perspective where Said believes that ideas have been created that represent the Orient or the Middle East, the Arab and Islam in a way where the West becomes its counterpart. Islamophobia is about perceptions that Islam would be a repressive, aggressive, and combative religion. The study has a qualitative approach that is based on five interviews with teachers who teach religious knowledge. Three teachers teach at the upper secondary school and two teachers teach at the high school. These teachers are not representative of all teachers throughout Sweden. In addition to interviews, observations have also been carried out in a class on two occasions at a high school. The pupils in the class are studying their third year at the upper secondary school, where all the students are over 18 years old and read a vocational preparation program. The result shows that there are many prejudices among students about Islam and that the teachers feel that Islam is the most difficult subject to teach about in the religious education. The reason why it is a complicated subject to talk about in the religious education is because Islam is a controversial subject today that is being raised in the media. The result shows that teachers' teaching on Islam is based on the representations that appear in the media. The teachers claim that the media depicts Islam and Muslims in a negative way, which results in many people perceiving Islam as a woman oppressive, male-dominated, aggressive, and combative religion. / Uppsatsen syftar till att studera hur islam framställs i undervisningen samt hur dessa framställningar tolkas utifrån Edward Saids teori om Orientalism och Mattias Gardells teori Islamofobi. Saids teori grundar sig i ett ”vi” och ”dem” perspektiv där Said menar att det har skapats föreställningar som framställer Orienten eller Mellanöstern, araben samt islam på ett sätt där västerlandet blir dess motbild. Islamofobi handlar om uppfattningar om att islam skulle vara en förtryckande, aggressiv och stridslysten religion. Studien har en kvalitativ ansats som bygger på fem intervjuer med lärare som undervisar i religionskunskap. Tre lärare undervisar på högstadiet och två lärare undervisar på gymnasiet. Dessa lärare är inte representativa för alla lärare i hela Sverige. Utöver intervjuer har det även genomförts observationer i en klass vid två tillfällen på en gymnasieskola. Eleverna i klassen går tredje året på gymnasiet där samtliga elever är över 18 år gamla och läser ett yrkesförberedande program. Resultatet visar att det förekommer många fördomar bland elever om islam och att lärarna upplever att islam är det svåraste ämnet att undervisa om i religionskunskapen. Anledningen till att det är ett komplicerat ämne att tala om i undervisningen är för att islam är ett kontroversiellt ämne idag som aktualiseras i media. Resultatet visar att lärarnas undervisning om islam har sin utgångspunkt i de framställningar som framkommer i media. Lärarna hävdar att media gestaltar islam och muslimer på ett negativt sätt, vilket leder till att många människor uppfattar islam som en kvinnoförtryckande, mansdominerad, aggressiv och stridslysten religion.

Abstract [en] On 27 April 2017 Sweden was struck by an Islamic terrorist attack which with various terrorist attacks in Europe, lead to increased Islamophobia and far-right populism in the country. This has seemingly led to Swedes becoming more prone to believe Islamophobic conspiracy theories. Such as the notion that Muslims are terrorists and Islam a violent religion from which terrorism springs to life. This twisted perception and further Islamophobia can lead to Muslims being perceived as a potential threat, due to being associated with terrorism. Since radicalization has been linked to social alienation and discrimination, the concern regarding increased Islamophobia in Sweden and what consequences it has on radicalization among Muslims in Sweden is warranted. Islamophobia is a form of discrimination against Muslims, but research regarding radicalization has not fully integrated the concept of Islamophobia with Islamic terrorism and its radicalization. This despite the increase of global Islamophobia and the witnessed increase of Islamic terrorism in forms of [Western] foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs), as well as home-grown cells and planned lone wolf attacks in recent years, which all indicate a potential increase in Islamic radicalization. As Islamophobia, far-right populism and extremist sentiments are growing in Sweden, this thesis presents a desk study through a qualitative text analysis, to investigate how the current climate and development affects Muslims in Sweden, and whether they are excluded as a result to presumably enhance national security. This is done through an abductive approach with an analytical framework focused on radicalization processes and the perspectives of inclusion and exclusion. The potential correlation between Islamophobia and radicalization among Muslims, where Sweden is used as an example to exemplify the consequences of Islamophobia regarding Islamic radicalization and security through exclusion contra development through inclusion is presented in this desk study.