Neo-Islamophobia: A New Western Social Order Muhammad Tariq

Traditionally, the term Islamophobia refers to prejudice, racism, and/or securitization which implies that this phenomenon operates at cognitive, cultural, or structural levels. The current researchers anticipate that the term now represents an Islamophobic social order in the West where hatred for Islam and everything related to it appears to be the collective behaviour of the society. This points to a new social reality that goes beyond the psychological problem, now referred to as Islamophobia. Therefore, the researchers have added the prefix "neo" to this term in order to account for Islamophobia's psychosocial nature which manifests itself in discourses and practices. The purpose of this research is to study Islamophobic discourses in the media of two Western societies in order to better understand the nature of Islamophobia in each: the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (USA). It studies leading articles (that is, 446 in toto) from The Independent and The Washington Post between November 2016 and December 2017, using DHA's analytical framework. This study concludes that traditional "Islamophobia" dominates in the UK context, where Islam is perceived as a threat to Europe's symbolic identity and "Neo-Islamophobia" in the US context, where Islam is seen as a threat to the socio-political order. It also proposes a cyclical process of neo-Islamophobia, beginning with problematizing Islam, and progressing to “otherizing,” racializing, and finally securitizing Muslims. The researchers, however, recommend similar studies in other contexts too.


Introduction
Concerns about Islamophobia have grown considerably as an aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Terrorism and extremism are now considered as the major threats to international peace and security and are perceived to be derivatives of radical Islam. Consequently, several groups of people have been portrayed as security threats, especially Muslims, whether they form a minority or a country's majority population. The perceived fear of Islam has escalated to the point where Muslim identity is seen as a threat to the West as a whole, Europe, and the US in particular. On this pretext, Muslims and their religious sites are targeted for racial, criminal, and arson attacks across the West.
"Words create worlds" and "what begins with a word ends in a deed", as renowned Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observed. 1 This is true of President Donald Trump and his advisers who frequently used the word "terror" in their rhetoric against Islam and the media amplified such rhetoric to the wider public, fomenting hatred for Islam that forced people to attack Muslims and Islamic places in the US society. For instance, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) reported 302 cases of hate-crimes and xenophobic political speeches in the US during Trump's first year in office, with 82% of them fuelling anti-Muslim sentiments. These incidents increased by more than 45% in the year preceding the 2016 election cycle, reaching a level not seen since the year following 9/11. 2 Furthermore, one out of every five assailants used Trump's name, his government policies, or campaign slogans during their attacks, demonstrating that their behaviour was a reaction to terror discourse. 3 This illustrates that fear drove these hate-crimes, as well as the fact that when a state's officials cultivate fear of Islam, Islamophobia becomes the mental behaviour of the society as a whole. This media(ted) phenomenon extends beyond what the Runnymede Trust first defined as "anti-Muslim prejudice," 4 and now as "anti-Muslim racism." 5 This paper aims to study this new phenomenon. As Durkheim recommends, while trying to study a social problem, the efficient causes that produce it and the functions that it performs must be explored separately. Methodologically, it is logical to identify the causes of a problem before attempting to determine its effects. 6 The conventional media's portrayal of Muslims often portrays Islamophobia as a rational choice, despite the fact that it only identifies symptoms rather than root causes that can be identified in history. 7 Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to probe into the historical causes of Islamophobia and its manifestations in Western media in order to figure out what caused Islamophobia to manifest as neo-Islamophobia in modern times.

Causes of Islamophobia
Islamophobia is the modern offshoot of Orientalism, which Beydoun describes as "a master discourse" that frames Islam as "the civilizational antithesis of the West." 8 Edward Said traced the origins of this discourse back to 1312 when the Vienne Council decided to establish Oriental language chairs at European universities, 9 whereas Tolan attributes it to "the defensive reactions of Christian Orientals, unwitting subjects of the new Muslim empire." 10 This recalls the state of affairs during early 7 th century, when Islam emerged from the Arab world, shocking the whole world, putting European dominance at risk, shifting power balance, overthrowing centuries-old empires, and setting new global standards. When the first Muslims arrived in the Spain, North Africa, and Levant, they posed a threat not only to the pre-Islamic Christians' narrative about the elevation of Christianity to the level of a state religion, however, also to their standing in the emerging world. 11 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 The Arab conquest and following power transition radically changed the landscape of 7 th and 8 th century Byzantium, causing changes in politics, culture, and even religion as the Byzantines began to succumb to Islamic rule. 12 The Orthodox Christian hierarchy, which served as the spiritual arm of political power, observed Islam as a serious threat to Christianity's and the Christian world's survival. 13 Both theologically and politically, the Church's leaders had to provide scriptural-based explanations for the growth of a new faith and the decline of territorial and political powers. 14 Perhaps, John of Damascus (675-750 AD) was the first to declare that Islam had given birth to a "problem" for the Christian world. He started a debate over Islam being a fake religion, calling it "punishment for the unscrupulous sins of other religions and their followers." 15 His work "Heresy of the Ishmaelites" is generally acknowledged as the first qualified response from inside Orthodox Christianity, positioning John as the first polemicist against Islam and even the "first" apologist for Muslims. 16 His controversial arguments centered on three main points: firstly, he claimed that Prophet Mohammad (SAW) was a self-proclaimed representative of God on earth, and he portrayed various aspects of his life and character in a negative light. 17 Secondly, he argued that the Qur'ān was a human invention rather than a divine revelation. Finally, he characterized Islam as a collection of heresies, using extremely negative language and imagery to support his claim. For instance, there are words like "Saracen" as well as imagery like "arrogant soul(s) of the enemy, sons of Ishmael" or "a race born of a slave", which not only fits into the narrative about Islam's distorted origins, however, also problematized and otherized Muslims because of their background and racial/ethnic roots. 18 In a comparative study on Christian and Islamic theology, perhaps no single Christian thinker is more important than John, 19 because his dozen or so pages on Islam are still discussed in scholarly circles. 20 Since these texts are the earliest Christian reflections on modern Islamophobia and undoubtedly the most important pieces for a long time, John might be seen as the founding Christian tradition concerning Islam. 21 His writings influenced other polemicists, especially monks and Church leaders who launched a fierce campaign of demonization and vilification against the religion, its Prophet (SAW), and its adherents. Being an elder of Christianity enjoying prophetic status after Jesus (SAW) in humans and slightly lesser than Jerusalem in terms of sacred places, John played a DEPARTMENT OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 significant role in shaping early negative perceptions of Islam. 22 These perceptions eventually evolved into prejudice, to some extent, fear towards Islam, leading to various forms of discrimination and bias.
One manifestation of this prejudice was the othering discourse, which served as a vehicle to express Europeans' pride in themselves and contempt for others. The Church was the only most notable proponent and agent of medieval discrimination against Muslims, which Daniel termed "cultural ethnocentrism." 23 It is important to mention that Christians' hostility towards Islam stems not just from Muslims' ongoing military and political triumphs, but also from feelings of religious or cultural inferiority. It is generally assumed that Muslims claimed that their military victories demonstrated their faith's and civilization's superiority over others, and as a result, they gained a large number of converts. This claim left adherents of other religions with a sense of cultural inferiority. 24 Church elders articulated this inferiority complex by portraying Muslims as "the rod of God's fury" or the "scourge of God's fury" in order to persuade Christians that their defeats are not due to their faith's or culture's inferiority, but because they are not good Christians. 25 These images, on the other hand, emphasized the fundamental 'Otherness' of emerging and powerful foe, thereby psychologically dividing the two communities in Spain and Byzantium. 26 Consider 9 th century's Saint Eulogius, who declared that "our inheritance" had been given to strangers, "our houses to aliens" and that "servants have ruled over 'us': there is none that doth deliver 'us' out of their hand." 27 By the 11 th century, the concept of Islamic "Other" was rationalized and used as a building block in the crusade propaganda, characterizing Muslims as "implacable enemies," proponents of a religion "devised to supplant and destroy Christianity" and that "there was no possibility (in theory) of reconciliation." 28 The enemy image enabled not only Crusades against Muslims, but also societal discrimination against Muslims since legal measures were taken to keep Christians and Muslims apart, whether in Christian or  It is worth noting that most of the Crusades' propaganda, as well as all of the intellectual propaganda, was written by clerics. 30 The clergy, of course, was not a homogeneous group; it included people with varying degrees of power, interests, skills, abilities, and cultural backgrounds. The more intellectual (albeit perverse) propaganda came from clergy with a greater level of competence and intelligence, as well as a spontaneous interest in the idea of "Christendom." 31 Peter the Venerable of Cluny (France) (1092-1156) was the most influential and scholastic priest of the time, whose verbal participation and moral backing of the 12 th -century Crusades against Muslims proved to be a way towards a destiny where Christianity wins over Islam. 32 His 'verbal martial art' 22 Iqbal,Islamophobia,83. 23  and polemical writings served as a literary counterpoint to the Crusaders' military campaigns. 33 Nonetheless, he realized that an ideology could not be fought only by force; it needed to be defeated on moral and intellectual levels as well. 34 In 1143, Peter got the Qur'ān translated into Latin to preach Christians that Qur'ān is a demonic scripture that Muhammad (SAW) produced with the cooperation of Jews, Christians, and heretical doctors. 35 He attempted to prove Muhammad (SAW) to be a false prophet and Islam to be a summation of Christian heresies. 36 Peter used polemical arguments to denigrate the Prophet (SAW) and the religion he preached. 37 This implies that Islam was viewed as a rigid precursor of violence, posing an imminent threat to the continuity of Western ideologies, cultures, and political systems.
Even after Peter died in 1956, his literary legacy continued to taint Christian-Muslim relations. Between 1311-12, the Church's General Council in Vienne, France, endorsed Peter's strategic design as a future course of action to control the spread of Islam. 38 The Council initiated an academic and political crusade against Islam, paving the way for "Orientalism," an academic discipline that worked in collaboration with European political powers against Muslims through discursive practices. 39 Orientalism began as a means of dealing with the military, political, and sociocultural challenges posed by the Ottoman empire's expansion into Europe, then evolved into a means of assisting European powers in colonizing the Muslim world's eastern regions for imperialist ambitions, before morphing into mediated "Islamophobia" for political reasons, which is now a means of governance. The next section examines how contemporary Islamophobia operates and how such operations produce a neo-phenomenon.

The Construct: Neo-Islamophobia
The term Islamophobia is now widely used to characterize "fear" and "hate" against Islam and Muslims, which the Runnymede Report (1997) defined as "unfounded hostility towards Islam" with symptoms ranging from "discrimination" to "exclusion" of Muslims. 40 The report triggered academic debate over the theoretical underpinnings of Islamophobia, its functions, and symptoms in the Western societies, with Iqbal presenting the most recent explanation, which views it as a corpus of three phobias: "threat perceptions," "prejudice," and "racism." 41 These phobias appear to be the result of three processes: "problematization," 42 "otherization," 43 and "racialization." 44 These DEPARTMENT OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 processes, in fact, comprise three levels of Islamophobia, with the first being the basic process of making negative perceptions of Islam that serve as justifications for the second and third level functions and subsequent symptoms. Literature demonstrates that since Iranian Revolution, Western discourses have fanned fears of a clash of civilizations, resulting in the perception of Islam as an existential threat. 45 A "perceived threat" causes a "fear" reaction, which is the underlying reason for all "phobias." 46 Fear produces "hate" feelings, which serve as the basis for what Iqbal calls "a negative posturing toward Islam and Muslims." 47 Since 9/11, the most prominent societal manifestations of an Islamophobic attitude in the US and Europe have been verbal and physical hostility against Muslims and Islamic artefacts. 48 This hostility signifies the individual-centric nature of Islamophobia, which begins as "attitudinal bias" (prejudice) and then transforms into "behavioural bias" (discrimination), manifesting itself in a variety of ways at different levels in society. 49 While prejudice and discrimination are distinct, together they form the basis of "racism." 50 This implies that racism is the manifested form of prejudice in that it is "a form of racial discrimination that stems from conscious and unconscious personal prejudice." 51 Allport's pioneer perspective explains prejudice as "an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization." 52 It arises from one's strong attachment to a certain group, which eventually makes one prejudiced against some other groups. It can be felt or expressed, but its expressions are often directed from the dominant to the dominated. 53 These expressions take the form of "otherization," which is a discursive process by which a dominant ingroup (Us, the Self) establishes one or more out-groups (Them, the Others) by stigmatizing differences (real or imagined) and presenting them as a negation of identity and thus a potential motivation for discrimination. 54 These differences are then legitimized and normalized through the representational process of ''racialization," which is often used synonymously with ''racism.'' 55 In essence, racism is a culturally sanctioned strategy for defending the advantages of power, privilege, 45 John L. Esposito, "Foreword." In Fear of Muslims?: International Perspectives on Islamophobia, edited by Douglas Pratt and Rachel Woodlock, v-vii. (Switzerland: Springer, 2016 and prestige that "Whites have because of racial minorities' subordinated position." 56 It serves as an "ideology of exclusion and inclusion." 57 This points to Islamophobia's structural operation, which Beydoun compares to structural racism. 58 The above facts illustrate the bottom-up character of Islamophobia, but it has a top-down character too. Consider structural racism, which is the "inequalities rooted in the system-wide operation of a society that excludes substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions." 59 In effect, racial discrimination in these institutions "derives from individuals carrying out the dictates of others who are prejudiced." 60 The motivations behind bottom-up and top-down discrimination or exclusion are different, yet both are manifestations of the individualistic-character of Islamophobia. These manifestations signify a psychological phenomenon, but not a psychosocial phenomenon in which hate for Islam becomes a collective behaviour since real racism exists only among the "extreme right" in the US and European societies. 61 This implies that while all Europeans and Americans may harbour psychological prejudices against Islam, this does not imply that they are all Islamophobic in their behaviour. When the extreme right dictates a country, Islamophobia takes on a collectivist-character and so mobilizes hate as the behaviour of the society as a whole. This phenomenon extends beyond existing definitions of Islamophobia, allowing the term to be prefixed with "neo" to account for its new character. Neo-Islamophobia serves as a "political strategy" 62 for "the disciplining of Muslims by reference to an antagonistic Western horizon." 63 It works through the racially embedded process of securitization, 64 in which state agents (political leaders and high-level decision-makers) rhetorically transform a subject into a matter of urgency and security-thinking, which is known as an extreme version of politicization that enables the use of extraordinary procedures against that subject. 65 This demonstrates the "state-centric nature of securitization," 66 which also involves "functional actors," including media institutions, which propagate securitarian narratives and thereby cultivate public acceptance/rejection, and reactions. 67 Neo-Islamophobia thus breeds fear and hatred for Islam in all societal institutions, giving rise to an Islamophobic order. Consider Belgium's ban on the burka, France's refusal to grant a Muslim woman French citizenship because she insisted on wearing a veil, and prohibiting the wearing of religious clothing in schools in France; or Switzerland's ban on the DEPARTMENT OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 construction of minarets because they are signs of "Islamization," or German Chancellor Angela Markel's emphasis that "mosque cupolas" should not be higher than "church steeples," which are not isolated instances of Muslims' securitization. Rather, these governmental actions are a product of a neo-Islamophobia that runs deeply in European governance systems, including the judicial system. 68 It normalizes Islamophobic tendencies in the public since securitization shapes both the securitizers and the securitized. 69 Consider the surveillance of Muslims in the West, which is the product of Muslim securitization after 9/11 in the US 70 and after the 7/7 bombings in Europe. 71 It serves as a security apparatus of control as well as a cause of insecurity for both the securitized and other people. 72 Surveillance tactics are critical in the administration and confinement of the global population because they create a global "banopticon" that is designed, in part, to keep foreigners on the fringes of society. It has now evolved into the banopticon dispositif, a new kind of liberal regime governmentality. 73 That dispositif is marked by "exceptionalism" within liberalism, a logic of "exclusion" based on the creation of profiles that determine who is "abnormal" and the necessity of freedom translated into a "normalization" of social groupings whose actions are watched for the present and future. 74 This logic suggests that police are more concerned with the surveillance of those defined as security threats than with the general community. 75 When someone is securitized, they are said to fall into the special category of an "existential threat," and they take on a distinct character based on a friend-vs-enemy dichotomy and urgency. 76 This distinguishes neo-Islamophobia from old-Islamophobia in that the latter is based on the image of Muslims as "other," whereas the former is based on the image of them as "enemy." Otherness consists of prejudiced or racial feelings, but an enemy-image cannot consist only of feelings of hatred or antipathy since it always involves the possibility of violence and destruction. It is a question of life and death. In this case, neo-Islamophobia would be "a hostile attitude towards Islam and Muslims based on the image of Islam as an enemy, as a threat to 'our' well-being, and even to 'our' survival." 77 However, "enmity" and "otherness" are the two identity-creating and identity-reversing concepts of exclusion. Every enemy is an "other," but not every "other" is an enemy to a state, 68  implying that the creation of an enemy image is similar to the process of creating an "other," which is a three-step process as explained-above. If the "other" is perceived to be existentially threatening at a certain point in time, it can easily be transformed into an "enemy." 78 In this case, Muslims' otherness was first defined in response to fear reaction to rising of Islam in the 7th century. When they conquered parts of Europe, this otherness became an enemy-image, inciting widespread fear for Islam, facilitating crusades against far-off Muslims, and restrictions on Muslim communities in medieval Europe. Consider Vienne Council's decisions to deal with Islam's threats, which included regulations restricting the Muslim call to prayer on Christian lands. 79 This might be regarded as the first instance of Islam's securitization, facilitated by Church elders.
However, as Baysal argues, securitization lasts until the securitized subject is fully desecuritized, which, in the case of Islam, continues. 80 It posed a threat to the Europe's survival for almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish arrival in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. 81 Following that, this threat remained inactive, but the image of Muslim "other" remained functional, manifesting itself on different levels in European societies. Islam's enemy-image reactivated in 1979 when the Iranian revolution was interpreted as a "return to extreme orthodoxy in Islam," and Islam was labelled "anti-Western in nature." 82 Since then, the media, government, geopolitical strategists, and academic experts have all agreed that Islam poses an existential threat to Western civilization. 83 This implies that Muslims are not the West's natural-born enemies, but they become that (enemy) as a result of local circumstances, 84 as witnessed after 9/11 attacks in the US. In this way, the long-securitized image of Islam and Muslims has now grown into what Vuorinen calls an "arch-enemy," a persistent threat that appears to be ever-present. 85 Rather, it has now become a political tool for mobilising national hatred for Islam. Consider Donald Trump, who rose to power with a demonstrably Islamophobic campaign. During his campaign, for example, he told CNN that "I think Islam hates us" and that "it's difficult to separate "radical" Islam from Islam itself". 86 When a state's president uses such hateful words for Islam, his words translate into collective hate behaviour by society as a whole since he represents a state (collective) rather than an individual. Similar behaviour was witnessed in the US society during the first three months of Trump's presidency. For example, several mosques and religious centers received threatening letters stating Muslims "children of Satan" and "vile and filthy people," and 78 Marja Vuorinen, "Introduction: Enemy Images as Inversions of the Self," In Enemy Images in War Propaganda, edited by Marja Vuorinen, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 1-3. 79 87 This new social condition in the US points to the psychosocial character of Islamophobia. For this character, the media plays a critical role in that it often chews up elite hate narratives and therefore foments hatred on a collective level, from the cognitive to the behavioural patterns of a society as a whole. Take, for contrast, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, who is well-known for his anti-Islamic views and routinely exhibits his hatred in the media, but he has failed to generate the same level of popular indignation as Trump. The point of consideration is that he is now speaking as an individual and does not have ultimate control over the state, but this could change if he gains this power. This was observed in the case of Trump, who was anti-Islam even before ascending to office but was unable to create an anti-Islam climate on such a large scale as he did as President.
In sum, the term "Islamophobia" refers to an ideology that functions in two ways. When it takes on a bottom-up character, it generates a psychological phenomenon that begins at the individual level and extends to the institutional level, driving attitudinal hatred for Islam, which manifests as discrimination and exclusion of Muslims. When it takes on a top-down character, it creates a psychosocial phenomenon that begins at the top of a state and shifts to the government and social institutions, thus mobilizing collective hate for Islam. The latter activates hatred at all levels, making society itself Islamophobic, and has the potential to change the existing social order into an Islamophobic one, with hatred for Islam becoming the new normal. Thus, Islamophobia has changed its character and the term has now come to symbolize a neo-phenomenon -a new social order that is taking place in some western societies. Neo-Islamophobia, therefore, is a name for a Western new social order. It is not essentially a global order, nor is it of the West as a whole, but rather of certain societies that represent the West, e.g., the United States.
Whether it is "old" or "new" Islamophobia, both are products of similar discourses. However, the nature of Islamophobia is established within the discourse that problematizes Islam, and for studying that, Michel Foucault suggests investigating "how" and "why" something is created as a "problem" that needs a solution. 88 Given that the elite discourses that manifest in the media generate public acceptance or rejection and, accordingly, collective reactions, the researchers analyse Islamophobic discourses in the media in the US and the UK. This discourse analysis also assists in identifying the nature (old or neo) of Islamophobia in these societies. As Mautner argues, national dailies and newspapers of any society are the main sources for studying the manifestations of dominant discourses in that particular society. 89 Therefore, these researchers chose one leading newspaper from each society, i.e., The Washington Post (WP onward) from the US and The Independent (ID onward) from the UK. They used the following research methodology:

Methodology
The methodology used in this analysis is based on an analytical framework drawn from the discourse-historical-approach (DHA). This framework is three-dimensional and aids in the study of prejudiced ideologies, such as Islamophobia, as well as how discriminatory practices against target 87  groups are linguistically prepared, legitimized, and normalized. 90 The first step in any discourse analysis is to systematically collect data. In this study, the data comprises news stories and leading articles, including features and editorials, published in two selected newspapers. The data was obtained from LexisNexis, by searching for the word "Islam" and "Muslim." This search yielded overall 446 newspaper articles (228 from ID and 218 from WP) published between wee days of November 2016 and end of December 2017. This period corresponds with Trump's announcement of a moratorium on Muslim immigration in order to combat radical Islamic terror. Such periods are considered crucial discourse moments in news coverage since they "involve specific happenings" that may challenge the "established discursive positions." 91 The first level involves downsizing the data to the relevant content for in-depth analysis. At this level, all the articles were analyzed for Islamophobic discourses, which involved several open-ended readings of each article. As a result, 38 articles (texts and up) were identified as having the most Islamophobic discourses -21 from WP and 17 from ID. These texts then underwent an in-depth analysis at the second level. This analysis is based on the examination of basic representational strategies for producing prejudice as a collective attitude: "nomination" and "predication." 92 The list of strategies is vast and comprehensive; however, it was required to categorize them for analytical purposes in order to highlight those that may be especially important to this study. Owing to this, these strategies were categorized from level 1 to 3 depending on their intended representational purposes, which are most sensitive to the above-proposed Islamophobia processes: "problematization", "otherization" and "racialization". • Level-1 examines the strategies of "collectivization," which is realized in texts through "collective proper nouns" (e.g., al-Qaeda), and "collective nouns" (nation); and "socialproblematization", realized through "criminonyms" (killer), "negationyms" (illegal), "negative ideologonyms" (jihadist), and "victimonyms" (victim); and "militarisation", realized through "militarionyms" (militant). These strategies express the representational processes that produce or reduce collective identities to a problem.
Lastly, the linguistic means and specific, context-dependent linguistic realizations were evaluated using the "triangulation procedures" proposed by Wodak and Reisigl. 93 DHA recommends these procedures, which include examining "intertextuality" and "interdiscursivity" to reduce the risk of critical biasing and ensure the findings' validity. 90 Ruth Wodak, and Martin Reisigl, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (Routledge, 2001

Findings
The linguistic means specific to each strategy were used to realize the manifestations of representational strategies used for Muslims in the analyzed texts. All instances of linguistic realizations were physically extracted, transcribed, and classified into pre-defined Islamophobia levels. Due to space constraints, Table-1 summarizes the results of each strategy's linguistic realizations based on the hierarchy of these levels.
Table-1 demonstrates that Level-1 strategies account for the greatest proportion of instances identified in the analyzed texts, indicating that the fundamental process of Islamophobia construction in analyzed texts is one of "problematization". These findings are consistent with historical representational patterns that have created the image of Islam as a "problem" since its rebirth, facilitating otherizing of Muslims, racializing them, and finally securitizing them as "enemies." The next section examines "how" and "why" Islam is represented in the two newspapers, as well as whether this representation contributes to old or neo-Islamophobia. Muslims into a single category, which is a process of organizing perception and judgement. 94 The findings revealed that collective nouns such as "community," "nation," and "world" were frequently used to achieve that goal. The identification of prediction strategies also revealed that the word "Muslim" was the most commonly utilized left-hand collocate of these nouns. The terms "Muslim community," "Muslim nation," and "Muslim world," for example, appeared frequently in these newspapers, all of which present the picture of a "monolithic Islam." 95 In the first Islamophobia Report, 96 this was defined as the basic perception of Islam that causes Islam to be problematic, thus creating Islamophobia. However, the nature of Islamophobia, its functions, and the psychological or psychosocial impact are set within the discourse context, and change as the context changes.
In the UK discourse context, Islam was constructed through a "narrative of hatred" in the form of discriminatory discourses directed at people of religious affiliation. 97 It was defined in these discourses by its branch, "Wahhabism," and was characterized as a "prejudiced ideology," "intolerant of all who disagreed with it," including "members of other Muslim communities such as the Shia or women." 98 Consider the claims that "Islam is intolerant of other religions and cultures," "misogynistic ideology," or "a violent jihadist ideology that causes terrorism," which were found in ID's discourses that tend to characterize Islam as a prejudiced religion. These findings are supported by Mandaville and Hamid, who describe Wahhabism as a rigid brand of Islamic religion that radicalizes Muslims and drives them to terror. 99 Alvi considers terrorism the product of radical ideologies based on Wahhabi/Salafi beliefs. 100 Similarly, Rakic and Jurisic claim the Salafist-jihadist movement, which seeks a return to traditional Islam, is to blame for the emergence of Wahhabism as a violent ideology in Europe. 101 Two names, ISIS and al-Qaeda, represented this movement in ID's texts that were designated as groups that carry out ideological "prejudices to what they see as a logical and violent conclusion." 102 They were considered a kind of "Islamic Khmer Rouge," 103 when "an armed (communist) group with a deeply twisted interpretation of the faith presided over the mass deaths of its own people." 104 When Cambodia's Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took power in 1975, they slaughtered anyone who spoke a European language or wore European clothing, including Cham Muslims who were killed because of their identity. 105  to Robinson, ISIS is a group that considers "the display of Western cultural influence to be a major indicator of potential apostasy and social contamination" of Islam. 106 Dillon declared ISIS as the key source of global terrorism. 107 Though the word "terrorism" is a securitizing one, the designated group is securitized when state actors frame it as an existential threat to society and its citizens. 108 However, the current study found no mention of state actors in ID discourses, which could indicate the government's intention to securitize Islam as an existential threat. Furthermore, the threat posed by ISIS did not apply to all Muslims, but just to those who were deemed to represent a branch of Islam. Consider Table 1, which reveals that the ID used more specific nouns (9.18%) rather than generic nouns (12.94%) for Muslims, which could potentially generalize the terror problem to all Muslims. 109 These findings imply that the ID painted a symbolic picture of Islam as a prejudiced religion, thereby symbolizing it as a threat to Europe's symbolic (cultural) identity.
In the US discourse context, Islam was constructed through the "narrative of security" that conveyed the official US image of Islam, which presents it as a "political system" rather than a religion. 110 This "system" was characterized as "totalitarianism," with characteristics that put Islam in opposition to democratic institutions and societal values. Consider the claims in WP texts that "Islam is anti-democracy," "Islam is anti-freedom," and "Islam is anti-women." These claims tended to portray Islam as a political system. For example, US House Speaker Newt Gingrich's statement said, "Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States," 111 and in another statement, the Trump campaign's chief executive, Stephen Bannon, said that "practicing Islam means belief in the oppression of women and the murder of infidels, and that the religion is, therefore, unconstitutional." 112 These statements reflect the official vision of Islam, that it is a threat to the US political order. Furthermore, Islam was also presented as a "cultural system," which was characterised as "violent and opposed to Judeo-Christian values," 113 "the product of an inferior culture," 114 and thus "incompatible." 115 These characteristics place Islam in opposition to Western civilization, which Trump's advisor Flynn considers "far more civilized, far more ethical, and moral." 116 These systems were presented as being governed by "Shariah," which was represented as a "dangerous political ideology" 117 that positions Islam as a "political religion", posing threats to the political and cultural JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 continuity of US society. These patterns of representation present the image of "Islam as an enemy of the state." 118 The functions of political Islam, or the so-called "script of Islamism," 119 were described in the discourse on Islamist groups identified by collective proper nouns, which account for 11.85% of all instances found in WP. This analysis demonstrates that this discourse was designed by US conservative politicians and state agents and that their media (WP) amplified this to gain public acceptance of Islam as an enemy. Consider Trump's Defense Secretary, James N. Mattis, who considers "political Islam" the major security problem confronting the US, 120 or a quote from Flynn's 2016 book that "We're in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam." 121 It cannot be assumed that this quotation was re-printed in WP mistakenly, because "messianic" refers to "Khomeini's and his successor's messianic vision," 122 and "movement" refers to "a fearsome movement, based on deep religious conviction," 123 whereas the metaphor "evil" tends to define "Shariah" as a political ideology in Flynn's book. 124 This analysis reveals that in the US, Islam was considered a form of totalitarianism, and those thought to represent it, the Islamists, were all viewed as enemies, with a tendency to subordinate civil society to "totalizing Shariah." 125 Table-1 also demonstrates that collective nouns (15.24 %) were commonly utilized in WP, which tended to make broad generalizations about Islamist groups. Consider the adjective "evil" in the preceding statement, which describes Shariah as problematic, but when combined with the general term "people," it seems to apply to all Muslims. Also, it is impossible to find a Muslim who practices Islam but does not believe he or she is following Shariah. In this sense, identifying Islamist groups as "terrorists" on the basis of Shariah is tantamount to describing all practicing Muslims as "terrorists." These groups were presented as a global political movement or civilization jihad bent on destroying the West; for example, "regardless of whether it's al-Qaeda, CAIR, or the Islamic State, they just have a different methodology for the destruction of Western civilization." 126 In addition, sweeping generalizations about Islamist groups were made in ways that did not occur in ID, such as a statement by a former CIA analyst who stated, "I think it's likely there will be terrorist attacks in the coming years." 127 Through the systematic use of language acquired from politicians and state officials, this threat was first extended to Islamist groups and subsequently evolved into a fear of Islam as a whole. Perhaps to inculcate Islam's terror in the US collective consciousness, the WP writers frequently used two metaphors. The first, "evil," tends to define "Sharī'ah" as a political ideology that drives Muslims to terrorism. The second, "cancer," tended to directly associate terror DEPARTMENT OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 with Islam, labelling all practicing Muslims as terrorists, as in Flynn's description of Islamism as a "vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people." 128 The above findings reveal that in the WP, Islam was constructed as an "ideological threat" and viewed as a threat to the political and cultural health of US society, and this threat was applied to every Muslim, whereas in the ID, Islam has been created as a prejudiced ideology that endangers Western symbolic (cultural) identity, but not all Muslims have been perceived as a threat, rather a portion of them. The model below illustrates why Islam is a threat in two separate contexts-the UK and the US-followed by the next section, which examines the manifestations of Islamophobia and thus seeks to determine its dominant form in each context.

Manifestations of Islamophobia
The previous section revealed two Islamophobias: one originating from Islam's religious dimensions and the other deriving from its systemic dimensions. The former represents old-Islamophobia, while the latter symbolizes neo-Islamophobia. The religiophobia dominated the UK discourse context, which points to historically transmitted fear of Islam that led to the beginnings of "cultural ethnocentrism" against Muslims in medieval Europe. 129 Said termed this phenomenon "Orientalism," by which "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self," 130 which Bleich considers Islamophobia, 128 Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, "U.S. Muslims' Defense: The Constitution," The Washington Post, February 10 2017, A17. 129  calling it "a new word for an old concept." 131 This fear of "other" manifests itself today in culturally charged views that distinguish between "the self" and "the other" and legitimize these differences as historical truths about Europeans and Muslim "otherness." The process of otherization begins with referring to someone as "they," "them," or "their" and ends with reducing them to the psychological category of "other." 132 Deixis can induce the perceptual relationship of "the uttered indexical expression to various situational features," 133 e.g., "we" can be used to help perceivers think of group identification as "self," whereas "they" would imply "other." Table-1 shows that ID writers used 6.53% more deictic expressions than WP writers. These expressions are symptoms of the psychological character of Islamophobia.
The systemic-phobia dominates the US discourse context, which refers to the historically formed enemy image of Islam as a threat to the political and cultural continuity of US society. Perhaps because the US is a superpower, its attempt to demonize the weak "other" as an "enemy" has never been greater, for religious and political reasons. One of the prime examples of the weak "other" in the US is Muslims and the Islamic religion itself. 134 The preceding section established that the WP writers presented an official US government image of Islam that was focused on portraying Muslim "Other" as an alien force aiming to destroy US society. Consider the use (5.48%) of "actionyms" such as "immigrants", "migrants", "refugees", or "asylum seekers" by WP writers, which is more than the ID's 1.29%. These expressions are not manifestations of the psychological category of "other," because they appear to have alienating effects on Muslims, placing them in the sociological category of "out-group" that belongs to radical Islam, which is characterized as a state enemy. According to table 1, WP writers frequently referred to Muslims via geographical references (e.g., Syria) and their nationalities (e.g., Syrians) more frequently than ID writers. In WP discourses, such references tend to collectivize and racialize Muslims into a single racial category 135 made up of nationals from seven Muslim countries, including "Iran," "Iraq," "Libya," "Somalia," "Sudan," "Syria," and "Yemen," all of which have been designated as "alliance of evil countries." 136 However, the "evil" metaphor applies to all Muslims because it was used to represent shariah-adherent Muslims and thus to all Muslims as "evil"-an enemy who threatens the political and cultural survival of US society.
Finally, the racialization of Muslims in the US discourse context facilitated Muslim securitization, necessitating policy solutions to the security problem by those who hold authority. Consider McCaul's proposal on Muslim immigration, which was presented in WP texts and suggests suspending "admissions from major terror-threat countries, like Syria, until we are confident terrorist groups cannot use pathways like our refugee program as a Trojan Horse to send operatives to attack us." 137 These texts also presents Trump's statement that "Anyone who believes sharia law supplants American law will not be given an immigrant visa," 138 and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the presidentelect's designee for attorney general's claim that "there is nothing wrong to refuse admittance to those DEPARTMENT OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 who distance themselves from our values." 139 From a securitization perspective, these utterances can be regarded as securitizing moves aimed at establishing Muslims and Islam as an existential threat. 140 These are symptoms of the psychosocial character of Islamophobia that result in a neo-phenomenon. These findings led to the following study conclusion.

Conclusion
This study concludes that the discursive construction of Islamophobia begins with the problematization of Islam, which then serves as the foundation for 'otherizing' Muslims, 'racializing', and 'securitizing' them. It presents the following process model of Islamophobia.
The proposed model above illustrates that Islamophobia operates in a cyclical fashion, with one manifestation leading to the next. It suggests that Islamophobia manifests itself at cognitive, cultural, and structural levels, with discursive manifestations of "otherization", "racialization," and "securitization" of Muslims, which symbolizes three different phenomena of "prejudice", "racism", and "securitization", respectively. However, the nature of Islamophobia is established inside a discourse that makes Islam a "problem" and it changes as the discourse context changes. The findings of this study demonstrate that Islam was presented in the UK discourse context as a "religious problem," which problematized it as a threat to the symbolic identity of Europe. This indicates the revival of religio-phobia, which was born with the rebirth of Islam and later defined as "Orientalism," which is now considered Islamophobia. On the other hand, in the US discourse context, Islam was symbolized as a "systemic problem", which problematized Muslims as a security threat to the sociopolitical and cultural continuity of US society. This points to a new form of Orientalism, which emerged with the re-emergence of Islam in the late 1980s and has now taken the shape of "neo-Islamophobia" to serve the 'political strategy' for mobilizing national hate for Islam. The media, as a functional actor, supports the reshaping of the existing social order into an Islamophobic one, in which hatred for Islam becomes the behaviour of society as a whole, despite the fact that neo-Islamophobia starts at the top of the state. This study attempted to unpack the process and theoretical JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION Volume 13 Issue 1, Spring 2023 underpinnings of neo-Islamophobia, but the researchers propose that more research be done in other contexts.