Are Muslim experiences taken seriously in theories of Islamophobia? A literature review of Muslim experiences with social exclusion in the West

ABSTRACT Scholars within Islamophobia studies are predominantly concerned with studying societies and actors that embody Islamophobic beliefs and practices. A common claim in this literature is that Islamophobia is structurally and institutionally embedded, resulting in a multifaceted social exclusion of Muslims across Western societies. This article sets out to evaluate this claim by means of reviewing the qualitative literature concerned with Muslim experiences with social exclusion (Islamophobia, discrimination, racism, prejudice, stigmatization, and exclusion) in Western settings. In doing so, this article provides a structured overview of existing knowledge within these related topics, while also identifying assumptions within Islamophobia studies that ought to be informed by this empirical knowledge.

emerged and sustained itself across different socio-historical contexts.The second question is what Islamophobia leads to (causes) in society. 1 The third question is tied to the second, namely, how Islamophobia functions, or, how exactly it causes what it is theorized to cause.It is safe to say that the first question, namely the emergence and reproduction of Islamophobic beliefs, is well addressed.Important contributions here are Brekke (2020), Abbas (2019), Gardell (2011), Allen (2010), Love (2009), and Bunzl (2007).Furthermore, this special issue adds to this list by highlighting the presence and (re)production of Islamophobia in contexts beyond the West, such as China (Stroup 2023), India (Menon 2023), and Buddhist majority states in Asia (Frydenlund 2023).The second question, what Islamophobia leads to, is, in many ways, a much wider, and far more complex question.The complexity resides in Islamophobia here being understood as a cause as opposed to effect.That is, rather than Islamophobia being approached as something in need of explanation, it is approached as something that does the explaining of something else.The fact that this something else can be a myriad of different things places a lot of responsibility on scholars to carve out these connections.This underlines the importance of properly addressing the third question by providing rigorous specifications of the process(es) that tie together cause and effect.In what ways are these latter two questions addressed in the literature on Islamophobia?That is, what is Islamophobia theorized to cause, and how is it theorized to do so?
To begin with the first question, effects of Islamophobia are relevant in the literature in two different ways.On one hand, effects, or consequences, are approached as evidence of the presence of Islamophobia.For Bleich (2011), who understands Islamophobia as "indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims", consequences are indicators that can be used to measure the presence and intensity of these attitudes and emotions.Examples of such indicators are "disparaging portrayals of Islam and Muslims in textbooks or in popular culture", "oppressive public policies towards Islam and Muslims", and "Muslims' own perceptions of high levels of prejudice and suspicion".From this perspective, the consequences of most vital interest are those that can most easily be rendered into operationalizations of the concept (Islamophobia) that is sought to be measured.Thus, the challenge for researchers consists in understanding "the quality of the indicator and the likelihood that it reveals the underlying phenomenon" (Bleich 2011(Bleich , 1591)).This approach can be summarized as effects as evidence of Islamophobia.While crucial for studying the presence of Islamophobia in a given context, this way of understanding Islamophobia's effects falls short of providing more intricate causal analyses.In the words of Chris Allen, "Islamophobia (the "phenomenon") has been explained, understood and at the same time identified through its more obvious and explicit manifestations and forms ("products"), thus excluding any potential or actual consequences that either or both may individually or collaboratively initiate" 2 (Allen 2010, 130).This perspective highlights the other approach to the effects of Islamophobia, namely as theories that explain social phenomena that are interesting in and of themselves.Allen (2007) suggests the following to be considered as consequences of Islamophobia in Europe 3 : The erosion of the multicultural model, the tightening and implementation of anti-terror and security laws, the tightening of immigration policies, physical and material abuses and attacks, populist right-wing politics, media stereotypification of Muslims, and finally, anti-Islamophobia initiatives.This variety of scale in terms of what Islamophobia is theorized to cause or impactranging from physical abuses to the erosion of the multicultural modelis common among scholars of Islamophobia, and reveals the potency that they assign to the phenomenon: Abbas (2019) suggests that Islamophobia leads to radicalization of both Muslims, and (working-class) non-Muslims, Bleich (2011) speculates that it might impact foreign policy stances towards Muslim-majority countries, and Kumar argues that Islamophobia is an enabler of US imperialism in the Middle East and beyond (Kumar 2021).These approaches can be summarized as theorized effects of Islamophobiathe ultimate consequences of its presence in our societies.
This leads to the second question, namely how Islamophobia causes what it is theorized to cause.While this obviously varies between different proposed causalities, certain "grand narratives" exist, and are well established, within the field.In an article in Islamophobia Studies Journal claiming to be "the first of its kind to theoretically map the field of Islamophobia studies", Hafez claims that "the most prominent strand in academic Islamophobia studies literature today" is "racism studies informed by the central assumptions of postcolonial theory, such as othering and power-relations" (Hafez 2018, 216).Within this strand of the literature, Islamophobia is generally understood as a discourse which facilitates the construction of Muslims as carriers of negative and dangerous traits due to their affiliation with Islam, which, in turn, causes their othering and discrimination.Islamophobia as discourse thus facilitates the racialization of people affiliated with Islama concept used to denote the processes whereby certain identity traits become signifiers of negatively laden characteristics.For Garner and Selod (2015), "using racialization as a key analytical concept allows us to make sense of the fact that regardless of physical appearance, country of origin and economic situation, Muslims are homogenized and degraded by Islamophobic discourse and practices in their everyday lives" (17).While the agency in these processes is somewhat unspecified, the primary focus is on macro, as opposed to micro, realities.Critical scholars use different concepts to capture these realities, such as "power structures" (Hafez 2018), "disciplining" (Sayyid 2014), and "world-system" (Grosfoguel 2012).Within this understanding, concepts from postcolonial studies, such as othering and subalternity, are used to articulate the processes through which macro realities impact Muslims.Indeed, Hafez claims that criticizing the power structures that "aim to govern the subjects they have constructed" is the very goal of Islamophobia studies, which carries the epistemological consequence that "for most authors today, engaging in the discipline of Islamophobia studies does not mean engaging with Islam and Muslims, but rather with the dominant culture in those societies where anti-Muslim racism is located" (Hafez 2018, 217).Furthermore, some scholars regard "anti-Muslim racism as a central dimension of the hegemonic structure of Western societies" (Hafez 2018, 218), and, in a similar vein, Sayyid argues that "if we understand Islamophobia as the regulation and disciplining of Muslims by reference to a Westernizing horizon, it means accepting that this hostility to Muslims is neither necessarily emotional ("hatred") nor religious ("Muslims as infidels") or cultural ("Muslims as outsiders") but rather political" (Sayyid 2014, 19).Taken together, these sentiments clearly enable the proposal of a grand narrative that provides an explanation to the broad range of phenomena that are related to Islamophobia in contemporary societies, with the main message being that Western societies have a deep-rooted problem with Islam which leads to systematic processes of racialization and discrimination of Muslims in the West.On the other hand, the apparent downside of such theorizing is that it effectively essentializes the "West" as a socio-political entity, while also neglecting the presence and authenticity of multicultural processes in Western liberal democracies.Different understandings regarding these issues are indeed visible among Islamophobia scholars.For example, for Grosfoguel, Islamophobia is (amongst other things) "a form of racism against Muslim people" (Grosfoguel 2012, 19), which manifests itself in the labor market, in education, and in the global economy, while, for Allen, suggesting that countries like the UK is institutionally Islamophobic is "equally overblown and homogenizing as suggesting that all Muslims are supportive of terrorism" (Allen 2010, 132).Such disagreements notwithstanding, it is safe to say that the predominant paradigm within Islamophobia scholarship today is Critical, with its most general claim being that Muslims in the West are subject to systematic processes of racialization, causing their discrimination across Western societies.This however poses the question of how well this proposition holds up against the empirical reality that it claims to describe, namely Muslim experiences in Western contexts.The remainder of this article will address this question by means of a literature review, followed by a discussion of the possible implications that the findings from the review could have for theories of Islamophobia.

Justification for review and research question
Previous literature reviews related to Islamophobia are confined to either specific subfields or concepts.Hafez (2018) is an example of the former, in the sense that he focuses on the "theory-based literature on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism and those organizations that are (…) part of what I have called institutions that conduct work in Islamophobia studies", thereby only sampling literature from a specific milieu.An example of the latter is Selod and Embrick (2013) and Cainkar and Selod (2018), who structure their respective reviews of empirical research on Muslim American experiences around the concept of racialization.Furthermore, Garner and Selod (2015), who argue for the need to implement Islamophobia into racism studies, claim that there is a "relatively weak presence of fieldworkbased studies (particularly those in which Muslims are the subjects of interviews and/or ethnographies)" that deal with Islamophobia (Garner and Selod 2015, 10).Taken together, it appears that Islamophobia scholars who are looking to inform their concepts and theories with qualitative empirical data primarily are oriented towards studies that already employ these very same concepts and theories, meaning that studies that employ other concepts in practice become irrelevant for conceptual and theoretical development.Indeed, it is this articulated restriction within the field itself which motivates this article, accompanied by the underlying assumption that theorizations about Islamophobia can benefit from empirics gathered outside the realm of studies that utilize concepts that are theoretically related to it.In order to address this issue, an integrative literature review will be conducted; a type of review suitable when addressing "new or emerging topics that would benefit from a holistic conceptualization and synthesis of the literature to date" (Torraco 2005, 357).Having all of the above in mind, the purpose of this review is thus to evaluate the core theoretical propositions within contemporary Islamophobia scholarship by means of testing them empirically against a relevant empirical landscape.Indeed, as alluded to above, there are good reasons to believe that what amounts to relevant empirics far exceeds what is currently considered as such by contemporary scholars of Islamophobia.Since Muslim experiences in the West clearly is too large of an empirical universe to consider within the scope of this article, the review will narrow it down to Muslim experiences with social exclusion in the West.
This paper views social exclusion as a "multidimensional concept" (Fangen 2010) that includes symbolic and tangible forms of exclusion, ranging from discursive othering to physical violence.The review will sample the qualitative research exploring this phenomenon, thereby aiming to center the discussion in the paper around the relationship between theory and experience.While including survey studies would make for an even more complete presentation of relevant data, it would not be possible to thoroughly explore the full range of qualitative studies without an exclusive focus.The sampling itself will be done on the basis of the following concepts, all of which are submerged under the umbrella term social exclusion: Islamophobia, racism, discrimination, stigma, stereotypes, prejudice, and exclusion.This is not an exhaustive list, but it is arguably sufficient for sampling much, if not most, of the qualitative research concerned with Muslim experiences with social exclusion, across theoretical perspectives.As will be shown in the methods section, wildcard searching was used in order to also include variations of the concepts (e.g.including racialization as a variation of racism).
To summarize, the review is conducted in order to provide an answer to the following research question: To what extent do findings in the qualitative literature about Muslim experiences with social exclusion in Western contexts support the dominant theoretical prepositions in contemporary Islamophobia studies, namely that Muslims in the West are systematically racialized and discriminated against?

Method and sample
The following search string was entered into Web of Science, searching through titles, abstracts and keywords: The starting criteria were that articles had to be peer-reviewed, published, and indexed between 01.01.2010 and 20.09.2021, written in English, and categorized in Web of Science as either sociology, political science, ethnic studies, religious studies, communication studies, social issues, anthropology, cultural studies, interdisciplinary social sciences, women's studies, or educational sciences.These settings gave the total result of 2154 articles.I then selected all qualitative studies that had empirics that were based on data collection from no less than five participants.To do this I manually went through all abstracts and/or method sections, leaving me with 159 articles that fit the criteria.When the sample was finished, I went through each article and assigned it its year of publishment, field, key terms, research aim(s), country/countries of study, research context, method, sample, and key findings (Figure 1).
The sample -Year published, country of study, and discipline of journal where published (Figures 2 and 3).
Each article was then assigned an area of contribution, which was done after considering the theory, research questions and findings of each article.This inductive process was carried out in order to get an overview of the focus areas within the research sampled around the selected concepts of social exclusion.The categories that came out of this process were lived experiences, coping strategies, identity and belonging, activism, and perceptions.In instances where an article was deemed to give multiple contributions, weight was given to the contribution that was most relevant in relation to the concept(s) of exclusion utilized in the article.What characterizes each category is elaborated in the beginning of each review section below (Figure 4).
Finally, when incorporating the articles into the review section of this article, the primary emphasis was to extract the main empirical findings, as opposed to the theoretical interpretations of the findings.The reason for focusing on core findings at the expense of analysis is simply that the sole purpose of the review is to consider the empirical support for the main propositions made within contemporary Islamophobia studies, not to give a full review of the theoretical discourses within the sampled literature itself.

Lived experiences
While the aims, contexts, samples, and theoretical outlooks of the 73 articles in this section vary immensely, what they have in common is that they contribute to our knowledge on if, how, and where Muslims experience exclusion, as well as how Muslims themselves understand these experiences.What, then, characterizes Muslim experiences with exclusion?A finding across  studies conducted in different countries, such as Britain (Allen 2021, Ali & Whitham 2021), Canada (Mercier-Dalphond & Helly 2021, Rahmath 2016 et al.), Germany (Becker 2021), and Spain (Ouassini 2021), is that discrimination, verbal abuse and hate crime mostly occurs in public spaces.Interestingly, in some studies where respondents don't report direct experiences with discrimination, they still report a sense of being scrutinized and surveilled in public (Bull & Rane 2019, Moufakkir 2015).Furthermore, many studies find the content of verbal abuse to be tied to race or ethnicity (Ali & Whitham 2021, Nojan 2021, Selod 2015, Kloek et al. 2013), gender (Ali & Whitham 2021), and to associations between Islam and terrorism (Nojan 2021, Carr & Haynes 2015).Another important finding in the above-mentioned studies is that discrimination in most cases is triggered by visible signs of Muslimness, which is also well documented in studies on white Muslim converts (Casey 2021, Husain 2017, Galonnier 2015, Moosavi 2015a) An exemption from this is found in Ramahi & Suleiman (2017) who find that conversion alone severely impacted some of their interlocutors' family relations.Furthermore, many studies echo the impact of key events for participants' experiences with exclusion (Allen 2021, Beaman 2021, Mahmut 2021, Thompson & Pihlaja 2018, Gunaratnam 2013).For example, interviewing Muslims in the US, Canada, and Australia, Barkdull et al. (2011) find that "the participants did not recount any pre-9/11" incidents related to active discrimination (143), and that they "reported feeling markedly stigmatized after 9/11", experiencing verbal harassment and threats, discrimination at border crossings and in the job market, as well as rejection from non-Muslim friends.Several studies echo these findings (Mercier-Dalphond & Helly 2021, Ghaffar & Kucher 2021 et al., Gowayed 2020, Magan 2020, Britton 2019, Selod 2019, Hussain & Bagguley 2013, Mythen et al. 2013).Some studies however also find that respondents don't find such events to define their daily lives.In his interview-study within a Somali community in Canada, Tiilikainen (2015) finds that "the informants related that immediately after 9/11 they might have received some negative comments in the public spaces, workplaces or schools, although in general it was not a major issue" (59).Additionally, "the interviewees mostly felt that they were accepted as Somalis or Muslims in Canada" (58).Similarly, Bonino (2015b) finds that "aside from airports, the collective body of Muslim experiences and perceptions of daily interactions with the non-Muslim Scottish majority are positive overall" (381).
While the literature generally identifies public space as the primary space of exclusion, many studies focus on Muslim experiences within institutions, such as the workplace, in schooling, and in higher education.Beginning with the workplace, Koura (2018) finds that a majority of her veiled female interlocutors in the US had daily experiences with microaggressions at work.This is echoed by a study among veiled British-Pakistani women (Tariq & Syed 2018), with some however claiming that their religion did not cause them to face issues at work.Similarly, the Dutch Moroccan interviewees in Siebers & Dennissen's (2015) study experience that their colleagues often echo media portrayals and statements by politicians when making comments about their religion.Furthermore, many of Shams' (2020) interlocutors in Mississippi felt "insecure about their jobs and place in society despite their academic and financial success" (666).Within a French context, Rootham (2015), who explores the employment trajectories of six Muslim women in France following the veil ban, finds that most veiled participants expressed hardships in relation to their visible religiosity after the implementation of the ban.Similarly, in her study on female (mostly veiled) Muslim entrepreneurs in Paris, Karimi (2018) finds that "the desire to start a business of one's own was at once an expression of a refusal to negotiate the right to wear a hijab, and an act of overcoming the negative stereotypes to which they are subjected" (423).A more positive outlook is found in Ramadan (2021) who, in an interview study with eight veiled female academics in the UK, finds that they all had overall positive experiences from working within academia, and that "none of the participants voiced anxieties about their career progression" (44).
Turning to education, the literature is vast, which reflects the popularity of the Muslim experience within Educational Sciences.In a study based on formal discrimination complaints against Swedish institutions filed by Muslims, Bursell (2021) finds half of the complaints to be directed against the educational system, with the most common complaints being claims of being ignored, obstructed, or more harshly judged.A typical finding within studies focusing on elementary and high school is that Muslim pupils experience generalizations about Islam and Muslims in the classroom setting (Collet-Sabe 2020, Amjad 2018, Al-Fartousi 2016, Merchant 2016, Jaffe-Walter 2013, Housee 2010), as well as feeling different or as "not belonging" due to their perceived Muslimness (Hauser 2021, Leo 2020, Jaffe-Walter 2013, Kayaalp 2014).Furthermore, some of these studies also highlight Muslim pupils' experiences of being surveilled at school, like Shirazi's (2018) study on members of the Muslim Students Association in a US high school, and Bi's (2020) study on Muslim pupils attending a school in Birmingham that was involved in the Trojan Horse Affair.A study on second-generation Indonesian Muslim girls in an Australian public school is the only one to stand out among the school studies, where Zulfikar (2016) finds that the interviewees considered their school to be accommodating and accepting of their Muslim identity, and that they rarely experienced exclusion or discrimination.Turning to the university setting, a study centered around four universities in California (Ali 2019) finds that Muslim students "regularly felt anti-Muslim bias and bigotry on their campuses" (17), while Karaman & Christian (2020) find that their hijab-wearing interlocutors at a Southern university in the US "expressed that they felt different" (525), and that they were perceived as un-American.Furthermore, Brown & Saeed (2015) find that their British Pakistani Muslim female interlocutors felt perceived as radical when being visibly Muslim at university.There are however also many quite positive findings among these studies.Tremblay et al. (2018) find that the majority of their Muslim interlocutors in Quebec didn't feel excluded at their college, and that they considered themselves as, wholly or partly, members of the majority.Similarly, Islam & Mercer-Mapstone (2021) find that their Muslim student interlocutors in three UK universities feel some sense of exclusion due to a lack of accommodations to their religious needs, but that they were generally positive about their university experiences.Furthermore, Seggie & Sanford (2010) find that, while their veiled female interlocutors report having experienced discrimination and prejudice, they perceive their campus as mostly welcoming, and that "classrooms on campus are generally safe environments with a nurturing and positive atmosphere that contributes to their academic success".Finally, Shammas (2017) finds that some of her interlocutors at California and Michigan universities had experienced discrimination from other students, but that experiences with faculty and staff were generally positive.This notion of a generally positive university experience despite some experiences with exclusion is also echoed in the literature focusing on Muslim international students (Anderson 2020, Yakaboski et al. 2018, Mrayahn & Saleh 2016).
What does the literature say about how Muslims understand their experiences with exclusion?A study on Muslim female victims of Islamophobic assaults finds that many of the women believed that they were targeted "because of the impact of gendered Islamophobic discourses that construct Muslim women as being passive, weak, and oppressed" (Ahmad 2019: 45).This is also a finding in Nagra's (2018) study on veiled Muslim women in Canada, and in studies on Muslim women wearing the niqab in Spain (Yeste et al. 2020) and the UK (Bibi 2020), respectively.Furthermore, in a study examining the impact of the Trojan horse affair on the Muslim community in Birmingham, "one of the key findings was this sense that communities in Birmingham feel that this was a wider political stunt which maligned Muslim communities because of what they believed in" (Awan 2018: 207).This is also echoed in Redclift & Rajina's (2021) study on British Bangladeshi Muslims in post-Brexit Britain.Exploring how Pakistani and Bangladeshi youth in Birmingham experience inclusion and exclusion in their schooling, Ghaill & Haywood (2014) find that "there is no settled understanding of why exclusion is taking place", with interviewees considering islamophobia, racism, and classism as possible motivations.Furthermore, Lynch & Veale (2015), in their study on Muslim youth in Ireland, find that their interlocutors did not understand their experiences with discrimination in relation to events such as 9/11, 7/7 and the War on Terror, and that "there was no evidence of a rehearsed rhetoric that incorporated grand narratives related to the victimization of Muslims or any conspiracy against Islam" (2007).Another common finding is that interlocutors don't regard prejudiced people as representative of their communities as a whole (Yilmaz et al. 2021, Mrayan & Saleh 2016, Kloek et al. 2013, Barkdull et al 2011).Similarly, in Moosavi's (2015b) study on white converts in Britain, he finds that they "typically conveyed their experiences of Islamophobic (…) slurs as a nuisance that arose every now and then rather than a persistent problem" (46).Finally, some Muslims also blame the wrongdoings of other Muslims for their experiences with exclusion (Kloek et al. 2013).
Some studies produced findings that challenge established notions of excluders and excluded.For example, Nurein & Iqbal (2021) find that their black female interlocutors in Britain had troubling experiences of racial exclusion and anti-black prejudice within mosques and among their non-black Muslim peers.Similarly, but in the opposite direction, Moosavi (2015a) finds that his convert interviewees experienced both positive and negative discrimination from other Muslims due to them being white.Furthermore, in a study on Muslim LGBTQ Refugees in Amsterdam and Vienna, Alessi et al. (2020) found that especially gay men experienced Islamophobic prejudice when attempting to establish relationships with people from the LGBTQ community.Similarly, in a study analyzing a collective Swedish Instagram account "by and for LGBTQ people racialized as non-white and/or Muslim", Kehl (2020) finds that the entries expressed frustrations of being seen as externalized and/or exotic others.Finally, in their study on veiled female Muslim refugees to Germany, Paz & Kook (2021) find that many of their interlocutors experienced harassment and sabotage from translators who themselves had immigrant backgrounds from Muslim-majority countries.

Coping strategies
The 23 articles that are here labeled as literature on coping strategies have as their primary focus to investigate the measures taken by Muslims to cope with, or avoid, negative situations that arise because of their (assumed) visible Muslimness.Most of the studies used either the concept of stigma or stereotype to denote the burden experienced by the interlocutors.A finding across these studies is that Muslims have clear ideas about which aspects of their appearances and behaviors that function as signifiers of their stigmatized Muslim identity, ranging from personal name (Khosravi 2012, Harris & Karimshah 2019), to the male beard (Naderi 2018, Amer 2020), ethnicity or skin color (Esholdt 2019, de (Naderi 2018), abstaining from alcohol or from eating during Ramadan (Muhe 2016, Harris & Hussein 2020), as well as certain types of behavior that might come across as "suspicious" due to their Muslim visibility, such as specific conversational topics in public spaces (Shams 2018, Harris & Hussein 2020).One study that stands out in this sample is Casey (2018), who finds that his Muslim American middle and upper-class interlocutors also experienced being stigmatized by other Muslims for not being Muslim enough, and/or for being "too American".
The studies mentioned above find that awareness of stigmatization and stereotypification lead to either pro-active or re-active ways of coping.Beginning with pro-active measures, Khosravi (2012) finds that many who officially change their surname from a "Muslim-sounding" name to a "Swedish-sounding" name, report doing so because their name "causes discomfort or offence", and that they therefore have a "desire to dissociate from Islam and Arabs" (: 71).Another identified pro-active measure is modifying appearance before entering certain spaces where Muslim visibility is expected to cause stigmatization, such as Naderi's (2018, 48) finding that nine of her twelve male interlocutors reported having shaved their beards prior to travelling via the airport.Furthermore, Najib & Hopkins (2019) find that their interlocutors, who were all previous victims of hate-crime, avoided going to certain places altogether, specifically to the city center of Paris, "where they know in advance that they won't be accepted" (106).In a similar vein, Shams (2015) finds that most of his Bangladeshi-Muslim interlocutors in Mississippi attempted to avoid social interactions that could reveal their religious identity, while Eijberts & Roggeband (2016) find that some of their female interlocutors in the Netherlands had quit their jobs due to experiences of stigmatization, with some even contemplating emigration.As for re-active measures, that is, reactions to perceived experiences of stigmatization, one key finding is that some Muslims either actively talk back to, or enter in dialogue with, people whom they expect to hold, or perceive as espousing, prejudices against Islam (Lems 2021).Related to this is downplaying the significance of these experiences, for example by highlighting the ignorance and assumed low degree of education among the perpetrators of prejudice (De Nolf et al. 2021, Ellefsen & Sandberg 2021, Hargreaves 2016).Another common finding in this literature is that Muslims attempt to behave in ways that signal their distancing from established stereotypes, such as consciously behaving in ways that counteracts the "oppressed Muslim woman stereotype" (van Es 2019), or by making se-referential jokes (Moulin-Stozek & Schirr 2017, Esholdt 2019).Similarly, Harris & Karimshah's (2019) find that their young Muslim Australian interlocutors consciously perform "ordinary Australianness" in order to "demonstrate subscription to Australian values", while simultaneously distancing themselves from Muslims who fail to do so (623).A variety of this are attempts to normalize Islam, either by showing the likeness between Islam and the mainstream culture of society (Naderi 2018, 53), or by "living the example", i.e. striving to be exemplary representatives of Islam with the conscious aim of a showing "that anti-Muslim people and propaganda were wrong" (Ellefsen & Sandberg 2021, 11).Several other studies echo this finding (Hansen & Herbert's 2018, Ali & Sonn 2017, Ryan 2011).

Activism
The 17 articles that are here labeled as literature on activism have as their primary focus to investigate how, and on what grounds, Muslims, individually and collectively, engage politically to further their interests through activism (widely understood).A crucial insight from this literature is the intersectional conditioning of both the experiences that motivate activism, as well as the type of activism that is put into practice.For example, while Rogozen-Soltar's (2012) anthropological study among Muslims in Andalusia found that "many considered active work to improve public opinion of Islam a personal and communal duty", for her convert interviewees this involved engagements around making their mosque in the city center available for non-Muslims, while for her Moroccan interviewees, it entailed preparing to make sure that they made "a good impression" whenever their visible Muslimness prompted public encounters (616).Another central finding is that activism often is spurred as a direct response to a particular incident or policy.Jalalzai (2011) finds that his Muslim interlocutors in Saint Louis reported an increased interest in politics and mobilization following 9/11.Furthermore, Pilkington & Acik (2020) finds social activism among Muslim youth in the UK to be motivated by their experience that Prevent policies construct their communities as "suspect communities", which results in activist resistance like the "Students not Suspects" campaign.Similarly, Evolvi (2019) finds that online female Muslim activist utilized the viral images showing French police forcing a woman to take off her "burkini", to challenge mainstream narratives about Muslim women in France.Likewise, Ahmad & Thorpe (2020) find that Muslim sportswomen actively use social media to challenge established stereotypes.Activism is also spurred by general lived experiences with discrimination and Islamophobia, as found by Alimahomed-Wilson (2020) in her study on female Muslim activists in Los Angeles and London, Peucker's (2021) study among Muslim community workers in Australia, as well as Finlay & Hopkins's (2019) study on political participation among young Muslim women in Scotland.Similarly, Sohrabi & Farquharson (2015) finds that Australian Muslim leaders' perception of the prevalence of negative stereotypes targeting Islam and Muslims in Australian society has caused them to engage publicly to "promote a Western-friendly image of the Muslim identity", led by the belief that "Islam is malleable and adaptable to Australian culture".While some of these efforts can rightfully be labeled as identity politics, that does not necessarily hold true for all cases.Kassir & Reitz (2016) found that organized Muslim mother activists protesting the extension of the headscarf ban in French schools (to also include mothers accompanying their children on school trips), protested solely as citizens, as opposed to as Muslims.The protesters had "strong feelings of being French, endorse(d) the French value of religious neutrality, and support(ed) French public schools" (as opposed to private Muslim schools) (2697).Hass (2020) has a similar finding during her fieldwork studying converted Muslims in the Netherlands, where an organized protest against the socalled Burka ban was carried out under paroles such as "We are the victims of symbolic politics" and "Human rights are being violated" (20) The notion of activism being a means through which to assert citizenship was also a finding in Evolvi's (2017) study on how the Muslim-ran blog "Yalla" related to the marginalization of Muslims in Italy, finding that "Yalla's bloggers often assert their Italianness", and that their primary political cause was to make the naturalization process for attaining citizenship easier.Similarly, O`Loughlin & Gillespie (2012) apply the term "dissenting citizenship" to describe the political engagement of the participants in their study on the political subjectivities of young Muslims in Britain in the decade following 9/11.
The studies focusing on Muslim organizations reveals the importance and priority attributed to issues dealing with stereotypes and prejudice.Examining how Muslim advocacy groups (CAIR and MPAC) have articulated Muslim American policy interests in the context of the 2016 US Presidential Election, Cury (2019) finds that "anti-Muslim discrimination became the main focus of these organizations' advocacy efforts", with leaders stressing that the most important goal of their organizations was to access policymaking processes through collaboration with elected and government officials.However, Zainidinov (2021) finds a stark discrepancy in how the two Muslim American organizations CAIR and AIFD perceive and respond to the "Muslim terrorist" stereotype, with CAIR rejecting this stereotypical portrayal as an illegitimate socio-political construction, while AIFD considers it as a legitimate portrayal that reflects a deep problem in the Muslim reality.Discursively dealing with terror perpetrated by extremist Islamists is also a central part of the work conducted by the three major Muslim organizations in Australia, where Abdel-Fattah (2017) finds that most of their press releases are reactions to terrorist events, such as conveying condolences to victims, repudiating terrorism on religious grounds, and calling for social unity.Finally, investigating how activist Muslim organizations tackle perceived misrecognition of Muslim political agency within the context of British electoral politics, Dobbernack et al. (2015) find that while most emphasize the need to organize politically against misrecognition, the political subjectivities promoted by these organizations "are not simply determined by the experience of misrecognition" (204).

Perceptions
The 15 articles that are here labeled as literature on perceptions have as their primary focus investigate how Muslims understand and relate to certain concepts, policies, and practices.Beginning with concepts, and the concept of Islamophobia, Ghaill & Haywood (2015) find that "there was much confusion about the meaning of Islamophobia" among their young Birmingham-based Pakistani and Bangladeshi interlocutors.While some understood it as a form of racism, there was a general denial of viewing Islamophobia as a "universal and homogenous category of exclusion", with the interlocutors articulating a "generationally-specific identification with local white working-class young people and a (local) place affiliation around the increasing socio-economic divisions that circumscribe their collective social lives" (109).Continuing with the concept of Islamophobia, Husain (2020) finds that representatives of Muslim Community Organizations in Australia understand it "in its entirety as systematic and institutionalized social and political injustices targeting Muslims", locating Islamophobia "within the mainstream system that constructs the discourses, policies and the experiences of vilification and misrecognition Muslims encounter within their multicultural settings" (485).A somewhat different perspective is found in a study by the same researcher on working-class Black Muslim-Americans (Husain 2021), where a key finding is that many of the interviewees consider the "Islamophobia analysis" of US society as middle-class politics that promotes the construction of a separate brown Muslim racial identity at the expense of the Black anti-racism struggle.Another study investigates how Australian Muslims interpret the labelling of Muslim communities as "moderate" (as opposed to "extremist"), where Cherney & Murphy (2016) find their interlocutors to be confused about the content of the label and the arbitrariness of its application, as well as provoked by the underlying implication that being "moderate" meant that one had compromised certain aspects of their faith.As for perceptions of minority-majority relations, Ewart et al. 2017 find that "Australian Muslims are highly critical of news media coverage of Islam and Muslims and express concern about the divisiveness that such portrayal can have for Australian society", a finding which is echoed by two UK studies conducted among students (Pihlaja & Thompson 2017, Brown et al. 2015).Furthermore, Sohrabi & Farquharson (2016) find that Australian Muslim leaders consider stereotypes about Islam and Muslims to be a result of ignorance and misinformation, but that they are optimistic about the prospects for the younger generations, who they consider being "an integral part of Australian society", to successfully promote the compatibility between Islam and Australian culture.Investigating how young Muslims living in Sydney perceive the Sutherland region, the site for the 2005 Cronulla Riots, Itaoui & Dunn (2017) find that nine out of ten interviewees consider Sutherland as an "Islamophobia hotspot", and that there was a "collective understanding of being "unwelcome" as a Muslim in the Sutherland region".
Related to minority-majority relations are studies concerned with Muslim perceptions of policies and politics.Investigating how Muslim women who wear the niqab in the UK view the niqab ban in France, Zempi (2019) finds that the "participants described the veil ban as a form of racism and Islamophobia" (2595) Furthermore, investigating how members of Islamic Representative Organizations perceived "the field of political possibilities in America", Kazi (2019) finds that the interviewees considered American politics, in general, to be "inherently militaristic and anti-Muslim", making it impossible to mobilize politically around issues that many found important (such as ending the occupation of Palestine and the War on Terror), but that there was still a profound sense of the importance of gathering the Muslim vote behind the best possible candidate during presidential elections.Investigating how Muslim-American communities evaluate policies aiming at countering violent extremism among Muslims in the US, Yazdiha (2020) found perceptions to be heavily conditioned by the intersecting identities of her interlocutors, with wealthy, longtime immigrants living in "white communities" viewing these policies as a means of collaborating with the police.A similar study finds that Dutch Muslim elites in the Hague perceive pre-emptive policies of deradicalization as a consequence of Dutch society in general "possessing anxiety towards Islam, which is present in the media, politics and education", ultimately viewing the policies as ineffective and counterproductive (Welten & Abbas 2021).A study investigating whether changing state policies by UK governments towards British Muslims has impacted perceptions of belonging to British society among Pakistani/Kashmiri Muslims in Birmingham, finds that "all participants believed that the state facilitated and contributed to the demonization of Islam following the Northern disturbances and the terrorist attacks on September 11th" (Ahmed 2019: 588), and "believed the state had created British Muslims as being different and distinct to other minorities" (590).Ellis et al (2020) find that Somali immigrants in Boston, Minneapolis and Toronto perceive to be scrutinized by police for being Somali, black, and Muslim, with some however perceiving the police as benevolent.

Identity and belonging
The 31 articles that are labeled as literature on identity and belonging are concerned with how Muslims identify, and how they articulate their sense of belonging to society.Many of these studies revolve around identity and belonging in the aftermath of key events such as 9/11, 7/7, ISIS-affiliated attacks in Europe, and the general overarching context of the so-called "War on Terror".One important finding in this subset of the literature is a "doubling down" on Muslim identity among interlocutors (Nagra 2011), for instance due to a perceived increase of hostility towards Islam and Muslims within school environments (Ghaffar-Kucher 2012).The importance of key events for identity performance is also echoed by Alizai's (2021) study on Muslim students in Canada in the aftermath of ISIS-affiliated terror attacks in 2015, by Mir's (2011) study on female Muslim students in the US in the aftermath of 9/11, and by Ahmad & Evergeti's (2010) study on prominent Muslim elites in Britain, who consider the Rushdie Affair, 9/11 and 7/7 as vital for the emergence of Muslimness as the primary identification for British Muslims.Likewise, in a study on 16 Muslim mothers in the US, Abdalla & Chen (2022) find that their interlocutors report having adjusted their parenting following Trumps election in order to "teach their children how to reconcile religious, national, and ethnic identities positioned as mutually exclusive" (290).Furthermore, the practicalities of the War on Terror are also found to negatively impact citizenship, as indicated by a study on the impact of anti-terrorism policy on citizenship among Muslim in the UK which finds that "citizens of distinct ethnic and geographical demographics perceive a diminishment of citizenship that stems from anti-terrorism measures" (Jarvis & Lister 2013: 672).This is also echoed by Mustafa (2016) who finds that most of his young Muslim interlocutors in the UK consider their status as British citizens to be conditional and precarious.Similarly, Zopf (2018) finds that many among his Egyptian-American interlocutors found their allegiance to America to be "rejected by others who assume that because they are Muslim they cannot also be American" (: 185).Furthermore, in a study on 50 young Muslims in Canada, Nagra & Maurutto (2016) find that their participants "experienced surveillance (particularly at border crossings) as a direct attack on their Muslim identities and an erosion of their Canadian citizenship" (188).Likewise, Blackwood et al. (2013) find that their Scottish Muslim interviewees experienced airports as places of humiliation where they were "denied the identities that gave them position and pride in society" (1105), namely their national, professional, and religious identities.Interviewing Muslims living in Britain who have had their British passports canceled, Kapoor & Narcowitz (2019) find that their interlocutors felt disconnected both from British society, and from their own communities.In an Italian study, Cicognani et al. (2018) find that some of their young Moroccan interviewees "position themselves as migrant/ethnic others despite the fact that they were born in Italy" (113), while others are "actively and openly claiming an insider status" (118).Many studies however also indicate that experiences and perceptions of hostility towards Islam or Muslims don't necessarily diminish sense of citizenship or national belonging.Mirza (2019) finds that most of her middle-class British-Pakistani female interlocutors "saw discrimination and prejudice as inherent to their experience of being British-Pakistani Muslims", however "for most their positive experiences have outweighed their negative ones, making them proud to be British-Pakistani and Muslim" (318).Nagra & Peng (2013) find that there is a "discrepancy between the young Canadian Muslims' experiences of discrimination and their strong sense of Canadian identity", and that "multiculturalism plays a huge role in how young Canadian Muslims place themselves in Canadian society" (613-614).Similarly, Qureshi and Zeitlyn (2013) find that while their young Pakistani Muslim interlocutors were "unanimously critical of British foreign and domestic policy", they still "identified strongly with the notion of patriotic citizen that crystalized in Britain after the 7/7 bombings" (117), and that they felt British.Likewise, Kabir (2015) finds that, in the aftermath of the Cronulla riots, almost all of her young interlocutors still identified, wholly or in part, as Australian.Similarly, an interview-based study with forty-nine young Muslims in Melbourne finds that the participants considered it "possible to forge productive inter-connections and hybrid identities whereby there is no perceived conflict between engaging with majoritarian Western culture on one hand and upholding one's religious beliefs as a practicing Muslim on the other" (Lam & Mansouri 2021: 777).This is also stressed by Karam (2020) who, based on 72 interviews with upper middle-class Muslims in Michigan, finds that the respondents consider their identities as American and Muslim to be self-reinforcing, and that strengthening the Muslim identity of their children was widely considered as a means through which to ensure "upward assimilation" in American society.Similarly, many of the respondents in Jamil's (2014) study on Muslims with a Pakistani background living in Quebec "had a positive view of Canada as a space that allowed them to teach their children about their culture and religion" (2334).Furthermore, Bonino (2015a) finds that while his interlocutors in Edinburgh report that their Muslim identity had become more salient after 9/11, they still had a strong affiliation to Scotland, and "found Scotland to be a positive, accommodating and welcoming environment to live in, settle down and be Muslim" (17).Likewise, many among Kassaye et al's (2016) young Dutch Somali interlocutors "actively asserted their membership in the Netherlands" despite perceiving the media as anti-Muslim.Both these notions, namely media criticism and connection to host society, are also echoed in Kabir's (2016) study on Muslim women in Australia, Britain and the US.Furthermore, Phoenix (2011), who's sample consist of Muslim Somali girls (nine of ten wearing a hijab) from an inner-city college in London, found that her interviewees felt unaffected by Islamophobia, and that they described themselves as "modern young Somali Muslims" who were "into the British kinda thing" (321).Similarly, in a sociological intervention study among Muslim women in the UK (Joly 2017), "the majority of the women insisted that they were British Muslims, emphasizing their identification with Britain" (822).Finally, in a study among 20 "leaders" from the Canadian Muslim community, McCoy et al (2016) found that "interviewees expressed quite positive sentiments related to belonging to Canada, especially in relation to the image of a diverse and multicultural image of Canada" (44).
Lastly, there is the literature focusing on identity from within racescholarship, which, taken together, finds that Muslims with different backgrounds vary in how they position their religious identity in relation to race, class, and ethnicity (Mahmut 2021, Yazdiha 2021, Byng 2017, Guenther et al. 2011).

Discussion
The review-section of this article has revealed a rather complex literature with diverse findings.What remains now is an evaluation of the research question posed at the end of section 2.1, namely: to what extent do the findings in the sampled literature support the dominant theoretical prepositions in contemporary Islamophobia studies, i.e. that Muslims in the West are systematically racialized and discriminated against?Given the diverse findings, one could easily imagine readers to have conflicting opinions about the implications that this review could, or should have, for established theory in the field.Bellow, two interpretations of the review-findings will be discussedone which affirms the theoretical prepositions in the research question, and one which rejects it.

Systematic racialization and discrimination?
The theoretical claims of systematic racialization and discrimination seemingly enjoy substantial empirical support from the articles in the sample, especially considering that most of the studies, across countries, find that participants have had experiences with some form of discrimination due to their visible Muslimness (usually tied to the hijab and/or phenotype).The fact that "looking Muslim" evidently causes Muslims in different national contexts to have discriminatory experiences can thus be taken as support for the claim of systematic racialization, with the sheer spread of geographical contexts being an indication of a certain degree of systematization of a racialized Muslim imaginary.This geographical spread of experienced discrimination can furthermore be taken as what in section 1.1 was presented as effects as evidence of Islamophobia, i.e. discriminatory experiences across the West as indicators of the existence of a racialized Muslim imaginary, which in turn implies a cultural rootedness of Islamophobia that goes beyond the individual society.The Table 1 presents the articles in the sampled literature where at least some of the participants had experienced discrimination due to being visibly Muslim, listed by country of study.
While the number of articles that document experienced discrimination is substantial, there are also findings in the review that challenge an evaluation of the research question like the one presented above.Particularly, the review revealed that many Muslims, despite having had experiences with discrimination, don't consider their societies as exclusionary, and that many also seem to feel a strong sense of belonging to the country in which they reside.A proponent of the theoretical understanding proposed in the previous paragraph could argue that some Muslims are privileged relative to others on the grounds of class, ethnicity, and/ or race, which in turn renders them less likely to have frequent experiences of exclusion, and therefore more likely to feel included.This explanation however does not adequately explain the findings, as they apply to studies with large sample variety, including samples with participants that would be regarded as "less privileged".The table below presents these studies, including the country of study, sample, and specified finding.

Taking Muslim experiences seriously
The empirical tension that emerges from the sampled literature, as presented in the previous section, requires addressing.One could problematize the inclusiveness of the findings presented in Table 2, for example by arguing that informants are suppressing their experiences and emotions, or that they have assimilated to the extent that they have become tolerable to their host societies.A further development of the latter point could be that inclusion, through rewarding certain attitudes and behaviors, actually enables exclusion of those who fail to live up to the set standards (for example Deepa Kumar's idea of the "good Muslim" who supports US imperialism).These are relevant explanations that need to be considered.Consideration however does not entail a dismissal of the potential relevance for theory of these findings.Indeed, dismissal on the grounds just elaborated would ultimately deny agency on the basis of positionality, i.e. imply that some Muslims are incapable of giving an accurate account of their lives, which in turn renders the accounts that they do make as irrelevant for our understandings of what it is like to be Muslim in a non-Muslim majority country.It would appear fair to assume that this alone makes the cost of dismissing the findings in Table 2 as too high, and that the findings therefore, in the very least, need to be entertained in a serious fashion.
What does it then mean to take Muslim experiences with inclusion seriously?A key argument in this article is that it ought to have significant implications for theoretical claims about systematic racialization of Muslims, especially systematization understood as unitary societal intent and practice.
On the most fundamental level this entails a deconstruction of the West as a socio-political entity that has a modus operandi towards Muslims.This should not by any means be taken as a call to reduce racialization to individual prejudice, or as a rejection of the political, social and cultural dimensions of Islamophobia.Rather, it should be taken as an encouragement to develop conceptualizations of the macro aspects of Islamophobia without assuming Western cultures and societies as inherently Islamophobic.This is arguably also necessary in order to be able to theoretically take into account the main message of this special issue, namely that Islamophobia is a truly global phenomenon, and not only, or even predominantly, attributive to Western societies (Ganesh, Frydenlund, and Brekke 2023).Furthermore, this should also be taken as an invitation to develop a theoretical framework of Islamophobia that allows for both exclusion (racialization and discrimination) and inclusionan encouragement that stems from the finding in the review that processes of both exclusion and inclusion are in play in Muslims' everyday lives.This alone shows that doing research on Muslims indeed can inform our concepts and theories regarding Islamophobia, making one of the key arguments in this article that scholars should acknowledge the utility of assuming an agent-oriented perspective when considering claims about the nature and workings of alleged macro phenomena.Indeed, as shown in this article, the findings from such an enquiry constitute a strong argument for the need of nuancing grand narratives that speak of an omnipresent exclusion of Muslims.In other words, claims about "the workings of culture" (as Hafez does using the concept of dominant culture) ought to be informed by the full range of experiences of those theorized to be subjugated by it, not just the experiences that support established concepts and theory.This is by no means a call to dismiss the significance of theory within Islamophobia studies, which has been tremendously fruitful in both historicizing and actualizing the phenomenon.Rather, it is a call to challenge the premise that studying Islamophobia "does not mean engaging with Islam and Muslims" (Hafez 2018, 217).In practice, this means that research on exclusion of Muslims also ought to inquire about inclusion, and by so doing, scholars of Islamophobia would, as the title of this article implies, take Muslim experiences seriously when theorizing about Islamophobia.

Notes
1.In addition to these, a couple of psychological questions also appear interesting (especially concerning the appeal of Islamophobic beliefs, as well as the link between beliefs and behaviors).The focus of this article however lies within the social sciences.2. Emphasis my own 3.For something to be a consequence of Islamophobia, it has to be "informed or initiated by ideological meanings or motivations", that is, acts that are "based on some anti-Muslim ideological premise" (:153).Islamophobia for Allen is thus, simply put, a set of ideas, and these ideas reveal themselves through the acts that they motivate.4. Eight of the studies in the sample have been assigned more than one country.5. Journal discipline was determined using the Norwegian register for scientific journals, series and publishers: https://kanalregister.hkdir.no/publiseringskanaler/Forside.action?request_ locale=en

(
Islamophob*) OR (discrimination and Muslim) OR (Rac* and Muslim) OR (stigma* and Muslim) OR (stereo* and Muslim) OR (prejudice and Muslim) OR (exclusion and Muslim).

Table 1 .
Articles that find experienced discrimination due to Muslim visibility.