The unbearable anxiety of being: Ideological fantasies of British Muslims beyond the politics of security

Why ideology? Moving beyond the security paradigm

There is an extant literature in the fields of politics and international relations that addresses social policy and media constructions of Muslims in the West through the conceptual lenses of ‘securitization’ (Bosco, 2014; Brown, 2010; Cesari, 2009; Fox and Akbaba, 2015; Hussain and Bagguley, 2012), ‘suspect communities’ (Awan, 2012; Choudhary and Fenwick, 2011; Hickman et al., 2011; Kundnani, 2014; Nikels et al., 2012; Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009) and ‘governmentality’ (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Birt, 2011; De Goede, 2008; De Goede and Simon, 2012; Heath-Kelly, 2013; O’Toole et al., 2016). Each of these lenses offers something useful, but each also remains tied to the paradigm of security as its key reference point. Distinct concerns over schools, food and sexual abuse, among other things, have been articulated through a series of media scandals, and while each is partly represented as overlapping with security concerns around terrorism and ‘radicalization’, none is confined to this topic. We therefore need a conceptual and analytic framework that can speak to the more pervasive nature of anxieties about Muslims.

This article shows that the concept of ideology – specifically the Lacanian version developed by Slavoj Žižek – can provide such a framework. In the midst of the liberal triumphalism of the early post–Cold War era, Žižek added his voice to attempts to resuscitate the concept of ideology, noting that the ‘idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence’ (Žižek, 2008: xxiv). In addition to his first major work published in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 1989), Žižek penned a series of shorter interventions that were concerned with retrieving the concept of ideology and reasserting its pertinence at a time when many were claiming that it had become a defunct or irrelevant category. Žižek’s Lacanian concept of ideology provides a way of seeing policy and media representations of an imagined ‘Muslim community’ as a confluence of fantasies and anxieties mobilized in the service of specific power relations and political strategies, which, we argue, makes for a deeper understanding of the wide range of ‘scandals’ relating to British Muslims and the prominence accorded to these in our public sphere.

Muslims are singled out for exceptional, sustained, multifaceted and intensive vilification (Alexander, 2017: 14). While critical security theory can contribute to explaining some aspects of this problem, there are important elements that are not accounted for. How has the figure of the Muslim become the pre-eminent ‘monster’ in our news media, across such a wide spectrum of issues? What sort of investment do we have as a society in the existence and threat of this monster that renders it so ubiquitous and anxiety inducing? To answer these questions, it is useful to engage in a form of ideology critique.

Which ideology? Beyond truth and falsehood

The Marxian concept of ideology has faced compelling challenges from within the critical tradition of social theory itself. Post-structuralist criticism has been articulated through a critique of claims to ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ ostensibly implied in the concept of ideology, and a consequent imagined ability to ‘step outside of discourse’ on the part of practitioners of ideology critique. Today, in the academic fields of politics and international relations, we find ideology counter-posed to Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ in the form of a vertical analogy wherein the former functions ‘top down’ while the latter acts from the ‘bottom up’ (Springer, 2012: 133). Contemporary Foucauldian scholarship rejects ‘mere’ ideology as inadequate for explaining the complex modalities and generative capacities of power in the (post)modern world (e.g. Rose, 1993; Vrasti, 2011).

How can we salvage the concept of ideology from this powerful critique? Žižek has striven to actively dissociate it from the ‘representationalist’ paradigm, according to which ideology is simply falsehood obscuring from view the ‘truth’ of the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to capitalism (Žižek, 1994: 7). Instead, Žižek (1994: 1) proposes a concept of ideology as a ‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship’. Such a matrix is not imposed ‘top down’, but consists in the basic interpretive frameworks, the ways of seeing (Berger, 1972), that we engage in our everyday lives. Ideology saturates everyday culture and communication, from film, literature, music and art to management practices and workplace training. We produce it ourselves; it belongs to us.

Žižek is not alone in conceptualizing ideology in a more spontaneous, less representationalist way. Stuart Hall, for example, rejects conceptualizations of ideology as the top-down imposition of an illusion or ‘some simple, all-or-nothing distinction between the True and the False’ (Hall, 1986: 39) – in favour of a sensitivity to the diffusion of ideology in social constellations, its operation in ‘logics’ and discourses, and in what Gramsci called ‘common sense’. We agree with Hall that ‘ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces’ (Hall, 1986: 42). But, as our analysis demonstrates, whereas Hall and others remain sceptical about psychoanalytic concepts, Žižek’s reading of the concept of ideology through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is particularly insightful.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Žižek (2013) uses the cult classic 1980s film They Live to summarize his approach. The protagonist stumbles upon a box of sunglasses developed by a clandestine resistance movement whose members are struggling against ‘bodysnatcher’ aliens that, without the sunglasses, appear as ordinary people and occupy all positions of political-economic power. When one dons the glasses, one sees through the illusion – the false consciousness – these aliens are broadcasting globally. Billboards, magazines, even dollar bills appear as they ‘really’ are: blank and grey, with simple and brutal injunctions inscribed onto them: ‘obey and conform’, ‘marry and reproduce’. They Live thus provides a crucial insight into the dynamics of ideology:

According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our ‘straight’ view. [In this view] ideology should be [understood as the] glasses, which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, like you take off the glasses so you can finally see the way things really are. This precisely – and here the pessimism of the film, of They Live, is well justified – this precisely is the ultimate illusion: Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive each meaning, and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology! (Žižek, 2013)

Ideology is something that societies buy into (emotionally as much as materially) and reproduce as the experience of a cohesive social totality, or what Mandelbaum (2016: 189) has called ‘the congruency fantasy’ with respect to ‘the discursive relations between state, nation and society in modernity’. ‘In the predominant Marxist perspective,’ as Žižek puts it, ‘the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own possibility’ (Žižek, 1989: 50, emphasis in original). The concept of ideology need not, therefore, ‘always stand in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth’ (Foucault, 1984: 60), but is rather constitutive of ‘truths’ as we experience them:

Ideology is thus not necessarily ‘false’: as to its positive content, it can be ‘true’, quite accurate, since what really matters is not the asserted content as such but the way this content is related to the subjective position implied by its own process of enunciation. (Žižek, 1994: 8, emphasis in original)

Thinking our problem through ideology in this sense therefore involves asking the questions: How do all of these stories around Islam and Muslims in 21st-century Britain function for us? Why, as a society, are we telling ourselves these stories about Muslims through our news media and national political conversation?

Fantasy and anxiety: Developing and applying Žižek’s Lacanian conceptualization of ideology

Žižek’s conceptualization of ideology rests upon a Lacanian theory of the subject. Given this, two aspects of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory are especially important to understanding how the social construction of British Muslims can be conceived of as ‘ideological’: fantasy and anxiety. These strands of Lacanian theory are intimately interrelated to the point of imbrication in Lacan’s theorization of the subject (Lacan, 2014), and we do not seek to describe each as a discrete phenomenon; to do so would be to fundamentally misunderstand both Lacan and Žižek. Nor do we offer a ‘doctrinaire’ account of Žižek’s Lacanian conceptualization of ideology. Instead, we draw upon both thinkers, and others, to develop our own conceptual-analytic framework for ideology critique.

There have been important interventions that have mobilized Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts in international relations (Eklundh et al., 2017; Epstein, 2011; Mandelbaum, 2016; Zevnik, 2017a, 2017b). However, these interventions do not explicitly engage with the concept of ideology, which yields fresh critical insight by attending to the ways in which power relations and political strategies are mobilized. Through discussions of the fantasy of congruence, Mandelbaum (2016: 191) argues that ‘possibilities of national/social congruency require an other, an empty signifier of sorts (e.g. the foreigner, the migrant, Islam and so on)’. This article engages in an analysis of an ‘other’, the conceptual Muslim, and its ideological functions in concrete political struggles beyond security.

The concepts of fantasy and anxiety are common to the Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic traditions that pre-date Lacan. But it is in Lacan’s Seminar X that the two concepts become thoroughly imbricated, with fantasies acting to manage anxieties generated by the ‘constitutive lack’ at the core of the subject (Lacan, 2014: 3; see also Ormrod, 2014: 116). Fantasmatic narratives about others allow us to conceal or escape deadlocks and antagonisms about ourselves, and in this sense fantasy is crucial to ideology. Specifically, while ‘reality’ is never directly experienced, but always-already symbolized, that symbolization is always incomplete. The ‘Real’ (in the Lacanian sense, aspects of social reality that remain non-symbolized) thus reasserts itself in the form of ‘spectral apparitions’ (Žižek, 2005: 262). These fantasmatic spectres serve to ‘fill up the hole of the Real’ (Žižek, 2005: 262), or to manage our anxieties about societal antagonisms. In this sense, anxiety plays a dual role in ideology – it is both cause and effect. We are anxious about social contradictions of which we do not speak; and then, when they erupt into the symbolic realm, we are encouraged to focus instead on spectral apparitions that are, in turn, cues to (actionable) anxiety.

In this engagement with the nomenclature of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we risk losing track of the concept of ideology itself. It is therefore important to emphasize that Žižek’s Lacanian reconstruction of the concept is very much within that ‘critical’ tradition defined by John Thompson wherein ideology is understood as ‘meaning in the service of power’ (Thompson, 1990: 7). For Žižek, as for Thompson, ideology is often realized and communicated textually or linguistically. A Lacanian concept of ideology does not contradict the claim of media discourse theorists and analysts like Roger Fowler that ‘anything that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position: language is not a clear window but a refracting, structuring, medium’ (Fowler, 1991: 10) and that consequently ideology ‘literally constructs the news, as it is written about’ (Fowler, 1991: 24). This is what Žižek (1994: 11) means when he says that ‘facts never “speak for themselves” but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices’. Particular media representations are ideological to the extent that they serve the interests of maintaining existing social orders and forestall radical social change. Such representations are not necessarily ‘consciously’ produced by a manipulative ruling class, however, but may result from what Jessop (2008) calls ‘strategic selectivity’, whereby policies, discourses and practices that favour and reproduce the social status quo are more likely to prevail.

This model does not involve a spurious extrapolation from the ‘individual’ level of psychology to the societal level. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, unlike dominant strains of social psychology today, no such methodological individualism obtains. In the Lacanian view (which begins from a ‘constitutive lack’ at the core of the subject), the psychological is always-already social, there is no abstract ‘individual’ – one of many parallels with Marx (see, for example, Marx, 1973: 84). In The Parallax View, Žižek rebuts the level-of-analysis objection in detail:

The focus of psychoanalysis resides elsewhere: the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate … to experience as an order which is minimally ‘reified’, externalized. The problem, therefore, is not ‘how to jump from the individual to the social level’. (Žižek, 2006a: 6)

This differs crucially from ‘cognitive’ psychological models of ideology, too. Van Dijk, for instance, explicitly rejects the critical concept of ideology employed by scholars like Thompson for being ‘exclusively inspired by the social sciences’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 21), and instead draws upon cognitive psychology in an effort to avoid focusing too strongly on ‘discursive and social dimensions’ (Van Dijk, 1998: 21). This methodologically individualist psychological framing of ideology is almost diametrically opposed to Žižek’s Lacanian model.

To conceptualize ideology as meaning in the service of power, and as realized in the interplay between anxiety and fantasy, is a productive strategy, as our analysis will demonstrate. It is also an approach that has not, as yet, been brought to bear on the research problem at stake in this investigation: the mediatized social construction of British Muslims beyond the politics of security.

Ideology critique and the unbearable anxiety of the ‘conceptual Muslim’

The value added to our analysis by placing Žižek’s Lacanian concept of ideology at the centre of our conceptual-analytic framework is prefigured by Žižek’s own discussion of Nazi ideology, the fantasy of the ‘conceptual Jew’ and a ‘Jewish plot’. Žižek argues that in Nazi ideology ‘the Jew is like the maternal phallus: there is no such thing in reality, yet for that very reason its phantom-like, spectral presence gives rise to an unbearable anxiety’ (Žižek, 2005: 258, emphasis added). It is the very gap between the ‘empirical’ Jew, actual Jewish people and their everyday lives, and the ‘conceptual’ Jew-as-monster, the omnipotent and conniving figure of the Jew, that reinforces the fantasy of the latter. Nazi ideology consisted partly in fantasies about what the monstrous ‘conceptual Jew’ got up to behind closed doors.

Such fantasies need not be limited to either Nazi ideology or the ‘conceptual Jew’. Žižek (2005: 256) suggests that while general social ‘intolerance’ to ‘foreigners’ takes the form of complaints about ‘their’ loud voices, strange food, ugly clothing or bad smell, such factors are found to be no more than ‘indicators of a more radical strangeness’, an ‘unfathomable je ne sais quoi’. The role that these fantasies ‘about the other’s political and/or sexual omnipotence, about “their” strange sexual practices, about their secret hypnotic powers’ play in ideological terms is their covering of the unarticulated or non-symbolized Real. These are the ‘spectral apparitions’ to which Žižek refers.

Žižek’s Lacanian concept of ideology captures some of the ways in which psychoanalytic categories, including fantasy and anxiety, figure in political and social processes and events, and allows us to think of ideology as filling the gaps and voids in our social world to shore up our fragile identities. Consequently, Žižek (1994) argues that:

[one] mode of the critique of ideology that corresponds to this notion is that of the symptomal reading: the aim … is to discern the unavowed bias of the official text via its ruptures, blanks and slips.

In response to Donald Rumsfeld’s (in)famous ‘known knowns’ speech on Iraq, Žižek put it another way. He noted that what Rumsfeld neglects to mention are ‘unknown knowns’ – things we don’t know that we know (Žižek, 2006b). This disavowed knowledge relates to the domain of the Real: the parts of reality that remain non-symbolized. The aim of a symptomal reading is therefore to attempt to describe the function of a given ‘spectre’ or fantasy in relation to this disavowed knowledge or non-symbolized reality. The purpose of our ideology critique is thus to carry out a symptomal reading that reveals powerful antagonisms underpinning and maintaining our social orders. Ideological representations involve a fantasy of facticity and empirical clarity with regard to the spectre:

One of the fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to some self-evidence – ‘Look, you can see for yourself how things are!’ ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology – the point being, precisely, that facts never ‘speak for themselves’ but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices. (Žižek, 1994: 11, emphasis in original)

The critique of ideology thus consists in an attempt to reconnect fantasmatic spectres to the ruptured Real. Rather than revealing some ‘deeper’ reality that is concealed by ideological illusion or falsehood, this method of ideology critique is about highlighting the functions of particular powerful fantasies in a symbolic order where fantasizing itself is inescapable. The point is to undermine fantasmatic narratives that claim that ‘the facts speak for themselves’:

When a racist Englishman says ‘There are too many Pakistanis on our streets!’, how – from what place – does he ‘see’ this – that is, how is his symbolic space structured so that he can perceive the fact of a Pakistani strolling along a London street as a disturbing surplus? That is to say, here one must bear in mind Lacan’s motto that nothing is lacking in the real: every perception of a lack or a surplus (‘not enough of this’, ‘too much of that’) always involves a symbolic universe. (Žižek, 1994: 11, emphasis in original)

Milan Kundera’s novel famously proposes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ in contradistinction to the heaviness of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (Kundera, 1984; Nietzsche, 2000). We can think of the ‘unbearable anxiety’ generated by the figure of the Muslim as precisely an instantiation of the eternal return of the ideological other; a fantasized ‘conceptual’ other who plots against and undermines our social whole. But the conceptual Muslim cannot really spoil our happy social whole, since it is never there in the first place. Our society is riven with difference and antagonism, with competing fantasies and aspirations. Instead, this figure, which ‘appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity with itself’, turns out to be its ‘positive condition’. In other words, we can here substitute a ‘conceptual Muslim’ for the ‘conceptual Jew’ in Žižek’s analysis, so that ‘by transposing onto the [Muslim] the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible’ (Žižek, 1992: 104). The more tension is ratcheted up in contemporary Britain, through ‘austerity’ and inequality, the rise of the far right, the split between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ in the wake of the 2016 referendum on EU membership, and a spike in hate crimes against minority groups, the more important the figure of the Muslim becomes in managing our political-economic neuroses. Islamophobic depictions of Muslims in British government and media in this sense can be considered ideological.

Ideological fantasies are thus the narratives by means of which we avoid confrontation with the Lacanian ‘Real’ of political and economic power: the unarticulated and contradictory structures and practices that underpin our social order. These fantasies intensify when that Real is close to ‘erupting’ into visibility. This differs from an ‘ideology as illusion’ conceptual model in that the fantasies are not necessarily ‘false’ in the content of their narratives about particular social events, actors and processes, but are rather a means of avoiding confrontation with the ways in which the same problems represented as ‘deviant’ by a fantasy narrative may in fact be at the heart of ‘normal’ life – an anxiety-inducing prospect indeed. In the second half of this article, we turn to three media-scandal case studies in relation to British Muslims. Our aim here is to show how Žižek’s Lacanian reconstruction of the concept of ideology and this notion of the ‘conceptual Muslim’ can be brought to bear to develop original insights into the political power dynamics of racialized othering and the demonization of Muslim minorities, beyond the politics of security.

‘Muslamic ray guns’: Muslim sexuality and paedophilia

Constructing the fantasy. The concept of the ‘Muslim rape gang’ went viral in 2011 through an interview with an English Defence League member (see YouTube, 2011). Asked why he is marching, he says, ‘cos I want Britain to be about British’, followed by a series of incoherent comments about ‘the Muslamic infidel’ who is ‘trying to put their law’, and ‘their Iraqi law’, ‘down on us’. He adds what sounds like ‘you’ve got Muslamic ray guns’. But this incoherent explanation is important since, despite its surface-level absurdity, there is something intelligible about it. The ‘Muslamic ray guns’ comment was significant because it was clear that he was really trying to say ‘Muslim rape gangs’. That such a disturbing comment appears in such a surreal form is telling. As inarticulate and intoxicated as the man appears, he is attempting to describe a ‘Muslim plot’, ranging from the imposition of Sharia law in parts of Britain to the infamous ‘rape gangs’. His comments can be read as a symptom (Zevnik, 2017a) of a wider complex of anxiety and fantasy regarding the sexually monstrous conceptual Muslim.

In 2012, cabinet minister and Labour MP Jack Straw claimed that men from the Pakistani community were deliberately ‘grooming’ white girls in order to form sexual relations with them, and argued that these men saw white girls as ‘easy meat’ (Prince, 2012). Since 2012, there have been a number of cases involving groups of men exploiting and raping young girls. In addition to Rochdale, there have been prosecutions in Oxford, Birmingham, Derby and High Wycombe (Bell, 2014). Explanations for these incidents of systematic sexual abuse have been directly linked to religion, race and misogyny (Tufail, 2015). Tory MP Kris Hopkins claimed that white girls are considered ‘available’ by Muslim men because they do not dress modestly, and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi said they were seen as ‘fair game’ (Huffington Post, 2012). Labour’s Shadow Equalities Minister Sarah Champion resigned in 2017 after arguing that ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’ in the Sun (Champion, 2017).

The link between religion, race and misogyny is made clear in these narratives: Muslim men rape because of their ethnic and religious identity. Allison Pearson (2013) sums this up: ‘Leaders of the Pakistani Muslim community – essentially a Victorian society that has landed like Doctor Who’s Tardis on a liberal, permissive planet it despises – are at pains to deny that the grooming gang’s behaviour has anything to do with ethnic origin or contemptible attitudes towards women.’ The hypervisibilized fact of some groups of men, who are racialized as Muslim, sexually abusing mostly white, non-Muslim girls is thus ‘made to speak’, to borrow Žižek’s turn of phrase, to a broader fantasy about British Muslims as a culturally deviant minority with sinister designs on ‘our’ (white, non-Muslim men’s) women and children.

The ideological functions of the ‘Muslim rape gangs’ fantasy. Stories of serial historical sexual abuse have proliferated since the death of television presenter Jimmy Savile in 2011. Savile abused up to 500 children he encountered through his television work and charitable visits to hospitals and schools (BBC, 2014). The investigation into Savile’s activities also triggered the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree, which investigated other well-known figures including DJ Dave Lee Travis, children’s television presenter Rolf Harris and publicist Max Clifford. Media reaction to these cases varied. In the case of Savile, shock was expressed by many members of the press despite the fact these allegations were known to many who had worked with him (Davies, 2012). But explanations for the actions of these men centred on their celebrity status at the BBC, their wealth and the sexual permissiveness of the time (Boyle, 2016; Robertson, 2013; Sillito, 2016).

Deborah Orr (2012) offers a different take: ‘Look at the crimes that were committed by one man under cover of a dangerously misogynistic permissiveness, and wake up to the fact that this is exactly what all those tedious feminists mean when they talk of “rape culture”.’ But this ‘cultural’ narrative found little purchase in the media discussion, and was in any case not racialized (Orr is not suggesting that, for example, the ‘whiteness’ of perpetrators may be to blame). Most recently, fallout from allegations of abuse and rape levelled at American film producer Harvey Weinstein led to an outpouring of stories from women on social media about their experiences through the hashtag #metoo. These revelations also extended to British politics. Several MPs were ‘outed’ for sexual harassment and misconduct, with Defence Secretary Michael Fallon resigning his cabinet post over allegations against him (BBC, 2017).

Juxtaposing these two examples of systematic sexual abuse reveals that one is represented as stemming from an excess of power and the other from degenerate religious or racial characteristics. Comparing the representation of sex offenders racialized as ‘Asian’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Pakistani’ versus those who were ‘white’, Tufail (2015) found racial and religious signifiers to be absent in coverage of the latter. White sex offenders were simply paedophiles, whereas those racialized as ‘Muslim’ were doubly monstrous. There is, meanwhile, a strong historical precedent to describing Muslim masculinities and sexualities as perverted and dangerous (Bhattacharyya, 2008; Puar and Rai, 2002). The example of the Prophet Mohammed as a paedophile is a recurrent trope in far-right discourses on the threat posed by Muslim men (Jackson and Feldman, 2011), and the YouTube film Innocence of Muslims, which sparked international riots in 2012, also depicted Mohammed in this way (BBC, 2012). Polygamy and the availability of virgins in heaven upon martyrdom are oft-cited examples of the apparent strangeness of Muslim sexual practices.

From Savile to Weinstein to Westminster, systematic sexual abuse by the dominant, non-Muslim white male culture is almost never described as a result of ‘cultural’ or racial failings. Cultural misogyny appears as the sole property of Muslim men who are ‘known’ to be sexually deviant, and this is the ideological function of the ‘Muslim rape gangs’ fantasy. This fantasy obfuscates the wider problem of endemic child sexual exploitation and patriarchal violence at large in British society perpetrated overwhelmingly by (white, non-Muslim) men. In making child sexual exploitation the work of Muslim men, and bringing racial and religious identity into the causal explanation, ‘Britishness’ and ‘British’ (white, non-Muslim) men are absolved. As bell hooks (1994: 135) puts it: ‘misogynistic attitudes tend to be portrayed by the dominant culture as always an expression of male deviance. In reality, they are part of a sexist continuum, necessary for the maintenance of patriarchal social order.’ The Muslim rape gangs fantasy allows us to say, ‘look, it’s the Pakistani, the Muslim’ and ‘in comparison, we, white British people are more civilized’. This fantasy ensures the participation of many feminists in racist discourse about Muslim men (what Sara Farris [2017] calls femonationalism) and makes the transformational work of anti-racist feminists more difficult (Rashid, 2017).

The ‘Trojan Horse’ of Birmingham: Muslim ‘plots’ in the state education system

Constructing the fantasy. In 2014, a letter containing details of a supposed Islamist plot to take over 25 of Birmingham’s schools was sent to local educational authorities. Following the publication of the letter in news media, then Education Secretary Michael Gove ordered new Ofsted inspections of the schools concerned and appointed former head of counter-terrorism Peter Clarke to conduct a parallel inquiry (Travis, 2014). The result of the Ofsted inspections was to place three of the schools into special measures, despite the fact that two years previously two of them had been rated ‘outstanding’ by the same team. The schools were accused of not preparing children for life in modern Britain (Hiles, 2014), of failing to teach pupils about the dangers of extremism, and of weak teaching around sex and relationships (Stuart and Blake, 2017). However, the schools were not accused of ‘radicalizing’ Muslim schoolchildren.

The letter that provoked the crisis is now considered a forgery, but it was considered ‘real’ enough to warrant multiple inquires. There were ongoing problems at the schools regarding external speakers, the sacking of head teachers and the alienation of teaching staff (Cook, 2014). But it did not matter whether there was a conspiracy because, as the Ofsted reports suggests, these academy-status schools are already problematic for being run by Muslims. This view is reinforced by Gove’s move (later overturned) to ban those involved in the alleged ‘plot’ from teaching or becoming school governors (Gilligan, 2014). Published years earlier, Gove’s (2006) book Celsius 7/7 contained a chapter entitled ‘The Trojan Horse’, where he argued Islamists are trying to take over Britain through attempts such as the one outlined in the now-debunked letter. The spectre of the conceptual Muslim was already in place for Gove as he drew comparisons between UK Muslims, Nazis and communists in the scale of the threat they pose to ‘Western Civilization’.

Speculation over what was really going on in the schools abounded (Cook, 2014). Charles Moore at the Daily Telegraph provides an example par excellence of the kind of fantasizing the Trojan Horse scandal enabled:

I wonder what we shall learn about the curriculum. Was evolutionary biology taught? Were any dancing or singing classes allowed? Were classes sexually segregated, with girls at the back, not allowed to ask questions? How were non-Muslim teachers, parents and pupils treated? Were there cultural exchange visits to Mecca and did these exclude non-Muslim pupils? Were religious education classes on Christianity contrived specially for external visitors. (Moore, 2014)

The Daily Mail claimed that students were being taught ‘holy war’, for which its evidence was a religious education lesson that examined jihad and just war traditions (Clark et al., 2014). The Daily Express claimed that governors from one school

were demanding religious assemblies and regular time out of class for worship and generally turned the headteacher’s life into a nightmare. Their intention was to remove Dave Peck but it is my view that it was their ultimate intention to take over the school and make it a Muslim faith school with a Muslim head. (Wheeler, 2014)

The evidence for these claims was generated through fevered chains of linked speculation based on what is already ‘known’ about Muslims, which was sufficient to enable and structure the Trojan Horse fantasy.

The ideological functions of the ‘Trojan Horse’ fantasy. Writing about the Trojan Horse scandal, John Holmwood and Therese O’Toole (2017: 1) argue that ‘from the outset, it seemed to us there was no basis at all to this narrative’. Five teachers who were accused of ‘professional misconduct’ by the Department for Education (DfE) had their cases brought to the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), but the accusations were subsequently dropped. The NCTL accused government lawyers of ‘abuse of the process which is of such seriousness that it offends the panel’s sense of justice and propriety’ (Adams, 2017). Lifetime bans meted out to two further teachers by the DfE were also overturned, with Judge Stephen Phillips accusing government lawyers of ‘serious procedural impropriety’ and highlighting ‘considerable doubt as to the fairness’ of the proceedings (Adams, 2016). However, what is at stake in the analysis of the Trojan Horse is not only its veracity. The fantasy functioned ideologically to conceal wider tensions and contradictions in neoliberal educational reform and its reproduction of racialized, classed and gendered hierarchies, which these reforms were ostensibly designed to address.

As Education Secretary, Gove led wide-ranging changes, including significantly extending New Labour’s academies and free schools schemes, taking more schools outside the control of local education authorities. These schools receive funding directly from DfE and have control over staff, budgets, admissions and curricula. According to the government, this is about raising educational standards in disadvantaged areas (UK Government, 2015). Over half of English schools are now academies. As Holmwood and O’Toole point out, ‘social inequalities had previously been argued to determine outcomes, the focus was shifted to aspirations (on the part of parents and communities) and expectations (of teachers) in order to drive up standards regardless of circumstances’ (2017: 111, emphasis in original). Simply put, schools and the communities in which they are embedded are responsibilized for overcoming structural disadvantages and fostering their own success.

In 2012, Park View Academy had been judged ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in spite of catering to some of the most disadvantaged students in Britain. After the scandal broke in 2014, it was judged ‘inadequate’ and put into special measures. The change in status hinged on the idea the school had an ‘Islamic ethos’ which was not preparing children for ‘life in modern Britain’, rather than on educational attainment or teaching quality (Holmwood and O’Toole, 2017: 152–153). Taken together, these concerns point to fears that schools run by Muslims are susceptible to being ‘Islamized’. But, without the expansion of academies, the Trojan Horse scandal would not have been possible. Park View Academy was an example of the wrong race and class of people enabling the wrong kind of success through neoliberal educational reform.

Christy Kulz (2017) has argued that a ‘successful’ academy is one that attracts white, middle-class children and parents whose aspirational values provide an example or ‘oasis’ to unruly (working-class, racialized) ‘urban’ children. The colonization of academies by white middle-class families, to improve the chances of working-class and black, Asian and minority-ethnicity (BAME) children, reproduces the classed, raced and gendered structures they were ostensibly created to reform. The Trojan Horse scandal brought some of these tensions to light, but, as the example of Park View shows, the DfE and Gove were ultimately concerned with the ‘misuse’ of decentralized power by Muslims in the education system enabled by neoliberal reform. The fact that this school was providing poor local students with the possibility of educational attainment was not relevant. What was at stake in the Trojan Horse scandal was the reproduction of white middle-class values and privilege, which was subverted by the successful running of Park View by Muslims.

The ‘Halal Secret of Pizza Express’: Muslims and the British food industry

Constructing the fantasy. In May 2014, the Sun ran a front-page story relating to food, under the headline ‘Halal Secret of Pizza Express’, preceded by ‘After Subway ban on bacon…’. The use of halal meat by food outlets without labelling prompted newspapers to explain why this is problematic. The Sun wrote that ‘Islam says chicken can only be eaten if the bird’s throat has been slit while it is still alive’ (Jones, 2014). The story provides details about reciting verses from the Quran, facing Mecca when making the cut and the draining of blood from the animal. The Daily Mail sent an undercover reporter to a ‘halal’ abattoir who writes: ‘Grabbing one lamb at a time, he pulls back its head and slits the throat with a swift movement from his razor-sharp knife. Blood gushes everywhere as he recites the Islamic Bismillah prayer in Arabic: “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful”’ (Penman, 2010). The ‘halal’ process is thus palpably shrouded in a veil of ritualistic strangeness replete with references to Allah, the spilling of innocent blood and the recital of prayers. The reporter’s preoccupation with these aspects of slaughter points to a sense of unease and simultaneously a morbid fascination with the practice. The undercover investigation that sought to uncover the ‘truth’ about the halal process only reveals its profound unfathomability.

Coverage of this food-production story was in sharp distinction to the horsemeat scandal the preceding year. In 2013, DNA testing revealed that many supposedly ‘beef’ products available in supermarkets in fact contained little or no cow, but instead up to 99% horse. The Sun’s front page on the horsemeat scandal took a light-hearted approach, joking that Findus lasagne consisted of ‘Shergar’ (the racehorse disappeared by suspected IRA operatives in 1983) and pasta. Most tabloid coverage consisted of noting the level of horsemeat contained within the food, and the ‘household name’ stores stocking it, together with details of investigations underway. Major retailers including Tesco and Walmart-owned Asda were selling ‘own brand’ horsemeat lasagne wrongly labelled as ‘beef’. As the scandal unfolded, the narrative adopted – with active encouragement from the companies responsible for packaging horse as beef – was that the practice of substituting horse for cow was due to the involvement of ‘foreign’ factories in the production process. Retailers apologized and promised to switch or discipline suppliers to resolve the problem.

The ideological functions of the ‘halal secret’ fantasy. Both stories are unsettling in that they highlight increasing alienation from the processes of food production, the industrial slaughter of animals and the use of their flesh in ‘processed’ supermarket foods. However, whereas the horsemeat story is relatively light-hearted, with its Shergar joke (later Sun coverage noted that customers at a Mongolian restaurant were ‘neigh bothered’ about the sale of horsemeat), the coverage of the sale of halal meat at Pizza Express is framed in a much more sinister way: a ‘halal secret’. This story is also explicitly linked to one the paper had run the previous week under the headline ‘200 Subways cutting out ham for Muslims’, deepening the impression of a ‘plot’ or ‘conspiracy’ among UK food outlets to serve meat produced using halal slaughter methods ‘secretively’ to non-Muslims.

The Pizza Express story tells readers that the chain has been serving only halal-slaughtered chicken, ‘without telling us’. This ‘us’ (non-Muslims) is therefore unwittingly eating meat from animals killed in accordance with the Islamic faith. This is supposed to be intrinsically outrageous. Yet outrage is only possible if we link this information up to the ideological network of other stories about Muslims. They are taking our ham away from our branches of Subway; they are radicalizing our children at school; they are forming rape gangs and molesting white, non-Muslim British girls – these are all elements of the ‘Muslim plot’. In fact, as subsequent news coverage demonstrated, Pizza Express had trailed online their switch to halal-only chicken on grounds of cost effectiveness; it is cheaper to buy the meat in bulk, and hence all from one source (Muir, 2014). Hugh Muir further notes that, unlike generic meat production, the standards of both care and hygiene are actually likely to be higher in many forms of religious slaughter, since at least some connection to the living animal and the meaning of its death is retained.

The Pizza Express story, like the horsemeat story, speaks to societal anxiety about our meat industry and secretive industrial food production processes, hidden from sight in vast and remote factories across the world (Foer, 2011; Lymbery, 2015; Singer, 1975). Where meat comes from in contemporary Britain, with its reliance on mass-produced and ‘convenience’ food, is a source of anxiety (Blythman, 2015; Lawrence, 2013). The animal itself, its life and death, has been conceptualized in critical scholarship as the ‘absent referent’ of the meat production process (e.g. Cudworth, 2010). In this instance, the spectre of the conceptual Muslim rears its monstrous head to cover the Real of our industrial meat production processes. That a majority of people might daily be consuming food of which they have little or no knowledge – of the country or even species of origin – is an intensely anxiety-inducing idea. The fantasy of a Muslim halal ‘secret’ conspiracy provides a means of articulating and managing this anxiety. Lobbying for bans on halal meat on grounds of animal cruelty delays confrontation with the grotesqueries of contemporary industrial meat production.