This paper undertakes a critical analysis and evaluates the recent developments in the study of Islam and how it has gone beyond Orientalism; as Martin and Ernst remark in the preface and acknowledgements of Rethinking Islamic Studies: from Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism that the last three decades—after the publication of Orientalism in 1978—“has been a liberating experience for us as scholars initially trained in narrowly textual ‘Orientalist’ approaches, as we have been forced by circumstance to address many issues of contemporary political and social relevance.” However, I will also acknowledge the alternate perspective that these developments may not have gone beyond Said’s Orientalism, but have rather reinforced and maintained - and have “decidedly worsened”—the very ideas Said introduced in Orientalism because of issues such as: Islamic fundamentalism and the aftermath of 9/11, and how the study of Islam has been influenced by these issues in modern times thus returning to the Orientalist approach. I will look at the history of Orientalism in the study of Islam, then the emergence of space for self-representation, and then I will look at the current study of Islam. Esposito argues that Orientalism has taken a new form, and no longer romanticizes the Middle East as having sandy deserts where genies, thieves and evil sorcerers vied after scantily clad princesses amid a backdrop of white palaces and peasant-ridden streets, as presented in the film ‘Aladdin’.

A cursory look at Indian prime time news tells us much about the tone and tenor of the people associated with it. Exaggerations, hyperbole, and tempers run wild and news anchors flail in theatrical rage. News channels and news editors display their ideological affiliations subliminally. These affiliations — a factor of personal political stance, funding bodies, and investors — lead to partisan bias in the framing of news and, in some cases, can easily translate into racial prejudice. In this paper, I examine news coverage related to Muslims in India. I study the coverage of two issues specifically– love jihad and triple talaq –in prime time English news of two channels – Times Now and Republic TV. My analysis of the content, tone, and tenor of their coverage shows that these channels propagate associations between Islam and backwardness, ignorance and violence through consistent employment of the following tropes – ‘Muslim women need to be saved from Muslim men’, ‘Hindu women need to be saved from Muslim men’, and ‘Muslims are not fully Indian – they are anti-national’. I place this study of news media within the current political climate in India and briefly touch on the conversations it guides and provokes. This is also a call for further analysis on this subject to examine and evaluate how discourse manipulates public conversations and policy decisions.

Soon after the Conservative-led Coalition government came to power in 2010, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi announced that Islamophobia had passed the ‘dinner-table test’ in contemporary Britain. Resultantly, the need to address Islamophobia was identified as a priority for the Coalition. This article critically analyses how the Coalition sought to achieve this and the extent to which it was successful. Focusing on the period 2010-5, this article initially frames what is meant by Islamophobia before briefly setting out how it had been responded to by previous British governments. As regards the Coalition, a threefold approach is adopted that considers the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia, the Cross-Government Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hate and the political discourses used by the Coalition about Muslims and Islam more generally. Concluding that the Coalition failed to meet the high expectations set by Warsi’s speech, this article considers why this might have been so.

In the British setting, the deployment of the phrase ‘doing god’ has become increasingly common to refer to an emerging trend whereby religion has acquired an increasingly prominent role in political spaces and discourses. This was particularly prominent while David Cameron was Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party. While historically, religion has not had a prominent place in either the former Prime Minister David Cameron. Here, the findings from critical analyzing a series of Cameron’s public pronouncements about religion—and Christianity in particular—is set out to try and better understand his own adherence to Christianity (the personal) how this intersected with his politics and role as Prime Minister (the political), and more importantly how this shaped his views about Britain being a Christian country (the national). Contextualised within the embryonic scholarly literature relating to the phenomenon of ‘doing god’ in the contemporary British setting, this article concludes by considering alternative and analogous frames through which greater elucidation of the true motivations of his pronouncements might be understood.