Decolonising Islamophobia

ABSTRACT
 The predominant conception of Islamophobia defines it as anti-Muslim racism. The consequence of this rather narrow characterisation is that Islamophobia is treated as a Western conundrum—that is, as a form of racism in Western societies—that affects Muslim immigrants from non-Western—Arab, Asian, and African—societies. I contend that whilst the conception of Islamophobia as racism is germane to Western societies, it is hardly universalisable not least because Islamophobia manifests in different ways in different societies. I argue that Islamophobia in some non-Western societies is not so much about racism but about tribalism as it involves grouping of Muslims into a single tribe and associating Muslimness with negative stereotypes regardless of racial identity. I contend that Islamophobia manifests as anti-Muslim tribalism in some non-Western contexts in order to capture varied expressions of the phenomenon beyond the West. For illustrative purposes, I draw on Nigeria where Islamophobia is typically expressed in ethnoreligious and ethnoregional strife.


Introduction
On 20 December 2019, the Wall Street Journal published an article by the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled The New War Against Africa's Christians. Citing the 2019 Global Terrorism Index-which labels the Fulani as one of the deadliest terror groups in the world-coupled with his interviews with some local communities in the Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria, Lévy posits that the Fulani-one of the ethnic groups in Nigeria-are Islamic extremists waging jihad to Islamise Nigerian Christians. Lévy further contends that the Fulani are akin to, and even more lethal than, the infamous Boko Haram jihadists seeking to create a caliphate in the northeast region. Indeed, during his fieldtrip in Nigeria, Lévy emphasises that the Fulani he met were standoffish, intolerant of other religious communities, and wore garbs adorned with Nazi insignia. He concludes his article with a caution to the international community-his shorthand, alas, for the West-not to sidestep the potent threat of Islamist extremism orchestrated by "Fulani raiders" by erroneously tagging local conflicts that pit Fulanis against other ethnoreligious groups as one amongst Africa's myriad ethnic conflicts. As he notably puts it: Some professional disinformers will try to reduce the violence here to one of the "interethnic wars" that inflame Africa. They'll likely find, here and there, acts of reprisal against the Fula and Hausa. But as my trip concludes, I have the terrible feeling of being carried back to Rwanda in the 1990s, to Darfur and South Sudan in the 2000s. Will the West let history repeat itself in Nigeria? Will we wait, as usual, until the disaster is done before taking notice? Will we stand by as international Islamic extremism opens a new front across this vast land, where the children of Abraham have coexisted for so long? (Lévy 2019) The conflicts which Lévy refers to as more than interethnic wars are the resource competitions between predominantly Fulani pastoralists and mainly Christian farmers of various ethnicities in the Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria. These conflicts are one of the deadliest conflicts in Africa as they have "killed more than 10,000 people in the last decade" (International Crisis Group 2018). Levy is, I think, not mistaken about the religious dimension of the resource conflicts. Such resource conflicts in Nigeria are never only about ethnicity but incorporate religion as a marker of identity. However, Lévy is profoundly wrong to surmise that the conflicts between Muslim Fulani pastoralists and local Christian farmers are about religion alone that warrant them to be analysed through the sole prism of Islamist extremism. Episodes of religious violence in Nigeria are hardly about religion alone. Indeed, religious violence-much like the resource conflicts-in Nigeria is as much about religion as about ethnicity, economics, history, and politics. Meral posits that "Nigeria's size, as well as the complexity of its populations, religious trends and turbulent political history makes any reduction of the causes behind such extreme levels of religious violence in the country to religious beliefs alone problematic" (Meral 2018, 28). This assertion strikes me as an accurate reading of the Nigerian context. Indeed, as a consequence of the complexities of the resource conflicts, Lévy's claim has been repudiated by Vincent Foucher for its gross misunderstanding of the local context (Roussy 2020).
Taking Foucher's criticism into account, what I can confidently say about Lévy's presupposition is that it is Islamophobic-it is an anti-Muslim sentiment-not least because it projects Fulani Muslims as jihadists with an expansionist agenda to exterminate "Africa's Christians". And by overlooking the "real" Islamic threat of the Fulani to local Christian communities-so Lévy's argument goes-the West consents to the circulation of Islamist extremism with dire consequences for human rights around the world. Perhaps what is notable in Lévy's Islamophobia-and this is by no means unique to him as many Nigerian Christians share similar low opinions of the Fulaniis that there is no reference to race in his assertions. Why did Lévy advance such anti-Muslim sentiments without appealing to race as is the currency in contemporary conceptualisations of Islamophobia in the West-that is, Euro-America? The reason, I suspect, is that race makes no sense in the everyday life of Nigerians as they interact with one another so that it would have been foolhardy if Lévy had used the term to describe the Fulani Muslims he encountered in Nigeria. Nigerians tend to talk about one another with identitarian markers such as religion, ethnicity, region and so on. If anything, race as a category of social identification is insignificant-it is hardly ever used-in official and unofficial matters in the most populous Black state where the majority do not distinguish themselves on racial terms. Nigerians do not see their conationals as belonging to racial groups. Many Nigerians-like many Black Africans-typically become aware of the "fact of Blackness" (Fanon 2009) when they sojourn-for business, tourism, and education-to the West. This is axiomatic from the assertions of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I wasn't black until I came to America. I became black in America. Growing up in Nigeria, I didn't think about race because I didn't need to think about race. Nigeria is a country with many problems and many identity divisions, but those identity divisions are mainly religion and ethnicity. So my identity growing up was Christian, Catholic, and Igbo … But, when I came to the U.S., it just changed … And, I came here and very quickly realised to Americans I was just black … Nigeria has many divisions but it's really hard to tell who is who just by looking at people -so that kind of immediate and overt discrimination just can't happen. If I walk into a store in Nigeria you can't tell if I'm Igbo or Yoruba. (Reese 2018) Adichie's presuppositions are in the vicinity of truth. For, the approximately 370 ethnicities in Nigeria 1 are not different races in any phenotypic sense but different ethnolinguistic groups. Because anti-Muslim sentiments interact with racism in the West-and there is no point in dismissing this reality-the prevailing conception of Islamophobia equates the phenomenon with anti-Muslim racism. But this conceptualisation sidesteps the experiences of some Muslims outside the West who suffer discrimination from their conationals because of ethnicity and religion even in the absence of race as a social identity. It is this peculiar conception of Islamophobia that I want to address in this article. My contention is not that racism does not exist in non-Western societies. Coining the term "multiracism" Alastair Bonnett has, for example, convincingly argued-with cases ranging from Morocco, South Korea, and Japan to India, China, and Indonesia-that racism happens outside the West (Bonnett 2022). However, my aim is to counteract the increasingly dominant picture that equates Islamophobia with racism in terms of exclusion based on one's relation to, or hierarchy in, Whiteness. In short, I wish to decolonise the Euro-American forms of Islamophobia emblematic of Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz's scholarship that do not fully capture the nuances of anti-Muslim discrimination in some non-Western contexts.
Like many terms in the social sciences, decolonisation is an "essentially contested concept" (Gallie 1956) that has meant many different things across time and space (Betts 2012). I employ decolonisation in the sense of "provincialising" (Chakrabarty 2007) Euro-American knowledges and the "recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures … that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity" (Walsh 2018, 17). In other words, to decolonise is-in the context of this article-to interrogate and transcend the Westerncentrism embedded in the sphere of knowledge production whereby Western epistemologies are, to an extent, automatically assumed to be representative of the globe without taking into consideration the plurality of local worldviews in diverse contexts that are neither mere adaptations nor extensions of intellectual discoveries in the Global North. Western claims of universality must be tempered by locally generated knowledges. My understanding of decolonisation is in keeping with the insights of the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said whose literary corpus subverts the proclivities of the West to privilege its ways of knowing, being, and representations of itself and, in so doing, to misrepresent other cultures (Said 1978). The two influential scholars of Islamophobia whose writings I critique in this article-Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz-are embedded in the history of their societies and it is thus quite unsurprising that their conceptualisations of anti-Muslim discrimination are inflected by their specific contexts in Britain and the United States. This corroborates Said's observation about the imperialism of Western ideas as Western authors are "very much in the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure" (Said 1994, xxii). Hence, by decolonising Islamophobia, I aim to assess anti-Muslim discrimination from the standpoint of some non-Westerners who may seem alien to Euro-American categories of racial discrimination. Comaroff and Comaroff are not misguided, I think, when they advocate for the interrogation-and inversion-of the Global North-Global South epistemic hierarchy so that ostensibly commonsensical models manufactured in the West are transvaluated from an African vantage to engender novel insights into the workings of the pluralist world (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 114).
Given this background, I contend that whereas Islamophobia is coterminous with Euro-American racism in terms of the "colour line", 2 such conceptualisation is bereft of meaning in some non-Western contexts where identification along colour lines is not socially pertinent. The comprehension of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism has led some scholars to circumvent cases in the non-Western world, as is evident in the dominance of cases of Islamophobia in the Western world and the relative dearth of significant instances in parts of the non-Western world like Nigeria. This theoretical bias has seemingly induced some scholars to suppose that Islamophobia does not yet exist in Nigeria (see Wariboko 2015, 47). I contend that the dearth of racialised identification in some non-Western contexts does not entail the absence of Islamophobia. Rather, it means we must excavate the specific ways Islamophobia occurs in specific localities outside the West. I argue that in some non-Western contexts Islamophobia manifests as anti-Muslim tribalism-that is, as in-group versus out-group dread of Muslims regardless of racial identity. For illustrative purposes, I examine Islamophobia in Nigeria which takes the form of anti-Fulani prejudice.
This article is organised around three sections. First, I assess the conceptualisation of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism by Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz. Although Western perspectives on Islamophobia are internally diverse, I focus on the frameworks of Modood and Aziz based in Britain and the United States, respectively. Both authors contend that Islamophobia occurs when there is a sort of convergence between colour and differentialist racismthat is, Muslims are discriminated first on the basis of colour and then later on the basis of cultural difference. Accordingly, colour racism is-for both authors-inexorably tied to differentialist racism. Although I do not reject their conceptualisation of the phenomenon as it pertains to the Euro-American context where a large proportion of Muslims are non-White immigrants, I contend that this particular way of defining Islamophobia is hardly universal but instead transposes experiences from the West to varied parts of the non-Western world where race is not a relevant social identity and where racism in terms of discrimination based on phenotypic differences, as the authors comprehend it, is implausible. For analytic purposes-and consistent with the academic convention-I differentiate race from ethnicity even though both terms are social constructs that sometimes overlap (Ford and Adam Kelly 2005). Whereas ethnicity is a "multifaceted, dynamic concept that develops and strengthens relationships through the formation of communities coming together around cultural similarity" (Suyemoto, Curley, and Mukkamala 2020, 2, emphasis in original), race is a "social representation created for the purpose of devising social groupings related to physical appearance in order to create and maintain a power hierarchy between groups and enforce systems of privilege, most specifically between White people and people of colour" (Suyemoto, Curley, and Mukkamala 2020, 3). Wendy Roth posits that race is a "cognitive structure that divides people into hierarchically ordered categories on the basis of certain physical or biological characteristics that are believed to be inherent" (Roth 2016(Roth , 1311. Similarly, this distinction between ethnicity and race has been underscored by David Theo Goldberg: "Ethnicity … tends to emphasise a rhetoric of cultural content, whereas race tends to resort to a rhetoric of descent" (Goldberg 1993, 76). Based on this analytic distinction, I will show that Islamophobia is possible without the "race concept" (Du Bois 2007) so that it is not necessarily racist. Indeed, as I shall argue, Islamophobia in some non-Western contexts reflects local skirmishes without the burdens of race. Second, I shall discuss one form of Islamophobia in Nigeria which manifests in anti-Fulani sentiments. I will reveal the embedded Islamophobia in such sentiments despite the Fulani not being non-White immigrants in Nigeria. Following the distinction between race and ethnicity, the Fulani in Nigeria are an ethnic group rather than a racial group. Third, I shall reiterate my thesis on transcending the discourses of Western Islamophobia with the view to incorporate non-Western experiences into the canon. I will suggest using the term anti-Muslim tribalism to describe the discriminatory experiences of Muslims in certain non-Western contexts where racial identity is not implicated in Islamophobia. In the conclusion, I shall advocate for more consideration of Islamophobia in non-Western contexts that have received too little scholarly attention. This would open up, I hope, the concept to global perspectives.

The problématique of generalisation
Psychologists often say that psychology has a short history and a long past (Farr 1991). The same could be said of Islamophobia as a term which has a short history and a long past. The long past concerns the time in the early 1900s when Islamophobia was used in different ways by scholars such as Alain Quellien, Maurice Delafosse, Slimane ben Ibrahim, and Étienne Dinet to describe the fear and hatred of Islam and of Muslims as an incarnation of the Islamic religion. 3 The short history of Islamophobia dates from 1997 when the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (CBMI) made the term relevant for public policy by publishing the flagship report entitled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (Runnymede Trust 1997). With the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the concomitant Global War on Terror (GWOT), the 7/7 attacks in the United Kingdom, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI's controversial Regensburg Lecture in 2006 which engendered violent demonstrations by Muslims around the world, and the Lars Vilks Muhammad drawings controversy in 2007, Islamophobia took on a life of its own and became a frequent occurrence in news broadcasts, policy documents, and scholarly publications. Indeed, due to public suspicions that classify Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as the incarnation of Islam, Muslims became a "suspect community" in Western eyes (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009).
Despite the "coming of age" (Klug 2012) of the concept since the late 1990s, there is hardly any consensus as to whether it refers to anti-Islam (hatred of Islam) or to anti-Muslimism (hatred of Muslims) (Halliday 1999, 898). Cesari opines that Islamophobia is a contested concept because it is often imprecisely applied to very diverse phenomena, ranging from xenophobia to antiterrorism. It groups together all kinds of different forms of discourse, speech, and acts by suggesting that they all emanate from an identical ideological core, which is an irrational fear (a phobia) of Islam. (Cesari 2011, 21) Regardless of the contestations over its interpretation, something of a consensus has emerged in Western academia, one that associates Islamophobia with racism. The justification for this consensus lies, I suspect, in the fact that Muslims in the West-as mostly non-White immigrants-are not targeted on the basis of religion alone but also on the basis of race. Indeed, Cesari holds that "Islamophobia is a modern and secular anti-Islamic discourse and practice appearing in the public sphere with the integration of Muslim immigrant communities and intensifying after 9/11" (Cesari 2011, 21). This is whywriting from British Muslims' experiences in the Britain-Tariq Modood contends that Islamophobia is a form of cultural racism because while the perception and treatment of Muslims clearly has a religious and cultural dimension, it, equally clearly, bears a physical appearance or ancestral component. (Modood 2019, 76) To clarify what anti-Muslim racism means, Modood makes a distinction between biological racism and cultural racism where the former is "the antipathy, exclusion and unequal treatment of people on the basis of their physical appearance or other imputed physical differences-saliently, in Britain their 'non-whiteness'" and the latter "builds on biological racism a further discourse which evokes cultural differences from an alleged British, 'civilised' norm to vilify, marginalise or demand cultural assimilation from groups who may also suffer from biological racism" (Modood 2019, 77). For Modood, Muslims in the West and elsewhere are vilified because of their racial and cultural difference independent of whether they follow the dictates of the Islamic faith. Islamophobia is cultural racism-so he further arguesbecause it discriminates Muslims biologically and culturally. Muslims thus suffer what he variously terms a "double racism", "compound racism", or "two-step" racism based on colour and culture (Modood 2019, 34). The conjunction "and" is noteworthy because, as I see it, Modood is not suggesting that cultural racism is only about cultural difference or solely about colour racism: it simultaneously involves both aspects such that differentialist racism is a necessary addendum to colour discrimination. Accordingly, phenotype and cultural difference combine to provide the Islamophobe with materials for demonising Muslims. In Modood's model, so it seems to me, discrimination based on cultural difference alone does not suffice to constitute Islamophobia unless it is combined with colour racism to generate a compound racism. I suspect that his model is meant to drive home his central contention: that Islamophobia is not so much about religious intolerance but about racism so that focusing exclusively on cultural discrimination undermines the "colour racism" (Modood 2005) that British Muslims encounter in multicultural Britain.
This particular understanding of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism stems, I think, from two intimately entwined assumptions about Muslims in the West-viz. first, most Western Muslims are non-white immigrants; second, most Western Muslims are socioeconomically marginalised (Cesari 2011, 24). This conjunction means that "Islamophobia overlaps with other forms of discrimination, such as xenophobia, anti-immigration policies, political discourses, and rejection of cultural differences' (Cesari 2011, 24) because Muslims in the West have a non-white immigrant background. Based on these two assumptions, the discrimination against Muslims is, as Modood puts it more a form of racism than a form of religious intolerance, though it may perhaps be best described as a form of cultural racism, in recognition of the fact that the target group, the Muslims, are identified in terms of their non-European descent, in terms of their not being white, and in terms of their perceived culture. (Modood 1997, 76) The assumption about the non-White immigrant backgrounds of Muslims which explains racist attitudes toward Muslims in the West has been supported by many scholars of Islamophobia. For example, Raymond Taras observes that "Islamophobia never stands still" or apart from racism because "[t]he expansion through immigration of Muslim communities in Europe-whose diverse ethnic backgrounds encompass Turkish, Maghrebi, sub-Saharan African, Iranian, Arab, Pakistani, Indian, and many others-has been accompanied by a rise in anti-Muslim attitudes among established European citizens" (Taras 2013, 417). Similarly, Rana opines that the term "Islamophobia" came out of a growing need to address the place of Muslim migrants in Northern countries, and the supposed divide between the Western and Islamic worlds. Indeed, in the latter half of the twentieth century large populations from Muslim countries migrated to Europe and North America, signalling economic shifts that required large pools of new labour reserves. (Rana 2007, 148) Several scholars, journal articles, reports, books, and organisations in the West have come to adopt this definition as dogma with many associating the term with racism and the politics of Empire (Kundnani 2014;Kumar 2012;Tyrer 2013;Bakali 2016;Kazi 2019;Wolfreys 2018;Nguyen 2019;Hafiz 2022;Razack 2022). Ibrahim Kalin asserts that "it is impossible to separate Islamophobia from the ethnic and racial hatred of Arabs, Asians, and blacks" (Kalin 2011, 11). Erik Love contends that "there are a set of physical traits and characteristics that can mark someone as 'Muslim', regardless of their actual religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Race is the only way to explain how this is so" (Love 2017, 2). Andrew Shryock concludes that Islamophobia "has its richest connotations, when it is used to describe a sentiment that flourishes in contemporary Europe and North America" (Shryock 2010, 2). On this view, anti-Muslim racism in the West is the most suitable or apposite yardstick to analyse cases of Islamophobia around the world because it is the ideal type-the oncomouse of anti-Muslim discrimination, so to speakwhere the negative phenomenon is best conceived, lived, and experienced.
A similar textbook case of the association of Islamophobia with non-White immigrant Muslims who are phenotypically different from Whites in the West is Sahar Aziz's book entitled The Racial Muslim (Aziz 2021). Focusing on the United States, Aziz draws on the cultural racism framework, conceptualises -like Tariq Modood-Islamophobia in the conventional way as anti-Muslim racism, and limits her conceptual framework and analysis to immigrant Muslims (Aziz 2021, 5). For Aziz, "[t]he social construction of Whiteness is shaped as much by religious identity as it is by skin colour, hair texture, facial features, and other phenotypical characteristics" (Aziz 2021, 5) so that "empire, American race/racism, xenophobia, and religion interact to racialise immigrant Muslims in the post-9/11 era". 4 Moreover, Aziz argues, "Racial Muslims are a suspect race, permanent foreigners, and national security threats who warrant exclusion, purging, or incarceration to protect real (White Judeo-Christian) Americans. Their mere presence on US soil poses a national security threat" (Aziz 2021, 6). With what she calls the Racial Muslim Typology, Aziz contends that Islamophobia cannot be disentangled from four related issues: immigration, American imperialism, Orientalism, and White Protestant supremacy. Consequently-since the 9/11 attacks-Islamophobia is associated-in Aziz's unique framing-with the discrimination of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia: The September 11 terrorist attacks finalised a transformation of Muslim identity that had been in the making for decades and was grounded in European Orientalism. Immigrant Muslims historically have been presumed to be Arabs and vice versa. As a result, Middle Eastern attire, the Arabic language, and Arab-presenting physical markers are combined with real or imputed Muslim beliefs to create a racial identity. Put simply, to be Middle Eastern is to be presumed Muslim and vice versa. After the September 11 attacks, the racial markers of Muslim identity became tied to Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Hamas. Persons who looked, dressed like, or had the same names as terrorists profiled in the media were collectively treated as Racial Muslims. Moreover, people of South Asian originwhether Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or Muslimjoined Arabs in being "Muslim-looking." (Aziz 2021, 6) For Modood and Aziz, Islamophobia is racism because it involves the migration of non-White ethnic minorities from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to White-majority Britain and the United States, respectively. One might assume that this ideological hegemony produced by both distinguished scholars in Western academia is limited to the Euro-American context, but that would be mistaken because some researchers analysing instances of Islamophobia in non-Western societies-and even in Muslimmajority countries-have equally adopted it. Consider, for instance, the compendium on Islamophobia in Muslim-majority countries edited by Enes Bayrakli and Farid Hafez. The editors state the book's working definition of Islamophobia in Muslim-majority countries as anti-Muslim racism. It is about a dominant group of people aspiring to seize, stabilise and widen their power by means of defining a scapegoat-real or invented-and excluding this scapegoat from the resources, rights, and definition of a "we". (Bayraklı and Hafez 2019, 2) I am not convinced that Islamophobia in a Muslim-majority polity such as Turkey is about anti-Muslim racism because the majority of Turkish citizens are Muslim, share analogous ancestral roots, and do not experience discrimination on the bases of phenotypic and cultural difference. 5 It makes no sense, I think, to transpose Modoodian and Azizian schematism to Turkey where Islamophobia has nothing to do with non-White immigration. Most Turks are indigenous to the places they inhabit and do not have immigrant backgrounds. I suspect that Islamophobia in Turkey-as in most Muslim-majority countries like Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Pakistan, say-is not so much about anti-Muslim racism but about particular ways of being Muslim in a post-9/11 world where certain expressions of Islamic piety are associated with terrorism and insecurity. Mahmood Mamdani's model of "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" (Mamdani 2005) comes to mind here: for, in some Muslim-majority societies, certain behaviours or expressions of the Islamic faith are stereotypically associated with the "Bad Muslim" who is so puritan as to harbour extremist proclivities dangerous enough to destabilise state and society. By contrast, the "Good Muslim" is any Muslim who believes in, and practices, Islam devoid of behaviours that portend religious fundamentalism. In such Muslim-majority contexts, it is not racial or cultural difference-it is not cultural racism-that is problematic per se but particular interpretations and externalisations of Islamic piety. It is the dread of the supposed immoderate forms of the faith (Shryock 2010, 9-10). There is nothing wrong, I think, with theorising Islamophobia as racism provided that we comprehend that this is not intrinsically generalisable. Whilst there is no attempt to deny that post-9/11 Western epistemologies have had significant impacts on local worldviews in non-Western societies-as I have shown, scholars of Muslim-majority polities have appropriated Western epistemologies-what is quite evident, I think, is the embedded Western ethnocentrism in the conceptualisation of such a global phenomenon that assumes different local forms. Indeed, it is ethnocentric to universalise Western Islamophobia for three major reasons: 1. Some non-Western societies do not employ race as a social category to describe their fellow citizens. It would be foolhardy to transpose the "race concept" from the West to non-Western societies that do not ordinarily use it. For example, most Nigerians hardly use race in common parlance or official documentation to distinguish ethnoreligious or ethnoregional groups. Rather, they tend to use other identitarian markers such as ethnicity, religion, region, and so on. The dearth of race as a social identity does not entail the absence of anti-Muslim discrimination in Nigeria.

Most Muslims in Europe and America are immigrants of Arab, Middle
Eastern, Asian, and African descent. "In the USA, Muslims are comprised of South Asians, Arabs and African-Americans. In France the majority are North African, while the largest number in the UK are South Asian (of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin)" (Garner and Selod 2015, 7). This means that race and religion often interact in Western Islamophobia. The main concern for the West in such contexts is whether Muslims can integrate in Western societies and embrace multiculturalism. By contrast, in some non-Western societies like Nigeria, Muslims are not non-White immigrants; they are indigenous to the places where they are discriminated against. Additionally, discourses of multiculturalism are not confined to Western societies; they are also salient in multicultural Nigeria (Adebanwi 2018). 3. Islamophobia is not about racialisation in some non-Western societies. In the West, Islamophobia involves racialisation-that is, assigning groups to "a hierarchy with white Europeans … at its summit, and other groups in their wake" (Garner and Selod 2015, 12). However, in Nigeria, religious animus is often entwined with ethnoregional divides without the burdens of colour racism. Indeed, Islamophobia occurs in Nigeria without racialisation based on Whiteness because it does not involve assigning ethnoreligious groups to a hierarchy based on phenotype.
There is no White Protestant majority in Nigeria discriminating against non-White immigrant Muslims of Arab, African, or Asian descent despite the "economy of political panic" (Last 2007) in Nigeria. Put differently, Islamophobia in Nigeria is not about people of Arab, African, and Asian descent who migrated to the postcolonial state and look physically or phenotypically different from the White majority-there is no White majority in Nigeria-but about the discrimination of real or perceived Muslims regardless of social identity.
Indeed, I am insisting that cultural racism is, ab origine, a concept embedded in historical experiences of discrimination against non-White national minorities in the West. Cultural racism is not the antithesis of biological racism; rather, it is biological racism by other means. For it supposes that racially different, non-White, social groups-and they could be identified through phenotypic characteristics that are rooted in biology-are inferior or dangerous because they inhabit cultural worlds that are in stark contrast to Western culture. 6 Exactly because cultural racism draws on culture (anthropology) and colour (biology), it is intimately linked to questions around immigration, assimilation, and multiculturalism in the West. This is precisely why Ali Rattansi remarkably cautions us not to treat biological racism as the antithesis of, or as distinct from, cultural racism as they almost always interact in the West (Rattansi 2007, 100-101).
If Islamophobia is conceived as a form of cultural racism, then it means, I think, that it has to do not so much with the religion but with phenotypic and cultural differences. This way of defining Islamophobia is what I do not concur with, not least because cultural racism which presupposes discrimination based on phenotypic differences as employed by Modood and Aziz does not apply to some non-Western societies where Islamophobia exists. Indeed, there is the possibility of Islamophobia devoid of racism so that generalising such conceptual model would be ethnocentric. In the next section, I shall discuss one context-Nigeria-where Islamophobia neither intertwines with Modoodian compound racism nor reflects Azizian Racial Muslim typology.

Islamophobia without compound racism: the Nigerian case
Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people, approximately 370 ethnicities, and over 500 languages making it Africa's most populous and diverse state. The major ethnic groups in Nigeria are (1) the Igbo in the southeast; (2) the Hausa and Fulani in the north; and (3) the Yoruba in the southwest. Agbiboa posits that "[t]he northern Hausa-Fulani 7 consist of 30% of the country's total population, the western Yoruba make up 20% of the total, and the eastern Igbo constitute 17%, with the rest being the so-called 'minorities'" (Agbiboa 2013, 10). In terms of religious inclination, the Hausa and Fulani are mostly Muslim; the Igbo are predominantly Christian; and the Yoruba are religiously mixed. Regionally, the southern region is predominantly Christian; the northern region is largely Muslim; and the Middle Belt region is religiously mixed with a significant Christian majority. In the Middle Belt and southern regions, Islamophobic sentiments directed against the Fulani are not uncommon. In Nigeria, ethnicity, religion, and region tend to go hand in hand. In an Afrobarometer survey where Nigerians were asked how they would describe themselves apart from "being Nigerian" it is unsurprising that a "solid plurality of Nigerians identify in ethnic or regional terms, while nearly two-thirds (64%) choose communal identities of ethnicity, region, or religion" (Lewis 2007, 5). These tripartite identitarian configurations manifest in Islamophobic episodes in Nigeria.
One form Islamophobia assumes in Nigeria is the dread of Fulanis by non-Muslim ethnoreligious groups in the Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria. Although this seems like ordinary ethnic stereotyping it also has a religious component. The Fulani are the largest nomadic group to inhabit West Africa and the Sahel, though there are also sedentary Fulani (Higazi 2016, 368). They are predominantly Muslim and were instrumental in the diffusion of Islam in West Africa. The embedded Islamophobia in anti-Fulani sentiments is founded on two negative stereotypes about Fulanis in Nigeria-namely, that the Fulani (1) exude a penchant for armed violence; and (2) are religious extremists with a clandestine agenda to Islamise non-Muslim groups. These negative assumptions are decipherable in Lévy's article. If Islamophobia symbolises anti-Muslim tribalism, then anti-Fulani sentiments qualify as one of its modes, as the Fulani are a "suspect community" in Nigeria (Ejiofor 2022). With resource conflicts between predominantly Fulani pastoralists and the mainly Christian farmers, these stereotypes have triggered anti-Fulani hostilities. In the paragraphs that follow, I shall trace the genesis of Islamophobia in anti-Fulani sentiments from the precolonial and colonial through to postcolonial eras, showing how it intersects with ethnoreligious and ethnoregional anxieties regarding the ostensible Islamisation of non-Muslims.
There are various hypotheses regarding the origin of the Fulani (Lambrecht 1976, 26-27). However, genomic evidence suggests a West African origin; thus, the Fulani are indigenous to West Africa (Vicente et al. 2019). The origins of the Fulani aside, I shall commence my analysis of Islamophobia embedded in anti-Fulani sentiments from the eighteenth century when the Sokoto Caliphate was founded in northern Nigeria because it is the period germane to my research. For this reason, I divide the history of Islamophobia into three phases in the political history of Nigeria that correspond to three anti-Fulani narratives. The first phase is the precolonial phase (1804-1884). This phase yielded narratives of the Fulani as jihadists with the agenda of Islamising non-Muslim groups in Nigeria. The second is the colonial phase . This phase engendered narratives of the Fulani as allies of the British imperialists, employing the privileges accorded them to Islamise other groups. The third is the postcolonial phase (1960-present) characterised by narratives of the Fulani as a politically dominant group supposedly utilising their political power to Islamise other groups. These three phases are closely linked to questions of power.
Prior to colonial rule in Nigeria in the 1880s the Fulani already inhabited northern Nigeria: some lived as cattle nomads whilst those who were literate took up key roles in the capitals of Hausa royals as advisors, tax collectors, and secretaries. Perhaps the greatest transformation in the early 1800s was the conquest of Hausaland orchestrated by Usman dan Fodio, a Fulani scholar and revolutionary. Criticising what he saw as the corruption and paganism of Hausa aristocrats in Hausaland, Usman dan Fodio waged wars-the socalled "Fulani Jihad" 8 -that led to the foundation of the Sokoto Caliphate and the consequent integration of the sedentary Fulani in collaboration with Hausa elites in northern Nigeria. The Sokoto Caliphate expanded beyond the northern region as the Sokoto Jihad of 1804-1808 transformed not only the Hausa city-states, but also shaped the geopolitics of their neighbours to the south, especially the diverse communities in contemporary central and northeastern Nigeria (modern Nigeria's Middle Belt region) as well as the Yoruba region in the southwest. (Vaughan 2016, 1) Meanwhile Christian missionaries penetrated large parts of the Middle Belt and southern regions which explains why, until today, ethnic groups in those regions in Nigeria are predominantly Christian. Islam was imposed on ethnic groups living in the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate and most communities that rejected Islamic governance were either plundered by jihadi troops or sold off as slaves. 9 Precisely because of the unpleasant living conditions of non-Muslims in the Sokoto Caliphate, Fulani identity became associated with jihadism so that-to this day-local farmers from indigenous and Christian communities in the Middle Belt region typically interpret resource conflicts with Fulani pastoralists as the continuation of their longstanding struggle against jihad perpetrated purportedly by Fulani jihadists under the guise of pastoralism. The embedded Islamophobia in the statements of non-Muslim groups in the Middle Belt region could be perceived in Higazi's ethnography: Some political narratives of Plateau indigenes claim that there is an Islamic agenda to dominate Plateau State and that Muslims instigated violence on the Jos Plateau in their struggle for power. This viewpoint has also been framed historically, arguing that the current conflicts are a continuation of the nineteenth century jihad that swept across northern Nigeria, establishing the Sokoto Caliphate, but which the people of the high Plateau, aided by the rugged terrain and their decentralised pattern of social organisation, successfully resisted. (Higazi 2016, 370) Despite its influence, the Sokoto Caliphate did not halt British colonisation of West Africa. In the colonial phase , the Fulani were disparaged as allies-and imperialists-of the British Empire. The colonial phase that commenced after the Conference of Berlin (1884-1885), where African territories were "scrambled for" by European powers, was characterised by resistance to colonialism. The emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate resisted but were ultimately defeated by the British colonialists in 1903. Despite abolishing the Sokoto Caliphate, the British colonialists did not discard the religious-cum-political positions of the emir but instead retained them, entrusting the Fulani aristocracy as "native authorities" (Mamdani 1996) with the governance of other groups in the Northern Region. This does not mean that the British colonialists had a favourable view of Islam. Indeed, the attitude of the British colonialists toward Islam in colonial northern Nigeria was generally negative. British colonial perspectives on Islam equated Islam with "oriental despotism" but also considered the religion inferior to Christianity and well-suited to Africans who, in turn, were considered inferior to Europeans (Reynolds 2001, 603). Islam-for the British colonialists-"represented perhaps the highest level of spiritual achievement that could be attained by Africans, and was certainly a superior alternative to the various forms of indigenous African belief" (Reynolds 2001, 603) Such a condescending posture toward Islam and Africans in the colonial period can be gleaned from the remarks of Lord Lugard-the architect of indirect rule in Nigeria-who was convinced that Islam was germane to the condition of the purportedly uncouth African: "[Islam] is a religion incapable of the highest development, but its limitations clearly suit the limitations of the people" (Reynolds 2001, 603).
Although Islamophobes, the British colonialists were opportunistic toward Islam in colonial northern Nigeria. Indeed, "[a]fter decades of experience with Islam in India and Egypt, the British were well aware that the political legitimacy of a government in a Muslim region was closely tied to the popular perception of the rulers as devout Muslims" (Reynolds 2001, 604). Islamic institutions were supported to the extent that they did not challenge colonial authority (Reynolds 2001, 602-605). Indeed, with the Fulani emirs making a pact with the British to be subject to colonial authority whilst allowing Islam to be practiced in the colony, the British looked favourably on Fulani emirs as favourites to administer northern Nigeria (Harnischfeger 2006, 43). At Lord Lugard's behest, the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate were transformed into the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, whilst territories in the southern region that had been under the administration of the Royal Niger Company became the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. Both protectorates were amalgamated in 1914 to form the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. This was primarily for economic reasons: the colonial administration thought it best to employ the budget surplus of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate to make up for the budget deficit of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. 10 Despite the amalgamation of these protectorates, they were governed differently, with the Fulani aristocracy collaborating with the British to subjugate ethnic minorities and to levy taxes whilst simultaneously restricting Christian missionary activities in the northern region (Barnes 1995;Akande 2020;Reynolds 2001, 601-618). In the colonial phase, the Islamophobic narrative of the Fulani as Islamisers became the norm. As Akande describes it: "Because this governance design ostensibly privileged Islamic institutions, Muslim rulers, and Muslim populations to the detriment of non-Muslim religious populations, critics of the colonial state, especially European Christian missionaries, labelled it 'Muslim sub-imperialism.' " (Akande 2020, 461). Such perceived "Muslim sub-imperialism" compelled Christians in the northern region to campaign for a new administrative region to be established outside Muslim control. Hence, the Middle Belt region was founded as a "regional home for northern Christians" (Barnes 2007, 594). This is precisely why Barnes regards the Middle Belt Movement-a regional group created by Middle Belt peoples to represent their interests during the colonial era-as a political and cultural movement that sought a novel administrative region for northern Christians outside Muslim political control (Barnes 2007, 594). In the Middle Belt region today, Islamophobic-anti-Fulani-sentiments may be seen to derive from the colonial period.
In the postcolonial phase (1960-present), the narrative is that the Fulani are a politically dominant group using their powers to Islamise non-Muslims. The Islamophobic narratives directed against the Fulani in the postcolonial period draw on the precolonial and colonial phases. The postcolonial period is characterised by resistance to perceived Fulani hegemony in political life. For instance, as I have noted earlier, Christian and indigenous groups from the Middle Belt region formed the Middle Belt Movement to contest the ostensible Muslim hegemony. Indeed, the result was the creation-after Nigerian independence in 1960-of new states in the Middle Belt region-Benue and Plateau states, for example-for predominantly Christian groups outside the northern region and the concomitant invention of "indigeneity" 11 as a legal category to exclude "non-indigenes"-the Fulani-that are not considered "indigenous" to the Middle Belt region, a practice that has spread to other parts of Nigeria. Much like the Middle Belt region, the Nigerian-Biafran War (1967)(1968)(1969)(1970))-a pivotal episode in Nigeria's political history-which saw the predominantly Christian Igbos of the southern region trying to secede from Nigeria was framed by the Biafran leadership as a struggle against Islam and northern Muslim domination. During the war, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu-the leader of the secessionist Biafran state-stated in the Ahiara Declaration that the Biafran secessionist agitation was a struggle against Islam and "Arab-Muslim expansionism" (Ojukwu 1969) foisted upon Biafran Christians by Northern Muslims, especially the Hausa and Fulani.
From the foregoing discussions, it is axiomatic that Islamophobia manifests in ethnoreligious and ethnoregional strife amongst different groups despite the absence of Modoodian and Azizian "colour racism" as Nigerian Muslims do not experience discrimination based on phenotype. Many Christian and indigenous groups in the Middle Belt and southern regions interpret resource conflicts with the Fulani who mostly inhabit the northern region as a sort of resistance against Islam and Muslim domination. Additionally, in the postcolonial period, claims of indigeneity coupled with the "clash of civilisations" (Huntington 1996) thesis and the War on Terror have further stoked anti-Fulani-and, by extension, Islamophobic-sentiments with the belief that, as Muslims, the Fulani ostensibly epitomise nothing but terror and domination. Take, for example, the diatribe of Femi Fani-Kayode-a Christian politician from southwest Nigeria-against the Fulani: Fulani herdsmen are symbols of bloodshed, terror, mass murder, ethnic-cleansing, genocide, carnage, torment, trauma, and evil. They represent nothing other than cruelty, suffering, land-grabbing, church-burning, home-stealing, molesting, and pillaging and they are instruments of occupation, domination, and conquest. (Fani-Kayode 2019) The above anti-Fulani sentiment is not uncommon amongst Christians and indigenous groups in Nigeria. With the farmer-herder conflicts that increasingly perturb Nigeria, Christians in the Middle Belt and southern regions perceive the occasional retaliatory violence perpetrated by some Fulani pastoralists "as a continuation of jihad seeking an Islamic state throughout Nigeria" (Lowry 2018). As one Christian writer puts it: The activities of the so-called Fulani herdsmen, especially in the Middle Belt and the southern parts of the country so far resemble those of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Al Shabab in East Africa, Boko Haram in [northeastern] Nigeria and Taliban in Afghanistan. The areas when the so-called herdsmen carry out their heinous activities in Nigeria are the areas the jihadists will normally classify as the territories of the infidels and therefore, natural targets of jihadists. Therefore, if the Fulani killers call themselves herdsmen, the rest of us must disagree with them … .We must stop referring to them as herdsmen because they are not. They are either terrorists or jihadists and possibly both … .It is possible that their veiled aim is to carry on the unfinished task of the jihadists of 1804-1830. This will be extremely dangerous or even calamitous. (Adesua 2018) Condemning the farmer-herder conflicts, the Catholic Bishops of Kaduna state that [t]he Fulani want to subjugate Christians, disintegrate the country, weaken the gospel and destroy the social and economic life of the people. There is a hidden agenda targeted at the Christian majority of southern Kaduna. This jihad is wellfunded, well-planned, and executed by agents of destabilisation. (Lowry 2018) Open Doors-a US-based Christian organisation-holds the following view about the Fulani in Nigeria: "According to the expansionist principle of Dar al Islam (house of Islam), everything belongs to Allah directly and to his followers indirectly, including the land where the Fulani want to let their cattle graze. They believe it is right for them to take those resources by force from infidels and apostates" (Lowry 2018). This peculiar Christian interpretation of the resource conflicts is undoubtedly Islamophobic even though it does not point to race as the driver of the attacks against mainly Christian farmers. Federal policy proposals geared toward curbing the resource conflicts have been rejected by many Christians in the Middle Belt and southern regions because of dread that the Fulani harbour a hidden agenda to Islamise others. A good case in point is the Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA) settlement policy proposed in 2019 to sedentarise Fulani pastoralists so as to curb conflicts with farmers stemming from cattle grazing. This was rebuffed by stakeholders in the predominantly Christian Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria due to dread of Islamisation by the Fulani. Rejecting the proposal, Yinka Odumakin-the former publicity secretary of Afenifere, a pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group-made the following argument: No matter how it is dressed, Ruga connotes no other thing than a measure in ethnic domination and conquest as it seeks to create territories for Fulani people all over the country. This is not about cattle in any way … The rest of Nigeria is aware of how the Fulani used subtlety to corner Hausaland under the guise of introducing pure Islam to them. The Hausas bought this and some communities killed their own kings to have Fulani Emirs. That was how Fulani became domineering in all Hausa territories even when they did not build a single town or city in the land … Cattle are now seen as the guise to penetrate the rest of Nigeria in the manner religion was used to take over Hausa territories. (Odumakin 2019) For their part, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)-a Biafran separatist group campaigning to "restore" the secessionist Biafran state in the southeast region-have mobilised against Fulani Muslims. Indeed, IPOB separatists perceive their struggles for the restoration of the Biafran state as resistance against Islam and Islamisation that Fulani Muslims seemingly symbolise in Nigeria. Nnamdi Kanu-IPOB's leader-"attacks what he perceives as Fulani (Muslim) domination of Nigeria. He often conflates former generals, oil rig owners, political bosses, and nomadic herders all as the same Fulani" (Mayer 2021). Moreover, when RUGA was proposed, IPOB separatists insisted that they would not accept the federal government's proposal because of suspicions that the administration led by a Muslim Fulani president-Muhammadu Buhari-had a clandestine agenda to Islamise Igbos. As they put it: "We are not in support of this their evil agenda, are totally against Islamisation of Igboland. We are Biafrans, we are not Fulanis … No matter what they call this their evil plan, we reject every Islamic agenda" (Aliuna 2019). In IPOB's news broadcasts, the Fulani are excoriated as jihadists disguised as Igbo Christians waiting to unleash terror on indigenous peoples in the southeast region: We advise Christians and other religious leaders to sit up, be at alert and be security conscious as strange seeming worshippers of non-Igbo ethnicity would infiltrate their midst to commit havoc. They must be on the lookout for Fulani looking persons that may come to join them in pretence as converted Christians, do not also be deceived into thinking that Fulanis don't speak Igbo, dress like Igbo and behave like indigenes because they do. (Nnachi 2022) For IPOB separatists based in the southeast region, as I say, Fulani Muslims are the "enemies within" that must be eliminated so as to restore the Biafran state in the southeast region. The Islamophobia embedded in anti-Fulani discourses is also evident in the following statement of a certain Christian writer from southern Nigeria rejecting RUGA as an attempt to give free rein to Fulanis to Islamise others: One may argue that it is possible to have a symbiotic relationship with Fulani settlers such that both parties mutually benefit from their stay on our land. Yes, that would be a valid argument except that in this situation we are dealing with a people who have an ulterior motive, a hidden agenda … If we forget the history of the invasion and occupation of the Fulani Empire and the Jihad campaigns/wars of the 17th/18th centuries, we will painfully and regrettably re-live these sad experiences to our own demise and those of generations to come … The relationship can never be positively symbiotic. Invasion (by peace or conquest), occupation and eventual Islamisation of our land are always at the back of the minds of Fulani people. (Ejeh 2019) By the same token, after convening a meeting on 11 May 2021 regarding the supposed "Fulani-cum-Muslim threat" to the southern region, governors of seventeen states in southern Nigeria interdicted nomadism in the southern region (Daily Trust 2021). This ban was defended by many southern Nigerians for whom the Fulani embody Muslim domination. As one writer put it: The Southern governors have made it clear that open grazing remains banned. On this single page, the people and governments of the South stand. Fulanisation is a conquest agenda that was used to subjugate the North to establish the Sokoto Caliphate dominated by the Fulani. This cannot be extended to the South in this day and age, no matter how powerful those today controlling our Federal Government think they are. It will be vehemently resisted. It is already being vehemently resisted, and it will never stop being resisted in the South. (Nnanna 2021) Given the widespread Islamophobia, "Southerners have reacted to perceived Islamisation and 'Fulanisation' by forming regional vigilante outfits such as Operation Amotekun, which is supported by governors in the Yorubamajority southwest, and IPOB's Eastern Security Network in the southeast" (Nwankpa 2021). The truth, however, is that Fulani herders have not captured the Nigerian state for the purposes of Islamisation. Whether it be farmer-herder clashes or banditry, violence involving Fulani is almost always driven by local conditions and competitions-often over scarce land or material resources-rather than a grand ideological and religious project. (Nwankpa 2021) The consequences of categorising the Fulani as a suspect community are dire for Fulani communities in the Middle Belt and southern regions where they constitute an ethnoreligious minority (Ejiofor 2022). Indeed, these Islamophobic sentiments have fanned hostilities against Fulanis in the Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria. Moreover, although these anti-Fulani discourses constitute Islamophobia in the strictest sense, they do not involve compound racism as the term is deployed in Modoodian and Azizian scholarship to make sense of the racialisation of Arabs, Asians, and Blacks in Britain and the United States. Again, the Fulani are as Black as other ethnoreligious groups so that ascribing racial identities to them would be foolhardy especially in the Nigerian context where race-recall Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's assertions?-is vacuous as a term for classifying ethnoreligious or ethnoregional groups. I am thus calling for more precision in recognising how Islamophobia is not necessarily about racism but something similar to do with ethnicity even in the absence of racial identities. Dread of the Fulani is not so much due to phenotype but because of the religion linked to the ethnic group: Islam. Given the history of jihads perpetrated by Fulani revolutionaries coupled with colonial and postcolonial power contestations, Christian ethnic groups in the Middle Belt and southern regions interpret their resource conflicts with the Muslim Fulani in contemporary Nigeria as a continuation of jihadism and Muslim imperialism geared toward ridding Christians and indigenous peoples of their identities. Anti-Fulani sentiments are just one amongst the myriad forms of Islamophobia that Muslims encounter in their interactions with Christians, for many Nigerian Christians are wary not just of the Fulani but of Muslims in general as a consequence of the negative stereotypes they associate with Islam. In the Nigerian context, therefore, Islamophobia occurs devoid of the compound racism evident in the Euro-American context so that it is not necessarily racist. In the next section, I shall propose anti-Muslim tribalism as a term that captures the plural manifestations of Islamophobia in parts of the non-West.
Toward a more inclusive definition Robert Cox once wrote: "Theory is always for someone and for some purpose" (Cox 1981, 128, emphasis in original). Because of the issues connected to the ungeneralisability of the "Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism" model, it seems to me that we would need a novel one to conceptualise Islamophobia in a way that captures anti-Muslim discrimination in non-Western societies.
For this reason, I propose "anti-Muslim tribalism" as an alternative definition for Islamophobia. I should like to say at the outset that I am aware that the concept of "tribe"-from which "tribalism" is generated-is now considered derogatory by Western-trained anthropologists (Sneath 2016). However, the eminent Africanist Peter Ekeh has rescued this term from its abuses and shown how-contrary to the views of scholars based in Western academia -tribalism is pertinent to, and explains the failure of, the postcolonial African state (Ekeh 1990). In this article, I understand "tribe" as "a human social group sharing a common interest" (Clark et al. 2019, 591) and "tribalism" as "tendencies to be loyal to and favourable toward one's own tribe (and less favourable toward other tribes)" (Clark et al. 2019, 591). Tribalism signifies the fact of humans being clannish creatures. This clannishness means that people tend to be loyal to their own social group and to exclude others outside their group. We tend to see the good in our own groups and the evil in other groups. As Amy Chua notably puts it: Humans, like other primates, are tribal animals. We need to belong to groups, which is why we love clubs and teams. Once people connect with a group, their identities can become powerfully bound to it. They will seek to benefit members of their group even when they gain nothing personally. They will penalise outsiders, seemingly gratuitously. They will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their group. (Chua 2018) Tribalisation is a process that involves the creation of enemies by grouping peoples into one tribe and associating the tribe with extremely negative characteristics. As recent studies in social psychology have shown, tribalism is a feature of human social groups (Clark and Winegard 2022). In parts of the non-Western world where racial identities are quite irrelevant, Islamophobia is anti-Muslim tribalism. Or-to put it bluntly-it is the tribalisation of Muslims. For it involves the grouping of (perceived) Muslims into a single tribe and the association of the tribe-Muslim-with negative stereotypes. In the cognitive world of the Islamophobe, Muslims are a single tribe with an agenda to Islamise non-Muslims. Such cognition results in the spiteful anti-Muslim discrimination. Anti-Muslim tribalism could assume many different forms in diverse local contexts that have nothing to do with Middle Eastern or Asian or African immigration in Britain and the United States.
My position is not so much that we discard the conceptualisation of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism but that we comprehend its limitations in elucidating what happens in some non-Western societies. In the Western context, for example, Islamophobia manifests-as Modood and Aziz have convincingly shown-as racism so that people who appear "Muslim" by virtue of their non-White immigrant background-phenotype, ancestry, and culture-are subject to racial discrimination. Because most Muslims in Euro-America are non-white immigrants, it is easy to comprehend how Islamophobia might be coterminous with racism in Euro-American contexts. In the Nigerian context that I have examined, however, Islamophobia manifests not so much as racism but instead interacts with ethnicism, as the Muslim Fulani are considered jihadists. The Fulani are not immigrants in the Western diction but Nigerians and of West African origin and indeed share common ancestry, phenotype, and culture with various other dark-skinned Africans that inhabit Nigeria. The Fulani are as phenotypically Black as other ethnicities in the Middle Belt and southern regions that stigmatise them. Also, anti-Fulani sentiments in Nigeria have a long history stretching back to the 1800s when Fulani revolutionaries waged jihads to convert much of West Africa to Islam. As I say, wherever Islamophobia occurs it is not simply reducible to some events in the West or because Muslims are non-White immigrants but because Muslimness in some non-Western societies, without Western racial categories, is a suspect tribe. Beyond Nigeria, Islamophobia could be fomented by Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, or any human social group that perceives Muslimness as an existential threat. When some Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus associate Islam with savagery, they do not appeal to White Protestant supremacy or Orientalism but to their own local experiences of longstanding conflicts with Muslims. The dread is about Muslims as adherents of Islam, a religion that non-Muslims in some non-Western societies associate with aggression and violent behaviour.
The cultural racism model of Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz suggests that Islamophobia cannot possibly happen without colour racism as Muslims in the West are first singled out by their non-whiteness before being subjected to cultural discrimination. Hence, colour racism precedes-and is nondetachable from-differentialist racism. However, as I have pointed out, in thinking about Islamophobia in some non-Western societies we have to come to terms with the fact that the anti-Muslim racism model is provincial and simplifies the complex world that we share. Tribalisation makes the other the enemy, regardless of whether that stranger who enters our midst speaks our language, eats our food, or shares our skin colour. This is equally the case of Islamophobia as a form of tribalism: it makes Muslims the enemy wherever they are, regardless of phenotype, class, nationality, or gender. In my view, conceptualising Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism relieves us of the ethnocentrism embedded in the cultural racism model as it evades the problematic of transposing Western racial categories to non-Western societies where Islamophobia assumes many different forms. Racism is in itself just one form of tribalism: not all forms of ingroup favouritism derive from racial identities but tribalism underpins all forms of ingroup favouritism. Sexism, casteism, ethnicism, and classism are all forms of tribalism that may or may not intersect with racism. Tribalism is, so it seems to me, the umbrella term that encompasses the multifarious ways processes of inclusion and exclusion work. To comprehend Islamophobia as anti-Muslim tribalism in some non-Western societies is-in my view-to see how it might occur without compound racism.
The notion of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism "flattens" discrimination against Muslims by assuming that the phenomenon is reducible to Western interactions with Middle Eastern, Arab, African, and South Asian Muslims after 9/11 when, in fact, Islamophobia existed in so many different societies prior to European colonialism. Generalising the cultural racism model would therefore be a classic case of "Europe and the People Without History" (Wolf 1997). True, Western discourses impact on local ethnoreligious skirmishes around the world, but Islamophobia in many non-Western societies is not simply the aggregate of Western experiences of racism and anti-racism; they have their own unique sources and history. When Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote-some four years ago in Wall Street Journal-that the Muslim Fulani are waging jihad against Christians in Nigeria, he was merely tribalising Muslims in ways American Evangelicals often do, by associating anything Islamic with horror. That he does this without invoking race or racial identities in the Nigerian context unearths how much Islamophobia in the non-West is more about the unsavoury image of Islam and of Muslims as an incarnation of evil than about racism. This is why Melani McAlister is right, I think, to contend that to describe anti-Muslim discourse as (primarily) racism … flattens more than it explains. Imperialism and structural inequalities are highly relevant to the post-Cold War framing of Islam on a global scale and in Africa particularly, but neither race [n]or "phobia" captures the full complexity of the power dynamics at play. In our transnational moment, we cannot simply export descriptions of how anti-Muslim sentiment works in the United States, even as we must continue to actively and insistently oppose the multiple forms of hostility and aggression faced by Muslims or those presumed to be Muslims in the US and beyond. (McAlister 2018)

Conclusion
In this article, I have contended that the definition of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism is peculiar to Euro-American experiences of racism whereby immigrant Muslims of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African-non-Whiteancestry or phenotype are discriminated against on the basis of their phenotypic and cultural differences. I argued that the cultural racism model is not generalisable to some parts of the non-West where Muslims and non-Muslims are Black. The absence of the colour line in some parts of the non-West does not entail the non-existence of Islamophobia in non-Western societies. It seems to me that there should be specific definitions for specific contexts. Hence, anti-Muslim tribalism is, I contend, a better definition of Islamophobia in some non-Western localities since it collapses all Muslim regardless of racial identity into one tribe and creates an enemy out of them. Of course, scholars could counterargue that there is racism without race and that racialisation does not always entail phenotype. And, of course, this is absolutely correct. However, the cultural theorists of Islamophobia in Europe and North America that I critique in this article-Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz-do not think of Islamophobia-as is axiomatic from their literary corpus-as a form of racism without race. Indeed, their understanding of Islamophobia as racism follows the "racism with race" paradigm whereby colour racism cannot be disentangled from anti-Muslim discrimination-and this is precisely the ideological hegemony that I counteract in this article. Our task as intellectuals is to comprehend and explain unique expressions of anti-Muslim tribalism in specific localities without assuming that racial identities must be a necessary component for Islamophobia to be worth the name. Thus, perhaps future research could examine the various and varied local expressions and experiences of Islamophobia beyond Euro-Americanism making use of my notion of anti-Muslim tribalism proposed here. see King (2019). 3. For a comprehensive overview of the history of Islamophobia as a term see López (2011) and Rana (2007). 4. Aziz (2021, 5). Emphasis in original. 5. Ali Murat Yel (2021) has argued that Islamophobia is cultural racism in Turkey using the case of Islamic attire. Whilst the article is insightful, it misrepresents the cultural racism model used to make sense of Islamophobia in the Euro-American context. There is no "two-step racism" combining colour and cultural racism in Turkey: most Turkish citizens are Muslims, have relatively similar skin complexions, and do not discriminate fellow Muslims based on phenotype. Hence, it seems to me that the claim of Yel's article are not in concert with the cultural racism paradigm proposed by Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz. 6. This is my summary of the frameworks of Tariq Modood and Sahar Aziz. 7. Because of the cultural integration between the Fulani and the Hausa in northern Nigeria, both are considered together as Hausa-Fulani. However, they are distinct ethnic groups. 8. A much better term, I think, is "Sokoto Jihad." This is because of the diversity of ethnic membership in the jihad. According to Shenton (1986, 4): "The jihad, which was ultimately to sweep aside all but a few of the ruling lineages of the Hausa birane, has most often been described in tribal terms as a Fulani revolt against a Hausa ruling class. While this description may have been functional for the ideologues of the colonial state, it bears little relation to historical reality...this dichotomy conceals the complexity of the social and political relations embodied in the jihad and the resistance to it. Fulani and Hausa were to be found on both sides of the revolution as, for that matter, were professed Muslims themselves. Although the revolution was justified in religious language, the jihad was primarily concerned with the relation of ruler to ruled, and royalty to commoner. The term 'Fulani' came to be associated with the jihad's adherents by those who opposed the movement; it was a political label rather than an ethnic or tribal category." See also Waldman (1965) for a comprehensive overview of the Sokoto Jihad. 9. Harnischfeger (2006, 43). For more on slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, see Salau (2018). 10. There were other ideological and political reasons for the amalgamation. See Bourne (2016) for a comprehensive overview of the ideological and political reasons for the amalgamation of Nigeria. 11. The definition of indigeneity in the Nigerian context is this: "People who are the first to have settled permanently in a particular area and who are considered as traditional natives . . . People who have exclusive claims to a place through historical and homogenous culture without an alternative place to practice that culture. Such designation being inherited from one's ancestors as opposed to their having bought the place of residence, or being given such places free by earlier settlers. Such persons have rights to their lands, their traditions and culture" (Adebanwi 2009, 350, emphasis in original). Of course, this is similar to the native-settler dichotomy found in many modern societies around the world.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: [Grant Number OPP1144].