Peter Morey

MUSLIMS IN THE FRAME

‘Islam and Freedom: are they destined to clash?’(Newsweek). ‘Muhammad Cartoon row intensifies’ (BBC). ‘Burka makes women prisoners, says President Sarkozy’ (Times). ‘Universities urged to spy on Muslims’ (Guardian). The headlines that scream out at us every day from news hoardings and television screens seem unanimous in the picture they paint of Muslims: unenlightened outsiders who, while they may live and work in the West, still have an allegiance to values different from those recognized in Europe and North America. Whether the controversy is over veiling, cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine, or protests about the knighthood given to Salman Rushdie, Muslims appear always as a problematic presence, troubling those values of individualism and freedom said to define western nations. In this issue of Interventions we seek to critically analyse such recurring yet reductive images. The Framing Muslims research project, which provided inspiration for this volume, seeks to interrogate the paradigms through which Muslim communities in the West are understood and represented. Most contemporary attempts to address this issue have focused on one or two particular genres of representation to construct an argument for the