'1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ Sympathy for Jihadis’: An insight into the Lived Experience of UK Muslims following the Terror Attacks in Paris’

Abstract

On November 13, 2015, 130 people died in terrorist attacks in Paris. Ten days later, The Sun published the headline ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims Sympathy for Jihadis’ (The Sun, 2015). The Paris attacks and the backlash on British Muslims were followed by further ISIS-inspired attacks in Brussels, Nice and Berlin. Across Europe, far right parties with anti-Muslim sentiments have grown in influence (NY Times, 2016); the British EU Referendum has led to incidents of overt racism in the UK (The Independent, 2016). This chapter is about understanding the effect of these events upon British Muslims and the tendency to associate the Muslim faith with violent ‘Jihadi’ terrorism as a national problem and a collective, indiscriminate object into which a whole nation can project its deeper fears.
In framing this projection, the so-called ‘Islamic State’ becomes synonymous with a violent state of being. In our chapter, we show how the British Muslims who participated in our research felt identified with the incursion of this ‘Islamic State’ into
the UK as a sovereign ‘State’. The Islamic ‘State’ is at once an invading State and a psychic state. Both States/states become a single locus for the intolerable fear that must be expelled once it can be identified as an object to be targeted. The frustration of British Muslims emerges at the node of a simultaneous need to expel such hatred and fear coupled with the psychic impossibility of accepting this expulsion as a projection into one’s self, leading to a limbo of combined projection and rejection held in relationship through mutual tension and a determination to ‘resist’ on all sides.