The last decade has been appalling for Europe as terrorist attacks shook the continent, while the European Union (EU)was battling an economic crisis in Greece caused by the global financial meltdown of 2008 and threaten the entire eurozone. The EU also faced a political crisis as it was to lose a member for the first time because of the Brexit referendum. Adding fuel to the fire, the continent endured a staggering inflow of refugees from Syria and other war-torn regions. This is the context in which the resurgence of the far-right groups is befalling. The anxiety of these devastating events that have rattled Europe’s economy and security may have spurred the current far-right surge, but it did not create it. The origins of far-right populism lie further back in the postwar structural shifts of European society and politics towards integration, multiculturism, and neoliberalism. The new far-right has taken Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hostility as its main mission. This paper will discuss the history, evolution, and resurgence of far-right groups and evaluate their discourse with the old binary Orientalist narratives; by showing the recycling and changing ideas and narratives that are used when defining the “Other”, in this case, Muslims in Europe. The paper will address three main points: how far-right groups show similarities and differences with Orientalism in general; what are the similarities and differences between the old and new far-right; and how Orientalist discourse is manifested at every step in the evolution of the far-right’s narratives. 

                   Usually, far-right refers to “extremist parties whose traditions hark back to fascist or Nazi parties,”[1]prominent of anti-Semitism, and Jews were the target.[2] Today, far-right as “an umbrella concept”[3] refers to groups with various ideas including neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, far-right populist, far-right extremist, and other views that feature aspects of exclusivism, nativism, xenophobia, racism, and use of violence.[4] The far-right politics always involves ideological maneuver of “othering” and blaming out-groups for societal misfortunes.[5] Nazis in the 1930s blamed the Jews, and fascists in the 1920s blamed communists and socialists for their misfortunes.[6] Today, the far-right parties have distanced themselves from past anti-Semitic profile to gain wider acceptance, and they have taken Muslim minorities as their scapegoats.[7] The new far-right organizations arisen in Europe in the 1970s,[8] with France`s Front National (FN) as the leading light of the new far-right movement. The FN made its successful electoral breakthrough in the mid-1980s in response to mass immigration and concern to growing unemployment “by promising to return France to its past monocultural glory.”[9] Many of the new far-right parties across Europe adopted FN`s narratives and sloganstowards immigration, and there was even an attempt to unite Europe`s far-right groups by FN’s leadership.[10] At the turn of this century, the new far-right parties shifted their narratives from being predominantly anti-Semitic to anti-Muslim, as global politics shifted attention to the Muslim world. Muslims have replaced Jews as the new “Other” in Europe.[11]After the cold war, Islam came to increasingly seen through the cultural lens of being in a civilizational “clash" with the Christian West. This has put Muslim minorities in Europe at disadvantage and being viewed as the enemy "within". The 9/11 attacks and the aftermath "war on terror" exacerbated the situation emboldening far-right’s opposition on Islam, Muslims, and immigration. Their anti-Muslim message is “increasingly overt” and the conflict with Islam is “a central political issue”.[12]

                   It’s necessary to differentiate between extreme and populist versions of far-right groups,[13] and we can draw on the work of Mudde that underline the distinguishing features: far-right populist “accepts democratic rules, refuses the use of racism and violence to accomplish its political goals, and works within the political system”;[14] by contrast, far-right extremist does not recognize the existing political system as “legitimate, and is willing to make use of racism and violent means to accomplish its political goals”.[15] An example of far-right extremist’s racism and use of violence is the terror attack in Oslo and Utoya in Norway on July 22, 2011, in which seventy seven citizens lost their lives. The perpetrator Anders Breivik was an activist of far-right extremist party, the Norwegian Progress Party.[16] Breivik`s logic targeted the governing party for "opening up Norway" to mass Muslim immigration.[17] He wanted to oppose Norway`s increasingly multicultural bent by using fascist vision of "racial discrimination" and preservation of "ethnic purity."[18]As of far-right populist, it’s the fusion of “populism and nationalism” - concepts that draw on hostile social relationships. Populism draws on the “antagonistic relationship” between "us" (the pure people) and "them" (the corrupt elites), and it assumes that decisions made in society are legal and moral only when they reflect the “will of the people”.[19]Nationalism, on the other hand, draws on the “antagonistic relationship” between the “in-group” and the “out-group” claimed to preserve the nation`s unity, autonomy, and identity, which is described in homogeneity and exclusionary of those who are outside the in-group. The populist-nationalist platforms enable far-right parties to mobilize electoral voters and significantly increased their popular support.[20] Of course, there is a degree of heterogeneity between individual parties, in terms of their political agenda and internal characteristics, but many of the far-right parties espouse the “dark side”[21] of nationalism, “the belief that superiority and inferiority are innate realities and rejection of social equality”[22] and consequently support authoritarianism, nativism, racism and xenophobia.

                   The manifestation of Orientalist discourse in the evolution of far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives can best be explained through the work of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said has stirred a debate on the disparate relationship between the West and Islam, “on questions of colonialism, dominance, and power, as well as on longstanding stereotypesand prejudices against the Muslims”.[23] According to Said, Orientalism can be understood as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the “Orient” and the “Occident”, and a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”.[24] In the Western mind, Said argued, the “Orient” is represented, in contrast to the “Occident,” as monolithic and static bloc that is unresponsive to change, irrational and inferior to the West.[25] Said depicted Orientalism as “a hegemonic discourse” that was seldomly doubted, but rather achieved “an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical location”.[26]

                   Orientalism has produced a flourishing scholarship, literature, and art that focused on the Orient. Some Orientalists held great admiration for the Orient and Islam, others developed images of Arabs and Muslims that perpetuated medieval stereotypes and tropes bolstered by appeals to scientific and racial/cultural superiority of Europeans. Muslims were always depicted as lacking reason and intelligence by virtue of adhering to Islamic faith, tantamount to rejecting “the European spirit” of reason, science, and the drive for knowledge. Orientalists’ art frequently romanticized Muslim women’s bodies and attire, often with subtext that these women were sexually oppressed and exploited by their religion, culture, and by powerful Muslim men. While many of the Orientalist stereotypes and tropes on Islam and Muslims are found in the new far-right’s narratives, Orientalism and far-right differ in many ways. The issue of power in Orientalism is explicit and connected to the imperialist domination of the “Other”, while far-right’s power is implicit in demonization of racial/cultural and gendered depiction of Islam and Muslims. Far-right has retained the Orientalist dichotomy of superior/inferior identity, but now linked with the reworked idea of “clash of civilizations”[27] that has arisen white-supremacy, xenophobia, white-culturist, and white-nationalism. The Orientalist vision of incompatible to modernity has now been entrenched in far-right’s universalization of Western culture and values. The “clash of civilizations” theory has manifested its own dichotomy of fight of good against evil, where Muslims are depicted as terrorists, and new ideology of home securitization is born. While Orientalism moved away from Enlightenment’s universalism and promotes multiculturism, far-right exhibits hysteria rejection of multiculturism and “imagined demographic threat” of European culture and values. Bernard Lewis has articulated clearly, they hate our democracy, our freedoms, our values, and our way of life. 

                   Orientalism reached its peak between mid-19^th and mid-20^th centuries, with colonialism and nationalismplaying important roles in its development. Postcolonial period, Orientalism became increasingly disoriented, leaving behind “weak, fragmented and contradictory versions.”[28] In the 1990s post-cold war, there has been a rise of Islamophobia, which is a clear breakaway with the history of Orientalism. Islamophobia has become the new tool “predicated on the reworked idea of clash of civilizations” which spread swiftly in the West post-9/11. Samuel Huntington, “who has done much to popularize the notion of clash of civilization” argued that, “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic societies.”[29]

                   Islamophobia emerged in the new geopolitical context that is linked to questions of global mobility and security and has become the vehicle for political mobilization among the new far-right political parties and groups.[30]Even the West’s perpetual “war on terror” has been rationalized and legitimized by Islamophobia such that anti-Muslim narratives and Western triumphalism have advanced together.[31] Islamophobia also entered mainstream politics and government policies, especially immigration policy, where the “the immigration debate has turned into a debate on Muslim immigrants and Islam.”[32] The Orientalist’s binary differs from that of far-right’s because in the colonial period, the Muslim was frequently the far-off “Other” who was placed apart and fantasized over at foreign lands, however, those Muslims who are the target of far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives and policies are living amidst Europe’s societies and regularly experiencing exclusionist attitudes and discriminatory practices. These developments have been facilitated by racialization of home security using powerful surveillance matrix targeting Muslim minorities, immigrants, and refugees.[33] Comparing to Orientalism, “which deals primarily with history and subjects that lie in the past and has never really attracted the attention of the public”,[34] the new far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives point to current issues that regularly generate varieties of public discourses and electoral mobilization. While the new far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives are not innovative, they rely on many of the racial stereotypes and tropes articulated by Orientalists.[35] Orientalism isunderstood as “a multi-layered construct that conflated negative with positive sentiments, and thereby also occasionally romanticized the Orient”[36], in contrast, the new far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives are based on the “unidimensional conception of an essentialized Islam and a racialized Muslim, and are stimulated by prejudices and stereotypes”[37] that promote undesirability, distrust, and hostility.

                   The mounting trace of fears about an alleged “clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic Orient”[38] isaffecting the old colonial politics of power and hegemony. The economic and strategic motives underlying the targeting of Islam and Muslims may have been obscure, what’s clear is far-right’s use of Islamophobia to confront Islam and Muslims politically at home. While Orientalism has been mainly applied to “academic production”, literature and art, the new far-right “generally applies to popular culture, including the media and grassroots prejudice”.[39] With the diminishingsignificance of the nation-state and the upsurge of postmodernism, “academics are now far less likely to represent national interests than they were in the colonial period”.[40] Therefore, connection with colonial anti-Muslim narratives “are more likely to be found in popular culture”,[41] than academic Orientalism. Muslim women and men are target in Europe as threat to Western culture, values, and ideals. The gendered manifestations of the new far-right are like Orientalist, but in the current context their propulsions are different symbolized through acts like ban on veil or gender segregation or minarets or “saving” of oppressed women or profiling of Muslim youth, etc.[42] Even actions that are insignificantlychallenge Western cultural privileges such as “the arrival of undocumented migrants and refugees on Western shores”[43]is racialized as “Other” and perceived as a threat. The effective use of both mainstream media and social media is the other important characteristics of the new far-right and has been critical in fueling anxiety of Islam and Muslims with the public. Edward Said has discussed the media`s depiction of Arabs in the West and “highlighted the notion of Islam as news,”[44] but the contemporary Western media coverage (mainstream and social media) of Islam and Muslims is much more racist and ethnic tinted.

                   Muslims as the new "existential threat"[45] to the Western civilization are at the center of the new far-right’s program, especially when they are portrayed as not only posing a security and economic threat to the West, but also as being incompatible with the Western cultural identity and values, and “the most challenging group to assimilate” to the Western way of life. Some new far-right groups insinuate conspiracy theories that Muslims have a secret plot to "Islamize Europe"[46] or to make it "Eurabia".[47] Such flawed rhetoric is often spewed in the media, calling for "resistance movement" to "fight against the Muslim invasion of our countries",[48] but also to fight "against the national traitors who assist them."[49] Speaking ahead of the 2009 parliamentary election to the Party Congress, the Norwegian PP leader Siv Jensen warned against the "stealth Islamization"[50] of Norwegian society. She stated, "We cannot allow particular groups to decide the direction of societal development in Norway."[51] She also stated, "We will not allow special demands from particular groups."[52] The special demands she was referring to, turn out to be the ordinary acts of Muslim women wearing hijab, eating halal food, a Muslim woman visiting a female doctor, or having a prayer space. Similar narrativeshave been echoed in France by President Macron who unfortunately adopted far-right’s narratives calling "to fight against separatism."[53]

                   The primary political program of all new far-right parties in Europe is opposition to immigration, but the issueof immigration is increasingly conflated in the Western public discourse. "Immigrants" came to mean "Muslims" and mainstream parties are being accused of “misleading the public” about consequences of immigration to the European national identity, culture, and values. Anti-Muslim narratives have become “a regular staple” of far-right parties, and these viewpoints have shifted from the peripheral of European society to the center of political discourse. In the West we hear far-right parties’ leaders openly push for a ban on Muslim immigration, a crackdown on halal certification, and depiction of Islam as a political ideology.[54] The focus on criticizing Muslims’ culture and values rather than on biological differences that was done by the Nazis, enabled the new far-right parties to gain support in the public and political arenas. Today, the social, political, and media landscapes in Europe favor far-right politics, but at the expense of Islam and Muslims in Europe. New far-right populist parties are now in the parliaments of most of European countries. They are also governing parties or part of governing coalitions in many other countries. The case of Hungary is remarkable, where the governing and the largest opposition parties are both far-right populists. Once the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has described the EU “as a threat against Hungarian values and its national sovereignty.”[55]

                   The new far-right parties are redefining electoral behavior in Europe, and the key drivers are their opposition to immigration and rejection of multiculturalism. They take “anti-establishment stance” articulated in rhetoric that tendsto focus on “the homeland of betrayed people”, and that the established parties have “sold out” the homeland and/or the welfare state in favor of multiculturalism.[56] For example, Swedish far-right parties speak nostalgically to “Sweden of the 1950s and 1960s as the dream country with social welfare, high employment rates, progress, and few immigrants from non-European countries”.[57] Usually, political parties that combine nationalist with populist claims have a very “narrow ethnic understanding”[58] of nation, the one that is inhabited exclusively by the natives, the non-native people and cultureare rejected because are “threatening to the nation-state’s homogeneity”[59]. The new far-right sees fighting against those who “threaten” the homogeneity and values of the nation should be their main goals. There is a resemblance to the Orientalist binary view of “Others”, but without carrying the “White men’s burden” to civilize and tame them. Thenativist rhetoric functions as a mobilizing force against establishing a cosmopolitan society that is tolerant to cultural diversification.

                   The increasing electoral success of the new far-right parties in Europe is related to voters’ fears over Muslim immigration. While immigration is multidimensional and may pose cultural, economic, and security challenges, far-right politics puts more emphasis on cultural threat, referred as identity politics. Many of the supporters of far-right parties, their feeling of threat by Muslim immigrants and minorities “do not simply stem from economic grievances…more accurately, they appear to stem from a belief that immigrants, minority groups and rising cultural diversity are threatening the national culture, and community way of life.” Since immigration creates a divide between those voters with “cosmopolitan” bent that support multiculturalism, and those with “nationalist” bent that reject them, the new far-right is best understood as the product of a “cultural backlash”[60] against immigration, but driven by those on the wrong side of the divide who feel that “cosmopolitan elites have made gains at their expense”.[61]

                   Knowledge of the fast growth of Muslim population in post-war Europe is important to make sense of the new far-right’s obsession to anti-Muslim immigration that generates so much tension and controversy. Although Islam has a deep history of over a millennium in Europe, the percentage of Muslims today is relatively low. The total population of Europe was estimated at 584 million in 1950, out of which 2% (11.68 million) was estimated to be Muslim.[62] The total population of Europe today is estimated at 744 million and Muslims are estimated to have grown from 2% to to 6% (44.64 million).[63] Much of this growth came from the wave of Muslim immigration in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s at the invitation of European governments to rebuild Europe, through labor and guest worker programs. Europe saw another wave of immigration in the 1980s and 1990s as asylum seekers and refugees seeking safety from conflicts in their own countries. The latest wave is that of Syrian refugees in 2010s directly caused by Western military interventions in Syria. Muslim population growth in Europe is also contributed by the highest birth rate trends and the highest conversion rate to Islam from other faiths. The growth in Europe’s Muslim population is significant because Muslim presence will continue to be more substantial, visible, and asserting their religious and cultural identity in the public space, at the time when Christianity’s public influence fades due to secularism – a point of disputation between Muslim minorities and the majority population, which feeds the new far-right’s animosity towards Muslims. 

                   No doubt, the 9/11 attacks had a profound effect on US political and cultural landscape, which led to fear of “Islamic threat” against Western security, values, and freedoms. Europe succumbed to similar fear stemming partly from the new realities in the global terrorism leading to 9/11, but also from a series of attacks on the European soil that reinforced fears about the growing Muslim population. Attacks such as: the murder of Theo van Gogh (2004), the Madrid attacks (2004), the London attacks (2005), the Danish cartoon controversy (2006), the Paris attacks (2012), the Paris Charlie Hebdo (2015), and Belgium attacks (2016), all fueled fear of the Muslim enemy “within” and had reverberations well beyond the borders.[64] The murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was significant in the development of far-right’s anti-Muslim discourse in Europe as Van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight on the street of Amsterdam.[65] It was carried out by a young Dutch of Moroccan and Muslim background, Muhammad Boueri, as a retaliatory act for a provocative short film called Submission that was jointly produced with a Somali refugee turned far-right politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.[66] The film was purposely produced to portray Islam as a religion that condoned the oppression and abuse of women. Unfortunately, Boueri’s wrong action ironically helped the film’s objective. The murder sent shockwave throughout the Netherland and the rest of Europe, unsettling many who had viewed the Netherlands as the model of multiculturalism and religious tolerance. 

                   Reflecting on the larger impact of Van Gogh’ murder on the position of Islam and Muslims in the Netherlands and in Europe in general, Todd H. Green in his book, “The Fear of Islam” (2015) made the following observations:  First, multiculturism suffered a huge setback with the murder[67] when many in the Netherlands and throughout Europe started to harbor the view that multiculturism has gone too far and started questioning such policies. Second, freedom of speech (including freedom to offend) became the primary framework used to interpret the murder and controversy over Submission,[68] and all similar acts to follow such the Danish cartoons and the French Charlie Hebdo. Third, the resultant suspicion of Muslim minorities in Europe paved the way for a stronger far-right’s presence in the political arena.[69]Finally, the murder reinforced one of the core Orientalist and Islamophobic stereotypes of Islam – that it’s inherently violent by nature.[70] The fact that the mainstream media in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe framed Boueri’s action as a “holy war”, bolstered the perception that Islam is at war with the West and Europe is the battleground. 

                   Far-right used to refer to extremist parties in Europe “whose traditions hark back to fascism and Nazism”. The new far-right populist parties in Europe appeared in the 1970s and had successful electoral breakthrough in the mid-1980s in response to mass immigration. Their emphasis on anti-Muslims is relatively recent, and strongly related to post-cold war and post 9/11 attacks. As global politics shifted attention to Islam and the Muslim world, the far-right shifted their narratives from being predominantly anti-Semitic to predominantly anti-Muslim. European far-right populism has a primarily cultural/identity dimension of excluding the non-native groups. Today, the primary focus of the new far-right parties is anti-Islam, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration. Their narratives are driven by Islamophobia, but they share the Orientalist dichotomy of “Other” and many of the negative stereotypes and tropes of Islam and Muslims. Yet, Orientalism and far-right differ in many ways. For example, the colonial Orientalism has been mainly “applied to academic production”, literature, and art, while the new far-right applies to popular culture, including media and populace racism and prejudice. The Orientalist’s binary differs from that of far-right’s because in the colonial period, the Muslim was often the distant “Other”, while Muslims who are the target of the far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives and policies are living amidst European societies having first-hand experience of racism and exclusion. Orientalism dealt primarily with history and subjects that lie in the past and did not attract the public’s attention, while the new far-right’s narratives point to current issues that generate public interest and political discourse. Orientalism is a multi-layered construct that conflated negative with positive sentiments of Islam and Muslims, while the new far-right’s anti-Muslim narratives are one-dimensional notion of “an essentialized Islam” and “a racialized Muslim” and are stimulated by prejudices and stereotypes that “promote undesirability, distrust and hostility”. Power in Orientalism is explicit in relation to the imperialist cultural and economic domination of the “Other”, while far-right’s power is implicit and postured in demonization of cultural and racial representation and gendered depiction of Islam and Muslims. 

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