Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a new scale to measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a new scale to measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique Roland Imhoff & Julia Recker University of Bonn Accepted for publication in Political Psychology Keywords: Islamophobia, prejudice, Islam, Muslims, secularism, Islamoprejudice Author Note The present research is partly based on a research internship of the second author completed under the first author’s supervision. The authors would like to thank Aleksandra Lewicki for helpful comments. Correspondence regarding the article should be addressed to Roland Imhoff, Department of Psychology, Kaiser-Karl-Ring 9, 53111 Bonn, Germany, [email protected]. Differentiating Islamophobia 2 Abstract Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of the discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independently or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition vs. support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. Implications and application of the differentiation between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique will be discussed. (1173 characters) Differentiating Islamophobia 3 Since 2001 many populist right-wing parties have gained votes at regional and national elections throughout Europe with an explicitly endorsed anti-Muslim agenda (e.g., the PVV in the Netherlands, the FPÖ in Austria, the PRO parties in several German municipalities). In the United Kingdom, the explicitly anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL) was founded in 2009 and made the news in 2010 by forging links with the American Tea Party and an organization called “Stop the Islamization of America” (SIA; see Townsend, 2010). These developments seem to be rooted in a growing wariness towards Islam. A 2006 poll by the Washington Post suggested that roughly half of all Americans hold a negative view of Islam (Deane & Fears, 2006), and particularly concerns about Islamic extremism are shared among the population majorities in almost all Western countries (Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2006). The apparent prevalence of wariness and concern about Islam has led several researchers to warn against a dramatic rise of Islamophobia after the violent attacks on the World Trade Center at the hands of self-proclaimed Islamic terrorists on September 11th, 2001 (Allen & Nielsen, 2002; Sheridan, 2006; but see Kaplan, 2006). However, anti-Muslim hostility as a general phenomenon can be traced further back to the first Gulf war in 1991, the Rushdie affair in 1988, or even the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 (Moodod & Ahmad, 2007; Poynting & Mason, 2007). Across several historical episodes, the perception of individual Muslims as violent led to an association of Muslims in general with violence and threat and the perception of Muslim communities in Western countries as a “fifth column” of a globally threatening aggressive Islam. Several scholars have subsumed these developments under the neologism Islamophobia (e.g., Allen, 2007; Gottschalk & Greenberg, 2008). However, despite its widespread use in political discourse, few concepts have been debated as heatedly over the last ten years as the term Islamophobia. Best translated as “Fear of Islam”, Islamophobia is considered by some to currently be the most dangerous form of prejudice, discriminating against individuals on basis of Differentiating Islamophobia 4 the religious belief in Islam (Allen, 2007; Bunzl, 2005). In 1998, the British non-governmental organization Runnymede Trust provided a definition of Islamophobia that equated it with closed (vs. open) views of Islam (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, 1998). According to this definition, the eight main features of Islamophobia are views of the Islam as (1) monolithic, (2) separate from and (3) inferior to Western cultures. Islam is seen as (4) “an enemy” and as (5) a manipulative political ideology. Criticism of the West is (6) a priori rejected, (7) discrimination against Muslims is justified, and (8) Islamophobia is seen as natural. This definition remains the most ambitious effort to explicitly define Islamophobia. Use of the term has become widespread, and yet its definition is highly contested. Two particular criticisms are regularly raised. One claims that Islamophobia is an expendable neologism that merely describes a rather well-known phenomenon of prejudice and discrimination against immigrants (particularly from Muslim countries). The other, more intransigent, objection denounces Islamophobia as a discursive weapon intended to silence well-justified critique of Islamic practices and dogmas. We will briefly outline these two critical positions below before introducing our empirical approach to the question. Old Wine in a New Bottle Critics of the term have claimed that Islamophobia is a highly popular, new phrase for a rather old phenomenon: racism. In this understanding, the new label Islamophobia would conceal that discrimination and prejudice against immigrants – also but not exclusively from predominantly Muslim countries – constitute a long-standing tradition in many Western countries. Thus, Islamophobia is characterized as neologism for racism (Love, 2009; Semati, 2006). Halliday (1999) argued that, in contrast to what the term Islamophobia suggests, “the enemy is not a faith or a culture but a people” (p. 898). Thus, Salaita (2006) proposed the term anti-Arab racism as a more accurate replacement for Islamophobia. At the same time, several Differentiating Islamophobia 5 scholars have argued that religious categories have not only replaced ethnic categories as the salient part of immigrant self-concepts, but also as political categories (Modood & Ahmad, 2007). However, the term Islamophobia implies that Islam as a religion is the target of discriminatory practice, when in fact it is individuals who suffer discrimination. One of the most prominent manifestations of such a view was expressed in the Manifesto signed by twelve intellectuals and initially published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo in Feburary 2006 (Hirsi Ali, Chafiq, Fourest, Levy, Manji, Mozzafari et al., 2006). According to the English translation, there is no use for the neologism of Islamophobia as it “confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it”. Islamophobia as a Discursive Weapon against Enlightened Criticism Several authors have claimed that allegedly democratically motivated criticism of current Islamic realities merely serves the same goal as open prejudice: to delegitimize Islam and justify discrimination against Muslims (Abu Sway, 2006; Fekete, 2004; Semati, 2010). Others have countered that the use of the term Islamophobia serves specific interests that are beyond consideration of anti-discrimination. As one of the most outspoken critics of the concept, antiracist organizer Kenan Malik (2005, 2009) provocatively asked whether the hatred and abuse of Muslims was being exaggerated to silence critics of Islam. A common demand of this position is that public criticism of aspects of Islam should not be misidentified as prejudiced views, but rather as enlightened – and secular – critique of religious practices (like veiling, circumcision, and the ritual slaughtering of animals). The proponents of such criticism claim that “such practices should be prevented not because they are non-Christian but because they represent a culture that promotes extreme submission to religion and, hence does not allow individuals to subscribe to secularist values” (p. 510; Özyürek, 2005). Halliday (1999) warned that the term Islamophobia also challenged the possibility of dialogue based on universal principles as it Differentiating Islamophobia 6 suggested “that the solution lies in greater dialogue, bridge-building, respect for the other community” while running the risk of “denying the right, or possibility, of criticisms of the practices of those with whom one is having the dialogue” (p. 899). Malik (2005) went as far as claiming that “the threat of Islamophobia is now being used to stifle criticism of Islam”. Such a view is also mirrored in the comment of a British senior journalist who characterized Islamophobia as “a construct that’s been used to cover an awful lot of people and censor debate” (cited by Meer & Modood, 2009; p. 345). In summary, there exists the fear that Islamophobia is in essence a derogatory term for legitimate and enlightened critique of certain religious traditions, habits, and religious regimes. Considering this wide range of interpretation of what Islamophobia is – from a descriptive term for hatred directed against Islam to a denunciatory catchword directed against those who express legitimate criticism of Islam – it seems highly desirable to provide an operational definition that clearly distinguishes a prejudiced view of Islam from criticism of Islam motivated by universalistic, secular, and democratic convictions. Such a differentiation is needed in order to facilitate both research and discussion. We suggest that the neologism Islamophobia may conceal more than it illuminates and thus developed a scale that incorporates both understandings – prejudiced and secular views – but clearly differentiates between them. Islamophobia as a descriptive term of prejudiced or “closed views” (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, 1998) of Islam is a misnomer when describing prejudice against rather than an actual fear of Islam (for an Islamophobia definition actually referring to a fear of Islam see Lee, Gibbons, Thompson, & Timani, 2009). Likewise, other proposals like the term anti-Arab racism (Salaita, 2006) seem misleading as Arabs are only one small minority in the global community of Islam (Ummah). Despite general agreement with the definition provided by the Runnymede Trust, we propose to refer to such prejudiced views of Islam with the term Islamoprejudice rather Differentiating Islamophobia 7 than Islamophobia. To support the usefulness of this concept it needs to be shown that it is an internally consistent concept, has any incremental value above and beyond existing prejudice scales, and that it is not just a denunciatory term for a secular critique of Islam. The Present Research To base the political discussion on an empirical ground, we sought criteria to distinguish prejudiced views of Islam (Islamoprejudice) from secularly motivated criticism of Islam. Whereas a recently published Islamophobia scale focused on the ‘fear’ aspect of this concept (Lee et al., 2010) and thus actually holds what the term promises, we sought to align our scale with a political definition of anti-Islam prejudice as proposed by the Runnymede Trust. Despite the fact that our definition is based on what the Runnymede Trust calls Islamophobia, we propose to use the term Islamoprejudice instead. Importantly, we sought to distinguish these prejudiced views of Islam from secularly motivated critique of certain Islamic practices, thus adding a measure suitable to tap into non-prejudiced but critical views of Islam. To this end, a scale was developed and validated in a first study. We constructed a scale with two hypothesized factors: Islamoprejudice and Secular Criticism of Islam. The items designed to tap into Islamoprejudice followed directly from the definition of Islamophobia characterized as closed views of Islam by the Runnymede Trust (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, 1998). It was hypothesized that the eight closed views of Islam would form a consistent pattern of thought (which has not been empirically demonstrated thus far). Furthermore, we expected the Islamoprejudice factor to be highly correlated to established measures of explicit and implicit prejudice. In contrast, Secular Criticism of Islam was expected to show no correlation with measures of prejudice. Regarding a locally heatedly debated issue, we predicted Islamoprejudice to be the strongest predictor of opposition versus support of a construction of a new representative mosque in Cologne (a larger city close to the location where Differentiating Islamophobia 8 the sample was recruited). We conducted a first study to empirically test these predictions, then extracted and cross-validated a shorter version of the scale in Study 2 using a larger and more diverse sample. Study 1 In a first study, the validity of the newly created Scale for Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique of Islam (SIPSCI) was tested by exploring its factorial structure and convergent validity with explicit prejudice as well as implicit associations between threat and Muslims. The latter was included as the perception of Muslims as threatening directly and uniquely predicted support for personal and institutional discrimination of Muslims in a recent study (Doosje, Zimmermann, Küpper, Zick, & Meertens, 2009). As the study was conducted at a time when the building of a new representative central mosque in Cologne was being heatedly debated, we included a oneitem measure to assess the support for or opposition against this project. Despite the claim of opponents that their opposition was merely based on secular concerns, we reasoned that the position for or against the mosque could be best predicted by Islamoprejudice. Individuals free of any desire to exclude Muslims from the same rights the majority has should support the mosque, whereas those high in Islamoprejudice will be opposed to it. Secular Islam Critique was not expected to be related to this issue, as the denied support would go beyond mere critique of problematic issues to the level of exclusionary practice. Method Participants and Procedure. A sample of 60 students (14 men, 46 women ranging from 19 to 57 years, M = 24.23, SD = 5.92) was recruited in the university building for a study of person perception and picture categorization. Participants were welcomed and seated in front of a computer on which they completed all measures. After demographic information and a picture- Differentiating Islamophobia 9 rating task to uphold the cover story, for one half of the participants the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was administered, then followed by an irrelevant distracter questionnaire and the subtle prejudice scale. The other half of the participants received these three tasks in reverse order. After another picture categorization task, participants completed the SIPSCI questionnaire and self-categorized either as supportive of the new mosque or not. They were then thoroughly debriefed and thanked. Measures. Islamoprejudice. The Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (1998) proposed eight criteria for a ‘closed view of Islam’, indicative of Islamophobia. For each of these eight criteria, two or three items were rationally constructed (see Table I for exact wording) to construct a scale with the following subscales: Islam as an unprogressive monolithic bloc (items 1-3), Islam as separate and other (items 4-5), Islam as inferior (items 6-8), Islam as violent (items 9-10), Islam as mere political ideology (items 11-12), unscreened rejection of any criticism made by Islam (items 13-14), justification of discriminatory practices towards Muslims (items 15-17), and acceptance of anti-Muslim hostility (items 18-19). Together, these 19 items (8 items reversecoded, such that high scores indicate low Islamoprejudice) were expected to tap into one overarching concept of Islamoprejudice. Secular Critique of Islam. Four criteria were developed to reflect laicist positions towards Islam regarding the relation of religion and state (rejection of religious authority over political sphere; items 20-21), gender relations (rejection of gender division; items 22-23), the adherence to universalist values (rejection of cultural relativism; 24-25), and criticism of Islamic fundamentalism (items 26-30). A fifth category reflected general secular conviction towards all religions, not specifically focusing on Islam (items 31-35). These 16 items (3 items reversecoded) were hypothesized to reflect Secular Critique of Islam (see Table I for exact wording). Differentiating Islamophobia 10 Subtle Prejudice against Muslims and Turks. To explore the relationship between Islamoprejudice and conventional forms of racism, we included the Subtle Prejudice Scale (Meertens & Pettigrew, 1997), adapted to Muslims and the largest Muslim group in Germany, Turks. Each scale has 19 items. Implicit associations of Muslims with threat. To tap into the implicit associations between Muslims and threat an Implicit Association Task (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) was constructed. In an IAT, participants have to categorize attribute-relevant items and target category-relevant items first separately and then in two differently combined blocks simultaneously. In this IAT, the attribute dimension was “threatening” vs. “non-threatening” and participants had to categorize words that were pretested to be either clearly non-threatening (meadow, chick, sunshine, fruit) or threatening (murder, war, terrorist attack, atomic bomb). The target dimension was “German” vs. “Muslim”. Target items were four pictures in each category: German targets were faces of Northern European men in front of a neutral background (restaurant), whereas Muslim targets were faces of Turkish men (the largest Muslim community in Germany) in front of a mosque. This target dimension was chosen in light of the interpretation of Islamoprejudice as racist ideology (e.g., Love, 2009) much more than an actual religious debate (which would have justified using Muslim vs. Christian as target concept dimension and religious symbols as items). Support for mosque. The item tapping into support for or opposition against a representative mosque in nearby Cologne read “Do you support the controversial building of a new great mosque in Cologne?” (yes/no). Results Differentiating Islamophobia 11 An exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation offered the solution of a two-factor structure with factors (based on the scree plot) that could be labeled as Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique of Islam, as per the discussion above. All items related to Islamoprejudice loaded significantly (>.30) on the first factor and not on the second (with the exception of item 14), and all items hypothesized to reflect Secular Critique loaded on the second factor (>.30). Consequently, indices were calculated for both subscales that proved highly reliable (Table II) and uncorrelated (r = .01). The correlation with the other measures showed that the Islamoprejudice had a strong overlap with the conventional prejudice measures against Muslims (as a religious group) and Turks (as a national group), whereas Secular Critique was entirely uncorrelated with these measures of prejudice. It is conceivable that this pattern emerged merely as a result of differential social desirability of these scales. It is clearly socially sanctioned to articulate prejudiced views and the same might hold for the Islamoprejudice scale. Secular critique, in contrast, might be a more socially accepted form of articulating prejudice by legitimizing it with positive values like secularity. If that was the case, the indirectly measured implicit association of Muslims with threat should not show any differential correlation between the two factors. For the IAT, we calculated a d-score (IAT-d; Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) that can be interpreted as individual effect sizes of how much stronger the association between the concepts Muslim and threat is compared the association between the ingroup (German) and threat. As expected and in contradiction to the claim of mere social desirability effects, the associative strength between Muslims and threat (IAT-d) was positively related to Islamoprejudice but not to Secular Critique of Islam (Table II). Opposition to the building of a new representative mosque was related to both variants of the subtle prejudice scale and to implicit association between Muslims and threat as well as the Differentiating Islamophobia 12 Islamoprejudice subscale, but not to Secular Critique (criterion validity in Table II). As Islamoprejudice showed remarkably high correlation with established measures of prejudice against Turks and Muslims, it was crucial to provide evidence for the incremental validity of the subscale. We thus analyzed its unique relationship to the building of the new central mosque in Cologne in contrast to subtle prejudice against Turks and Muslims. Almost precisely one half (n = 31) of the 60 participants claimed to support the building of the new mosque, whereas the other half (n = 29) did not. Both SIPSCI subscales as well as subtle prejudice against Turk as well as Muslims were entered together with the IAT score in a binary logistic regression to predict opposition to (vs. support for) the new mosque. Because the predictors were highly intercorrelated, a stepwise procedure (forward conditional) was chosen. Results showed that Islamoprejudice was the strongest predictor, B = 1.36, SE = 0.42, Odds Ratio Exp(B) = 3.89, p = .001. None of the other variables added any incremental value. Discussion The new SIPSCI scale clearly differentiated two different factors: a Secular Critique of Islam as well as a prejudice-laden closed view of Islam, the latter of which has been referred to as Islamophobia in the literature but never formally differentiated from the first. Our study is the first to show that the definition brought forward by the Runnymede Trust (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, 1998) can be translated into an internally highly consistent set of individual statements. Correlations with established measures of explicit and implicit prejudice showed that Islamoprejudice can be best conceptualized as a form of religion-based prejudice that is linked to the perception of Muslims as threatening. However, importantly the Islamoprejudice scale outperformed previously existing measures in predicting the position in a concrete political issue: the building of a new mosque. Debates around the building of new mosques, the height of Differentiating Islamophobia 13 minarets and other issues concerning the role of Muslims in society have appeared all over Europe and our results suggest that, although prejudice does play a role in predicting which side individuals will be take in these debates, the new Islamoprejudice scale is a better predictor than established measures. In contrast, the second factor, Secular Critique of Islam, showed no relationship to any of the prejudice measures. In the case of the explicit prejudice scales, this could be explained by socially desirable responding. It might have been that some individuals disguise their prejudiced views as an allegedly enlightened and Secular Critique. However, the lack of a correlation between the critique scale and automatically activated associations between Muslims and threat speak against such an interpretation. Instead, it seems that our Secular Critique subscale captured a relatively consistent pattern of thought that is not contaminated with prejudices but is highly critical of Islam and religious interferences in the worldly sphere. However, some individuals might make use of such – not inherently prejudiced – statements to justify their prejudiced views. As a critical note, it may raise concerns that our factor analysis was based on 35 items but only 60 participants. This is in contradiction to Cattell (1978), who suggested using a minimum respondent-to-variable ratio of 3:1. However, more recently MacCallum, Widaman, Zhang, and Hong (1999) argued that the needed ratio is not the same for every data set. For a dataset with wide communality and a variable-to-factor-ratio of 20:3, they received 100% convergent solutions even with a sample size of only 60 in a Monte-Carlo study. As the present dataset also showed a wide communality (ranging from .10 to .69) and an even better variable-to-factor-ratio of 35:2, the small sample-to-item ratio may still have produced a robust solution. However, to confirm these findings, it is advisable to cross-validate our findings. In addition, a shorter (and thus more easily administered) scale is highly desirable. Thus, for Study 2 the scale length was Differentiating Islamophobia 14 reduced and the shorter scale was administered to a larger sample to bolster the reliability of our results. Study 2 To expand the findings from Study 1 beyond a small student sample, we conducted an online study with a community sample. The aims were to confirm the dimensionality of the questionnaire using a short form and to explore its subscales’ relationships to right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and religiosity. Resulting from a view of the world as threatening, right-wing authoritarianism is assumed to evoke dislike for potentially threatening groups (Altemeyer, 1988, 1998). Islamoprejudice was thus expected to be positively associated with RWA, as the perception of Muslims as violent, hostile, and threatening lies at the core of Islamoprejudice. In contrast, Secular Critique should be negatively related to RWA, because one of the core principles of RWA is authoritarian submission, i.e. the imperative to show obedience. One application of such obedience concerns the role of women in society (reflected in the reverse-coded item “The days when women are submissive should belong strictly in the past. A woman’s place in society should be wherever she wants to be,” in the RWA scale by Funke, 2005). Along similar lines, the Secular Critique scale includes statements that oppose the alleged duty of Muslim women to conform to Islamic norms regarding their position in society. Another generalized political opinion concerns the tendency to justify existing hierarchies and derogate low-status groups (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes such a mindset and has been defined as the general tendency to emphasize one’s own groups’ superiority over other groups (von Collani, 2002). Whereas conservatism is one of the core components of authoritarianism, SDO contains a firm belief in Differentiating Islamophobia 15 inequality, independent of any traditionalism. We thus predicted SDO to be positively associated with Islamoprejudice, as Islamoprejudice may serve as a way to legitimize the ingroup’s privilege, thus legitimizing an existing hierarchy. With regard to Secular Critique, the situation may be more complex. On the one hand, Secular Critique is clearly based on egalitarian norms (e.g., equal rights for women). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that people who endorse anti-egalitarian beliefs and hold prejudiced opinions about Muslims (Islamoprejudice) would not also express critique. Voicing an – allegedly secular – critique might serve as a means to justify existing prejudice and support for discriminatory practices. In that sense, the critique is still not inherently prejudiced but may serve as a justification of these anti-egalitarian attitudes. We thus expected participants high in SDO to show a positive relationship between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique. The more prejudiced they are against Muslims, the more they should express criticism of certain Muslim practices as a form of justification of their prejudice. For low-SDO participants, we expected comparably high scores on Secular Critique, independent of their (generally lower) degrees of Islamoprejudice. For religiosity, we expected a dissociation of the relationship to the subscales. The degree of religiosity for non-Muslims should be positively related to Islamoprejudice, as religious systems are generally mutually exclusive and this should increase a view of Muslims as different. However, an opposite prediction was made for the Secular Critique subscale. This scale includes the rejection of Muslim (but also other) religious intervention into the worldly sphere. Thus, religious non-Muslims should object to such a Secular Critique as it is potentially applicable to certain aspects of their own religion as well. Method Participants. The study was conducted online and participants were approached via social network forum and online discussion boards. The data of fifteen participants were discarded as Differentiating Islamophobia 16 they self-identified as Muslims. The remaining 316 participants (148 men, 168 women) ranged in age range from 16 to 72 years, M = 29.21, SD = 11.49. The majority of the respondents selfidentified as Christian (106 Christian-Catholic, 116 Christian-Protestant, and 5 ChristianOrthodox), eleven participants belonged to another faith, and the remaining 78 participants claimed not identify with any specific religion. Measures. SIPSCI. A short version of the scale used in Study 1 was created. The criteria for item selection were high item-total correlations in Study 1 (|r| > .50), a minimum of scale heterogeneity and a balance of positive and reverse-coded items. The final scale consisted of nine items tapping into Islamoprejudice and six items tapping into Secular Critique (see Table I for details). Perception of Muslims as powerful. A one-item measure tapped into participants’ perception of Muslims as holding a position of power and influence compared to them (“Compared to myself Muslims have a lot less [a lot more] power and influence” ranging from 1 (a lot less) to 5 (a lot more)). Generalized political attitudes. We used the German scale by von Collani (2002) to assess SDO. In addition, RWA was measured with the German scale by Funke (2005). Religiosity. Participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they perceived themselves to be religious on a scale ranging from 1 (not religious at all) to 7 (highly religious). Results First, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test three competing models: a onefactor solution in which all items of the SIPSCI scale were influenced by one latent variable, a two-factor model with Secular Critique and Islamoprejudice as independent factors, and a two- Differentiating Islamophobia 17 factor model that allowed for a correlation between Secular Critique and Islamoprejudice. Results showed that the model with two correlated factors was superior to both alternative models, particularly the one-factor model (Table III). The data also fit the model with two completely independent factors, but the fit was not as good. As a result, two separate indices were calculated; they were both reliable but moderately correlated, r = .21 (Table IV). We had expected the two scales to be correlated particularly for individuals who endorse anti-egalitarian attitudes (SDO). To test whether SDO moderated the consistency between the two subscales, we conducted a moderated regression analysis (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003). Participants’ Secular Critique scores were regressed on their centered SDO score, their centered average score on the Islamoprejudice scale, and the cross-product of these two, representing the interaction term. Results revealed that Islamoprejudice was a positive predictor, ß = .20, p < .001, and that SDO a marginally negative one, ß = -.13, p = .06. Importantly, this was qualified by a significant interaction, ß = .17, p = .006 (Figure 1). Simple slope tests at ±1 SD of SDO fully supported the hypothesis that Islamoprejudice was only a significant predictor of Secular Critique for high-SDO participants, B = 0.31, SE = 0.07, p < .001, not for low-SDO participants, B = 0.08, SE = 0.07, p = .26. To further test for the unique variance associated with the two subscales, we ran regression analyses in which the shared variance was adjusted for by entering Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique as simultaneous predictors of SDO, RWA, religiosity, and the perceptions of Muslims as powerful. Results revealed that Islamoprejudice was related to greater SDO, ß = .49, p < .001, greater RWA, ß = .66, p < .001, and greater perception of Muslim as powerful, ß = .28, p < .001. In contrast, Secular Critique was related to less RWA, ß = -.18, p < .001, and less religiosity, ß = -.14, p = .02. These results fully supported our predictions regarding the dissociation between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique. Differentiating Islamophobia 18 Discussion The factor structure extracted in Study 1 was replicated with a short and economic version of the scale (15 items total). Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that models based on the assumption of two distinct factors showed a superior fit to a one-factor model. Different from Study 1, the two subscales were not entirely independent, but showed a small correlation. We have argued and tested that this intercorrelation might due to individual differences in antiegalitarian attitudes. Participants who endorsed such hierarchy-justifying beliefs (SDO) showed a correlation between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique, potentially as they make instrumental use of allegedly unbiased critique to justify their prejudiced opinions. Study 2 also added empirical evidence for a dissociation of the two subscales. Statistically adjusting for the shared variance of the subscales, Islamoprejudice was positively related to authoritarian attitudes (RWA), whereas Secular Critique showed a negative correlation with RWA. In addition, Secular Critique was negatively related to religiosity in our non-Muslim sample. This is in line with our conceptualization of Secular Critique as a general opposition to religious interference in worldly spheres. General Discussion Our studies provide the first approach to translate the well-accepted political definition of Islamophobia proposed by the Runnymede Trust (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, 1998) into a psychometrically sound scale tapping into individual differences in Islamoprejudice. Across two samples, the different aspects of Islamoprejudice seem to reflect a coherent and consistent mindset as indicated highly internally consistent scales. Our results further show that this definition of Islamophobia (Islamoprejudice) is indeed closely related to prejudiced opinions about religious (Muslims) and ethnic (Turks) groups. This speaks against the Differentiating Islamophobia 19 claim that Islamophobia – in the way defined by the Runnymede Trust – is merely a “discursive weapon” to silence criticism of Islam; it can indeed be characterized as a form of prejudice. Importantly, however, it was not fully redundant with well-established measures of subtle prejudice, as it outperformed them in predicting opposition to or support for a public building project highly associated with opinion about Islam, a representative central mosque. To further establish construct validity of the newly designed scale, it was shown that Islamoprejudice is associated with the automatic association of Muslims as threatening and generalized right-wing political attitudes like RWA and SDO. In contrast, Secular Critique of Islam (i.e., laicist views that are extremely critical of certain practices allegedly commanded by Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and religious authority over worldly manners) was unrelated to explicit and implicit prejudice. Thus, potentially harsh criticism of certain Islamic practices should not be mistakenly confused with Islamoprejudice. Although our results from Study 2 show that some (highly anti-egalitarian) individuals may express criticism only to the degree that they are prejudiced, our scale seems to tap into universalistic concerns about repressive aspects of Islam. Our scale provides a chance to distinguish these two facets of opinions about Islam that are often confused under the overarching label of Islamophobia when in fact they are very distinct. Importantly, we have relied on the so far most ambitious effort to define closed views of Islam by the Runnymede Trust but suggested using a different label than Islamophobia. Islamophobia implies that it is predominantly a fear of Islam that stands behind these closed views when in fact there is little empirical support for such a claim. Lee and colleagues (2009) have recently presented an Islamophobia scale that covers specifically fearful reactions to Islam. Their scale does not examine the construct defined by the Runnymede Trust, a gap filled by our Islamoprejudice subscale. However, we further propose to clarify the debate about Islamophobia Differentiating Islamophobia 20 by strictly differentiating between a negative and closed view of Islam (Islamoprejudice, our subscale), predominantly fearful reaction to Islam (Lee et al., 2009), and non-prejudiced but highly critical views of Islam (Secular Critique, our scale). Outlook Future research might benefit from the distinction established in the SIPSCI to further elucidate whether political stands in current debates are motivated by authentic concerns about democratic values or are rather an expression of a rise in prejudices against Muslims. Political campaigning against the rising influence of populist parties across the Western world might differentially target voters motivated by Secular Critique and those whose prejudiced views led them to vote for parties like the Dutch PPV (Partij voor de vrijheid), the Austrian FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), the French FN (Front National), the German NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), or the British EDL (English Defence League), or the US-based SIA (Stop the Islamization of Amercia). Conclusion Our research has shown the existence of a rather consistent pattern of opinions about Islam that can be called prejudiced. At the same time, not just any form of admittedly harsh criticism of Islam needs to be associated with explicit or even automatically activated prejudices. Our results support the previous criticism that Islamophobia may be an expendable neologism for a phenomenon already known for long: racist prejudice (e.g., Love, 2009; Semati, 2006). In fact, our data suggest that Islamoprejudice as we propose to call it accordingly is highly related to prejudice against Muslims in general but also to ethnic groups like Turks specifically (independent of the fact that a majority of Turks might consider themselves as non-religious). However, we have also provided empirical support for the fact that Islamoprejudice is a suitable concept to make very specific predictions about political standpoints on Islam-related issues, like Differentiating Islamophobia 21 the building of mosques. 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Muslim cultures have so fundamentally different values, that it is difficult to identify common aims or ideals. 5. Islam and Christianity share the same universal ethical principles. -.70 -.02 6. Islam is an archaic religion, unable to adjust to the present. .80 .22 .80 .17 7. Compared to West Europeans Muslims are rather irrational. .63 .23 .79 .18 8. Compared to other religious and philosophical approaches Islam is .63 -.01 .79 .05 -.34 -.11 - - rather primitive. 9. I don’t think it is justified to speak of a clash of the culture between Islam and the West. 10. I think Islamic religion and its aggressive sides predispose it .67 .18 .79 .10 -.37 .08 - - .34 -.12 - - .50 -.03 - - .41 - - .53 -.19 - - .68 -.10 .67 .03 towards proximity to terrorism. 11. I think Islam is above all a religion as therefore has nothing to do with politics or war. 12. Islam is a political ideology used to serve political and military goals. 13. Any critique of the West brought forward by representatives of Islam is exaggerated und unjustified. 14. When Muslims criticize certain aspects of our Western life style we -.32 should at least listen to their points. 15. It is completely legitimate to exclude Muslims from certain key positions as our society is essentially Christian. 16. Muslims and their religion are so different from us that it would be naive to demand an equal access to all positions in society. 17. Wherever a large number a Muslims live and visit the schools, -.71 .11 .52 .11 -.49 -.11 Islamic religious education should be offered. 18. Today it is not uncommon to be suspicious of Muslims. - - Differentiating Islamophobia 27 19. Hostility against Muslims is an intolerable form of discrimination. -.41 .27 - - 20. The strict division of church and state is a Western accomplishment .22 .72 .03 .75 -.01 .62 - - .23 .63 .21 .55 .02 .61 .17 .55 .00 -.40 - - that would be a progress in many Islamic shaped countries. 21. It is a scandal that in some countries noncompliance with religious rules of the Islam results in earthly punishment. 22. Although some women voluntarily wear a veil one should not ignore that for some women it also means coercion. 23. The rigid Islamic gender division should not be conceded to – neither in public health sector nor in physical education. 24. The criticism of so-called fundamentalists only fuels the baiting against all Muslims and should be labeled racism. 25. The term Islamophobia can be misused to make all Muslims feel -.03 .37 - - .29 -.17 .58 .67 .31 - .44 - -.15 .37 - - .15 -.40 .03 .37 - - like victims and thus prevent a necessary conflict between moderate and fundamentalist fractions of the community. 26. It is wrong to ignore the threat by fundamentalist Islam. 27. We should support those liberal Muslims who distance from fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. 28. One can fight against the political ideology of Islamic fundamentalism without having anything against nonfundamentalist Muslims. 29. Islamic fundamentalists fight for a legitimate cause. 30. Islam is above all a religion, but fundamentalist Islam is a political ideology. 31. Religion should be private matter, to use one’s own religious -.09 .50 - - -.12 .61 - - .08 .68 -.14 .55 .03 -.32 - - -.08 .76 convictions and feelings as a measure of how others should behave is undemocratic. 32. Universal human rights and certain legal norms should always stand above religious rules. 33. Religion becomes a problem when humans try to take the holy writing literally. 34. I think that religion – no matter which one – mobilizes the best within humans. 35. As any other religion one must criticize Islam and its representative when they interfere with non-religious issues. .07 .51 Table II Descriptives and intercorrelations for all continuous measures in Study 1. Criterion Validity Descriptives Correlations Opposition to Mosque α M SD 1. 1. Islamoprejudice .87 3.18 0.84 - 2. Secular Critique of Islam .82 5.68 0.70 .01 3. IAT-d .81 0.66 0.34 .47** .08 - 4. Subtle Prejudice Muslims .80 3.75 0.51 .72** -.02 .34** - .69* 5. Subtle Prejudice Turks .82 3.63 0.51 .66** -.04 .29** .85** .65* 2. 3. 4. AUC .76** .72** Note. All scales (except IAT-d) ranging from 1 to 7. The IAT-d score is an individual effect size. Greater scores represent stronger association between Islam and threat. Differentiating Islamophobia 29 Table III Fit indices for three different models in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) χ2 χ2/df 222.02*** 2.49 Model 1. Two correlated factors Difference between Model 1 and Model 2 2. Two independent factors CI 90% AIC RMSEA (PCLOSE) 0.07 0.06 – 0.08 (**) 314.02 0.07 0.06 – 0.08 (**) 321.14 0.11 0.10 – 0.12 (***) 498.07 9.12* 231.14*** 2.57 Difference between Model 2 and Model 3 3. One factor Δχ2 176.93*** 408.07*** Note: N = 316; *** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05 4.53 Differentiating Islamophobia 30 Table IV Descriptives and intercorrelations for all continuous measures in Study 2. Descriptives Correlations α M SD 1. 1. Islamoprejudice .88 3.27 1.34 - 2. Secular Critique of Islam .71 5.79 0.89 .21** - - 2.49 0.88 .26** -.01 - 4. RWA .81 2.97 0.98 .62** -.05 .20** 5. SDO .91 2.56 1.03 .49** .06 .07 .54** - - 1.95 1.00 .06 -.12* .09 .22** -.05 3. Powerful Muslims 6. Religiosity 2. 3. 4. 5. - Note. All multiple-item scales (1, 2, 4, 5) ranging from 1 to 7. Perceptions of Muslims as powerful (3) ranging from 1 (much less power and influence than me) to 5 (much more power and influence than me), religiosity (6) ranging from 1 (not religious at all) to 4 (very religious). N = 316. Figure Captions Figure 1. Secular Critique of Islam as a function of the interplay between Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Islamoprejudice plotted at ±1SD. Differentiating Islamophobia 32 Figure 1 Secular Critique of Islam 6,5 6,0 Low SDO (-1SD) High SDO (+1SD) 5,5 5,0 0,0 -1 SD +1 SD Islamoprejudice