Unpacking the intersection between Islamophobia and Statelessness

February 2025

In this piece, Kowthar Yussuf, a JD candidate at Melbourne Law School and a Paralegal at the Peter McMullin Centre’s Stateless Legal Clinic, examines the situation in Myanmar and India, demonstrating how Islamophobia, along with associated rhetoric, perceptions, and hate speech embedded in government policies, contributes to statelessness, denationalisation, and the marginalisation of Muslim communities.

Unpacking the way Islamophobia operates in the context of statelessness has seldom been a prominent focus and framing in research addressing statelessness. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), ‘more than 75% of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups.’ Discrimination is one of the main catalysts for statelessness and denationalisation, and discrimination is one of the main effects of Islamophobia. Muslims – particularly, are a minority group overrepresented within stateless populations (see Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, Palestinians, Kashmiris , Uyghur Muslims, Assam, a state in North-east India).

This blog post will explore how Islamophobia and Islamophobic rhetoric, imaginings and hate speech towards and of Muslims within governmental policies propagate statelessness, denationalisation and the social exclusion of Muslim populations. In doing so, I will particularly consider the cases of Myanmar and India.

Defining Islamophobia

Islamophobia has been defined as ‘the “othering” of Muslims’ through both ‘structural racism and anti-Muslim violence’, ‘the presumption that Islam is inherently violent, alien and inassimilable’ and can include ‘any ideology or pattern of thought and/or behaviour in which Muslims are excluded from positions, rights … because of their believed or actual Islamic background.’ The ‘war on terror’ rhetoric played a huge role in formalising Islamophobia through the conflation of Muslim identity with terror suspicion.

Khaled Beydoun in his book American Islamophobia frames Islamophobia as operating within three dimensions: private Islamophobia, structural Islamophobia and dialectical Islamophobia. I am interested in this third dimension which he describes as ‘a process’ whereby ‘state action legitimizes prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and stereotypes of Islam and communicates damaging ideas through state-sponsored policy, programming, or rhetoric, which in turn emboldens private violence against Muslims (and perceived Muslims).’

Islamophobia in the context of Statelessness: Redefining ‘Citizen’ in Assam, India

As shown by some scholars (see here and here), India’s colonial past, its partition, and consequent postcolonial nation-building contributed to an “otherisation” of India’s Muslim citizens. More recently, Islamophobia and Islamophobic hate speech framing Muslims as ‘illegal infiltrators’, ‘barbaric’ or as endangering Assamese Hindus have been normalised under the rule of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The prevalence of this Islamophobic hate speech has been instrumental in excluding the Muslim population in Assam and India more widely in two main ways: firstly, in excluding Muslims from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam and rendering them effectively stateless. Secondly, the language used towards Muslims by politicians has redefined what it means to be a ‘citizen’ and has excluded Muslims from this definition.

Critically, the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) grants citizenship to ‘illegal’ immigrants from neighbouring countries around India who arrived ‘on or before 31 December 2014’ while excluding local Muslim populations. Language weaponised by Modi and the Assamese government has enabled the law to exclude Muslims or depict them as threats ‘undeserving’ of the benefits of citizenship. The continued use of such language further dehumanises Muslims in Assam and throughout India so that the general population may ultimately find stripping them of citizenship or the right to ‘belong’ less radical.

Social Media and Islamophobic Hate Speech: Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar

In a not entirely dissimilar manner, in 1982, the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar were arbitrarily deprived of their nationality through the Burma Citizenship Law and became stateless. Social media has particularly been used to generate hate speech against the Rohingya population, detail inaccurate news and to reinforce the idea of ‘the threat posed by Muslims and the Rohingya to the Burmese race and the Buddhist religion’. Academic research has shown that there is a direct link between the examples of hate speech found on platforms like Facebook and ‘the escalation of violence and atrocities’ against the Rohingya population.

In the case of Facebook, examples of hate speech targeting Rohingya include labelling them as ‘invaders’ and using other dehumanising and offensive descriptions that sometimes directly incite violence against the community, as Amnesty International has documented. Enabling this Islamophobic hate speech both through public approval and governmental policies perpetuates the persecution and genocide of the Rohingya Muslims.

Moving Forward

In both cases, viewing and portraying Muslims with hostility facilitates the production and continuation of statelessness for members of these communities. A combination of public and governmental perception that these groups do not ‘belong’ to the country or are otherwise a threat contributes to practices that exclude and render them stateless. More work needs to be done in unpacking Islamophobia and its effects in the context of statelessness. As a Muslim woman, it has been heartbreaking to witness the pain of my Muslim brothers and sisters, and how Islamophobia has often been used to condition depriving them of citizenship. The right to belong – both socially and legally (including the right to a nationality) – is and should be a right fundamental to all.

_{Image by  Jigar Panchal on Unsplash}