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Paper short abstract:

Muslims in the UK must endure not only the fear and stress of a pandemic but also the increasing threat-based narratives of the UK government and media. Securitising and criminalizing policies and proposed policies create fear about and within Muslim communities, causing harm.

Paper long abstract:

Muslim communities in the UK, representing several identities both claimed and put onto them, have endured myriad fears during the pandemic, during which security has been heightened. This paper examines the amplification of affect for Muslim communities during Covid-19. Viewing pandemic affect as domination means viewing fear-based securitising policy and policing as integral to the domination. The pandemic has served as impetus to sound alarms on various fear-based narratives in the UK, bringing to the forefront securitising and criminalising projects. Political and media language conveying threats have become intertwined with pandemic messaging, including about immigration and border control and counter-terror. Such messaging translates into policies restricting civil liberties and even infringing on human rights for some to guarantee "safety" for others. Brown and black bodies are inculcated as threatening vectors of violence, extremist ideologies, and disease, which are interpolated onto and bounded with various Muslim identities.An affect of domination is put upon Muslims in Britain by both proposed and implemented policy, creating and sustaining Muslim fear of criminals, terrorists, disease, and dangerous outsiders, but also feeding internal fears which are symbolically violent, including fearing Muslimness itself, and fearing those attempting to prove themselves as acceptable "good Muslims" as threatening, as they might be reporting or otherwise participating in Islamophobic policy processes and enforcements (Abbas 2019; Mamdani 2002; Bordieu 2003). It is not necessarily the policy that dominates, but the ways it creates fear within and about the Muslim community.