Un/muting Muslim difference: anti-Muslim racism and secular whiteness in Dutch and Belgian academia

Abstract

The academy's efforts to celebrate racialized and gendered Others often serve to reinforce its image as progressive and inclusive. Yet these narratives starkly contrast with the everyday racist and sexist experiences of racialized and female academics. Within this broader context of exclusion, the role of religious-based racism, specifically Islam, remains largely overlooked. Anti-Muslim racism, though deeply embedded in academia, operates as an insidious, institutionally unacknowledged form of exclusion. This paper examines how anti-Muslim racism in Dutch and Belgian academia is enacted through strategic silences and selective un/muting of Muslim identity. Drawing on our interviews, we identify three practices: (1) racist marking of Muslim bodies, rendering them suspicious and subjecting them to racist violence; (2) institutional muting: rendering visible Muslim difference invisible, reinforcing an academic culture where religion must remain unseen and unspoken; (3) selective unmuting for diversity optics: institutions strategically unmute Muslim difference aligning it with diversity optics, rendering Muslim difference hypervisible. Nonetheless, Muslim academics engage in practices of counter-unmuting institutional silences by (re)claiming voice, space and visibility. By theorizing un/muting as a mechanism of institutional control and resistance, this paper advances scholarship on race, gender, and higher education, centering anti-Muslim racism as a silent yet pervasive form of exclusion.