Radio ReOrient Season 14 Round Up, hosted by Saeed Khan, Amina Easat-Daas, Marchella Ward and Claudia Radiven
June 12, 2026
AI Summary
5 min read“The Muslim will never be enough for this full imagined assimilation into this tolerant multicultural society,” Amina Easat-Daas says during this season-roundup episode of Radio ReOrient. “There will always be the convenient other, the convenient outsider.” That line captures the throughline of Season 14: a global tour of how Islamophobia operates not as a collection of one-off bigotries but as a systematic, state-enabled project of ethno-nationalist restoration—one that polices Muslimness at every level, from the street to the university to the border.
The Global Geography of Islamophobia
The season’s geographic breadth was deliberate. The hosts traveled through episodes set in Iran, France, the Netherlands, Bosnia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Denmark, and Malaysia. Marchella Ward explains that this spread reflects a core ReOrient conviction: Muslimness cannot be contained within the geographies Orientalism assigned it—the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Instead, Islamophobia must be understood as a global phenomenon. What the geographic range revealed, Ward says, is “a kind of concerted political world order” rather than isolated incidents driven by “bad actors, bad leaders, or one-off racists.” Across contexts, the same pattern emerges: ethno-nationalist projects that imagine the nation belonging to one racialized group, and that necessarily exclude the Muslim as an inte
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Welcome and Season Intro** - Hosts Saeed Khan, Amina Easat-Daas, Marchella Ward, and Claudia Radiven open the roundup episode, summarizing the vast array of topics covered in Season 14, including the policing of Muslimness, everyday Islamophobia in universities, and the legal regulation of tolerance.
- 2 (02:23) **Geographic Breadth and Global Islamophobia** - Marchella Ward reflects on the season's geographic spread (Iran, France, Netherlands, Bosnia, Pakistan, Bangladesh), arguing it demonstrates that Muslimness is not contained within traditional Orientalist geographies but is a global phenomenon.
- 3 (05:48) **Policing Muslimness: State and Street Level** - Amina Easat-Daas discusses how the season showed the policing of Muslimness at both the interpersonal street level (e.g., Tommy Robinson's marches) and the structural state level (e.g., the "coconut trial").
- 4 (09:49) **The Myth of Tolerance and Colonial Amnesia** - Claudia Radiven draws on the hosts' recent experience at the ISRA conference in Malaysia to explore how Islamophobia manifests even in Muslim-majority contexts, and how European states like Denmark use colonial amnesia to avoid responsibility.
- 5 (14:32) **Narratives of Restoration and Reconquest** - Marchella Ward examines the recurring narrative of "restoration" or "reconquest" across Islamophobic projects, from Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" to the Zionist "Greater Israel" and European far-right movements.
- 6 (20:55) **Islamophobia in Non-European Contexts** - Marchella extends the discussion to Buddhist nationalism in Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar, and Hindu nationalism in India, all of which mobilize an imagined pre-Muslim past to justify Islamophobia.
- 7 (23:26) **Multiculturalism, Erasure, and the Moving Goalposts** - Amina Easat-Daas critiques the myth of multiculturalism, arguing that the figure of the Muslim is never fully accepted; goalposts for assimilation are forever moving.
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Show Notes
In this episode, Saeed Khan, Amina Easat Daas, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven sit down for a round up of the season’s dynamic episodes, and take a look toward the future and the next season. The conversation drew on the manifestations of Islamophobia across many different national contexts and the connectedness of them all. Across the episodes this season we explored the structural and systemic problems facing Muslims internationally, the work being done to combat it, and how tolerance may not be so tolerant after all. In this round up the team looked back at conversations at the recent International Islamophobia Studies Research Association Conference in Malaysia as well as in the ReOrient journal and blog, ReOrientations. We also looked forward to the upcoming debates and discussions to be held at the Critical Muslim Studies Conference and Summer Programme in Turkiye.
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