Shout out/Shut up!

The academic and public debate on stereotypical representations of Islam, on Islamophobia or ‘fear of Islam’ has been growing internationally in the last couple of decades. Much less attention has been devoted, so far, to ways Muslims act and react to these representations, do create their own representations. The case of Italy is rather peculiar both in terms of lateness in the debate on representations of Islam and Muslims as well as in the still scarce interest in listening to and engaging with Muslims’ multiple voices and representations, despite a few recent contributions. They are often called and socially recognized as a minority, while they are not even juridically recognised by the State. In this chapter, we will be focusing on the self-representations and the fears emerging from within the Muslim communities in Italy today. We will rely on a corpus of primary sources made of interviews realised within the activities of PriMED project (www.primed_miur.it) – of which we were part – together with structured interviews with a sample of Italian Muslim leaders and young Muslim people.