Seemingly every day since the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, reports stream in of assaults both verbal and physical on American Muslims. Already the mass killings in Paris had precipitated a backlash in the US and elsewhere against Syrian refugees. But San Bernardino appears to have added even more kindling.

Most troubling, of course, is the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his ilk. But as Deepa Kumar reminds us, to simply dismiss Trump as a crank overlooks the pervasiveness of Islamophobia — that it has both conservative and liberal variants.

So how did we get here? How bad is the uptick in Islamophobia in historical terms? And how can we fight it? Below, Kumar, the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, addresses these questions and more.