Caricature Images for Religious Profi ling: A Multimodal Analysis of Islamophobia in Selected Press Images

The problem of religious profi ling and the increase of animosity, exclusion and maltreatment of Muslim minorities in the West have reached an unprecedented level in a community where racism and segregation are usually denounced. The paper investigates the concept of Islamophobia as presented in 25 selected caricature images, along with their accompanying texts, chosen from magazines and specialized cartoon websites. Multimodality and its related analytic tools are utilized for making explicit the interactive messages encoded within these caricature images. The theoretical framework upon which this study is conducted incorporates Halliday’s (1978) three metafunctions, and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) adaptation of them for the analysis of images and their captions.