Islamophobia - Misplaced Pages

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Islamophobia is hostility to the religion of Islam and especially to its inherent political dimensions. Many "Islamophobes" believe that Islam is a totalitarian religion that advocates a law code which is barbaric by modern Western standards, and which rejects the values that Westerners hold dear like freedom of religion, equality, and democracy; they therefore view most Muslims with suspicion. Islamophobia is a growing phenomenon in the light of the rise of Islamist terrorism targeted at Israelis and Westerners in recent months and years. Islamophobia is also fostered by the fact that many Muslims (including some living in the West) hold bitterly anti-Western views.

The term is a neologism dating from the early 1990’s and derives from Xenophobia. As such, it reflects the influence of such 1990s movements as multi-culturalism and identity politics.

The term most often appears in discourse on the condition of immigrant Muslims living as minorities in the West. In this case, the common experiences of immigrant communities of unemployment, rejection, alienation and violence has combined with Islamophobia to make integration particularly difficult. (See article by Tariq Ramadan in links.) This has led, in the United Kingdom, for example, to Muslim communities suffering higher levels of unemployment, poor housing, poor health and levels of racially motivated violence than other communities. (See paper by Maleiha Malik in links).

Islamophobia, as a phenomenon, dates back to the initial expansion of Islam, in which two-thirds of the territories of 7th century Christendom, including the Levant, the whole of North Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula, were conquered. This was a major shock to Christian Europe and inspired the Reconquista and the Crusades. It has been argued that Islamophobia exists outside the West, for example in India. This is more closely related to Communal Politics in India, although Islamophobia in India does share, with western Islamophobia, the denigration of Islamic culture and history (see linked article by William Dalrymple).

Some groups have argued that Islamophobia is a form of racism whereby Muslims, a religious group, not a race, are constructed as a race. A set of negative assumptions is made of the entire group, and therefore Muslims are discriminated against by Westerners. During the 1990’s many sociologists theorized that a shift in racist ideas was underway, from ones based on skin colour to ones based on culture (see paper by Dr Anya Rudiger and article by Jeremy Seabrook in links). Persons who harbor anti-Muslim sentiments ("Islamophobes") would argue that anti-Islamism is not "racist", because while they might be oppossed to an Arab Muslim, they are not opposed to an Arab Christian; while they might be opposed to a South Asian Muslim, they are not opposed to a South Asian Hindu, etc. It is not an opposition to a race, it is an opposition a religion, and therefore those people who try to construe the anti-Muslim movement as "racist" are merely grapsing at straws and trying to silence the argument.

Another reason why some people may liken Islamophobia to racism, even if they do not construct Muslims as a race, is that they believe that Islam could not be defeated in the way that secular totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism and Communism were defeated. The military defeat of the Third Reich effectively ended the threat posed by Nazism and the disastrous economic failure of the Eastern Bloc did likewise for Communism, but colonial rule of the greater part of the Islamic world produced almost no conversions away from Islam. The only areas of the world to ever be de-Islamicized (the Iberian Peninsula, Israel proper, and to a lesser extent much of the Balkans), all involved outright ethnic cleansing rather than conversion - this suggests that Islam could be destroyed only by genocide, an act which most contemporary Westerners would find morally repugnant.

It has been argued by some, most notably Edward Said, that the denigration of Islamic civilisation associated with Islamophobia is central to the concept of Western Civilisation. The ousting and marginalising of Islam marks the debut of ‘Western’ Civilisation and, thus, explains the depth and longevity of western Islamophobia:

“Islam was a provocation in many ways. It lay uneasily close to Christianity, geographically and culturally. It drew on the Judeo-Hellenic traditions. It borrowed creatively from Christianity - it could boast unrivalled military and political successes. Nor was this all. The Islamic lands sit adjacent to and even on top of the biblical lands. Moreover, the heart of the Islamic domain has always been the region closest to Europe... Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages, and together they dispose and re-dispose of material that is urgently important to Christianity. From the end of the 7th century to the 16th century, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman, North African or Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. That Islam outstripped and outshone Rome cannot have been absent from the mind of any European."

Edward Said: Orientalism. 2003 Edition. Page 74.

The Runnymede Trust has identified eight components that they say define Islamophobia. This definition, from the 1997 document ‘ Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All’ is widely accepted, including by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. The eight components are:

Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
Islam is seen as separate and 'other'. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a 'clash of civilisations'.
Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Given the strong association between Arabs and the religion of Islam, Islamophobia is often expressed as a form of anti-Arab racism, though not all Arabs are Muslim and the majority of Muslims are not Arab. Ironically, anti-Muslim bias has occasionally been expressed in violent attacks on Sikhs. In these cases, Sikhs were mistaken for Muslims on account of their distinctive turbans.

An alleged factor, that some argue provokes Islamophobia, is the rise of anti-Western Islamist movements, which have either come to power outright in some countries (Iran, Sudan, post-Soviet-era Afghanistan), or else exerted a strong influence on government policy in others (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan). Many people mistakenly believe that most Muslims are Islamist, when in fact the Islamist movement is only a minority position.

Recently there have been several efforts by non-Muslims to combat Islamophobia. In the wake of September 11, for example, a few non-Muslim women wore a hijab in a show of solidarity with their Muslim counterparts, who it was feared would be particularly vulnerable for reprisal given their distinctive dress. Non-Muslims also helped form community watches to protect mosques from attack.

Examples of Islamophobia

Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): "Just turn (the sheriff) loose and have him arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line" (to Georgia law officers, November 2001)
Ann Coulter: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Will Cummins: "It is the black heart of Islam, not the black face, to which millions object."
Robert Kilroy-Silk: "Muslims everywhere behave with equal savagery. They behead criminals, stone to death female - only female - adulteresses, throw acid in the faces of women who refuse to wear the chador, mutilate the genitals of young girls and ritually abuse animals"
Jean-Marie Le Pen: "These elements have a negative effect on all of public security. They are strengthened demographically both by natural reproduction and by immigration, which reinforces their stubborn ethnic segregation, their domineering nature. This is the world of Islam in all its aberrations."
Jerry Vines: "Christianity was founded by the virgin-born Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Mohammed, a demon-possessed paedophile who had 12 wives, and his last one was a 9-year-old girl."
Michael Savage: "I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings." (on his radio show The Savage Nation)
Rabbi Meir Kahane (1974): "There are no 'moderate' Arabs. There are only clever and less clever, patient and impatient. The final solution for all is the same - the elimination of any Jewish State. And so we repeat: There is no 'Palestine people' and there is no 'Palestine.'"

External Links

Examples of Use

Examples of use by the writer Faisal Bodi:

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