Islamophobia - Misplaced Pages

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Islamophobia is a hostility to the religion of Islam, and especially to the more extremist & politically-driven brand of Islam known as Islamism. Many "Islamophobes" believe that Islam is an inherently totalitarian religion that advocates a law code which is barbaric by modern Western standards, and which rejects the values that Westerners hold dear, including freedom of religion, equality, and democracy; they therefore view many or most Muslims with suspicion. Islamophobia is a growing phenomenon in light of the rise of the many high-profile vicious attacks, killings, beheadings, bombings, and other assorted terrorism perpetrated by Islamists and targeted at Westerners in recent months and years. Islamophobia is also fostered by the fact that many Muslims (including many living in the West) hold bitterly anti-Western views.

History of Islamophobia

The concept of Islamophobia (although not the term itself) dates back at least 1300 years; indeed, Islamophobia as a concept is probably as old as the religion itself, because of the nature of the religion and its followers. The hundreds of Muslim wars of conquest and subjugation across the world, including the various Islamic invasions of Europe, the massacre of non-combatants and raping of women, and the enslavement of people worldwide (especially in Africa) no doubt contributed heavily to anti-Muslim sentiment. The modern slave trade itslef was begun not by Europeans, as is often falsely claimed, but by Arab Muslims. The famous "Star of David" that Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany, was not something Hitler thought up, it was an idea the Nazis borrowed from Mohammed himself, who forced Jews and Christians to wear distinctive marks.

Islamophobia also exists outside the West, for example in India. This is more closely related to Communal Politics in India, although Islamophobia in India and in Europe shared many key points, such as reaction to Muslim conquests and "cultural enslavement" of the native peoples. Some pro-Islamists have argued that denigration of Islamic culture and history (see linked article by William Dalrymple) is shared by India and the West.

Islamophobia is far from being a new phenomenon, as it has existed among all non-Muslim peoples who have had contact with (or have been invaded by) Muslims through the centuries.

History of the term Islamophobia

Although the concept is as old as the Islam itself, the term Islamophobia 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 Muslim immigrant communities of unemployment, rejection, alienation, and Islamophobia have combined with the fact that most Muslims do not want to integrate to make Muslim-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 dramatically higher crime rates than other immigrant communities (see paper by Maleiha Malik in links).

Reasons for Islamophobia

Many observers (including author and ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq) have stated that Islam has above all been the supreme vehicle of Arab imperialism. Given this strong association between Arabs and the religion of Islam, pro-Islamists often falsely claim that Islamophobia is a form of anti-Arab racism (though not all Arabs are Muslim and the majority of Muslims are not Arab).

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 only 1 in 5 Muslims subscribe to the ideas of Islamism, according to one of the foremost experts on Islam, Daniel Pipes.

Some people believe that Islam cannot be defeated in the way that secular totalitarian ideologies such as Communism were defeated. The disastrous economic failure and the Western influence in the Eastern Bloc brought about the end of the Communist era, but so far economic failure and Western influence in the Islamic world have produced very few 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 wars of conquest (or re-conquest), so many anti-Islamists fear that the only way to defeat the Islamic religion is to defeat it militarily, which is quite feasible considering the military strength of the West, but it is a proposition most contemporary Westerners would find morally repugnant.

Palestinian-activist Edward Said has argued that the denigration of Islamic civilization 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.

Islamophobia as racism

Some groups have argued that Islamophobia is a form of racism whereby Muslims (a religious group, not a race) are constructed as a race, and a set of negative assumptions is made about the entire group. 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.

The eight components of Islamophobia

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.

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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