What I am about to do is consider a single word - Islamophobia. Single word, did I say? Well, yes, but it’s a compound word, and that’s an important point, as we’ll see. This particular compound word has come back into prominence here in the UK in a big way in the past week or so, thrown liberally around by our politicians and others as a stick with which to beat each other about the ears.
Yelling “That’s Islamophobic!” in the direction of a political or ideological opponent is intended to shut ‘em up. No argument. No discussion. Just zip-it time. It is a damning charge, instantly identifying the target as unspeakable, reprehensible, indefensible.
But is that a good and useful state of affairs? Or the opposite?
On 23rd March 2019 - crikey, that’s just coming up to five years ago! - I tweeted “Whatever else this is, it is definitely not a definition.” The target of my comment was a string of words, as follows, that seemed to have been generally accepted as defining Islamophobia:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.1
Well, looking back, my tweet was not exactly wonderful. The string of words can be construed as a definition. Just not a very good one. In fact, a pretty rubbish one, in my opinion. However, the tweet was enough to get me cancelled. (More about that later.)
The central flaw in the ‘definition’ is surely the conflation of religion with race? A religion is a set of ideas and beliefs. A race is a specific group of people. Race is immutable. Religion is not immutable and, being a human construct, must, surely, be susceptible to analysis, discussion and criticism.
And what about the word in the first place? According to my Oxford English Dictionary, a phobia is:
fear, (a) horror, (an) aversion; esp. an abnormal and irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.
The OED’s description chimes with the various phobias with which we all are familiar: claustrophobia, for instance, or agoraphobia, arachnophobia, or even hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
Okay, okay, I had to look that last one up. It is, apparently, a fear of long words. You never now when it may come in handy.
Anyway, if the time-honoured understanding of ‘phobia’ was to be applied, Islamophobia would be an abnormal and irrational fear or dread aroused by the religion, Islam, or some aspect thereof. But it isn’t. Indeed, in the Islamophobia Defined document already referenced the footnote that appears on each page reads:
Report on the inquiry into A working definition of Islamophobia / anti-Muslim hatred2
That is to say, an unequivocal connection is made between ‘phobia’ and ‘hate’.
Now, if a person suffers from, say, arachnophobia, they might well express it as, “I hate spiders!” … but it is a qualified form of hate. The more complete expression would be, “I hate spiders because I am scared of them.”
Which raises the question, is it rational to be scared of spiders? Although there are spiders that are mortally dangerous, they are localized to fairly tropical climes. The fear that is invoked by the average northern European domestic spider has more to do with the wriggly, unpredictable way it moves rather than any physical harm that it can do. It is an irrational fear.
However, what if we ask, is it rational to be scared of Islam? Well, I suggest it may be. Very recently, there was a hoo-hah in the British parliament when the Speaker of the House decided, unwisely, to try to vary the rules of debate. Turns out his heart was in the right place: he was seeking to protect British parliamentarians against external threats … but that would have amounted to giving in to rather than tackling the problem. The day afterwards, Winston Marshall ( @MrWinMarshall ) ‘Xed’ (is that the right term to replace ‘tweeted’?) this:
If you’re not awake to Britain’s Islamist problem after
7/7
Lee Rigby
Sir David Amess
Mike Freer
Manchester Arena
London Bridge 2017
London Bridge 2019
Westminster attack 2017
2020 Reading attack
Batley Grammar
Weekly Hamas-sympathetic marches through LondonThen I don’t imagine what happened in Parliament yesterday will have registered.
But it’s a big deal.
Britain is being bullied. Enough
A fairly damning list, huh? But, what happens? We keep using the slur of Islamophobia to discourage - or, even, disbar - any debate about Islamist horrors! Not a good idea. Sure, Islamists may be but a fraction of the overall Muslim community but they certainly seem to be a dangerous bunch.
As it happens, this issue of Happy Friday (which, I admit, is not a very happy one) is late. It’s more like Not-Very-Happy-Saturday. But, on this occasion, my tardiness provides the opportunity to mention two things related to this topic that otherwise would have been missed.
One: a splendid piece on Islamophobia by Frank Furedi, published here on Substack this very day. I do recommend that you take a look.
Two: mention of a speech made by Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, yesterday afternoon. Mr Sunak took the exceptional step of speaking from a lectern placed in front of No. 10 Downing Street, a practice that is reserved for ‘special announcements’ about matters of great national or international importance. I suppose we should be grateful that he felt this particular speech merited such ‘optics’, as they say these days, but I do query some of the content. He started out with this:
In recent weeks and months, we have seen a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality. What started as protests on our streets, has descended into intimidation, threats, and planned acts of violence.3
Well, agreed, but shortly thereafter he said:
And it is beyond alarming that last night the Rochdale by election returned a candidate who dismisses the horror of what happened on October 7th, who glorifies Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the British National party.4
My quibble with this is that I find his shock shocking. Of course this, or something else like it, was going sooner or later to happen. It’s of a piece with, but functioning in the opposite political direction from, those two famous events, Brexit and, in the U.S., the appointment of President Trump. “Oh my God, how could this happen!” “The horror! The horror!” “What’s wrong with people!”
In this instance I profoundly disagree with “the people” who voted for George Galloway but there’s no point blaming them. A little more introspection wouldn’t go amiss. Of course events like this are going to happen. They result from changes undemocratically introduced in populations. The shocks can come from the right or the left. How can a supposedly intelligent politician not realize this?
And note the way that Mr Sunak frames his concerns: in addition to the somewhat gratuitous weaving in of a supposed far-right bogeyman in the above quote, he refers to:
Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other. They are equally desperate to pretend that their violence is somehow justified when actually these groups are two sides of the same extremist coin.5
Personally, I’ve lost the plot, these days, when it comes to who the hell is ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘centre’ but I’m not aware that any right-wing fascists have mounted weekly demonstrations across this or other countries in the recent past.
And my final quibble, for now anyway, is with this …
But I fear that our great achievement in building the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi faith democracy is being deliberately undermined.6
Who knew it, eh? Here in Britain we’ve been building “the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi faith democracy” have we? It’s not that I’m necessarily against such a concept, but I seem to have missed the general election when a party manifesto included this particular far-reaching change!
Finally, let me come back to the word - Islamophobia. Why, you may ask, do I make such a fuss about it? Because, to my mind, it reeks of Newspeak. Which is to say, ‘Islamophobia’ is an example of the linguistic manipulation that George Orwell flagged up when he wrote 1984:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.7 (My emphasis)
In Newspeak terms I think Islamophobia fits into what Orwell termed, the B Vocabulary.
The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form.
Islam-o-phobia fits this criterion. Then comes the key factor:
The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence. (My emphasis)
My goodness, Islamophobia is surely proving itself successful in this respect. Which takes me back, finally, to the five-year-old tweet that I mentioned at the start of this article. I had been booked to talk about marketing to a conference of National Health Service professionals but, a couple of months before the event, I got a phone call to advise me that my Twitter account had been hacked. When I said, after checking, that it had not been hacked, I was informed that several delegates had looked up my Twitter feed and found my postings unacceptable. I was cancelled.
Yup, an example of the power of Islamophobia!
Thanks for reading.
Image at top: Shutterstock
Islamophobia Defined, All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, co-chaired by Anna Soubry MP and Wes Streeting MP (2018)
Ibid.
Sunak, Rishi. We must face down the extremists (Sourced from The Spectator 1st March 2024)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four - Appendix: the Principles of Newspeak (1949)