What's in a word? Islamophobia.
A tale of three religions involved in a civilizational battle.
We’re at the end of November, and the end of Islamophobia Awareness Month 2024. Had you noticed it? Lots of media mentions. Lots of online stuff. Lots of encouragement to … er … be aware of Islamophobia.
On 27 November there was even a question in the British parliament. Tahir Ali, a Labour party member, spoke thus when putting a question to Keir Starmer the prime minister:
November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts including the Qur’an, despite opposition from the previous government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the prime minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?
In reply, the prime minister said:
Can I agree with him that desecration is awful and I think should be condemned across the house. We are, as I said before, Mr Speaker, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division including, of course, Islamophobia in all of its forms.
So, it appears that Islamophobia is A Bad Thing - somehow inextricably connected with ‘hatred and division’. But why and how?
It’s a funny old topic, isn’t it? It seems to me to be unclear to the point of incomprehensibility … a kind of ‘talk about it but don’t talk about it’ topic … confused and confusing … ‘clear as mud’ as my old Mum used to say. So I thought I’d try to carry out a brief review.
First, I have to own up to the fact that the I-word has a special resonance for me. Back in the 20-teens I was invited to speak at a UK National Health Service (NHS) management conference.
My professional experience is in marketing and sales, with a particular emphasis on Customer Value, and I was asked if I would talk about lessons that might be learned from the commercial sector that could be relevant to patient care. “Delighted”, said I.
Then, some time before the event was due to happen, I got a phone call from the organizer who told me she thought my Twitter account had been hacked.
Surprised, I asked what had led her to this conclusion. It came down to the fact that I had been critical of what, at the time, was a fairly newly minted definition of the word Islamophobia. When I confirmed that I had made the post and no hacking was involved, I was promptly cancelled. Delegates, I was told, researched those who were announced as speakers and were deeply unhappy with my criticism.
It all seemed, to me, to be bizarre and, yes, extraordinarily unBritish. There was, it appeared, absolutely no interest in why I had said what I had said. It was sufficient that I had said it - that was the crime.
Earlier in November I accepted an online invitation sent to me to find out more about Islamophobia Awareness Month1 and when invited to download the Islamophobia Awareness Guide, I did so.
As in the photo at the top of this post (the photo is from the material that I received) the word ISLAMOPHOBIA appears big and bold. So, let’s start there, by trying to categorize the word itself which, by its very structure, classifies itself as a phobia. It can’t be anything else, can it? Islamophobia is, presumably, a phobia? Otherwise, why would you call it that?
My Oxford English Dictionary reminds me that a phobia is …
(A) fear, (a) horror, (an) aversion; esp. an abnormal and irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.2
… and that, when used as a suffix …
-phobia. Forming abstract ns. denoting (esp. irrational) fear, dislike, antipathy, as agoraphobia, Anglophobia, logophobia.
So, what’s the appropriate response to a phobia? Well, surely, it is training or treatment of some kind to help the sufferer of the phobia realize that the subject in question is not dangerous, or bad, or whatever. There seems normally to be sympathy - compassion, even - these days towards victims. And isn’t a person with a phobia a victim?
Well, anyway, the Islamophobia Awareness Month Guide explains that …
Islamophobia Awareness Month (IAM) is a month-long campaign founded by a group of Muslim organisations and is held every November. IAM’s mission is to showcase the positive contributions of Muslims in the UK and raise awareness of Islamophobia in society.
Well, that sounds okay and potentially valuable but, if this really is a phobia, it’s surely obvious that such action will not cure it. Not on its own, anyway.
It would be rather like trying to treat arachnophobia by delivering lectures about the contributions made by spiders in, for instance, predating flies, to which a response might be: “That may well be but I still hate the little buggers - can’t stand the way they squiggle around!”
Or trying to treat an agoraphobic by explaining how wonderful the big wide world is, to which the response might be: “So what? That’s not the point. The point is my fear of being overwhelmed by open spaces, and the fear that escape might be impossible from such an open space. That’s why I hate open spaces.”
Note, too, en passant, that I used the word ‘hate’ in both of the above vignettes. But it’s ‘hate’ as a synonym for ‘fear’ - “I’m terrified of … (insert phobic trigger of your choice).”
This point is relevant if and when criticism of Islamophobia gets labelled ‘hate crime’. In which context, don’t forget that response, mentioned earlier, by the British prime minister: “We are … committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division including, of course, Islamophobia in all of its forms.”
The “of course” tucked in there makes it sound as though the Islamophobia-as-hate proposition is so bloody obvious and clear cut that you’d be a real thicko not to realize it. Hmm.
To my mind, however, it is far from clear. Usually we do not blame people for being afraid of something, do we? In fact, in this supposedly ultra-compassionate age I thought we were supposed to respond to their concerns with understanding and care?
So, although showcasing the positive contributions of Muslims may be a good thing, it will not solve any genuine phobic issues, if such exist.
With that basic, perhaps naive, point out of the way, let’s go back to the leaflet. There, lo and behold, prominently featured, what should I find but the self same definition that I had criticized umpteen years ago:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
Hmm. And the irritation that I experienced in the past came flooding back.
Why? Well, again, clear as mud. This is surely either poor or manipulative use of language - which may or may not be intentional?
This so-called ‘definition’ turns the tables completely, in the sense that it flips the argument away from trying to help people understand something to, primarily, trying to blame them for what seems to have become, or at least is presented as, an offence against what is screamed from the rooftops as the cardinal sin of our age - racism.
This calls for a trip back to the dictionary:
racism - (Belief in, adherence to, or advocacy of) the theory that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, qualities, etc., specific to that race, esp. distinguishing it as inferior or superior to another race or races; prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism based on this.
Leading with the assertion that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism”, immediately followed by “and is a type of racism”, seems to me to be a double whammy smack down that moves this particular ‘phobia’ away from any sense that people might have some basis for fear, rational or otherwise, to re-frame the issue as a shortcoming, or even an outright crime, on the part of those who are not participants in, or familiar with, ‘Muslimness’, whatever that is.
And yet, and yet, surely there is good reason for fear? After all, we know that a very large number of men, women and children have been murdered in violent assaults committed by Islamists.
(Islamists, we are assured, are a tiny minority of the total Muslim community and your average Muslim deplores what they get up to. It’s a shame they don’t shout louder at them.)
Anyway, Islamist crimes there are aplenty. They are perpetrated on individuals, as with the early (1989) fatwa threatening the life of author Salman Rushdie. Why? For the ‘crime’ of writing a story. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote:
May I assume that you are opposed without reservation to the suborning of the murder, for pay, of a literary figure?3
… and sometimes the crimes are mass killings. You know the list. You know it’s long. You know it’s hideous.
So, is there a reasonable basis for fear? It is surely these hideous events that validate the notion of the appropriateness of the term Islamophobia, precisely because they do cause fear? Apart from anything else, that’s one of the perpetrators’ intentions, isn’t it?
A quibble might be, if ‘phobia’ is reserved for irrational fears then Islamophobia falls down on that particular because these fears are entirely rational.
Admittedly it depends how you define ‘race’ but an interesting point, to my mind, is that one thing Islam is not is a race. After all, there are Muslims of all shades, from all around the world. But maybe I’m being a little too picky there because a key to the ongoingness of issues around Islam is the fact that, it seems to me, it can be classified under several heading - as a religion, an ideology, a way of life, a civilization.
That last label calls to mind the work of Samuel P. Huntington as expressed in The Clash of Civilizations. In that volume, published nearly thirty years ago, Huntington identified nine civilizations in the post-1990 world: Western, Latin American, African, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese and Islamic.
Western culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their own societies. This phenomenon is most notable among Muslims in Europe …4
This perhaps begins to get nearer to the root of the problem because it forces us to probe more deeply - ‘What is Islam?’ One answer to which is … ‘It’s an idea.’
Does that sound too feeble? Okay, let’s say it is an idea and an accompanying narrative. And, to some, that idea and that narrative are the most important things in the world.
No surprise then that some writers become poetically expansive when they describe Islam. Here’s a snippet from a description by Hamid Dabashi about the Shi’a branch of the faith:
Shi’ism is a festive gathering, a festival, a feast, a constellation of moral manners, a commitment, a conviction, a mobile memory - the center-piece of it the iconic unsheathing of a dagger, for real, for sure, always half-drawn from its worn-out sheath. Always ready to change its own metaphors, Shi’ism is also a raised lantern of hope in desperation, a green flag, a red marker of martyrdom, sacrifice, renewal, resurrection.5
Dabashi goes on in this vein, writing often beautiful prose, to articulate the scale and scope of Shi’ism. His conclusion to this list is perhaps disconcertingly honest:
Shi’ism, in the end, is a paradox. It thrives and is triumphant when it is combative and wages an uphill battle: it loses its moral authority and defiant voice the instant it succeeds and is in power. It is, paradoxically, only in power when it is not in power - when it is in power, it lacks legitimacy, authority, audacity.6
Perhaps this goes some way to explain the behaviour of, for example, Iran?
I was brought up in a Christian household but long since decided that I cannot buy in to the idea of a ‘god’, let alone ‘God’. Nonetheless, religion fascinates me. And, indeed, I think that the fading of the Judaeo-Christian idea and narrative has not necessarily served the West well.
We humans, it seems, need a narrative to act as a kind of handrail for our lives.
This is a point that American literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) discusses in Sincerity and Authenticity7. In it, he references British historian J.H. Plumb (1911-2001):
‘A narrative past, a past with sharp and positive beginnings’ - it is thus that Plumb characterizes the past that is now vanishing. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ These are beginnings as sharp and positive as any can be …
Trilling goes on to point out that the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’8 of the sea of faith, confirmed by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as the death of God, …
… had the effect of making all things, and man himself, seem ‘weightless’: the great narrative historians in some considerable degree maintained the weightiness of things by thickening the past, making it exigent, imperative, a sanction of authority, an assurance of destiny. The tale they told interpreted the sound and fury of events, made them signify something, a direction taken, an end in view.
Western History is, of course, being ferociously and successfully undermined. Inevitably, this leaves a vacuum - something that, we are told, Nature abhors.
One might also paraphrase that, I suppose, in this mercantile age, as ‘Nature abhors a gap in the market’. And, today, it seems, two religions - one old and one new - are vying to replace the West’s faded North Star.
The old religion, launched in the year 610 CE, is of course Islam. It has a hugely confident narrative introduced with some supremely dominant claims, as the Qur’an demonstrates:
The true religion with God is Islam (3:19)
If anyone seeks a religion other than Islam,
it will not be accepted from him (3:85) …Will not he whose breast God has expanded to Islam,
walk upright in a light from his Lord? (39:24)Since the word ‘Islam’ means complete devotion or surrender (to God), the rhetorical question of the last verse lays down the fundamental duty incumbent on each Muslim to ‘walk upright in a light from his Lord’. 9
Then there is the competing new religion. And it’s a humdinger of a departure from previous versions. For a start, it is a secular religion. No God required. And it’s one that tries to appeal to everyone, but on a different basis than in the past.
Up until now, human societies have relied upon some version of hierarchy. Here’s Charles Taylor on the topic of what he calls “social imaginaries”. First, what are they?
What I’m trying to get at with this term is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking rather of the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.10
Taylor goes on to say …
Pre-modern social imaginaries … were structured by various modes of hierarchical complementarity. Society was seen as made up of different orders. These needed and complemented each other. … An example is the often repeated mediaeval idealization of the society of three orders, oratores, bellatores, laboratores: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. 11
But the new religion is radically different:
[W]hatever distribution of functions a society might develop is deemed contingent; it will be justified or not instrumentally; it cannot itself define the good.12
“[I]t cannot itself define the good” - this is a crucial point.
In the new world, under the new religion, roles are not fixed. People may help one another but the particular roles that they fulfill at different times may themselves be different and do not, in and of themselves, have specific worth.
It is adventitious, and potentially changeable. In some cases, it may be merely temporary, as with the principle of the ancient polis, that we may be rulers and ruled in turn. In other cases, it requires lifetime specialization, but there is no inherent value in this, and all callings are equal in the sight of God. In one way or the other, the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy, or any particular structure of differentiation. 13
Thus is the rise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and the corresponding fall of Meritocracy, explained.
So what is the best label for this new religion? Let’s call it Multiculturalism. That’s maybe a bit feeble, but it will serve.
As we are experiencing, things have become astonishingly tribal. Multiculturalism implies organization based more upon the primitive arrangement of tribal allegiance.
Crucially, along with this, we are constantly told that all tribes are of equal worth.
Well, except perhaps one. You guessed it … the White Anglo-American/European tribe who, until recently, distinguished themselves as world leaders in innovation and liberality. Time for them to take a turn at the bottom of the pile (except for the Elites, but I’ll save that for another day).
However, if this argument is anywhere near right, and if you step back to take in the whole panorama, Islam and Multiculturalism are battling for ascendency to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the old order.
Which means, not least, that each of these wannabes will, consciously or subconsciously, likely develop and deploy such weaponry as they can to win. Is Islamophobia one such weapon?
And, for so long as it is useful to them, these religions may even join forces because “My enemy’s enemy is my friend. For now, anyway.”
Is this, perhaps, why we see some conspicuously unlikely connections such as Queers for Palestine marching alongside Hamas supporters. Not sure that’ll end well!
So, with this point in mind, is Islamophobia a weapon being deployed to ease the path of one group to the top of the pile?
That’s a plausible concern, isn’t it?
Finally, let me just mention the missing link - the third religion, the one that would represent a continuation of life as, until recently, we knew it. It is some continuation of the past, based upon meritocracy within agreed territorial limits.
It’s a world where people value the the piece of land where they are born or live. And where the social imaginaries of those defined areas are respected. They will change, of course they will, but in ways that honour the best of the past.
Newcomers will always be welcome … but they will be expected to come because they want to be in their new destination and they will agree to go along with the core values of that society.
Which brings me back to the issue with which I started - Islamophobia Awareness Month and what happened in the British parliament when Tahir Ali asked:
Will the prime minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?
The answer from the prime minister should have been, “No.” Straight out. No elaboration. Just, “No.” or, perhaps, just for emphasis, “No! No! No!”
The West struggled long and hard to outlaw blasphemy. After centuries of division, hatred and slaughter in the name of one belief system or another - always a belief system with some sky god at its core - the West managed to get rid of it.
Everyone became free to talk openly about the ideas of all religions. Everyone was free to decide. You want to become a Christian? Fine. Alternatively, you think that Christianity is nonsense? That, too, is fine.
This is a much better world and I would not wish to see the free thought stifled. So much so that I go so far as to say that it is a defining feature of the Western social imaginery. Some followers of Islam seem to have a problem with this freedom. They need to get used to it.
And yet, and yet, we may already have crossed a red line. As I understand it, the teacher who used an image of Mohammad in a Religious Education class at a school in Batley, Yorkshire still, after four years, has to live in hiding with his family.
Personalities such as Salman Rushdie (blinded in one eye in a second attempt on his life!) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who I was privileged to see and hear at a lecture in London earlier this week), have to live in constant fear for their lives with 24-hour protection.
So, while I have no problem at all with the Muslim community talking about the good that they do, they must, please, get to grips with their own extreme wing. That’s the way to get rid of Islamophobia.
Thanks for reading.
https://www.islamophobia-awareness.org/
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Christopher Hitchens. Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (2006)
Hamid Dabashi. Shi’ism: a religion of protest (2011)
Hamid Dabashi. Ibid.
Lionel Trilling. Sincerity and Authenticity, The Authentic Unconscious (1971, 1972)
Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach (1867)
As quoted from … Bruce Lawrence. The Qur’an: a biography (2006)
Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (2007)
Charles Taylor. Ibid
Charles Taylor. Ibid
Charles Taylor. Ibid
Brilliant piece!