Hatred is not a phobia

The term Islamophobia was popularised, as I recall, in the 1990s to refer to hostility to Muslims in the European context. The logic behind it seems to be that people were hostile to Muslims because they did not know any Muslims and knew very little about Islam other than stereotypes and impressions from news stories about conflict and terrorism, some of which had nothing to do with Islam as such. The fears, people believed, were irrational and based in ignorance and would be overcome with education and engagement. This line of thinking makes a certain amount of sense when Muslims are a minority which is fairly new to a country, as with British Muslims in the 90s and 2000s. However, this morning I saw a link to an interview with Azad Essa about the links between the hard right in Israel and Hindu fascists in India and the Indian diaspora at +972 Magazine, and this article uses the term Islamophobia for that as well and talks of the two political groups being bound by shared ‘phobias’. I have heard it used in other contexts involving hatred of Muslims, such as by Serb nationalists, where I believe it’s inappropriate.

Muslims are not new to Bosnia, nor to India. They are not immigrants; they are native to the countries and have been there as long as anyone else, even if some of them are partly descended from previous conquerors, such as the Ottoman Turks and Moghuls, though in parts of India Islam was brought by merchants across the sea and not by conquering armies from Central Asia. Nobody who lives today was alive when the Moghuls ruled India; the vast majority were born in independent India, a few in India during the days of the British Raj. In Bosnia, similarly, nobody still living was born under Ottoman rule. Nobody living today has any responsibility for anything those dynasties did. We know that in many areas of Bosnia, Muslims had lived in the same villages as Croatian Catholics and Serbian Orthodox Christians, as well as people of no religious belief descended from them after a few decades of communism, and been friends with them. Similarly with Hindus and Muslims (and other minorities) in India. They knew their neighbours were not a threat to them and were not conspiring against them.

To call this fear, irrational or otherwise, is to suggest that it is somewhat understandable given “what they went through”. Nobody today “went through” any of that. This is a valid argument when a people are still oppressed (e.g. African Americans in many generations during and after slavery) but that’s not the case in India or Bosnia. People in India may have been oppressed in many ways, whether on the basis of caste, or class, or sex, or by colonialism if they are old enough, or poverty, but never by having lived under Muslim Moghul rule because they have not. No Serb in Bosnia or Serbia today has memory of Ottoman rule. I sometimes hear the excuse that Serbs live with some kind of hereditary trauma from the boy-tribute system used by the Ottomans to supply one division of its army, that the “wounds are still fresh”. This is nonsense; it was centuries ago, abolished long before the Ottoman empire fell, and in any case, it is not the only case where families lost boys or young men to the army. In Tsarist Russia the period of military conscription was 25 years, although not everyone served, yet nobody talks of this being a lasting trauma. They have just heard stories of it, that is all. It is just an excuse for hatred and resentment whipped up by people who want power for themselves.

Let’s stop using this term ‘Islamophobia’ to refer to the hatred whipped up by fascists and racists who talk of purifying their country of outsiders or outside influences. They don’t do this because of ignorance and fear of newcomers with an unfamiliar culture and religion; they just dig up old resentments to use as an excuse. We should not give rabble-rousers or the mobs they incite the benefit of ignorance or generational trauma. The leaders are nothing more or less than lying, murderous demagogues and the followers cowardly thugs, enjoying their new-found power over people who thought them their friends and justifying it on the basis of crimes they imagine their ancestors committed.

Sometimes hatred is just hatred.