It’s Islamophobia, thank you

A group of demonstrators in Vauxhall, London, in November 2023. Banners include "we stand with Palestine" and "genocide ain't kosher".
Demonstrators in London, Nov 2023

Over the past week, some of the same politicians and think-tankers who couldn’t hide their resentment at George Galloway winning a by-election and were accusing anti-genocide demonstrators in London of being controlled by extremists behind the scenes and making London a “no-go zone for Jews” (a claim reported uncritically by the BBC, who could have asked the police if their statistics back this claim up) were also telling us to stop using the term ‘Islamophobia’ and stop paying heed to those who do. According to them, Islamophobia is a term made up by Islamists to impose a blasphemy law on non-Muslims by the back door and to punish people who opposed Islamist politics rather than those who were hostile to Muslims as such. Politicians started telling us it was different from “anti-Muslim hatred” which of course they condemned. And lo and behold, today there was an open letter to politicians from a group of victims of Islamist terrorist attacks (Lee Rigby’s widow as well as relatives of the victims of the Bataclan massacre and the 7th October attacks, among others) appealing to politicians not to associate Muslims with terrorists and to stop fuelling “anti-Muslim hate”. Why is this a problem?

Islamophobia has been the term favoured by the Muslim community for hostility to Muslims and Islam since at least the 1980s; it was already well-established in the mid-90s when I was actively looking into Islam (I took the shahadah in 1998) because Muslims were campaigning for such hostility to be recognised in law, and for Muslims not to have to base any complaint on constructs of race. The term ‘phobia’, meaning fear in Greek, was already being used in words for hostility such as xenophobia. Perhaps not accurate in its use of Greek, but it’s certainly typical of English words derived from classical Greek and Latin. We tend to prefer this sort of single long word to a whole series of words when we have to refer to something a lot. As with other terms for racism or bigotry, it has no doubt been abused by some people to make people out to be racists who aren’t, but it’s a bit snappier and just as well understood as “anti-Muslim hatred”, much as ‘antisemitism’ does the job better than “anti-Jewish hatred”. But much as antisemitism includes more than shouting racial slurs and beating up Jews for being Jews, or calling for them to be expelled (less often heard than in the case of more recently arrived minorities), Islamophobia includes more than just obvious and straightforward hatred. These include:

  • Stereotypical views about Muslims, such as assuming we all eat the same foods, or that all Muslim women are oppressed, or are at risk from FGM or honour killing
  • The “politics of suspicion”, such as assuming that Muslims generally support terrorist actions committed in our name or in Islam’s, and in particular, demanding condemnations from Muslims who had nothing to do with them
  • Making assumptions about what, say, Islamic dress means or ‘symbolises’ and then talking over Muslims about these issues (the hijab is a common focus of such assumptions)
  • Ascribing political meanings to in themselves apolitical aspects of Muslim practice: portraying “Allahu akbar” (God is great) as the chant of terrorists, or minarets as military fortifications rather than places from which to project a call to prayer, and paying no attention to Muslims about the facts of these things
  • Making life difficult for Muslims when we try to practise Islam: excluding girls for wearing the hijab, or imposing a uniform that is incompatible with it, or preventing students from praying when they are an age when it is required of them.

As for the accusation of a “blasphemy law”, the protests about insults to Islam or Muslims are not usually about someone merely criticising Islam or disagreeing with something in it (or they think is in it) but about insults that have a threatening edge to them. Muslims accept that we cannot stop people saying what they like about Islam in the West; there is, however, no real reason to publicly insult another’s religion other than to whip up hostility to it and, by extension, its followers. Insults are perceived, often correctly, as threats to people’s safety. A commonly cited example is the teacher who left his job because of parent protests after showing cartoons published by the French comic Charlie Hebdo to his pupils. Now, this teacher could have displayed these cartoons on his personal blog or Twitter account, but as a teacher you have responsibilities to uphold the children’s welfare, and the cartoons are not actual critiques of Islam but a collage of racist stereotypes about Arabs. The teacher told his pupils that it was his right of freedom of expression to show them the cartoon, which is not an attitude any teacher should take.

Generally, minorities know what forms prejudice against them take. They know what certain words mean that are used as coded racial slurs and they know the subtexts (if they aren’t obvious) to racist slogans. That doesn’t mean false or abusive accusations of racism don’t happen, and sometimes people take it too far, interpreting something that sounds like a thing racists used to say as actual racism when the phrase has other meanings, but in general, members of a minority are able to spot expressions of bigotry and prejudice against them. There is a doctrine that something is deemed to be racist if it is perceived as such, regardless of what the speaker intended, and the same people telling us Islamophobia is not a thing, that it’s just made up for censorship purposes also insist that Jews know best about what is and isn’t antisemitism and we should just take them at their word. The politicians concerned have their agenda, but if you are concerned about bigotry against Muslims and want others to be, please don’t use language endorsed by the politicians who are doing just that. We call it Islamophobia, because it’s more than just hate.

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