In 2015, while speaking alongside the French ambassador, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed Muslims “dangerous animals” and complained that Israel had too many of them.
A few years ago, former Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman, called two billion Muslims the “anti-civilisation” enemy that spread from North Africa to Indonesia. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, French magazine Charlie Hebdo, in its editorial wrote that although the Muslim scholar, the Muslim woman wearing the veil, and the baker down the street had not outwardly harmed anyone, all of them had facilitated the terrorist attacks. In other words, there are no good Muslims.
Imagine the above statements made about any other community – religious, ethnic or national. It would be categorised as antisemitic and racist. The individuals making such statements, in those situations, would lose their careers. In these cases, Netanyahu went on to continue as the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. Zeman would go on to become the president of the Czech Republic (2013-23). Such is the normalisation of Islamophobia that it comes with little or no adverse consequence.
It would be misleading to imagine that Islamophobia is a problem only in Israel or in Western societies. Former Indian minister of law Subramaniam Swamy casually told Vice in a 2020 interview that he believed that any country where the Muslim population exceeded 30 per cent was in trouble.
It does not take a historian to understand that widespread normalisation of hate towards a community results in real-world atrocities. Sections of the international media continue to equate the genocide in Gaza with Israel fighting terrorism. The killing and displacement of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and the constant otherisation of Indian Muslims are just two of the many other examples one can present where Muslims are demonised and persecuted. Profiling of Muslim minorities is so common that most Muslim communities around the world have unfortunately come to expect it.
If defined as fear of, and hatred and discrimination towards Muslims, Islamophobia is not a novel development. The hostile attitudes towards Islam and its followers are often rooted in Muslim interaction with the Christian world, during the Crusades, and with Western colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, it became increasingly convenient to weaponise Islamophobia after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US. The primary representations of Muslims in the news and popular media were those of extremists and terrorists. Muslim societies were depicted as uncivilised and dysfunctional.
Post-September 11 American interventions and regime change precipitated the destabilisation of many Muslim states. Internal cohesion, where it existed, collapsed. It created space for violent extremist and validated their ideological anxieties. It drove recruitment to these organisations. Caught in the middle, many ordinary people had to abandon their homes and flee to wherever they envisaged safety. When some of them started arriving at the Western shores, it allowed public Islamophobes to characterise it as a Muslim invasion of the West.
The middle of the last decade saw Brexit, the rise of Trumpism and the return of hateful, extreme right-wing parties riding on stoking fears of Muslim immigrants. As evidenced by the examples in the opening paragraphs, rather than being ostracised, Islamophobes were lionised. Large swaths of populations were assured that hating on this marginalised, displaced community was an act of great valour. Calling for Muslim persecution was an act of heroism.
Suddenly, secular societies discovered that they had no room for Muslims to live in them. In France, the hijab became a barrier to Muslim integration into the French nation. In the US, mosques and community centres came under attack and arson. In India, ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘Land Jihad’ were coined to scrutinise the most mundane acts of Muslims. Everywhere, Muslims had to prove that their values were compatible with the societies in which they lived – a burden exclusively for Muslims to shoulder.
Islamophobia is real – and so are the dangers it poses not only to Muslims but to global peace. In principle, I believe that victims are not responsible for remedying the thoughts, words and actions of their oppressors. However, needless to say, we do not live in an ideal world. As Muslim individuals and communities, we should do what is in our power to combat Islamophobia, and we should be strategic about it.
Overly emotional, especially violent, reaction to hate is not only counterproductive, but also against the basic spirit and fundamentals of Islam. The Islamophobes tell their audiences that Muslims are violent and irrational. They expect Muslims to act as such. When Muslims call the hate-mongers out by questioning their adherence to common human values or sense of decency, it strips away their moral groundings. It makes the Islamophobes appear as the evil, irrational actors.
Muslim minorities should not isolate themselves from the societies in which they live. In my own experience in the West, when mosques and community centres would organise open days, it would go a long way in dispelling the negative perceptions about them. In every society, more people wish to live in harmony. By opening our doors, we attract allies. Human rights organisations, universities and some politicians can be natural allies. The way many non-Muslims stand with Gaza is a clear testament to this.
Leading Muslim countries need to invest more in creating and supporting centres and chairs in Western universities focusing on Islam and Muslim heritage. Such an investment would go a long way in bringing a new discourse around Islam and Muslims. Muslim voices and those supportive of Muslims should be amplified in the media. In the social media sphere, much has been accomplished in defanging the Zionist propaganda against Islam. More can certainly be accomplished.
More than anything else, within the Muslim communities, we need to hold ourselves accountable. We should ask ourselves whether we treat our minorities better than we expect other communities to treat us. Sectarianism and intolerance among Muslims provide justification to Islamophobes to cast us in a negative light. Very often, we give them the ammunition that they use against us.
We are arguably not responsible for Islamophobia. However, we are certainly responsible for putting forth the message of peaceful coexistence and justice for which Islam was revealed. Our failure in countering public Islamophobia will be our failure in conveying the true spirit of religion to other communities.
The writer is an academic and religious scholar who formerly served as the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII).