Islamophobia

The standard definition of Islamophobia is “prejudice against, hatred towards, or irrational fear of Muslims.” Islamophobia is enshrined in many hate speeches in the United States as well as in Europe. Just as some people are anti-Semitic or hate the evangelical Christians or African Americans, today in the West some are Islamophobic. Famous evangelist Franklin Graham told NBC news following the 9/11 attacks: “We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.” Pastor R. Parsley of the huge World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, a spiritual adviser to John McCain, said: “The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed, and I believe 9/11 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.” Though many Christians have expressed hate against Islam, today in USA there are blunt critic of Islam, behaving as an enemy of Muslims living in the West. Though President Barack Obama was impelled to take aim at nativism in his final State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 12, 2016, offering a not-so-veiled jab at politicians, specifically GOP presidential candidates, who called for keeping Muslims from entering the country and have denigrated other minorities. President Obama said:

[The U.S. needs] to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion, [not as] a matter of political correctness, [but to maintain the country’s values.] It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. …The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith. …When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals.

Noam Chomsky, the noted activist and MIT professor emeritus, remarked in an interview on January 25, 2016 with The Huffington Post, “The Republican Party has become so extreme in its rhetoric and policies that it poses a serious danger to human survival. … Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails.” Chomsky said the GOP and its presidential candidates are “literally a serious danger to decent human survival.” GOP presidential candidates have been aggravating the situation in their debates by making commitments that if they are elected, Muslims would be banned from immigrating to the United States; and that those already living, even as citizens, would be sent back to the countries from where they came. Muslims in the United States are seriously concerned whenPresident Trump issued an executive order to ban the immigration of Muslims from 7-Muslim majority countries, which, though has been temporarily suspended by the Federal Appeals Court. Such rhetoric is creating unrest amongst Muslims, and what we see in Western Muslims and the impact of conflicts in Muslim world, is consequentially going to be a dangerous situation as visualized by Professor Chomsky.

Efforts to deny any link between violent acts of terrorism and the religion of Islam are widespread in the news media as well as government circles. It is a well acknowledged fact that terrorism in the West is usually perpetrated by a handful of misguided individuals, who happen to be Muslims with connections to radical networks abroad, as has been proved in the case of the woman terrorist Tashfeen having connections in Saudi Arabia. Many experts in foreign affairs do notbelieve that Islam is on a collision course with the West or that it is inherently inimical to the modern age. It is, rather, the negative attitude of the Western media towards Islam which has created Islamophobia, scaring Western Muslims. The media, spreading fake news and articles on partly quoted Qur’anic verses, creates an atmosphere of “backfire effect.”

Is Something Going Wrong with the Muslims?

We are aware that billions of Muslims are not motivated by their faith even to hate, let alone to kill those who do not fully share their religious outlook. Many Muslim religious scholars teach that Islam is a religion of peace. But we cannot ignore that terrorists today are mostly Muslims who justify their atrocities on religious grounds. Rodney Stark argues in The Triumph of Faith:

Responses to Muslim terrorism have long generated confessions that terrorism exists because Americans, and Westerners in general, have offended Muslims in many ways, including by supporting Israel, that they really have only themselves to blame. In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attack, former president Bill Clinton cited the Crusades as one of “our crimes against Islam.” More recently, while speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, and in the aftermath of televised beheadings by ISIS terrorists, President Obama also stressed Christian guilt for the Crusades.

But it also seems important to point out that most Muslim terrorism is against other Muslims. It seems unlikely that even the most ardent apologists for Islam would suppose that either Western or American misdeeds are the reason why Sunni Muslims kill and are killed by Shi’ite Muslims. It is time to raise an important question: Is something going wrong with Muslims that every terrorist act points towards them? One of many other reasons is that the rise of a far more intense and militant Islam—justified and promoted as the need of the hour during America’s proxy war with the Soviets—seems primarily to have been a source of modern terrorism. Traditional Islam, isolated during European colonial rule until the end of the nineteenth century, was relatively lax and accommodative to worldliness. When modernity broke down that isolation and oil money enriched the Saudi Arabs, the result was not the proliferation of a new rational “enlightenment,” but the rise of national and international Islamic religious leaderships. These new religious leaders and scholars of Islamic Shari’ah, partly in a reaction against secularism and partly in response to Muslim economic/industrial backwardness, generated a kind of militant commitment to a variety of intense forms of Islam. It appeared in the form of intensification rather than a regression into a peaceful and pious past. We can say that modernity in the world of Islam resulted in an increase of religiousness instead of a modernity of rational and scientific enlightenment.

What is in Store for the Muslims!

The prospects for a harmonious relationship between Islam and the West seem uncertain. A period of cordial relations between the fanatically intense and militant Muslims and the allied American and British Westerners lasted for a very short period of a decade or so. Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, voices were being raised by thinkers and politicians in the West that this was the time to take care of “Islamic Civilization.” It was being argued by the socio-political experts that after the demise of Marxism the only ideology that could pose a threat to American supremacy was Islam. Works and interviews with Bernard Lewis appeared, followed by the famous book of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order, and many debates and discussions. Before a well-planned clash of civilizations could be ignited, the “Desert Storm” campaign against Saddam Hussein was administered as a testing ground. For me it is neither pride nor a matter of glorification—as since my childhood I have hated war from the core of my heart—that the concept of “Jihad for war” is so powerful in Islam that within a short period it shattered two great empires soon after the advent of Islam, and went a long way towards bringing the Soviet empire to its knees. It took ten years for the U.S. think tanks to find a new way to tackle the jihadi ideology by turning the mujahedeen into terrorists, engaging them to destroy their own believers of liberal and traditional Islam. The West has created an atmosphere of uncertain chaos in the Muslim world by adopting a careful and safe role for themselves and the deadly start of a horrible World War for the Muslims, right from the footage of September 11, 2001.—

MIRZA ASHRAF