Islamophobia
- Related Topics:
- Islam
- xenophobia
- discrimination
- religious persecution
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Islamophobia, fear, hatred, and discrimination against practitioners of Islam or the Islamic religion as a whole. The term appeared as “Islamophobie” in French literature in the early 20th century as a designation for anti-Muslim sentiments and policies and was popularized in English in the late 1990s. Islamophobia is a type of xenophobia, or fear of foreigners or foreign things. Some scholars have argued that it should be considered synonymous with anti-Muslim racism, since the effects of Islamophobia on the lives of individual Muslims and the attitudes of those holding Islamophobic views are closely comparable to those that result from racism.
Origins, manifestations, and misconceptions
Negative attitudes toward Islam and its adherents predate the existence of the term Islamophobia. Aversive portrayals emerged nearly as early as Islam itself, particularly from writers in the Middle East whose religious (e.g., Christian) or political (e.g., Byzantine) institutions were threatened by the expansion of Islamic society throughout the region. Many historians trace the structural distortions of Islam represented by modern Islamophobia to medieval Europe. They point to evidence of anti-Muslim attitudes underpinning both the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when Christian rulers sought to conquer Muslim-ruled lands, and the Reconquista of Spain, a series of campaigns by Christian states that culminated in the capture of the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the 15th century. Many scholars believe a key catalyst to the development of Islamophobia was the limpieza de sangre (Spanish: “purity of blood”) statutes during the Spanish Inquisition that discriminated against anyone with Jewish or Muslim ancestry, regardless of whether they had converted to Christianity. Finally, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe (particularly its Siege of Vienna in 1683) is believed to have entrenched anxiety regarding the potential power of Islamic nations into the collective European consciousness.
Islamophobia has had many manifestations in the centuries following the rise of the Ottoman Empire, particularly among European and American intellectuals. The Palestinian American scholar Edward Said wrote extensive criticism about Orientalism, a Western discipline devoted to the study of societies outside the Western world. Orientalist scholars, according to Said, minimized the complex intellectual heritage of the Islamic world and propagated a conception of Islamic society that was primitive and exotic.
Often underlying Islamophobia is the worldview that Islam represents a homogeneous civilization that is necessarily hostile to and actively seeking to conquer other discrete so-called civilizations, such as Western civilization or Hindu civilization. This is an ahistorical characterization of cultural areas of influence or strength as being entirely separate from one another and lacking internal diversity, in contrast to the reality of constant intercultural contact and exchange that characterizes European, Asian, and African history, particularly around the Mediterranean Sea. Islamophobic conceptions of Islam also generally conflate “Middle Eastern” with “Muslim” when the reality is that many inhabitants of the Middle East are not Muslim and the majority of Muslims worldwide live outside the Middle East.
Islamophobia in the 21st century
Islamophobia in the United States and Europe
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Islamophobia increased rapidly throughout the world. Thousands of individual Muslims living in the United States and in Europe were targeted by verbal and physical attacks. Many scholars have persuasively argued that Islamophobic attitudes were an integral element of the war on terrorism, the American-led counterterrorism effort launched in response to the attacks.
The rise of Islamophobia after the September 11 attacks is considered a key factor in the growth of an organized anti-Muslim movement in the United States and Europe. Dozens of organizations with the explicit mission of preventing an alleged cultural or legal Islamic takeover were founded in the early 21st century. Many found success by championing laws passed in some U.S. states that prohibited courts from referencing Islamic law (sharia). These laws are predicated on the idea that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization and have been passed to combat the nonexistent threat of hostile Muslims attempting to subvert Western institutions from within American society.
Other legislative and governmental efforts have had more concrete discriminatory aims than preventing illusory threats. For example, in 2009 Swiss voters enacted a law to prevent the construction of minarets, a key part of Islamic houses of worship (mosques). In 2010 France made it illegal to wear a face covering in public, a law whose clear target was preventing Muslim women from wearing traditional coverings like the niqab (see hijab). In 2021 the Austrian government released an online map of Islamic mosques, community centers, and more, which activists insist is a clear security risk for such institutions.
These legislative victories for Islamophobia are generally linked to the rise of populism and far-right political parties in democratic countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Many far-right politicians are openly Islamophobic in their beliefs and efforts and have stoked popular resentment for their own political gain. The endurance of these attitudes appears to have a direct impact on many events. For example, many activists claim that Islamophobic attitudes are to blame for the contrast between the hostility toward hosting refugees from Afghanistan and Syria and the welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees.
Islamophobia has also been at the root of many influential conspiracy theories, both in Western democracies and in the rest of the world. Many of those in the “birther” movement, which claimed that U.S. Pres. Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore should have never been eligible for the office of president, also advanced the belief that Obama received a radical Islamic education as a boy in Indonesia. The “Eurabia” conspiracy in Europe includes a version of conspiratorial replacement theory that argues that high birth rates among some Muslim immigrants to Europe are a danger to Europe’s Christian heritage and may eventually lead to an Islamic conquest of Europe. In 2020, conspiracy theories circulated in India claiming that Muslims were responsible for the spread of COVID-19, leading some overwhelmed hospitals to refuse admission to Muslim patients.
Islamophobia in Asia
The rise of Islamophobia in Western democracies is well documented, but Islamophobia also has a virulent presence in other parts of the world. In Myanmar, discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya minority led to a major refugee crisis in the 2010s. In China the Communist Party has frequently considered organized religions to be a potential threat to its authority. While members of many religious groups face discrimination in China, the state in the 21st century imposed a systematic program of reeducation and social control on Muslims in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang to promote involuntary assimilation.
In India there have historically been tensions between Indian Muslims and Indians of other religions. These tensions were exploited and exacerbated by colonial British rulers and in the modern day became manifest as growing Islamophobia on the subcontinent. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which advocates defining Indian society in terms of Hindu values (Hindutva), has often been accused of stoking Islamophobia. The party’s rhetoric contributed to the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a mob in 1992. While in power, the party sponsored discriminatory legislation, such as the controversial citizenship law of 2019 that excluded Muslim refugees from a path to citizenship. Anti-Muslim violence in India rose after the BJP formed a government in 2014, and the party’s continued success paired with its use of Islamophobic rhetoric demonstrates how Islamophobia can be consciously stoked and promoted for political gain.