Islamophobia

Jump to Comments

I find it ludicrous that some people question whether or not Islamophobia even exists. These people say that what Muslims and some non-Muslims perceive to be Islamophobia is in reality often only legitimate criticism of Islam (they seem to forget that Islamophobia isn’t only about “criticism”, there have been attacks on Muslims, mosques and Muslim owned places of business). Some people, they say, accuse others of being Islamophobic because they want to silence this legitimate criticism of Islam. After all, criticism of religion and all kinds of ideologies is part and parcel of Western democracy, secularism, freedom etc. and Islam isn’t the only religion that has been criticised. Christianity was under the same scrutiny and now it is Islam’s turn, because its strange values may be a threat to Europe. There is nothing racist about this, they argue. It’s a matter of defending their democratic, secular values. These are some of their arguments. I agree, in theory there is nothing racist about this and I am sure that there are those that criticise Islam and Muslims because they want to defend their democratic, secular values (because they believe in them) and they are sincere. That I am sure of. On the other hand I am positive that others are simply bigotted and sometimes racist and they want to ventilate their views on Islam and Muslims while hiding behind these slogans.

The reality is that Islamophobia does exist. Now, I’m not saying that everytime someone criticises Islam and Muslims this is Islamophobia, but a lot of the time it is. Some of these guys already have preconceived notions about Islam and Muslims and so they jump right into the Islamic sources in search of passages that they can try to portray as promoting terrorism or some other evil. They aren’t interested in finding the truth about what Islamic sources say about these issues, instead they will try to find something in the Qur’an or the Sunnah that can be twisted into meaning something that fits their agenda. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League in a report explains how the same tactic has been used against the Talmud:

 By selectively citing various passages from the Talmud and Midrash, polemicists have sought to demonstrate that Judaism espouses hatred for non-Jews (and specifically for Christians), and promotes obscenity, sexual perversion, and other immoral behavior. To make these passages serve their purposes, these polemicists frequently mistranslate them or cite them out of context (wholesale fabrication of passages is not unknown)…
In distorting the normative meanings of rabbinic texts, anti-Talmud writers frequently remove passages from their textual and historical contexts. Even when they present their citations accurately, they judge the passages based on contemporary moral standards, ignoring the fact that the majority of these passages were composed close to two thousand years ago by people living in cultures radically different from our own. They are thus able to ignore Judaism’s long history of social progress and paint it instead as a primitive and parochial religion.
Those who attack the Talmud frequently cite ancient rabbinic sources without noting subsequent developments in Jewish thought, and without making a good-faith effort to consult with contemporary Jewish authorities who can explain the role of these sources in normative Jewish thought and practice.

These people tried to use the Talmud to show that Jews are evil, and this is anti-Semitism. In the same way, when people use the Qur’an in this manner, this is Islamophobia.

As a Bosnian Muslim I have a special perspective on this. You see, my father was put in a concentration camp for Muslim men where he was tortured and had to perform slave labour. There was a genocide of Muslims in my home country. How could this happen? Well, to understand how and why you have to look at the rhetoric of Serb politicans on the eve of the war. I’ve seen footage of Radovan Karadzic where he, in a speech, spreads propaganda about how you cannot live with Muslims citing examples of Muslim-Christian conflicts in the world. This was classic fear-mongering. And you can’t play the fundamentalist card on this one, because the Bosnian Muslims were some of the most liberal Muslims in the world and still that wasn’t enough. We embraced democracy and assimilated almost totally into the non-Muslim culture. In fact, when the war happened we looked and acted like the Serbs so much so that you couldn’t tell us apart. If a Serbian soldier ran into someone without knowing his name, the only way he could find out if this was a Muslim was by ordering him to let down his pants so he could se if the guy was circumcised or not. So even though we were liberal and like them in so many ways (Muslims naively embraced the Yugoslav Communist slogan “brotherhood and unity”) they still wanted us gone. 

So because I personally have experienced what this fear-mongering can do, I am extra sensitive to the propaganda against Muslims I see today. I know what it lead to in Bosnia. Ethnic cleansing and genocide doesn’t occur just like that, people have to be convinced that it is the solution and this is done through propaganda. So after having fled from all this, I get really disheartened that Europe doesn’t seem to have learned anything from what happened to the Bosnian Muslims and keep spreading propaganda. In this country mosques are being destroyed and vandalised, Muslims attacked, myths about Muslims spred in the media etc. An example of myths being spread is when in one of the major newspapers in Sweden it was claimed that Muslims don’t shake hands with women because they are considered impure, and this was later repeated on Swedish National Television. For more examples of Islamophobia in Europe, you can read this report (it should dispel the myth that Islamophobia doesn’t exist).

I’m not naive, I know that the fact that there are Muslims terrorists and wackos out there have something to do with this. Muslims are also to blame, of course. But that doesn’t mean that in your hate of these terrorist you spread lies and propaganda about Islam and Muslims! Some people say: “Well, if the Islamic sources don’t promote terrorism, how come there are so many Muslim terrorists?” That is in fact an argument against them because there are more Muslims that are peaceful than there are terrorists. You mean to tell me that all of these Muslims are peaceful because they don’t follow the Islamic teachings which supposedly promote terrorism? Come on! The majority follows mainstream Islam. And if you claim that the classical scholars promoted terrorism and that this is the proof that Islam is a religion of terror, then my answer is to take a look at the quote by the ADL. Just like some took statements from Rabbis out of context to further their anti-Semitic agenda, these Islamophobes do the same with the staments of classical Islamic scholars. For a more detailed analysis of this, I recommend this article by Sherman Jackson. Again, I am extra sensitive to this because I’ve seen the consequences first hand. I’d also like to point out that I am not claiming that we are going towards some kind of genocide of Muslims in the West or that Muslims are opressed in the West. Far from it. We generally have it very good I think. I’m just concerned about the current developement where Islamophobic rhetoric is being tolerated and anti-Muslim laws are subsequently being passed. I mean, is anyone worried when some politicans want to restrict the freedom of Muslim women, telling them how to dress? In Denmark a leading politician recently said that she wants to forbid the hijab. If this isn’t racism then at least it’s secular fundamentalism where the secular values become something holy and religious people aren’t tolerated at all even when the practise of their religion doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s freedom, like in the case of hijab.

In closing, I’d just like to mention something that happened right before the genocide of Muslims in Srebrenica occured in 1995. The Serb commander, Ratko Mladic, told the Dutch UN troops that in the future, the Dutch would ask the Serbian soldiers to come to Holland to fight against the Muslims there because the Dutch would, as he claimed, realise that this is how you have to deal with Muslims. He basically claimed that the Europeans would feel the same way about Muslims as he did. Don’t prove him right. 

8 Comments

Filed under Muslim Europe, Thoughts and reflections