"An old lady is discussing with her best friend about the disgusting habits of her husband.'Even after all these years, my husband will not stop biting his nails,' the lady explains.'My husband had the same habit,' her bestie explained, 'but I fixed it. I just hid his teeth.'""In Indonesia, there is a film coming out called 'Kiblat', perhaps trying to imitate 'The Last Exorcism', but the result is that this film really harassing and inciting the way Muslims worship, thus leading to intolerance. Therefore, citing UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 'Let us keep working together to advance the shared values of inclusion, tolerance and mutual understanding—values that are at the heart of all major faiths and the United Nations Charter', the Indonesian government should revoke its distribution permit and prohibit its broadcast anywhere," said Jasmine while observing the real 'Qibla', Kaaba, a cubic structure in Mecca and one of Islam’s most sacred sites."According to United Nations, Islamophobia is a fear, prejudice and hatred of Muslims that leads to provocation, hostility and intolerance by means of threatening, harassment, abuse, incitement and intimidation of Muslims and non-Muslims, both in the online and offline world. Motivated by institutional, ideological, political and religious hostility that transcends into structural and cultural racism, it targets the symbols and markers of being a Muslim.This definition emphasises the link between institutional levels of Islamophobia and manifestations of such attitudes, triggered by the visibility of the victim’s perceived Muslim identity. This approach also interprets Islamophobia as a form of racism, whereby Islamic religion, tradition and culture are seen as a ‘threat’ to the Western values.Some experts prefer the label 'anti-Muslim hatred,' fearing that the term 'Islamophobia' risks condemning all critiques of Islam and, therefore, could stifle freedom of expression. But international human rights law protects individuals, not religions. And Islamophobia may also affect non-Muslims, based on perceptions of nationality, racial or ethnic background [https://www.un.org/en/observances/anti-islamophobia-day, retrieved on 30.03.2024]In a book by the painter Etienne Dinet in 1918, appeared in its French form, Islamophobie. The word 'Islamophobia' is not new, despite the fact that one would be hard pressed to find many instances of it prior to the 1990s. Jim Wolfreys suggests that across Europe, anti-Muslim prejudice has been reinforced by the global ‘war on terror’, its stigmatization of Islam, and demands vigilance, monitoring, and increased security. In France, Islamophobia has been fostered by a divided political elite that has used republican secularism, or laïcité, as a tool for putting Muslims under scrutiny and questioning their allegiance to the values of the Republic. In an era of intense and rising inequality, the construction of moral panics, insecurity, and scapegoats has found traction among social groups anxious about losing status and looking for someone to blame. Here the radicalization of secularism, historically associated with progressive forces against reaction, has helped both divide and neutralize anti-racist groupings and institutions, hampering attempts to confront the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment.Rodd H. Green. writes that the word has become an integral part of political and public discourse, says This is due largely to a much-cited study conducted by a British think tank, the Runnymede Trust, in 1997. The study defines Islamophobia as 'dread or hatred of Islam' and as 'unfounded hostility towards Islam.' It also defines Islamophobia in light of the concrete expressions this hostility takes, such as the deliberate exclusion of Muslims from mainstream social and political life. This definition is the one most frequently employed in debates pertaining to anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. Green added that Islamophobia is hatred, hostility, and fear of Islam and Muslims, and the discriminatory practices that result.True, there are some people who deliberately stir up animosity toward Muslims, says Green, in order to mobilize voters, increase ratings, generate traffic to blogs and websites, sell books, or justify wars. In other words, there are folks who are in the business of manufacturing Islamophobia for personal or professional gain, and they do deserve 'special condemnation.'What is the relationship between Islamophobia today and the anxieties toward Islam that have characterized much of Western history? How and why have hostilities toward Islam developed in Western history? Green explains that the earliest negative images of Islam among European Christians developed as the Islamic empire spread and posed a political and military threat to Christian domains. Islam arose in the early seventh century under the leadership of the Prophet (ﷺ), by the time of his (ﷺ) death in 632, much of the Arabian Peninsula had embraced the teachings of Islam. His (ﷺ) successors built on his (ﷺ) success and expanded the scope and influence of Islam. By the mid-eighth century, Islam encompassed much of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Africa, and Spain. Within the span of approximately one century, a considerable portion of what had once been the Christian Roman Empire had fallen into Muslim hands.Muslims did not have a monopoly on conquering strategic territories. As Islam enveloped Christian lands, European rulers and church leaders responded with calls for crusades and conquests. Pope Urban II ordered the First Crusade in 1095. This crusade was initially in response to the plea for aid from the Byzantine emperor as he sought to fight off invading Seljuk Turks, but the crusade eventually focused on taking Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim hands. In 1099, Jerusalem fell to Christian armies. These armies slaughtered almost all of the Jews and Muslims in the city and subsequently established the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the course of the First Crusade, European Christian armies founded three additional states. Holding onto the great prize, Jerusalem, proved to be quite difficult for the Christian conquerors. Much of the kingdom would be conquered less than a century later by the prominent Muslim general and sultan, Saladin.The First Crusade was followed by many others, often prompted by Muslim conquests of territory held by European Christian powers. Most of these crusades were failures. By the end of the thirteenth century, the last significant European stronghold in the Holy Land, Acre, had fallen into Muslim hands. The struggles for territory and political power set the stage for Muslim-Christian relations in the Middle Ages, but what impact did these power struggles have on Christians living under Muslim rule and vice versa? Both Muslim and Christian rulers devised ways of dealing with religious minorities. In the case of Muslim rule, the Qur’an did not establish clear parameters for how to govern non-Muslims, though it did prohibit Muslims from coercing the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab)—that is, Jews and Christians—to convert to Islam. Islamic law, or would eventually elaborate on the place of protected minorities, known as dhimmis.The restrictions placed on non-Muslim minorities may strike modern readers as intolerant, but, in fact, Jews and many dissident Christians in portions of the Byzantine and Persian Empires often enjoyed greater freedoms under Islam than under imperial Christianity. In the context of the early history of Muslim-Christian encounters, Islam, not Christianity, often proved more accepting of religious diversity.This brief overview of the rise of Islam and the battles between Muslims and Christians can give the impression that relations between the two were characterized only by conflict and confrontation. But not always. Collaborative endeavors and beneficial exchanges also took place between Muslims and Christians. For example, in Cordoba, Muslims and Christians shared worship space for a time in the Cathedral of Cordoba. One of the greatest exchanges was of translations of scientific and philosophical texts from antiquity. Thanks to the efforts of Muslim scholars, the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates became widely accessible to medieval European scholars for the first time.The impact of the Islamic world on the development of Europe extended well beyond transmitting and translating ancient texts. European science, mathematics, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and theology all drew inspiration from Islamic and Arab sources. Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Rāzi authored Liber continens, one of the most frequently used and respected medical textbooks in Europe during the Middle Ages. Abū Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham corrected ancient theories of vision that had been developed by the likes of Euclid and Ptolemy, arguing that vision is possible because of the refraction of light through the lenses of the eyes. Abū Abdullah Muhammad ibn Mūsa al-Khwārizmi contributed to the formation of a distinctive mathematical discipline now known as algebra; the word algebra is Arabic for 'restoration' or 'completion' and is found in the title of al-Khwārizmi’s widely circulated book The Compendium on Calculation by Restoration and Balancing. The Romanesque architecture of churches in southern France adopted forms and techniques from Islamic architecture, such as horseshoe arches and the incorporation of ceramic in the building materials. Fables and stories of Arab origin inspired authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Miguel de Cervantes. The Muslim philosopher Abū al-Walīd Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, referred to simply as Averroës in European writings, developed a series of commentaries on Aristotle’s works that paved the way for Aristotelian thought to serve as an important source of philosophical and theological reflection. Indeed, the most influential Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, engaged Averroës’s philosophy deeply, even if he was critical of it.In the earliest encounters between Christians and Muslims, the lack of awareness about Islam is easily explained. Christians simply did not show much curiosity in learning about Islam because most Christian authors initially viewed Muslims as a scourge sent from God to punish Christians for their sins. One sees the same phenomenon in the earliest encounters between Christians and Muslims in the West. As Muslims conquered vast portions of Spain, Christians viewed their conquerors as a punishment from God for their sins. The problem was with Christians, and therefore the solution, repentance, could only be found within the Christian community. It was only after a significant number of Christians converted to Islam that Christian authors began to view Muslims not simply as Divine-ordained military adversaries but as religious rivals.With the victories of the First Crusade, Christians came into closer contact with Muslims and learned that Muslims were not pagan idolaters but monotheists. Chronicles written during later crusades devoted much less attention to portrayals of Saracens as idolaters. Nonetheless, the image of the Saracen pagan lives on in the European imagination.The depiction of Muslims as pagans and idolaters ultimately gave way after the First Crusade to the belief that Islam was a form of Christian heresy. This perception, prominent by the twelfth century, actually found expression already in the first century of Christianity’s encounter with Islam in the writings of John of Damascus. John was much more concerned with iconoclasm, the destruction of icons, than with Islam, but he was still one of the earliest Christian thinkers to develop the view of Islam as a heretical version of Christianity.Historians often set the Middle Ages apart from the cultural, intellectual changes taking place beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Renaissance and continuing in the sixteenth century with the Reformation. Both the Renaissance and Reformation marked significant changes and innovations in European thought, but in the context of the topic at hand, we find very little that is new. Many thinkers in these movements continued to recycle images and stereotypes of Muslims and Islam that circulated during the Middle Ages.The end of the Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of three major Muslim empires: the Mughal Empire in India, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was the most powerful and long lasting of the three. With the rapid advancement of the Ottoman Empire in this period makes it understandable why medieval references to Muslims as 'Saracens' or 'Ishmaelites' gave way to the almost ubiquitous designation of 'Turks.' Christian authors frequently invoked the problem of 'the Turkish threat' in order to rally support for crusades or wars against the Ottomans, but, the designation of 'Turk' also functioned to denigrate one’s opponents in other Christian communities. The term, like its medieval predecessors, had ethnic, political, and religious dimensions.The Enlightenment, a cultural and intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West that emphasized reason, was a cultural and intellectual movement that arose toward the end of the seventeenth century and reached its apex in the eighteenth century. The movement stressed the primacy of reason in the human quest to acquire knowledge and discover truth. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason contributed to a climate in which philosophers and intellectuals increasingly attacked traditional Christianity, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties, as irrational and superstitious. The Enlightenment, however, did not witness the abandonment of older prejudices. In both philosophical and popular writings, unflattering images of Muslims and Islam persisted. In fact, we have plenty of examples of Enlightenment philosophers who reiterated negative stereotypes even as they articulated more positive appraisals.Sympathetic portrayals of Islam during the Enlightenment may have problematized the medieval narrative, but they did not dislodge it. Islam lived on in the European imagination as a religion rooted in deceit, violence, and misogyny. Even if the theological arguments driving polemical constructions of Islam lost some of their potency by the end of the Enlightenment, they did linger into the modern era. The fear of the Muslim “Other” as an obstacle and threat to European power and hegemony did not fade but rather intensified in the face of Ottoman decline and Europe’s increasing interest in colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.Colonialism was not a modern European invention, has been a recurring feature in human history. European colonization began in earnest with Christopher Columbus’s 'discovery' of the Americas in his 1492 expedition. The Spanish and Portuguese developed extensive colonial networks in North and South America in the century that followed. By the seventeenth century, they were joined by the British, the French, and the Dutch, among others. European powers also began extending their reach in the Eastern Hemisphere by the sixteenth century—the Portuguese captured Goa in India in 1510 and Malacca in Malaysia in 1511. The European conquests in both hemispheres were made possible by innovations in seafaring and greater control of shipping lanes. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Industrial Revolution provided a boost to European military technologies and capabilities that greatly facilitated colonial projects.Colonial endeavors left many Muslim-majority territories largely untouched prior to the nineteenth century, though Muslims in regions such as the Indian subcontinent certainly felt the effects of colonialism already in the sixteenth century. With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, we witness the beginning of serious European attempts to conquer Muslim lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Napoleon’s efforts failed, in part as a result of British intervention, but the French would succeed in invading and occupying Algeria in 1830. Algeria became the first permanent European colony in North Africa, and its conquest marked the beginning of a long, tumultuous, and at times bloody conflict between colonizer and colonized. The French made Tunisia and Morocco into protectorates in 1881 and 1912, respectively, and in 1923 the League of Nations gave the mandate for present-day Syria and Lebanon to France.By the early twentieth century, much of the Muslim world was subject to European rule, with only a handful of states in the Middle East—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen—escaping European colonial domination as the dust settled from World War I. By World War I, European nations exercised considerable political and economic power over much of the world, including the Muslim world.The impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the relationship between Islam and the West should not be underestimated. Many Muslims in the Middle East and in other Muslim-majority regions blame their political and economic struggles today on past as well as present interference from the West. The anti-Western sentiment that one encounters in these countries cannot be understood apart from the legacy of colonialism, just as any adequate analysis of contemporary Western discourse about Muslims and Islam must take into account the West’s past and present colonial enterprises and imperial designs in the Muslim world.The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Orientalism can be said also to have a role in Islamophobia, and we will discuss it in the following episode. We will discuss the organs and functions of the state from an Islamic perspective after the topic of Islamophobia, bi 'idhnillah."I walked in the room, eyes are red,and I don't smoke bangaDid you check on me? *)
Citations & References:
- Todd H. Green, The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West, 2015, Fortress Press
- Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France, 2018, Oxford University Press
*) "People" written by Libianca Fonji & Orhue Odia
