Knifey Spoony with Islamophobia

In a recent article on Harry’s Place, Edmund Standing quoted approvingly from this attack by Paul Sikander on the term “Islamophobia”:

‘Islamophobia’ is a constructed model designed to protect Islam and Islamic politics from criticism. It has little or nothing to do with protecting individual Muslims from discrimination. [...]

Anti-Semitism when it was expressed, the earlier racism of Europe, that had been present before the post war migration of black and Asian people to the UK, was simultaneously a similar and different mode of prejudice. But crucially, anti-Semitism when expressed and countered was not about defending the theology of Judaism.

The construction of the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ began in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. The impetus for it was to stigmatise an entire range of individuals and opinions, from those who took issue with religious precepts of Islam, to those who questioned certain values of the religion, certain cultural practices recurrent inside the sub-culture of some British Muslim groups, all the way through to those who critically analysed Islamist politics.

For the first time, ‘racism’ was not considered to be the active discrimination against individuals because of their ethnic background. Now, ‘racism’ was asserted to be anything that remotely offended the sensibilities of religious Muslims, including those from within the Muslim community who dissented from a certain line on any range of issues.

What a victory. To weld together the protection of religion and theo-politics with the whole idea of racism. To no longer privilege the dignity of the individual against racial prejudice, but to privilege the ‘dignity’ of the religion of Islam, and the politics of Islamism, and providing them with an immunity — the righteous immunity of protection from ‘victimisation’. [...]

The concept of ‘Islamophobia’ not only privileges the communal, and privileges a single religion, it also privileges the ‘grievances’ and ‘plight’ of Muslims over other minority groups in Britain, and it can be seen as an attempt to bully wider British society into submission to certain religious and theo-political norms.

There is a pervading confusion within what Sikander writes. He accepts uncritically the definition of Islamophobia as used by Islamists to defend their ideology and thereby seems to suggest that there is no legitimacy to any claims of Islamophobia; that there is not a specific kind of bigotry directed at Muslims.

But there most definitely is. After the 7/7 attacks, British Muslims faced a rapid rise in attacks. On July 14, 2005 the Washington Post reported on the situation here:

Several mosques have been damaged, and there have been more than 100 incidents of threats and attacks against Muslims since the July 7 bombings, although community leaders reported no upsurge in attacks Wednesday. The worst incident took place Sunday when a Pakistani man was beaten to death by young men in Nottingham, in the Midlands region north of London.

Police said Kamal Raza Butt, 48, who was visiting friends and family, was set upon outside a shop by black youths who demanded he turn over his cigarettes, taunted him as a “Taliban” and then attacked him. Nine people have been arrested in connection with the killing.

Then there was the aftermath of Jack Straw’s veil row which kicked off in late 2006:

At least six Muslim women have been abused for wearing scarves or veils after Mr Straw said last week that he asks Muslim women who visit his constituency surgeries in Blackburn to remove their veil.
In one incident a Muslim woman aged in her 20s had her hijab or headscarf pulled off her head and thrown to the ground by a young white man while she was at Canning Town Tube station in east London. The attack happened on the same day that a Muslim woman had the veil torn from her face by a white man who uttered racial abuse as she waited at a bus- stop in Liverpool’s Toxteth district. Both incidents occurred last Friday – the day after Mr Straw described the veil as, “a visible statement of separation”.

There were also reports that a young Muslim girl wearing a veil in Mr Straw’s Blackburn constituency was confronted by three youths last Friday night. One allegedly threw a newspaper at her and shouted: “Jack has told you to take off your veil.”

Three days later, a 21-year-old Turkish student told Muslim News that she was standing outside a supermarket in Canterbury, Kent, wearing a hijab when she was verbally abused by a middle-aged white woman. The older woman told her she hated her being in Britain and wanted her to leave.

On the same day in Hackney, east London, a black Muslim woman wearing a veil was getting off a bus when a passenger shouted out: “Why don’t you show your, lovely hair?”

The sixth incident involved a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, who reported that when she got on to the London Underground two men standing next to her deliberately started discussing their support for a ban on veils.

Even before Mr Straw’s remarks police had been receiving complaints of abuse towards Muslim women wearing veils. Police officers in Gloucestershire have investigated two allegations of verbal abuse against veiled Muslim women by white men. No arrests were made.

The BNP have tried to get mileage out of attacking Islam. They published this leaflet simply entitled ‘Islam’. In it is talk of “Militant Muslims” and “Muslim extremists”, but it then goes on to say:

Only the British Nationalist Party speaks out against both Muslim extremist terrorism and the threat that ‘mainstream’ Islam poses [my emphasis] to our British culture, heritage and ways of life. We are not against individual Muslims, who should not be blame for the attitudes taught by their religion.

This echoes what Nick Griffin wrote on his blog on the thirteenth day of his trial in early 2006:

It was clearly a mistake not to fight harder to stress the material I came across in my studies of Islam which convinced me that it is inherently ‘extreme’, fundamentalist and dangerous, [my emphasis] as the impression can all too easily be gained from this review that it’s only obvious fanatics like Qatada and Hamza who are dangerous. This can be taken to suggest that it is unfair to tar the whole religion with their brush. Here is something else that, in the light of the way my views have not been adequately presented in this trial, will have to be put right if we get a hung jury and a retrial.

There are some who suggest that these are examples not of Islamophobia but of old school racism, and it is impossible to deny that racism had a role in much of this. But when “Taliban” is shouted as a Muslim man is stabbed to death, or all Islam is conflated with terrorism, or converts are targeted, or Muslim women are abused and have their hijabs ripped off their heads it becomes clear that the attackers have a problem with Islam and phenomena related to it; that the victims were targeted not on the basis of their ethnic background but of their (perceived) religious adherence.

What Sikander omits to mention is that, whilst it is completely legitimate to criticise terrorists who seek to justify their actions in relation to Islam or to discuss the wearing of the hijab and/or niqab in Britain, there are certain bigots who go far beyond what is acceptable in debate and turn to victimisation and violence. In short, bigotry against Muslims. This is, in my view, Islamophobia. Much more importantly than my opinion on this topic, “Islamophobia” is what most Muslims call their daily experience of bigotry directed against them for being Muslim.

At this point I should probably clarify what Islamophobia isn’t. And that would mean much of what Islamophobia Watch et al claim. For example, there is nothing bigoted about calling for Daud Abdullah to resign from the Muslim Council of Britain for signing a document justifying attacking British naval units, or suspending Azad Ali for justifying attacks on British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor is there anything bigoted about calling for an official representative of a terrorist organisation to be refused entry to Britain or, as Edmund Standing observes, a head teacher introducing multifaith assemblies. These events had nothing to do with bigotry and therefore nothing to do with Islamophobia.

Which would appear to support what Sikander is complaining of when he writes:

‘Islamophobia’ is a constructed model designed to protect Islam and Islamic politics from criticism. It has little or nothing to do with protecting individual Muslims from discrimination.

And it is for this reason that some people avoid the term “Islamophobia”, opting for “Anti-Muslim bigotry” or, like Fred Halliday, (in Islam and the Myth of Confrontation) “Anti-Muslimism”. But these terms are rarely used in day-to-day speech, whereas “Islamophobia” is – frequently. Furthermore, it is exactly because the term “Islamophobia” has sometimes been misused so badly that we should use it more often and (crucially) more accurately to describe the kind of bigotry outlined above.

In that way we can delegitimise Islamophobia Watch’s claim to defend all Muslims and show their “Islamophobia” is nothing of the type. And at the same time we will be joining Muslims in standing up to the bigotry which sadly confronts them daily in this country.