Week 5: Islamophobia

Does Islamophobia matter? What is Islamophobia? Does it even exist?

I'll answer the last question first. Many people argue that there is no such thing as Islamophobia. They generally use one of two arguments. The first argument says that there is no such thing as prejudice against religion generally: racism and sexism target aspects of a person that they can't change, not religious or political choices. According to this argument, what appears to be prejudice against Islam is actually racism in disguise: people who say they hate Muslims are actually just racists, who use 'Muslim' as an alternative label for Asian people. Sikhs as well as Muslims were attacked after 9/11: what this shows isn't that the racist attackers got the wrong targets, but that the attackers were using religion as a pretext for targeting Asian people.

The second argument against 'Islamophobia' starts from an explicitly secular (non-religious) standpoint. According to this argument, there is such a thing as prejudice against religion, and it's a good thing: religions are irrational sets of beliefs, and rational people should be prejudiced against people who choose irrationality. This argument implies that 'Islamophobia' is a rational and non-violent set of ideas - an ideology rather than a prejudice; the kind of thing that Richard Dawkins might come out with.

These two arguments face one major challenge, which is whether they can account for what actually happens. According to the first argument, racist attacks don't take the form of attacks on Islam; according to the second one, there are such things as attacks on Islam, but they take the form of newspaper columns denying that there is a God. Are these arguments sustainable? I don't believe they are. Muslims and Islam have been subjected to a variety of attacks over the last decade, going far beyond legitimate criticism of religious beliefs. White Muslims as well as Asians have been subjected to violent attacks; the outward signs of religious observance attract as much hatred as signs of ethnic origin. Subtler attacks have been mounted by the government and the media: Muslims in Britain have been stereotyped as potential terrorists, as holders of antiquated and reactionary beliefs, and above all as being somehow un-British.

The greatest irony is that the government's own policy for cultural integration is based on the presumption that British Muslims are defined by their religion, and that they are not integrated into society - and that the government effectively needs to tell them to integrate, or else. It would be hard to imagine anything more calculated to promote alienation from the government and its idea of 'Britishness'.