Philos

Folks,

We hear a lot about ‘Islamophobia’ in the news these days, to the extend that it is now becoming the subject of serious academic debate. But what is Islamophobia?

The scholar Abou El Fadl is a fellow in Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he gives us some insights into this newest of Western phobias.

He says “It is important to look at a word like Islamophobia and try to understand why some people try to establish it as a part of social discourse and others are resisting it adamantly and vehemently.”

El Fadl points out that after the events of 9/11, there was a huge surge of Western publications apparently seeking to link this event to Islam as a whole. Titles appeared, such as ‘The Truth about Islam’, ‘Islam Revealed’, ‘The Trouble with Islam’, ‘What Went Wrong?’ ‘Islam Exposed’, ‘Politically Correct Islam’.” According to El Fadl, these authors had one thing in common; they sought to show that Islam is inherently immoral and depraved, and can never coexist with the ‘good’ West. The books found a wide readership, and a movement of what can only be described as a hatred and fear of all things Islam has grown up amongst us in the Western world.

This phobic thinking has gained such strength, that there many who want Islam to be subjugated by Western powers and (with astonishing affrontery IMHO), that Muslims should even be saved from their own faith. Some Muslims have welcomed a renewed interest in Islam, thinking that it might be the beginning of understanding and dialogue, but El Fadl points out that nothing could be farther from the truth. With sadness, El Fadl shows us that we are witnessing the resurgence of an age old human problem – religious and cultural bigotry.

El Fadl explores the psychology of mass phobia, invoked by the word ‘Islamophobia’ and shows how this word could be replaced with ‘boogeyman’. The word puts all Muslims together in one lump, reducing the whole concept of Muslims and Islam to a single threatening concept. However El Fadl does not regard the use of this word as entirely negative. I agree with him. Using the ‘phobic’ word also brings a backlash onto those it describes. A ‘phobic’ person is not usually thought to be thinking rationally or morally, but to be in the grip of a neurosis, a distortion of reality about invented fears, and I think that this is precisely what is happening in this instance. When we describe someone as an Islamophobe we are not talking about Islam; we are talking about neurosis.

Conspiracy theory.

One form of this neurosis surfaces as conspiracy theory. Some Westerners believe that Muslims have some overarching plan to take over the world, in the name of Islam, whereas the truth is that Muslims think of themselves as hopelessly divided, and almost terminally disempowered.

El Fadl finds this Western conspiracy view to be ‘vulgar’. I find it preposterous. To raise the whole of Islam to the level of a threat and a danger to the West is to ‘empower the powerful to erase the powerless’. We see this happening in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the current threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This kind of Western thinking includes the view that Muslims are little more than savages and should not attain self determination and the power to protect their nations. It is nothing more than the resurgence of colonial imperialist thinking, albeit in a changed and modern context.

For El Fadl, the most devious and problematic feature of the Western phobia is the belief that Westerners must have the power to divide Muslims into moderate (Western friendly) Muslims and those that we ‘ought to erase’. This is almost textbook imperialist thinking, and raises a great challenge to the Islamic nations, in a time when their very existence is coming under threat.

P.

Note – Quotes taken from El Fadl’s lecture to the American University in Cairo, March 6, 2006.

premjan

Colliding ideologies may need to fear each other until a way is found to reconcile their contradictions.