Understanding Islamophobia
Defining Islamophobia is a complex project, and one place to start is in the work of Khaled Beydoun’s three-part framework:
- Private Islamophobia – the fear, suspicion, and violent targeting of Muslims by individuals or private actors. This animus is generally carried forward by nonstate actors’ use of religious or racial slurs, mass protests or rallies, or violence against Muslim subjects.
- Structural Islamophobia – the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of institutions manifested through the enactment and advancement of policies built on the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat while framed in a facially neutral fashion. Such policies disproportionately target Muslim subjects and disparately jeopardize, chill, and curtail their civil liberties.
- Dialectical Islamophobia – the process by which state policies and popular media shape, legitimize, and endorse prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, stereotypes, and tropes of Islam and Muslims widely held by private citizens, commonly during sociopolitical moments such as the protracted “War on Terror” or immigrant bans targeting Muslim-majority nations, which embolden private violence toward bona fide and perceived Muslim subjects.
In addition to Beydoun’s definitions above, it is important to highlight three prevailing tropes of Islamophobia common today, which are the characterization of Islam as:
- Inherently violent, alien, and inassimilable with current society
- Correlative with a propensity for terrorism or misogyny, etc.
- Civilization’s antithesis, perpetuated by government structures and private citizens
What Islamophobia Is Not
- Critical questions about, constructive criticisms of, and scholarly analyses of Islam and Muslims are not Islamophobic.
- Denouncing crimes by individuals who may identify as Muslim is not Islamophobic.
- Criticizing the actions of Muslim politicians, Muslim bureaucrats, or the governments of Muslim-majority countries is not Islamophobic so long as the criticisms focus on the actions and policies of political officials in their capacity as government agents, and not on their presumed religious affiliation or motivations.
Strategies for Countering Islamophobia
The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding created this video called “4 Data-Driven Ways to combat Islamophobia.” The four take aways from the video are:
- Building coalitions with others who are impacted by discrimination or marginalized is a strong influence on countering bias against Muslims.
- Work to demystify Islam; knowing even a little about Islam lowers one’s likelihood to propagate Islamophobia. Consider what new book, film, speaker, or other form of learning you can do to learn a little bit more.
- Do more than interfaith bridge building; typically those engaged in interfaith work have a lot in common and finding ways to connect with those across different race, class, and political experiences is a strong combatant to Islamophobia.
- Make Muslim friends; having a relationship with a Muslim links strongly to lower likelihood of propagating Islamophobia.
This resource of Frequently Asked Questions and Answers About Islam provides further basic information to counter Islamophobic tropes and assumptions.
Some examples of Islamophobic rhetoric with more nuanced and fair responses:
| Rhetoric | Nuanced Response |
|---|---|
| Islam is static, monolithic, and can’t adapt to new realities. Islam doesn’t share common values with other major faiths or the West. | Islam is an Abrahamic faith that shares Abrahamic values with which I may not personally agree or espouse. |
| Muslims are terrorists. They are archaic, barbaric, and irrational. | Muslims have a long history of rational, scientific, economic, and cultural advancements and debates. Religious injunctions that value education play a vital role in influencing Muslims in various fields. |
| Muslims are violent extremists who hate us and our freedom. | Extremists who justify their crimes against humanity ignore Islamic scholarship, scriptural context, and principles of interpretation and application. |
| Muslims want to take us back to the 7th Century! | Many Muslims value understanding the context of Revelation and devotional or spiritual acts. |
How Discrimination and Prejudice are Deployed Systemically
Systems produce what they are designed to. A failure to address the core issues within a system will inevitably result in a continuation of the intended outcomes. Here are three players at work in systemic discrimination and prejudice:
Promoters – Individuals and institutions who opportunistically use Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of systemic discrimination to advance an agenda, e.g., seeking office, justifying policies, for-profit media outlets, etc.
Enablers – Individuals and institutions adopting or amplifying discriminatory rhetoric from Promoters, e.g., news outlets, influencers, and social media networks. Receivers may be genuinely open-minded with questions but overcome by propaganda. Others are close-minded, validating their preconceived biases.
Receivers – Individuals and institutions who can push back against systemic discrimination but choose not to, e.g., political figures fearing the electoral consequences of being perceived as too close to Muslims, Jews, etc.