Actions or sentiments against Islam, commonly known as Islamophobia, as a problem, is often argued to be a rational choice by the stereotypical media coverage of Islam and Muslims, even though it points to the symptom rather than the root cause.
Islamophobia re-emerged in public discourses and part of state policies in the post-Cold War period and built upon latent Islamophobia that is sustained in the long history of Orientalist and stereotypical representation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam itself. The book What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State, edited by NarzaninMassoumi, Tom Mills, and David Miller offers a unique contribution to how best to define and locate the problem of demonising Islam and Muslims in the contemporary period. The three scholars provide a more critical and structural approach to the subject by offering what they call the “five pillars of Islamophobia”, which are the following: (1) the institutions and machinery of the state; (2) the far-right, incorporating the counter-jihad movement; (3) the neoconservative movement; (4) the transnational Zionist movement; and (5) the assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left and the new atheist movement.
A UK-based research group correctly situates Islamophobia within existing power structures and examines the forces that consciously produce anti-Muslim discourses, the Islamophobia industry, within a broad political agenda rather than the singular focus on the media. Islamophobia emerges from the “Clash of Civilisations” ideological warriors and not merely as a problem of media stereotyping, representation, and over-emphasis on the Muslim subject.
Islamophobia is an ideological construct that emerged in the post-Cold War era with the intent to rally the Western world and the American society at a moment of perceived fragmentation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a vastly and rapidly changing world system. Islamophobia, or the threat of Islam, is the ingredient, as postulated in Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” thesis that is needed to affirm the Western self-identify after the end of the Cold War and a lack of a singular threat or purpose through which to define, unify, and claim the future for the West. Thus, Islamophobia is the post-Cold War ideology to bring about a renewed purpose and crafting of the Western and American self.
From Proto-Islamophobia to the Cold War
The antecedent to contemporary Islamophobia repertoire maybe traced to early medieval Christian representation of Islam, Prophet Muhammad ﷺand the Holy Qur’an, which at the time was part of the Church’s attempt at providing an explanation for the rapid rise of the new religion and loss of territories.
While this early period is important, nevertheless I am hesitant and careful not to use the term Islamophobia to refer to or describe the early formative period of Islam and its relations with the Byzantine and Persian Empires, on the one hand, and the rapid Muslim expansion into territories that up to that point belonged to both powers. Methodologically and theoretically, the period should be studied while taking into accounts all the complex variables at play, including the construction of a negative image of Islam and Muslims that continues to have utility in the current period.
Critically, seventh century Byzantine Empire Christianity was, at best, a fractured enterprise and several marginalised Christian sects in the Levant, North Africa and Spain struck amicable relations with the newly arriving Muslims and going as far as participating in war efforts on their side (Levin 2011). This was a function of pre-Islamic Christian contestation centring on the nature of Jesus and the elevation of Christianity into the status of a state religion. Adding to the internally existing debate regarding the nature of Jesus, Islam’s arrival into the Levant, North Africa and Spain in a short period challenged the existing Christian narrative of the world and their place in it, which required a scripture-based explanation. Theologically and politically, the leaders of the Church had to provide a scripturally grounded explanation for the massive loss of territory to Muslims, as well as the sizable Christians’ conversion to Islam in these vast territories.
For some Christians, the arrival of Muslims was viewed through the Apocalyptic literature, which was deployed “to explain the traumatic situation in which they now found themselves and so to provide a model of hope for the future, extending the promise of deliverance to those who stood firm” (Levin 2011). In this view, the Muslims were cast as the “barbarian tyrants” that will be ultimately destroyed and the faithful rewarded. Early Christian views of Islam and Muslims were exclusively and internally constructed with limited or no actual engagement with Muslims, be it theologically, culturally or philosophically.
Even in areas that came under Muslim rule, the early contact between Christian and Muslims was limited and not at all theological in nature despite some references to debates taking place during this period. Thus, we find persistent negative or distorted representations ranging from referring to them as “the scourge of God’s fury”, “pagans”, “Antichrist”, as well as portraying Muslims as a type of Christian “heretics” due to their affirmation of Jesus’ Prophethood but rejection of the trinity (Levin 2011).
Another set of negative images focused on the person of Muhammadﷺ, the Prophet of Islam, and referring to him as “imposter”, “violent”, and “lustful”, which were attributes fitting into an already constructed narrative about the distorted origins of Islam and Muslims (Gunny 2004). The early depiction of Islam and Muslims persisted and found more support in Western Europe during and post Crusades periods, which then gets projected and packaged into the negative images of the Turk during the Ottoman period (Setton 1992).
Formative and early relations between Muslims and Christian around the 7th and 8th centuries are complex, multifaceted (Penn 2015) but it is important to note that history is selectively mined by the Islamophobia industry to push forth a distorted agenda. Contemporary studies on Islamophobia must take stock of the expansive anti-Muslim repertoire of the early medieval period and the ways that it gets re-deployed to create historical un-disrupted continuities in Muslim-Christian hostilities to inform, regulate and construct modern discriminatory policies or affirm a clash of civilisation worldview. The approach to this early period should examine all the sources that bear on the subject and not to exclusively use or over-emphasise Western Christianity sources that represent one dimension of the over-all Christian-Muslim relations. Michael Philip Penn’s work, When Christians First Met Muslims, is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the complex multifaceted nature of Christian-Muslim relations and engagement in the Levant and North Africa (Penn 2015).
Locating Islamophobia in history is part of the theorisation underway by many scholars in the field and has many iteration and beginnings depending on the period and historical context in consideration. The “Muslim Question and the New Christendom: Medieval Geopolitical Theologies and the End of Liberalism”, a critical and unpublished paper in the field presented by Professor Adnan Husain on 22nd April 2017 at Berkeley’s IRDP 8th Annual International Islamophobia Conference, introduces an early historical examination of Islamophobia (Husain 2017).
The paper theorised what Husain calls proto-Islamophobia, dating it to the period of the Crusades. Adnan argues, “The new politics of the far right engages in a fantasy of medieval returns and revives Christendom as an ideal politico-cultural identity”. Furthermore, he states that the current Islamophobic trend “recapitulates a central dynamic of the crusading era that created the conditions for the construction of Christendom and its re-ordering and reform through persecution of heretics, Jews, and Muslims within Europe”. The key element for the Islamophobia field is that Adnan’s work “examines the conscious and structural interconnections between medieval paradigms and re-emerging modern realities”, which “allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics at work in contemporary Islamophobia and its political logic”.
Here, Adnan’s work takes the scholarship to an earlier period, thus calling it proto-Islamophobia and locating its emergence to possibly as early as the 11th century of the common era.
Similarly, Professor Sophia Rose Arjana’s book, Muslims in the Western Imagination, traces the construction of a feared and monster image of Muslims far back and much earlier than the current events cycle. In her book, Arjana maintains that “an imaginary Islam that has been shaped over many centuries” and not just as an immediate outcome of the events of 9/11 and the responses to it (Arjana 2015).
Arjana’s book is not directly interrogating Islamophobia as the main theme but rather examining the long entanglement of Western discourses with a constructed image of a Muslim and Islam monster that serves as the locus for fear and resultant demonization, a much-needed aspect to mobilising political projects of self-defence and military campaigns. Here, the dating of the phenomenon of Islamophobia into a longer engagement with an imaginary feared Muslim that is not an outcome or a product of contemporary events is an important undertaking.
Taking a de-colonial and world history approach to the Islamophobia, Ramón Grosfoguel locates the emergence of this phenomenon to the critical events arising from 1492 and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain and the “discovery” of the new world. In a very widely used article in de-colonial studies, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences”, Grosfoguel defines and locates Islamophobia in the emergence of the modern world and centred on a process of “genocides and epistemicides” committed against indigenous populations, including Muslims and Jews (Grosfoguel 2010).
Grosfoguel argues that Islamophobia is rooted in the knowledge production of the West, which produces the Eurocentric worldviews that are inherently founded upon racial demarcation at the level of the human. Ramón states: “Epistemic racism in the form of epistemic Islamophobia is a foundational and constitutive logic of the modern/colonial world and of its legitimate forms of knowledge production”. Ramón’s field of Islamophobia Studies originates in l492 and locates the problem in the formation of the modern Eurocentric world with all the erasures, genocides and sub-humanness that gave birth to it.
In another article, The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction, Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants provide a roadmap to Islamophobia from a de-colonial vintage point. The article provides four different ways to think and conceptualise the approach to Islamophobia: (1) Islamophobia as a form of racism in a world-historical perspective; (2) Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism; (3) Islamophobia as Orientalism; and (4) Islamophobia as epistemic racism.
Grosfoguel and Mielants state “that Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people is not only manifested in the labour market, education, public sphere, global war against terrorism, or the global economy, but also in the epistemological battleground about the definition of the priorities in the world today” (Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006).
The engagement with the Islamophobia phenomena without the actual use of the term itself would be easily ascertainable in the work of Franz Fannon, a West Indian psychoanalyst and social philosopher, who wrote several important works focused on the Muslim colonial subject in the post-WWII period. Fanon’s work includes Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Fanon 2008; Black Skin, White Masks) which provided “a multidisciplinary analysis of the effect of colonialism on racial consciousness”, using his work under French colonial administration.
Fanon’s most widely known book and published before his death is Les Damnés de la Terre (Fanon 2004; The Wretched of the Earth), a work that served as a foundational text for de-colonial studies but may be argued as an early work to examine the impacts of Islamophobia without naming it as such. Fanon’s experience and theoretical contribution in the field of colonial studies formed in Algeria, the Global South, may be considered the precursor to the emergence of the term Islamophobia and the treatment of Muslims and Islam in the Global North. As an enterprise, the colonial project was constructed around Islamophobic epistemic and sought to negate and dehumanise the Muslim subject to rationalise and embark upon a civilisational programme and domination.
The post-WWII period witnessed a coalescing of the post-colonial struggles where Islamic oriented parties and organisations took part in the effort to drive colonial forces out, but played a secondary role to nationalist forces in the post-colonial period. Furthermore, the emergence of the anti-Soviet Union global coalition after WWII and the discovery of large oil deposits in the Arabian Peninsula determined the Muslim majority states to embrace the Western alliance and place Islam in its service.
In the fight against Communism and Arab Nationalism, the Islamic groups and sects aligned themselves with the United States and Western powers. Thus, Islam itself was mobilised in public discourses across the Muslim world to be pro-capitalist, pro-market economy and vehemently anti-communist and anti-nationalist. Islamophobia as a state policy was of limited utility and only emerged in a controlled manner in relations to Palestine but nothing on a grand scale.
In reality, the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia’s Wahabbism, and Sufi groups operated within the same sphere and stuck a strategic alliance to oppose Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the Arab nationalist movement and the Arab socialist/communist regimes and groups. In retrospect, the 1960s and 70s witnessed an abundance of publications, books, articles, and media materials that focused on Muslims and Islam debating communism and socialism, which was often directed at consolidating public sentiments and support around the state’s already crafted pro-Western policies.
The period between 1945 and 1979 was very limited in anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourses or Islamophobia, with the bulk of policymakers, political elites and media discourses focusing on the threat of Arab nationalism and communism and not Islam per say. Here, the stereotypical content of the discourse was particularly anti-Arab and heavily anti-Palestinian while deploying a plethora of Orientalist imagery to rationalize the deployed foreign policy and media coverage, while Islam itself was just in the background and not centrestage