Politically correct liberals never miss any opportunity to join Muslim leaders and writers to howl down anything that they perceive as anti-Islamic. The term 'Islamophobia' has come in handy for them to silence even fair criticism of Islam or Islamic practices while they dub strident and even violent reactions of Muslims as aberrations or as actions of the fundamentalist fringe. A recent op-ed piece in an Indian newspaper has once again brought the issue of Islamophobia to the limelight of public debate as it draws on the culture of victimhood so deep-rooted in the Muslim psyche.
The writer of the article is doing exactly what he feels is inappropriate to do: "conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy." The 'anti-Muslim conspiracy' is packaged in a different brand name so fashionable among Muslims leaders and their politically correct liberal supporters: Islamophobia. The community would have been served well if the author had highlighted issues that can allow the Muslim masses to do introspection and free them from this entrenched notion of being under siege. Portraying Muslims as victims of somebody's prejudices only helps perpetuate the siege mentality.
True, many non-Muslims everywhere have lot of prejudices about Muslims just as many Muslims everywhere have prejudices about non-Muslims. But presenting some of the instances of such prejudices as representing a form of irrational fear (phobia) goes over the top. Islamophobia is also a convenient tool to gag critics of radical Islam. As the British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (who is a Muslim) says: "all too often Islamophobia is used to blackmail society." If somebody fears radical Islam and opposes Islam as an ideology of political control, she is likely to face the charge of being Islamophobic.
Take the Burqa issue, for example, that promises to become a major issue of cultural identity for Muslims, while the black veil that is increasingly becoming popular among the Muslims even in the Western societies is rightly viewed as a symbol primitive gender inequality and suppression of women. What is wrong if the French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for banning wearing burqa in public in his country which cherishes all those secular Enlightenment values of human dignity, freedom and gender equality? If the same set of values prompted a British Minister to walk out of a Muslim wedding reception in protest against segregation of men and women attending the party and thus to highlight the primitive culture of gender discrimination, can we call his action Islamophobic? Should be tolerate all primitive practices in the name of accommodating the sentiments of the communities practising them? Suppose, an upper caste Hindu hosts a marriage reception where upper caste and lower caste guests are segregated. Is it ok and don't you find any problem attending that marriage?
The article refers to the expulsion of Tariq Ramadan as an adviser to the Dutch city of Rotterdam (whose Mayor is incidentally a Muslim) after he hosted a weekly TV show on Press TV which is financed by the Iranian regime that has brutally suppressed opposition protestors challenging the re-election of Ahmadinejad as Iran's president. Ramadan would not have been appointed as advisor to the city in the first place and Ahmed Aboutaleb would not have been elected its Mayor if Islamophobia in the Netherlands had been very strong. Another incident that the author mentions is the call of a right-wing party in Switzerland for a ban on the construction of minarets in that country. The party has only launched a signature campaign against the minarets and not resorted to any violent action that critics of Islam often face. We should not forget that the Dutch society turned suspicious about Islam after the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was hacked to death by a Muslim immigrant in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004 for his making a short film critical of Islam. Violent protestors in Pakistan burnt the British queen in effigy when Salman Rushdie was bestowed knighthood. A group of Muslim protestors recently resorted to violence to protest against a Kolkata-based newspaper for publishing an article that criticised religious intolerance including that of Islam. Danish cartoons of the Prophet of Islam led to violent protests by Muslims in many countries.
The term Islamophobia may be useful to intimidate anyone who wants to criticise Islam but it indirectly lends credence to primitive Islamic practices that strengthen the anti-Islamic prejudices. Islamophobia is not a self-evident and uncritical idea as there is no shortage of writers, Muslims included, who have dismissed as false the accusation that there is Islamophobia in the West. Those brandishing the Islamophobia word cannot be oblivious to the equally strong charge that many Western leaders are indulging in Islamophilia, a charge that is not wholly unfounded. In 2007, the UN passed a resolution calling on all nations to 'combat defamation of all religions, Islam and Muslims in particular'. Earlier, the British government, in a bid to appease Muslim leaders, passed controversial legislation banning 'incitement to religious hatred'.
British writer Kenan Malik says obnoxious arguments of people like Canadian writer Mark Steyn (who said 'if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em') no more make Western societies institutionally Islamophobic than the actions of Mohammed Atta (who piloted the plane into the World Trade Centre) make Islam an institutionally violent religion. An international public opinion survey conducted by Globscan in 2007, more than 75 per cent of people in Britain felt that there was common ground between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The politically correct liberals who make a hue and cry about what they see as Islamophobia in the West were not heard expressing their outrage when a group of Muslim residents of the Malaysian city of Sha Alam on August 28 marched from a local mosque to the government office there carrying a severed head of a cow to protest against the government plans to relocate a 150-year old Hindu temple to their locality. The Allah Akbar-chanting protestors put the cow head at the gate of the office and spat on it and there was no response from the police personnel deployed there. This happened in an Islamic country often upheld as a model of tolerance, where the 32-year old Muslim model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno is facing Islamic caning punishment for the crime of drinking a beer, where two years ago, the Muslim-born woman Lina Joy's bid to convert to Christianity to marry her Christian boyfriend (inter-faith marriage is not allowed in Malaysia) failed, and where the Hindu woman Revathi Masoosai was forcibly separated from her Hindu husband and infant child and sent to an Islamic rehabilitation camp just because she was born a Muslim and therefore barred from leaving Islam.
It is puzzling to see bleeding-heart liberals keeping their silence about anti-Western sentiments in Islamic countries. There was no outcry in Islamic countries when Iranian president Ahamedinejad called for eliminating Israel. It was not a call from a crazy journalist like Mark Steyn but one from the president of a powerful Islamic nation.
3 comments:
It is because we feel secure under this secular penumbra that we do not see clearly as to what is happening outside of it. This Islamophobia is a minor stuff that the world may not dwell on for too long.
I am happy though that there are people like you who see the world like it really is.
Kudos!
Thanks Haroun. Often our intellectuals do not look at the world as it really is but live in their own fantasy world where everything is what it ought to be. Islamophobia is one such fantasy. No Muslim scholar worth the salt is known to have condemned the Taliban demolition of the Buddha statue in Afghanistan.
Noted some new comments that you added.
It is a known fact that freedom cannot be applied selectively. Let me jot down some of my observations on these matters.
No one was surprised when Sarkozy came under tremendous attack from not only fanatic mullahs, but also from fringe elements and many people in India as well who consider themselves champions of secularism. They also argued it as an assault on religious freedom.Is it not noteworthy that Sarkozy argued against burqa on the grounds that it not only allowed for public display of religious symbols as well as demeaning to women. We all know that France, the epitome of a free and secular society does not allow public display of any religious symbols - including Christianity in schools or other public instituitions.
Most of those who attavk Sarkozy never protested against authoritarian Islamic in Iran or saudi Arabia when they forced women to adopt burqa and put severe restrictions on women in the public sphere. Nor did we hear any voices of protest when women in Afghanistan and kashmir were coerced into wearing burqas and hijabs at the point of a gun. Women who defied the dress code imposed by Taliban had acid thrown on them while many others faced vilolent attacks in public. If the argument is that Islamic countries countries should be allowed to define their own modes of government and moral codes, Western countries also have a right to define secularism in whatever manner they choose.
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