The New Islamophobia
By
R. Ebrahimi
14 August, 2003
During
a trip I met a female American tourist. It was the time of hostage taking
of Western tourists in the Philippines by members of Islamist commando
Abu-Sayaf. This young lady asked me if I was feeling responsible
I didnt understand what she wanted to insinuate. Responsible for
what and for whom? She then explained to me: as a Muslim, you
should feel responsible for what your coreligionists commit. It seems
normal, specially for someone sensible. I had a very hard time
believing what I was hearing. I, the Iranian child of the Middle East,
living thousands of kilometers away from Philippines, and frankly having
no knowledge of this country, should feel responsible (this is nothing
to take lightly) about what Abu-Sayaf was committing there in the name
of Islam. Regardless of who I am or what my beliefs are. My being born
Muslim should be enough to engage my person and my responsibility.
-Yes, I feel responsible,
I replied. This seemed to satisfy her, she was surely thinking that
she was having a sensible Muslim as a rare specimen in front of her.
-And you, do you
feel responsible? I asked her. She frowned; she didnt seem to
grasp my question. Responsible for what? She asked me in turn.
-Of what your coreligionists
committed indeed, Inquisition, Crusades, the Saint-Bartholomew massacre,
colonization, genocides, slavery, serfdom, Napoleonian Wars, First World
War, Holocaust, the 60 million of human casualties of the Second World
War, atomic bomb, Vietnam, and the assassination of Iraq, to cite only
the most atrocious.
She thought it was
not similar. Indeed it was not, because among Muslims there is no individuality.
We only form a single fabric, although we are more than one billion
in number. An act committed by one of us is enough to accuse us all.
Thats the least of what people like her think.
And this interesting
dialogue took place long before the events of September 11, before Islam
became unofficially but openly the vociferous Nemesis of our beautiful
Western values of democracy and human rights. Something must have replaced
the deceased Communism. Another negative pole must have been found to
justify political acts, military actions and wars against terrorism.
Worlds polarization must have regenerated.
We are well and
truly living the new Islamophobia. On both sides of the Atlantic, demagogic
voices, terrifying of violence scourge Islam, the so-called Islamic
civilization, and Muslims. These voices dangerously recall anti-Semitic
lampoons of late 19th Century or even Mussolini and Hitlers racist
discourses. It makes one believe that the world retains no historical
lessons.
Mr. Silvio Berlusconi,
the present chief of the Italian State declared that Muslim civilization
is inferior to Europe and its history. Berlusconi is occupying
now the seat that half a century ago was Mussolinis. And honorable
American professor Samuel P. Huntington echoes his clash of civilizations.
Can these levelheaded personalities give us to begin with a definition
of what they call Islamic civilization? A Senegalese, in
the depth of sub-Saharan Africa, an Arab from the Middle East and an
Indonesian of the farthest Far East are members of the same civilization
on the pretext that those among them who practice Islam turn toward
Mecca to pray? Again, there is no individuality recognized in Muslims.
Muslims became pawns
of a supranational and supra-individual concept: Islam (or Islamism),
a very poorly understood concept because of its actual absurdity, supposed
to regroup all Muslims under a single enormous label. I would even not
evoke what Muslims brought to the world; I will not talk about mathematics
or medicine, I would not like to lower myself to the level of engaging
in comparison of civilizations just as if it was a question
of height measurement or a Hollywood rating of the best commercial productions
in film.
An Italian journalist
named Oriana Fallaci just published a book, Anger and Pride.
This book hits records of sale in Italy and Spain. Ms. Fallaci carries
out a strongly grotesque amalgam between Muslims, delinquent immigrants,
and terrorists and pretends to uncover the real face of Islam. She exploits
all hyper-mediatic themes of our sad era: terrorism, insecurity in Europe,
prostitution, and fundamentalism; she blames them on Islam, incites
to racial hatred, and thus sells books. She pretends that Muslims urinate
in baptisteries and multiply like rats. This book has been published
and sold. Imagine for a single instant if a personality as much enlightened
as Ms. Fallaci holds similar talks about Jews. She would be accused
of being an anti-Semite or a revisionist, and its highly probable
that her book would not be published at all. Trials would justly shower
down upon her. But when racism and revisionism target Islam and Muslims,
it apparently does not disturb anyone. It is rare for intellectuals
to raise their voices against it. Does a cause need a holocaust to be
intellectualized?
Islamophobia has
evidently a much harsher and more repulsive face in the United States
by conjugated action of latent ignorance of the American People on this
subject, Zionist glorification and the events of September 11. In the
United States, being a Muslim often equates with exclusively being a
Palestinian terrorist (if supposedly they are 10,000, what do they represent
in a total Muslim population of 1.1 billion?) In this country, even
the evocation of an eventual Palestinian people and their sufferings
is politically incorrect and can result in your being a participant
of anti-Semitism and subsequently of anti-Americanism. It happens daily
during political meetings or academic conferences. The American alternative
press reports it every day. The mass culture which wants Islam to be
equal to violence, terrorism and peace refusal is reinforced by the
silence of intellectual and political authorities to refute such categorizations.
Misinformation amplifies this phenomenon. The Arab-Israeli conflict
is reported by mainstream media (often right-winged and conservative)
through an exclusive siding with one specific partys viewpoint:
Israel.
One of the techniques
commonly used by Islamophobes is the arbitrary reference to Koranic
texts, taken out of their contexts and presented to masses to demonstrate
a so-called intimate and organic relation between Islam and violence.
An American personality, whose confession and political orientations
have no importance here, appeared recently on the radio with many references
to Koran in order to demonstrate that Muslims Book encourages
Jihad (implying crusade in this case), expansionism, and consequently
violence and war. I could also devote myself to this idiotic and malicious
game by citing such reference to the Torah (Deuteronomy 7, 23 &
24), which uses even more extreme terms than Koran:
But the LORD
thy God shall deliver those nations unto thee, and shall destroy them
with a mighty destruction, until they be exterminated. And he shall
deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name
from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee,
until thou have exterminated them.
Taken out of its context the above phrase sounds like nothing more than
an incitation to genocide.
On the CNN TV channel,
a very mediatic American priest maintained, with many references taken
out of the Koran too, that a religion like Islam not recognizing womens
rights can not be fair and peaceful. I could, in reply to this honorable
lover of the Christ and of its apostles, evoke this injunction announced
by the Apostle Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians (chapter
11):
The head of
the woman is the man (
). Therefore if a woman is not covered,
let her also be shaved. (
) A man indeed ought not to have his
head covered, being the image and glory of God; but the woman is the
glory of the man. (
) Neither was the man created for the sake
of the woman, but the woman for the sake of the man. For this reason
(
), the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head.
All racist discourses
based on religion are interchangeable.
Muslims have today enemies called amalgamation, ignorance, misinformation,
propaganda, intolerance and demagogy. The repeated attacks of the media
and of some dark and repulsive personalities like Mrs. Fallaci, who
make themselves out to be intellectual elites of our era bring me out
of my reserve. One should not be surprised if confronting such a perception
shared by so many non-Muslims, being Christian, Jewish, or even Hindu,
would in retaliation inspire Muslim youth of the four corners of the
world to sustain fundamentalist organizations: the only haven validating
their identity.
Meditate on this
simple fact: in Gujarat and in Ramllah, men and women are assassinated
because their only crime is being born a Muslim, not a Hindu or a Jew.
In Italy a book sells based on its only merit of abusiveness and despise
towards and for Muslims. Without an intent of downplaying events, victims
of what is called Islamophobia incomparably outnumber those
of the Twin Towers or those of Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem. And all
this seems to occur in an atmosphere of general indifference.