Islamophobia: a new instrument to taint Muslims
Monday, 17 March 2008
Maswood Alam Khan
LAST Thursday leaders of the world's Muslim states while attending in Dhakar, the Senegalese capital, the triennial convention of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), vehemently criticised a burgeoning trend of "Islamophobia" in the West. Delegates of the OIC, a 57-nation body founded in 1969 in reaction to an arson attack against Al-Aqsa Mosque, also pledged to combat extremism and blamed a handful of Muslims the purport of whose extremist activities has given rise to such a phobia.
Adolph Hitler was a democratically elected leader of Germany; he took captaincy of the nation in the first place with a seed of vengeance seated deep inside his psyche against the Jews of the world. He studied history day in, day out in quest for a ploy that could make Germans' skins get goose bumps out of a phobia at the very thought of some people he would portray as enemies. He delved into every branch of military science to master the art of firing zeal among German soldiers. He knew his soldiers must practice their battling lessons against some soft targets before embarking upon his grander design of invading the whole world. The soft target he had chosen was the community having their faith in Judaism and he left no stone unturned to motivate every single German soldier to harbour anti-Semitism---a prejudice and hatred towards Jews that ultimately gave birth to Holocaust under Hitler's Nazi Germany, the most infamous pogrom in the history of brutalities that killed six million Jews.
Hitler was almost successful in translating his dream of conquering the world by invasion into reality. Had he been a little patient and eschewed excesses like wholesale killing of Jews, intensive bombardments of London in September, 1940 and persuaded Japan not to bombard Pearl Harbour in December, 1941 in favour of a long term global strategy of cornering the Jews by introducing a slow, steady and silent xenophobic culture against Judaism, history would perhaps taken a different pathway and Jews all over the world would have been totally extinct religiously, politically and economically by this time.
Hitlers of modern times have got a very valuable lesson from World War II: "Don't attack enemies blatantly; rather send to their camp a few spies who would follow their religion, wear their garbs, speak their language and motivate them to indulge in a passion that would bare them as savage animals to the eyes of the world. Now you can kill your enemies who are already branded as animals and who people have developed a phobia about."
The term Islam has of late been branded synonymous with terrorism in the western world the way Semitism was viewed in the early part of the last century as an alien faith of exploiters whose only job was to grab commerce and wealth all over the world, a form of economic terrorism.
As a new phrase born out of religious bigotry, Islamophobia has gripped the whole western world. The moment a westerner hears about Islam or meets one wearing beard and turban bearing a first name like Muhammad fears send a chill down his/her spine. Such fear is not totally unjustified because most of the terrorism activities, especially with the September 11, 2001 attacks, have probably been carried out predominantly by Muslims led by people like Osama Bin Laden.
Islamophobia has gripped the Muslims, no less. Nowadays Muslim parents in our country while choosing names of their newborns opt for even Christian names or Muslim names with twisted spellings or any other nomenclatures that must not sound Islamic or Arabic as parents are concerned about their children's future safety when they would be travelling, lest their passports bearing Muslim names arouse suspicion.
American journalist Stephen Schwartz has defined Islamophobia as the condemnation of the entirety of Islam and its history as extremist, denying the existence of a moderate Muslim majority, regarding Islam as a problem for the world, treating conflicts involving Muslims as necessarily their own fault, insisting that Muslims make changes to their religion, and inciting war against Islam as a whole.
Islamophobia contributed to a great extent to the practice of discriminating against Muslims by stripping them of opportunities in economic, social and public life in the west and to the perception that Islam has no values in common with other noble cultures, is inferior to any other religion, and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion leaving Muslims around the world feeling aggrieved and misunderstood, fearing for their physical safety, and, bereft of their rights.
Two questions should gnaw the conscience of the Muslim world: Are Muslims to take the blame for leaving such a negative impression about Islam with the non-Muslim people? Is it the end result of some far-reaching conspiracy hatched by those who have been stunned by the unprecedented renaissance of a comparatively new faith which is only 1500 years old? The answer, to my humble opinion, is yes to both the puzzles.
We as Muslims have failed to educate ourselves with the truth of Islam. We have distanced ourselves from two fundamental teachings of Islam: education in the true sense of the term and compassion for humans irrespective of their colour, creed and religion. Our last prophet advised us to travel all the way even to China in quest for knowledge and Islam has taught us to show utmost compassion for the helpless, for the orphans, for the women and even for the enemies.
In the name of education we are depriving students studying in madrasas of the most essential knowledge about science and modernity. We as parents think if we only can make our children learn to recite the whole Koran by rote our roads to haven are paved. We believe that Arabic is the only language we have to communicate in when we would be dwelling in our havens; so we shut the doors for our children to learn any other foreign language.
As regards to compassion many of us sympathise with a young guy who in the name of Jihad commits suicide and some of us feel ecstatic when an unarmed American dies from a bomb blast knowing full well that suicide in Islam is completely 'haraam' (forbidden) and relishing killing of an unarmed man is sadism which has been repeatedly termed as un-Islamic and sinful in our Koran and Hadith.
Islam has of course taught us not to idle away time as sitting ducks for enemies to swoop on. Before fighting back against oppressors we have to evaluate our strength, our firepower, first. If our prowess as warriors is not enough to outmatch that of the oppressors (who may be deemed enemies) our wisdom should dictate us to be a little patient while spending our time and resources to exhort our leaders for good governance, enrich our knowledge about science and whet our appetite for diplomacy.
The long list of Nobel laureates on physics, chemistry and medicine is occupied by mostly Jews. Why? Because, with six millions of their brethren and sisters ruthlessly killed by the hands wielding guns they reinvented the truth that 'knowledge is the only power that ultimately emboldens the firepower'. Do millions of Muslims need to commit suicide or be killed before they take this historical lesson on the prowess of knowledge?
Islam as a religion had gained astronomical popularity especially among the oppressed who were discriminated against for ages---hapless earthlings like helpless slaves who were deemed purchasable commodities and wretched beings like dependent women who were meant only for procreation, at a time when the society was distinctly divided between upper and lower classes, between the ruler and the ruled, between the rich and the servile and, between the masters and the slaves. Islam ushered in a fresh philosophy that all humans are equal, when humanity was at stake, when a newborn girl was buried alive and when a grandson took his revenge on the grandchild of an enemy of his grandfather.
One and a half billion people, roughly one-fifth of the world population, are adherents of Islam. This huge community of Muslims, if they could remain united, would have made the hegemonic lords of the world die of insanity or insomnia. But, Muslims---unlike Jews---are divided into inimical sects like Sunnis and Shias and many other groups separated by historical, cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries. Muslims so divided are further pulverised by dogmas, fanaticism, misdirected education and narrow vision making their young children easy targets to be indoctrinated from their early age with misinterpreted teachings of Islam. A young Muslim so indoctrinated commits suicide in the name of Jihad as he has been spoon-fed a dose of unflinching belief by scholars (perhaps hired by hegemonic lords) like Osama Bin Laden from Saudi Arabia and Bangla Bhai from Bangladesh that the moment he detonates the suicide bomb he books in advance his and his relations' confirmed tickets to haven.
Islam's tenets are frequently distorted and taken out of context, with some invented tales, acts or practices being plucked with an ulterior motive to misrepresent a rich religious faith. Disparaging remarks about Muslims are allowed to pass in the media without censure, deepening the spiral of suspicion and alienation. Islam is branded in the West as incompatible with democracy, irrevocably hostile to modernity, and subversive to the rights of women---a concoction that is just diametrically opposite to the related teachings of Islam. Muslims are depicted as opposed to the West, despite a history of commerce and cooperation, and Western people immensely benefiting from the scientific learning and literature of Islamic scholars of the bygone eras.
Disunited as the Muslims are, time has not yet completely run out for the trapped Muslims to rediscover their strength and potency. A united ummah of one and a half billion Muslims can contribute their might and means to make this world liveable in peace and harmony, if true teachings of Islam---not that teaching on buying heaven's ticket through suicide bombings---can be propagated through truly educated Muslim men and women with all their tools and all their wills, not through those fanatic Muslims who think Sanskrit is the language of the malefactors and Arabic the language of the benefactors.
OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu during a session of the OIC conference in Dakar has rightly said: "Ignorance about Islam and calculated animosity with deep historic roots on the part of a minority in the West, as well as our failure to defend the true values of Islam, are the reason for the increasing wave of Islamophobia." Delegates in the same conference also criticised those who carried out attacks in the name of Islam.
OIC as a world body to represent Muslims has a great role to play to foster unity among Muslims and dissipate misgivings about Islam. But, it is lamentable that despite huge money power of many of the member states, OIC has not yet come up with a concrete roadmap to promote economic and educational developments of all the member states. OIC in their past summits decided to establish an Islamic peace-keeping force, a university, a common market, and a robust investment fund, but most of the decisions have not yet been implemented perhaps due to absence of cohesion among member states and paucity of fund. A $ 10 billion fund for Islamic development set up by the organization has so far received pledges for only $ 2.6 billion.
Now is the time for the OIC member states to consolidate their unity to fight poverty as a strategy to counter Islamophobia, because poverty breeds easy recruits for extremism that in turn has given birth to Islamophobia.
Unless OIC, through aids from oil-rich Arab states, fosters both economic and educational developments in poor member states like Bangladesh and in countries of sub-Saharan Africa, al Qaeda extremists would be gaining their footholds wherever they would find a poor, uneducated and gullible youngster who can be easily mesmerised to blow his life off by a suicide bomb in exchange for some money and promised havens for himself and for the family members he would be leaving behind.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank. He may be reached at
maswoodalamkhan@gmail.com
LAST Thursday leaders of the world's Muslim states while attending in Dhakar, the Senegalese capital, the triennial convention of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), vehemently criticised a burgeoning trend of "Islamophobia" in the West. Delegates of the OIC, a 57-nation body founded in 1969 in reaction to an arson attack against Al-Aqsa Mosque, also pledged to combat extremism and blamed a handful of Muslims the purport of whose extremist activities has given rise to such a phobia.
Adolph Hitler was a democratically elected leader of Germany; he took captaincy of the nation in the first place with a seed of vengeance seated deep inside his psyche against the Jews of the world. He studied history day in, day out in quest for a ploy that could make Germans' skins get goose bumps out of a phobia at the very thought of some people he would portray as enemies. He delved into every branch of military science to master the art of firing zeal among German soldiers. He knew his soldiers must practice their battling lessons against some soft targets before embarking upon his grander design of invading the whole world. The soft target he had chosen was the community having their faith in Judaism and he left no stone unturned to motivate every single German soldier to harbour anti-Semitism---a prejudice and hatred towards Jews that ultimately gave birth to Holocaust under Hitler's Nazi Germany, the most infamous pogrom in the history of brutalities that killed six million Jews.
Hitler was almost successful in translating his dream of conquering the world by invasion into reality. Had he been a little patient and eschewed excesses like wholesale killing of Jews, intensive bombardments of London in September, 1940 and persuaded Japan not to bombard Pearl Harbour in December, 1941 in favour of a long term global strategy of cornering the Jews by introducing a slow, steady and silent xenophobic culture against Judaism, history would perhaps taken a different pathway and Jews all over the world would have been totally extinct religiously, politically and economically by this time.
Hitlers of modern times have got a very valuable lesson from World War II: "Don't attack enemies blatantly; rather send to their camp a few spies who would follow their religion, wear their garbs, speak their language and motivate them to indulge in a passion that would bare them as savage animals to the eyes of the world. Now you can kill your enemies who are already branded as animals and who people have developed a phobia about."
The term Islam has of late been branded synonymous with terrorism in the western world the way Semitism was viewed in the early part of the last century as an alien faith of exploiters whose only job was to grab commerce and wealth all over the world, a form of economic terrorism.
As a new phrase born out of religious bigotry, Islamophobia has gripped the whole western world. The moment a westerner hears about Islam or meets one wearing beard and turban bearing a first name like Muhammad fears send a chill down his/her spine. Such fear is not totally unjustified because most of the terrorism activities, especially with the September 11, 2001 attacks, have probably been carried out predominantly by Muslims led by people like Osama Bin Laden.
Islamophobia has gripped the Muslims, no less. Nowadays Muslim parents in our country while choosing names of their newborns opt for even Christian names or Muslim names with twisted spellings or any other nomenclatures that must not sound Islamic or Arabic as parents are concerned about their children's future safety when they would be travelling, lest their passports bearing Muslim names arouse suspicion.
American journalist Stephen Schwartz has defined Islamophobia as the condemnation of the entirety of Islam and its history as extremist, denying the existence of a moderate Muslim majority, regarding Islam as a problem for the world, treating conflicts involving Muslims as necessarily their own fault, insisting that Muslims make changes to their religion, and inciting war against Islam as a whole.
Islamophobia contributed to a great extent to the practice of discriminating against Muslims by stripping them of opportunities in economic, social and public life in the west and to the perception that Islam has no values in common with other noble cultures, is inferior to any other religion, and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion leaving Muslims around the world feeling aggrieved and misunderstood, fearing for their physical safety, and, bereft of their rights.
Two questions should gnaw the conscience of the Muslim world: Are Muslims to take the blame for leaving such a negative impression about Islam with the non-Muslim people? Is it the end result of some far-reaching conspiracy hatched by those who have been stunned by the unprecedented renaissance of a comparatively new faith which is only 1500 years old? The answer, to my humble opinion, is yes to both the puzzles.
We as Muslims have failed to educate ourselves with the truth of Islam. We have distanced ourselves from two fundamental teachings of Islam: education in the true sense of the term and compassion for humans irrespective of their colour, creed and religion. Our last prophet advised us to travel all the way even to China in quest for knowledge and Islam has taught us to show utmost compassion for the helpless, for the orphans, for the women and even for the enemies.
In the name of education we are depriving students studying in madrasas of the most essential knowledge about science and modernity. We as parents think if we only can make our children learn to recite the whole Koran by rote our roads to haven are paved. We believe that Arabic is the only language we have to communicate in when we would be dwelling in our havens; so we shut the doors for our children to learn any other foreign language.
As regards to compassion many of us sympathise with a young guy who in the name of Jihad commits suicide and some of us feel ecstatic when an unarmed American dies from a bomb blast knowing full well that suicide in Islam is completely 'haraam' (forbidden) and relishing killing of an unarmed man is sadism which has been repeatedly termed as un-Islamic and sinful in our Koran and Hadith.
Islam has of course taught us not to idle away time as sitting ducks for enemies to swoop on. Before fighting back against oppressors we have to evaluate our strength, our firepower, first. If our prowess as warriors is not enough to outmatch that of the oppressors (who may be deemed enemies) our wisdom should dictate us to be a little patient while spending our time and resources to exhort our leaders for good governance, enrich our knowledge about science and whet our appetite for diplomacy.
The long list of Nobel laureates on physics, chemistry and medicine is occupied by mostly Jews. Why? Because, with six millions of their brethren and sisters ruthlessly killed by the hands wielding guns they reinvented the truth that 'knowledge is the only power that ultimately emboldens the firepower'. Do millions of Muslims need to commit suicide or be killed before they take this historical lesson on the prowess of knowledge?
Islam as a religion had gained astronomical popularity especially among the oppressed who were discriminated against for ages---hapless earthlings like helpless slaves who were deemed purchasable commodities and wretched beings like dependent women who were meant only for procreation, at a time when the society was distinctly divided between upper and lower classes, between the ruler and the ruled, between the rich and the servile and, between the masters and the slaves. Islam ushered in a fresh philosophy that all humans are equal, when humanity was at stake, when a newborn girl was buried alive and when a grandson took his revenge on the grandchild of an enemy of his grandfather.
One and a half billion people, roughly one-fifth of the world population, are adherents of Islam. This huge community of Muslims, if they could remain united, would have made the hegemonic lords of the world die of insanity or insomnia. But, Muslims---unlike Jews---are divided into inimical sects like Sunnis and Shias and many other groups separated by historical, cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries. Muslims so divided are further pulverised by dogmas, fanaticism, misdirected education and narrow vision making their young children easy targets to be indoctrinated from their early age with misinterpreted teachings of Islam. A young Muslim so indoctrinated commits suicide in the name of Jihad as he has been spoon-fed a dose of unflinching belief by scholars (perhaps hired by hegemonic lords) like Osama Bin Laden from Saudi Arabia and Bangla Bhai from Bangladesh that the moment he detonates the suicide bomb he books in advance his and his relations' confirmed tickets to haven.
Islam's tenets are frequently distorted and taken out of context, with some invented tales, acts or practices being plucked with an ulterior motive to misrepresent a rich religious faith. Disparaging remarks about Muslims are allowed to pass in the media without censure, deepening the spiral of suspicion and alienation. Islam is branded in the West as incompatible with democracy, irrevocably hostile to modernity, and subversive to the rights of women---a concoction that is just diametrically opposite to the related teachings of Islam. Muslims are depicted as opposed to the West, despite a history of commerce and cooperation, and Western people immensely benefiting from the scientific learning and literature of Islamic scholars of the bygone eras.
Disunited as the Muslims are, time has not yet completely run out for the trapped Muslims to rediscover their strength and potency. A united ummah of one and a half billion Muslims can contribute their might and means to make this world liveable in peace and harmony, if true teachings of Islam---not that teaching on buying heaven's ticket through suicide bombings---can be propagated through truly educated Muslim men and women with all their tools and all their wills, not through those fanatic Muslims who think Sanskrit is the language of the malefactors and Arabic the language of the benefactors.
OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu during a session of the OIC conference in Dakar has rightly said: "Ignorance about Islam and calculated animosity with deep historic roots on the part of a minority in the West, as well as our failure to defend the true values of Islam, are the reason for the increasing wave of Islamophobia." Delegates in the same conference also criticised those who carried out attacks in the name of Islam.
OIC as a world body to represent Muslims has a great role to play to foster unity among Muslims and dissipate misgivings about Islam. But, it is lamentable that despite huge money power of many of the member states, OIC has not yet come up with a concrete roadmap to promote economic and educational developments of all the member states. OIC in their past summits decided to establish an Islamic peace-keeping force, a university, a common market, and a robust investment fund, but most of the decisions have not yet been implemented perhaps due to absence of cohesion among member states and paucity of fund. A $ 10 billion fund for Islamic development set up by the organization has so far received pledges for only $ 2.6 billion.
Now is the time for the OIC member states to consolidate their unity to fight poverty as a strategy to counter Islamophobia, because poverty breeds easy recruits for extremism that in turn has given birth to Islamophobia.
Unless OIC, through aids from oil-rich Arab states, fosters both economic and educational developments in poor member states like Bangladesh and in countries of sub-Saharan Africa, al Qaeda extremists would be gaining their footholds wherever they would find a poor, uneducated and gullible youngster who can be easily mesmerised to blow his life off by a suicide bomb in exchange for some money and promised havens for himself and for the family members he would be leaving behind.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank. He may be reached at
maswoodalamkhan@gmail.com