Islamophobia

How islamophobia was copied from homophobia and hydrophobia

Islamophobia has been described as a copycat neologism: a new word formed by copying an existing new word without attending to how that one was made. The chain runs in three steps:

1. islamophobia copies the shape of an existing coinage rather than building from the root
2. the term it copies is Homophobia, which George Weinberg assembled in the 1960s for prejudice against homosexual people
3. homophobia and its relatives may themselves copy hydrophobia, the historical English name for rabies, a lethal disease that produces an inability to swallow and, in the older description, insanity

That is three steps from a fatal infection to a political attitude, and at no point in the chain did anybody return to the Greek to check what the suffix was doing. It is the clearest single illustration of how the -phobia vocabulary actually grows, which is by resemblance to the last word rather than by construction from the root.

Where the word islamophobia came from

The Oxford English Dictionary defines islamophobia as intense dislike or fear of Islam, especially as a political force, and hostility or prejudice towards Muslims, and attests it in English as early as 1923, where it appears quoting the French islamophobie.

The French word is older. Alain Quellien used it in a thesis published in 1910 for a prejudice against Islam widespread among the peoples of Western and Christian civilisation. English did not adopt it for decades, preferring the phrase feelings inimical to Islam, and the word resurfaced in an article by Georges Chahati Anawati in 1976. Wide use came in the 1990s, after the Runnymede Foundation gave it a definition.

The term did not exist in the Muslim world at all. It was translated into Arabic in the 1990s as ruhab al-islam, literally phobia of Islam, which is a loan of a European coinage back into the language of the people it describes.

Why the definition of islamophobia is contested

Detractors propose anti-Muslim as the better term for prejudice or discrimination against Muslims. The objection made, often from the political right, is that islamophobia is sometimes used to shield the religion from criticism by collapsing the distinction between racism and disagreement with a doctrine or a practice. Academics, activists and specialists who use the term reject that as an attempt to deny that the thing exists.

The catalogue records the argument rather than settling it, and notes what makes it hard. A religion is a set of claims, which can be criticised, and it is also a marker by which people are identified in the street, which cannot. Both are true at once and the same word covers both.

The working definition offered by the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, comes down firmly on one side: it describes a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by an existing Eurocentric and Orientalist power structure, directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat, maintaining economic, political, social and cultural disparities while rationalising violence as a tool of civilisational rehabilitation.

Why islamophobia treats Muslims as a single group

The characterisation that recurs is of a bigotry that stereotypes Muslims as a geopolitical threat or a source of terrorism, and that treats a population with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds worldwide as a single homogeneous racial group.

That last clause is what several scholars point at when they argue that islamophobia has explicit racist dimensions. A prejudice about a belief would attach to people who hold the belief. A prejudice that reads an appearance and assigns the belief from it is doing something else, and the discrimination described in daily life is racialised in exactly that way.

The causes listed for the increase since the end of the Cold War are specific:

• quasi-racialist stereotypes circulating in Western media since the 1990s
• the war on terror launched after the September 11 attacks
• the rise of the Islamic State after the Iraq War
• attacks by Islamist militants in the United States and Europe
• anti-Muslim material spread online by white nationalist organisations
• the radicalisation of Christian nationalist and far-right groups in the United States and the European Union

Who is most exposed to Islamophobic attack

A study conducted in 2013 found that Muslim women are more vulnerable to Islamophobic attack than Muslim men, and that those wearing headscarves or face veils are more vulnerable still.

That finding follows from the visibility argument. Where a prejudice is triggered by an identifiable marker, the people carrying the most visible marker take the most of it, which is a pattern that has nothing to do with anybody's beliefs and everything to do with what can be seen from across a street.

On 15 March 2022 the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus a resolution introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, proclaiming 15 March the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.