In the United States, 53 percent of Americans hold views of Islam described either as “not favorable at all” or “not too favorable.” In the Netherlands, 63 percent of Dutch citizens believe Islam is incompatible with modern European life. In France, 74 percent believe Islam is at odds with French society. Just fewer than one in four people in Britain believe Islam is compatible with the British way of life.

These statistics point to the larger reality with which this book is concerned—Islamophobia. Islamophobia refers to the fear, hatred, and hostility toward Muslims and Islam.

DEFINE: Provides a working definition of the term Islamophobia that anchors the book's subject.

This book is also not an attempt to condemn every person who has suspicions or misgivings about Islam. True, there are some people who deliberately stir up animosity toward Muslims in order to mobilize voters, increase ratings, generate traffic to blogs and websites, sell books, or justify wars. In other words, there are folks who are in the business of manufacturing Islamophobia for personal or professional gain, and they do deserve special condemnation. But they are also in the minority.

DEFINE: The author distinguishes deliberate, profit-driven Islamophobia manufacturing from ordinary suspicion or misgivings, which most people hold.

Why do a small minority of Muslims commit violence against civilians in the name of Islam? Why are their efforts increasingly aimed at the West, and why now? If the Qur’an or something inherent to Islam supposedly makes them commit this violence, why aren’t the majority of Muslims following suit? What do we make of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the victims of Muslim terrorism are other Muslims? And is it possible that the roots of what is called “Islamic terrorism” are found in historical and political conditions that include European colonialism and Western intervention in Middle Eastern countries and governments?

QUESTION: This factual claim about victim demographics invites deeper investigation into the specific numbers and distribution of victims across regions.

Some scholars, sympathetic with the need to analyze and combat anti-Muslim prejudice, maintain that the very word Islamophobia is a misnomer. They argue that a literal interpretation suggests that the primary object of fear or discrimination is religion (Islam), when in fact the prejudice in question is best understood under a different framework, such as racism or xenophobia. Other critics reject the word because they believe it stifles freedom of speech and the freedom to criticize the beliefs and practices of a particular religious tradition or community.

DEFINE: Clarifies that 'Islamophobia' is contested terminology — some prefer racism/xenophobia frameworks, others worry it chills criticism of Islam.

This is why the report goes to great lengths to differentiate what it deems legitimate criticisms of Islam, rooted in "open" views, from the "closed" views that constitute Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Introduces the open/closed distinction the report uses to differentiate legitimate criticism from Islamophobia.

The list of closed views begins with the notion that Islam lacks both diversity and internal differences and disagreements. In other words, all Muslims are basically the same, holding uniform worldviews and ideologies. In many ways, this perception drives much of the Islamophobia that one encounters in the West. If Islam is monolithic and unchanging, and if media coverage focuses on violence or terrorism carried out in the name of Islam by a small minority of Muslims, then it is easy to draw the conclusion that what one sees on the news is somehow endemic to Islam and all Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how essentializing a group enables prejudice and stereotyping across religious, ethnic, and cultural contexts.

To put the difference starkly, if al-Qaeda launches violent attacks against Western targets, some might conclude that this is due to an inherent quality in Islam and that, by extension, all Muslims are prone to violence because all Muslims are fundamentally the same. By contrast, when Anders Breivik, a self-identified Norwegian Christian, went on a killing rampage in and near Oslo in July 2011, Christianity and Christians as a whole were not implicated in his crimes.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on asymmetric moral attribution and the racialization of Islam versus other religious groups. SEED: Potential essay angle: how media framing assigns collective guilt by religion asymmetrically, using the al-Qaeda/Breivik comparison as an anchor.

The assumption that Islam is monolithic easily lends itself to the guilt-by-association principle at work in the campaign to label Obama a Muslim and in much of the Islamophobic discourse one finds in the West.

Builds on: "Islamophobia stems from viewing Islam as monolithic and unchanging"

Schlüer responded that the comparison was invalid because the steeple and the minaret represent two religions that hold two very different sets of values: "I think Christianity is an attitude of freedom, of recognizing different meanings, of tolerance. Islam has nothing to do with tolerance." Put another way, Christianity embraces and epitomizes Western secular values such as toleration and freedom, the very values Islam rejects. Since Islam is so different, so "other," its symbols cannot be allowed to occupy public space and promote values that are "foreign" to the Swiss people.

The report notes that racism and Islamophobia in the British context are often mixed together; as a result, anti-Muslim feelings and anti-Asian sentiment are often connected. In other Western contexts, it might be anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments. When Muslims are involved, racist practices and prejudices get a pass.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how Islamophobia intersects differently with local racial histories — in Britain with South Asian communities, elsewhere with Arab populations.

To take an earlier example, profiling in US airports is often defended not only in light of the religious identities of Muslims but also on the basis of their race and the belief that one can easily spot a Muslim based on outward appearance, presumably including skin color. Sam Harris, a prominent atheist philosopher and critic of Islam, plainly states this in regard to airport security lines: “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.” Racial discrimination and racist exclusionary practices are typically deemed unconstitutional today in the United States, but here is a case in which such discrimination is presented as normal and necessary.

XREF: Connects to debates on racial profiling, Islamophobia, and how security logic overrides constitutional anti-discrimination norms.

For example, many Western nations have intense debates about freedom of speech, and all set some limits on the scope of such speech. Some European countries have laws that prohibit Holocaust denial. One is not free in countries such as Belgium or Austria to deny or condone the genocide that took place in Nazi Germany. But when Muslims raise critical questions about the problems with speech that deliberately and disrespectfully denigrates the texts, figures, or practitioners of Islam, their views are often rejected outright. In 2005 and 2006, various Muslims inside and outside of Denmark raised such questions in response to satirical cartoons of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper. Their questions were largely dismissed, with some public figures going so far as to point out that the real problem was the inability of Muslims to understand and accept the Western commitment to freedom of speech.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of liberal universalism treating Western norms as neutral while excluding Muslim concerns.

A notable instance of this criticism is found in a manifesto issued by twelve authors, among them Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, written in response to the violence sparked by the publication of controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark and across Europe in 2005 and 2006. Titled “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism,” the manifesto denies the existence of Islamophobia: … We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatisation of those who believe in it.

DEFINE: The manifesto redefines Islamophobia as conflating legitimate religious criticism with stigmatization of believers.

The larger point is that the freedom of speech issue addressed in the manifesto is a concern shared more broadly across the political and religious spectrum. Even the Runnymede Report recognizes this potential problem.

How do we address this dilemma? What standards should apply when differentiating Islamophobia from legitimate, critical discourse about Muslim beliefs and practices? Let me suggest three overlapping criteria for making this crucial distinction. First, criticisms of Islam should be based on aspects of the religion that many Muslims recognize as a part of their faith and should avoid guilt by association. For example, disagreeing with the belief that the Qur’an is God’s fullest self-disclosure to humanity does not qualify as Islamophobic.

QUESTION: The other two overlapping criteria are implied but not yet stated. Worth chasing the full framework.

Second, criticism should not lapse into hate speech or otherwise endanger the safety of Muslim citizens. For example, in 2012 the American Freedom Defense Initiative posted an ad on a large billboard at a New York train platform that read: “19,250 Deadly Islamic Attacks Since 9/11/01—and Counting. It’s Not Islamophobia, It’s Islamorealism” (see image 9). Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League denounced the ad as hate speech and as a deliberate attempt to mislead the public. The billboard’s message is dangerous because it has the potential to incite violence against Muslims by branding them as enemies who are complicit in the killing of innocent people.

Andrew Shryock has a name for countering the Islamophobic image of “bad Muslims” with “good Muslims”—Islamophilia. Critics of Islamophobia who are prone to Islamophilia are sometimes desperate to construct the perfect, acceptable Muslim. The model Muslim is one who espouses nonviolence, is highly educated, embraces gender equality, believes firmly in democracy, and participates actively in interfaith dialogue. Shyrock reminds us that this is not only wishful thinking but also a harmful construct that both neglects diversity within Islam and attempts to force Muslims to conform to a Western ideal that, in turn, can be manipulated by non-Muslims for political purposes.

DEFINE: Defines Shryock's term 'Islamophilia' as the counterpart to Islamophobia — the counterproductive construction of a model Muslim who conforms to Western ideals.

Some of the reservations about the term Islamophobia are rooted in the belief that the word incorrectly suggests that the object of fear is Islam as a religion. The most prominent representative of this view is Fred Halliday. Halliday’s words have been cited so frequently that they are worth reprinting here: “‘Islam’ as a religion was the enemy in the past: in the crusades or the reconquista. It is not the enemy now: Islam is not threatening to win large segments of western European society to its faith, as Communism did, nor is the polemic, in press, media or political statement, against the Islamic faith. . . . The attack now is against not Islam as a faith but Muslims as a people.” Halliday suggests that a more accurate term to reflect the focus on the people rather than the religion is “anti-Muslimism.”

DEFINE: Introduces the term 'anti-Muslimism' as a proposed alternative to 'Islamophobia,' distinguishing between targeting a faith versus targeting a people.

It is true that important differences exist between the ways that Muslims were conceived of as the enemy in the Middle Ages and how this takes place today. Certainly, the Christian theological justification for opposing Muslims prevalent in the Middle Ages no longer holds in modern Europe, which is not surprising given the secularization and decline in Christianity’s influence that has swept the continent. We are not seeing battles in Europe to eradicate Muslim heretics in order to preserve and defend the ultimate truth of Christianity.

DEFINE: Distinguishes medieval religiously-grounded enmity from modern secular versions of anti-Muslim sentiment.

Even so, Halliday’s analysis falls short on two grounds. First, stereotypes about Islam as a religion do feed much of the Islamophobia that is rampant in the West. Islam is often equated in the media and in public discourse with terrorism, misogyny, backwardness, and so forth, and this is often done with Islam as a religion and an ideology in mind. Islam is attacked as a “faith,” even if such attacks, at least in Europe, are not primarily driven by the need to defend Christian truth claims.

If there is an explanatory factor that rivals religion in the debate over what drives Islamophobia, it is racism. Islamophobia is not racially blind, nor is it simply a manifestation of older forms of racism rooted in biological inferiority. It is an example of what some scholars have labeled “cultural racism.”cultural racism: hatred and hostility of others based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and ethnicity. This form of racism incites hatred and hostility based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and ethnic backgrounds. Animosity toward Muslims is expressed in terms of cultural and religious inferiority, with Muslims and Islam labeled as barbaric, violent, uncivilized, and inferior to Western culture and civilization. The presumed insurmountable differences between “Muslim culture” and the West serve as the basis for exclusion and discrimination. The argument of cultural inferiority has gained significant traction in recent decades, in part because many politicians, journalists, and public figures do not see it as racist; they assume that racism must involve overt appeals to skin color or biological inferiority.

DEFINE: Defines 'cultural racism' as hostility based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and ethnicity, distinct from biological racism. QUESTION: How does cultural racism operate as a legal or policy concept, and does it effectively capture Islamophobic exclusion?

With this question, once again we encounter notions of race and racism rooted in biological categories that do not fully capture the type of racism under analysis here. Moreover, as the scholars Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood argue, people do not, in fact, choose to be born into a Muslim family, nor do they choose to be born into a society in which to be a Muslim, or to have ethnic roots in a Muslim-majority country, automatically makes one an object of suspicion among the non-Muslim majority population. Many people suffer discrimination and hostility in the West simply because they are perceived to be Muslim, either because of outward dress or through family heritage or ethnic lineage. These realities would not disappear even if self-identified Muslims chose to identify with another religious community or dropped a religious identity altogether.

DEFINE: Clarifies why biological race categories fail to capture the ascriptive, perception-based racism directed at Muslims.

The anthropologist Matti Bunzl argues that, leaving aside historic animosities aimed at Jews and Muslims by Europe’s Christian majority, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have served two different functions in modern European history. Anti-Semitism reflected an attempt to secure ethnically pure nation-states by recourse to a racist ideology that targeted and excluded Jews from the national community. German nationalism, for example, relied on anti-Semitism and the supposed racial inferiority of Jews to rally support for a strong German nation. Other European countries also experienced strong waves of anti-Semitism and arguments about the incommensurability of Jewish and national (English, French, Norwegian, and so on) identity. Islamophobia, by contrast, reflects a different project of exclusion, one in which the desire to protect and maintain European civilization and anxieties over what it means to be European manifest themselves through anti-Muslim prejudice. The preservation of European identity, as opposed to national identity, is at the heart of Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Provides a conceptual distinction: anti-Semitism targets ethnic purity of nation-states; Islamophobia targets preservation of a supranational European civilization.

Second, both phenomena in the modern era have involved significant elements of racism, whether biological or cultural. In other words, both Jews and Muslims have been racialized by majority populations and have suffered significant discrimination and hostility as a result. For this reason, some organizations, such as the European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia, have conducted studies that view the challenges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as part of the same continuum.

DEFINE: Clarifies how both Jews and Muslims have been racialized by majority populations in the modern era.

First, I will use Islamophobia interchangeably with anti-Muslim and anti-Islam bigotry and hostility because I believe that Muslims do experience exclusion and discrimination based on their real or perceived religious identities. Second, my use of the term will assume that it reflects bigotry rooted in cultural racism in addition to perceived religious differences. Race and religion are inextricably intertwined in Islamophobic discourse and actions, and in most of the examples of Islamophobia that I use in this book, I will make no attempt to argue that they are reflections of only one or the other.

DEFINE: Clarifies the author's working definition of Islamophobia as combining cultural racism with perceived religious difference. Builds on: "Muslim anti-discrimination relies on race-like ascribed categories, not choice."

If the following historical overview demonstrates anything, it is that both discontinuity and continuity characterize the link between premodern and modern hostilities toward Islam. The most obvious discontinuity involves the overt theological interpretations of Islam at work in the Middle Ages, such as the common medieval conviction that Islam was a form of Christian heresy. By the time we reach the modern era, Western critics are much less concerned with demonizing Islam in order to promote and protect a particular version of orthodox Christianity. An important continuity pertains to the political rationale behind presenting Muslims as the ultimate enemies. From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, the West has feared Muslims because it has seen them as significant obstacles and threats to the building and preservation of Western empires and nations. Put simply, Western perceptions of Muslims as religious and political rivals drive most of the antagonistic renderings of Islam throughout history, with political rationales increasingly dominating religious ones in the modern period.

Pope Urban II ordered the First Crusade in 1095. This crusade was initially in response to the plea for aid from the Byzantine emperor as he sought to fight off invading Seljuk Turks, but the crusade eventually focused on taking Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim hands. In 1099, Jerusalem fell to Christian armies. These armies slaughtered almost all of the Jews and Muslims in the city and subsequently established the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

SEED: The crusade's initial purpose evolving into a holy war of conquest is a rich angle for an essay on how stated motivations obscure actual objectives.

In the case of Muslim rule, the Qur’an did not establish clear parameters for how to govern non-Muslims, though it did prohibit Muslims from coercing the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab)—that is, Jews and Christians—to convert to Islam. … Islamic law, or Sharia, would eventually elaborate on the place of protected minorities, known as dhimmis. … The tax represented the dhimmis’ acknowledgment of their subjugation, but it also guaranteed that their Muslim rulers would protect them and give them considerable legal and religious freedoms.

DEFINE: Defines the dhimmi concept and the jizya tax arrangement in Islamic law governing non-Muslim subjects.

The conquests destroyed little: what they did suppress were imperial rivalries and sectarian bloodletting among the newly subjected population. The Muslims tolerated Christianity but they disestablished it; henceforth Christian life and liturgy, its endowments, politics, and theology, would be a private not a public affair. By an exquisite irony, Islam reduced the status of Christianity to that which the Christians had earlier thrust upon the Jews, with one difference. The reduction in Christian status was merely judicial; it was unaccompanied by either systematic persecution or blood lust and generally, though not everywhere and at all times, unmarred by vexatious behavior.

XREF: Parallels the Christian disestablishment of Judaism, an ironic inversion this passage highlights.

Both Muslim and Christian rulers devised ways of dealing with religious minorities. … Christians in the Iberian Peninsula became subject to Muslim rule already in the eighth century. Muslims in Europe found themselves in a similar position beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Christians conquered Sicily and then ultimately the Iberian Peninsula. In most cases, Christian rulers created a status for Muslims similar to the standing of dhimmis in Muslim territories, including similar legal and religious freedoms. Muslims typically had the ability to practice their religion, but they could not have power over Christians in everyday life, and, like the dhimmis in Muslim lands, they faced severe restrictions in marrying or engaging in sexual relations with Christians. It was also common to pay a tax similar to the jizya, and in the case of the Norman conquest of Sicily in the eleventh century, Norman rulers actually continued to use the Arabic word for this tax.

XREF: Parallels the dhimmi system in Muslim lands, showing a symmetric pattern of minority treatment across medieval religious borderlands.

In the earliest encounters between Christians and Muslims, the lack of awareness about Islam is easily explained. Christians simply did not show much curiosity in learning about Islam because most Christian authors initially viewed Muslims as a scourge sent from God to punish Christians for their sins. Dionysus of Tel-Mahre, a ninth-century Syrian patriarch, viewed the Muslim invasions of Syria as God's punishment of the Byzantine church for embracing Dyophysite theology—that is, the belief put forth by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that Jesus consists of two distinct natures, divine and human, united in one person. There was no shortage of Byzantine theologians to adopt the flip side of the coin and maintain that God was punishing the Monophysites, those who rejected the Chalcedonian position and insisted on the divine and human natures merging into one nature in the person of Jesus. Both sides shared in common the hope that God might lift the scourge if genuine repentance ensued. Few thought it worth the trouble to study the religious beliefs of Muslims in order to find relief from divine chastisement.

XREF: Connects to the general theme of how religious rivals frame enemies as divine punishment, paralleling similar dynamics in other historical religious encounters.

It was only after a significant number of Christians converted to Islam that Christian authors began to view Muslims not simply as God-ordained military adversaries but as religious rivals.

In the interim, many Latin chroniclers and Western theologians developed the view that the Saracens were pagans who bore a striking resemblance to the Roman idolaters of antiquity against which the earliest generations of Christians struggled. This construction of Islam as paganism was particularly prominent around the time of the First Crusade, serving as one of the major propagandistic tools used by crusaders to justify their efforts to conquer the Holy Land. The struggles of ancient Christians against Roman idolaters were now replicated in the battles waged by Christians against Saracen pagans. Crusaders could find comfort in knowing that the risks they undertook were not in vain but were part of an ongoing battle in Christian history to eradicate those enemies of Christ who worshipped false gods and idols.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how religious others are constructed to legitimize violence and holy war.

A French epic poem from the twelfth century, The Song of Antioch, provides us with a clear example of how a Christian author portrayed Saracens as pagans to justify the actions of the First Crusade, particularly the conquest of Antioch. In the poem, the author implicates both the pagans of Rome and the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. With Saracens serving as contemporary stand-ins for Roman pagans, they, along with Jews, must be defeated in the name of Christ and for the sake of divine vengeance. The author even appropriates the figure of Muhammad into the Saracen pagan cult. Muhammad takes the form of an idol named Mahomes, suspended in midair by magnets. When the Saracen general, Sansadoines, is defeated, he destroys the idol, demonstrating in the process how powerless Mahomes was to protect the Saracens from defeat.

XREF: Relates to orientalism and postcolonial readings of how conquered peoples are reframed to legitimize violence, echoing Said's framework.

Chronicles written during later crusades devoted much less attention to portrayals of Saracens as idolaters. Nonetheless, the image of the Saracen pagan lives on in the European imagination. Festivals of Moors and Christians take place to this day in small towns throughout contemporary Spain. These festivals commemorate Christian victories over the Moors, or Muslims of North African origin, during the Reconquista. Some of these festivals include reenactments in which locals, dressed up as Moors, conquer a citadel and erect a Mahoma—an effigy of Muhammad—on the walls. Christian troops then attack the citadel and destroy the Mahoma. The reenactment taps into visions of Saracen idolaters from long ago.

SEED: The continuing Spanish Moors-and-Christians festivals with Muhammad effigies present a live, underreported angle on how medieval religious propaganda survives in modern civic culture.

The depiction of Muslims as pagans and idolaters ultimately gave way after the First Crusade to the belief that Islam was a form of Christian heresy. This perception, prominent by the twelfth century, actually found expression already in the first century of Christianity's encounter with Islam in the writings of John of Damascus. John was an eighth-century theologian from Syria who spent part of his career serving in the government of Caliph Abd al-Malik in Damascus before resigning his post and joining the St. Sabbas Monastery near Jerusalem. He is best known for his defense of the use of icons and images in Christian worship over against those who wanted to destroy images out of fear that Christians were worshipping them. The prominent place that the veneration of icons has held historically in Eastern Orthodox Christianity since the eighth century is due in part to John's theological defense of them.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of Christian-Muslim polemics and Byzantine theological debates. Builds on: "Crusaders reframed Islam as paganism to justify conquest"

John is one of the first significant theologians to possess a fairly accurate knowledge of Islam based on firsthand familiarity with Islam's sacred texts. He correctly recalls important Islamic beliefs, such as the oneness of God, Jesus as the Word of God and a prophet, Jesus' miraculous birth, the denial of Jesus' crucifixion, the Qur'an as God's revelation to humanity, and so forth. A greater knowledge of Islam, however, does not make him a more benevolent interpreter of Islam. John's agenda is not to provide an impartial description of Islam but to assist Christians who, as dhimmis, need help in their efforts to survive the pervasive claims of Islam and to resist the impulse to convert. The more Christians can see Islam as a perversion of the Christian gospel, the better equipped they will be to maintain steadfastness in the faith.

The view that Islam was a Christian heresy would eventually take root in the West as well. It began in ninth-century Spain where Christians, like their coreligionists in John's Syria, had been forced into the role of dhimmis. In this subservient role, they became more familiar with the beliefs and practices of their rulers.

Peter draws a conclusion about Muhammad that is similar to John's, that Muhammad is best understood as following in the line of heretics in the early church: "Vomiting forth almost all of the excrement of the old heresies (which he had drunk up as the devil poured it out), he denies the Trinity with Sabellius, with Nestorius he rejects the divinity of Christ, with Mani he disavows the death of the Lord, though does not deny that he returned to heaven." All of the figures listed by Peter were labeled heretics by early church theologians. A detailed elaboration of their particular teachings is not really necessary to grasp Peter's overall argument. He insisted that many of the basic core beliefs preached by Muhammad originate with the thoughts and writings of those long ago condemned by church leaders.

XREF: Connects to patterns of how polemicists delegitimize rivals by association with already-condemned groups.

What purposes did these medieval Christian constructions of Islam serve? Christians increasingly saw in Islam a formidable threat to Christianity's claims of superiority and hegemony in Europe and beyond. Faced with the Muslim world's competing theological claims, impressive military accomplishments, expanding empire, and superior intellectual and scientific advancements, medieval Christian authors responded polemically and aggressively. In the context of the Crusades and the Reconquista, theologians depicted Islam initially as idolatry and ultimately as heresy in order to justify violence and aggression against Muslims. In those circumstances in which Christians lived under Muslim rule, these same depictions were aimed at providing Christian dhimmis with the ideological tools to resist converting to Islam or, in the case of ninth-century Cordoba, to embrace martyrdom. By the end of the Middle Ages, centuries of military aggression, political hostility, and anti-Muslim discourse had taken their toll. Muslims became the feared "Other" in the European Christian imagination.

XREF: This connects with Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader construction of a feared 'Other' in European identity — the colonial framing has medieval roots here.

The preoccupation with the rapid advancement of the Ottoman Empire in this period makes it understandable why medieval references to Muslims as "Saracens" or "Ishmaelites" gave way to the almost ubiquitous designation of "Turks." Christian authors frequently invoked the problem of "the Turkish threat" in order to rally support for crusades or wars against the Ottomans, but, as we shall see, the designation of "Turk" also functioned to denigrate one's opponents in other Christian communities. The term, like its medieval predecessors, had ethnic, political, and religious dimensions.

DEFINE: Explains the historical shift in terminology from 'Saracens'/'Ishmaelites' to 'Turks,' showing how the term carried ethnic, political, and religious dimensions.

In the quest to find prominent reformers, Protestant or Catholic, who took the time to learn more about Islam than most of their contemporaries, two figures stand out. Theodore Bibliander, a Swiss theologian, devoted considerable energy to studying the Qur'an. He went to great lengths to publish an edition of the Qur'an in Basel based on the medieval Latin translation that had been commissioned by Peter the Venerable, despite the significant opposition he encountered from the authorities.

Martin Luther, the most towering figure of the Reformation, was a supporter of Bibliander's efforts in Basel and the best example of a theologian who sought to learn more about Islam. Luther studied the Qur'an, albeit in its Latin version, and gave considerable attention to Islam and Muslims based on some of this study. That said, his greater knowledge did not translate into a more benevolent assessment of Islam. Many of his thoughts reflected the medieval prejudices that went before him, and his writings more often than not served to justify violence and aggression against the Turks, just as many medieval Christian constructions of Islam served to authorize violence against Muslims during the Crusades and the Reconquista.

XREF: Runs against the assumption that familiarity breeds tolerance; parallels how greater knowledge can reinforce existing frameworks.

Earlier in his reforming career, Luther was actually not an advocate of a war with the Turks. He viewed Turkish advances into Europe as a form of divine punishment for the sins of the church, a view reminiscent of what we find in Christian writings on Islam in the eighth century: "To fight against the Turks is to oppose the judgment God visits upon our iniquities through them." Luther was particularly opposed to a crusade against the Turks under papal oversight. But things changed in the course of the 1520s as the Ottomans made greater inroads into Europe. By the time of the siege of Vienna in 1529, Luther had changed his mind, supporting a war against the Turks, what he referred to as the Türkenkrieg, as long as it was led by princes and not by the church.

In his treatise On War Against the Turk (1528), Luther develops more fully his assessment of Islam in the context of justifying a violent response to the Turks. He offers three observations about Islam based on his reading of the Qur'an. First, he argues that Muslims believe that Muhammad is superior to Christ and that Christ, while without sin, is merely a prophet and not humanity's savior. Muhammad undermines the very heart of the Christian faith, leaving his readers with a "doctrine of works" that places Muslims in the same category as Jews and Catholics in rejecting justification by faith. Such a doctrine is the work of the devil.

DEFINE: Explains justification by faith as the doctrinal lens through which Luther classified Islam with Judaism and Catholicism.

Luther's second observation is that the Qur'an teaches the Turk "to destroy not only the Christian faith, but also the whole temporal government." The Turks rule by the sword—that is, by force and coercion. "The Turkish faith, then, has not made its progress by preaching and the working of miracles, but by the sword and by murder." Islam is a religion of violence and brutality that has rejected the grace and peace that comes with the gospel of Christ.

Luther, like many other Protestant reformers, invoked negative images of Islam not only to garner support for a war against the Turks but also to attack his opponents. … Luther was quite fond of tarring both Islam and Catholicism with the same brush. He often used the language of the "Antichrist" when referring to both Muhammad and the pope, though eventually he concluded that the title was more deserving of the pope. Still, Muhammad and the pope were two sides of the same coin:

Catholic writers had no qualms about returning the favor by linking the Turkish threat with Luther and other reformers. In the words of one Catholic pamphlet from the sixteenth century: “The Turk tears down churches and destroys monasteries—so does Luther, the Turk turns convents into horse stables and makes cannon out of church bells—so does Luther.

In most Catholic and Protestant theological writings of the Reformation, we do not encounter efforts to nuance or move beyond medieval depictions of Islam. With the extension of the Ottoman Empire into Europe and the fracturing of Western Christianity in the Reformation, older medieval constructs of Islam are redeployed to respond to new circumstances. However, the underlying fear in Christian Europe remains the same—fear of the power and expansion of Islamic territories. It is only with the period known as the Enlightenment that we witness some of these fears subside, even if temporarily, while more significant efforts to depict Islam sympathetically come to the fore.

QUESTION: How exactly did Enlightenment-era writers manage to depict Islam sympathetically where Reformation authors could not? What structural or intellectual shifts enabled this?

The Enlightenment was a cultural and intellectual movement that arose toward the end of the seventeenth century and reached its apex in the eighteenth century.Enlightenment: a cultural and intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West that emphasized reason. The movement stressed the primacy of reason in the human quest to acquire knowledge and discover truth. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason contributed to a climate in which philosophers and intellectuals increasingly attacked traditional Christianity, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties, as irrational and superstitious.

DEFINE: Defines the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement centered on reason that challenged religious tradition.

As the military and political threat of the Ottoman Empire diminished, a space was opened for the study of Islam and even the Middle East that was not rooted in religious hostility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a greater interest in the study of Arabic and Islam developed. Some European universities sponsored Arabic studies, and a host of histories, dictionaries, and textbooks about Islam and Arab peoples emerged. The pieces were in place for a more nuanced picture of Islam.

The Enlightenment, however, did not witness the abandonment of older prejudices. In both philosophical and popular writings, unflattering images of Muslims and Islam persisted. In fact, we have plenty of examples of Enlightenment philosophers who reiterated negative stereotypes even as they articulated more positive appraisals.

XREF: Contradicts the common assumption that the Enlightenment uniformly championed tolerance and reason over religious prejudice.

On the other hand, Bayle takes issue with Christian critics who insist that Muhammad was a fanatic who manufactured a moral system that across the board accommodated “to the corruption of men’s hearts.” Bayle counters by insisting that Islamic law intensifies and magnifies the demands of the Christian Gospels, deviating in only two areas: polygamy and revenge (allowing an eye for an eye). Moreover, Bayle argues that Islam historically has shown itself to be much more tolerant of other religions than Christianity has. He even suggests that had Western Christians instead of Ottoman Turks ruled in the East, both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam would have disappeared, but, as it stands, Muslim rulers have fully tolerated Christianity.

QUESTION: Bayle's contrarian take on Islamic tolerance is striking for its era and invites further exploration of his source material and reception.

If Bayle and Voltaire were somewhat equivocal in their interpretation of Muhammad and Islam, the French author Henri de Boulainvilliers offered one of the more flattering portrayals of the Prophet in the Enlightenment. In The Life of Muhammad (1730), Boulainvilliers devotes more energy than most of his contemporaries to describing the Prophet as a man who epitomizes the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and free thought. Muhammad’s religion is true in its essentials. Muhammad’s thought “conformed to the light of reason” and helped others seek truth and perform good works. Sharing the concern of many other Enlightenment philosophers that appeals to the miraculous in religion undermine reason, Boulainvilliers appreciates how Muhammad “constantly declared and protested that he had no power other than to persuade those who would calmly listen unto him.” Boulainvilliers’s Muhammad closely resembles an Enlightenment deist—that is, someone who rejects appeals to revelation and the miraculous in favor of belief in one creator God and the importance of morality. While this portrayal does not accurately reflect how Muslims historically have understood the Prophet, it does remind us of the Enlightenment’s most important legacy in light of our topic: the introduction of an alternative, more sympathetic narrative concerning Islam, one that challenged, even if modestly, medieval stereotypes.

Sympathetic portrayals of Islam during the Enlightenment may have problematized the medieval narrative, but they did not dislodge it. Islam lived on in the European imagination as a religion rooted in deceit, violence, and misogyny. Even if the theological arguments driving polemical constructions of Islam lost some of their potency by the end of the Enlightenment, they did linger into the modern era. The fear of the Muslim “Other” as an obstacle and threat to European power and hegemony did not fade but rather intensified in the face of Ottoman decline and Europe’s increasing interest in colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial critiques of Western representations of Islam, which frame this persistence as serving colonial power interests.

With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, we witness the beginning of serious European attempts to conquer Muslim lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Napoleon's efforts failed, in part as a result of British intervention, but the French would succeed in invading and occupying Algeria in 1830. Algeria became the first permanent European colony in North Africa, and its conquest marked the beginning of a long, tumultuous, and at times bloody conflict between colonizer and colonized.

By the early twentieth century, much of the Muslim world was subject to European rule, with only a handful of states in the Middle East—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen—escaping European colonial domination as the dust settled from World War I. By the 1930s, Europe, along with its colonies and ex-colonies, constituted almost 85 percent of the earth's land surface.

In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah, a political scientist and the president of Ghana, employed the word neocolonialism for this new era: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

DEFINE: Nkrumah's 1965 definition of neocolonialism: formal independence with external control of economic and political policy. XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and modern debates about economic dependence, IMF conditionality, and corporate influence in developing nations.

The impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the relationship between Islam and the West should not be underestimated. Many Muslims in the Middle East and in other Muslim-majority regions blame their political and economic struggles today on past as well as present interference from the West. The anti-Western sentiment that one encounters in these countries cannot be understood apart from the legacy of colonialism, just as any adequate analysis of contemporary Western discourse about Muslims and Islam must take into account the West's past and present colonial enterprises and imperial designs in the Muslim world.

However, already in 1917 Britain expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In a letter written by Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader in Britain’s Jewish community, the British government’s support was made public: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which shall prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” This statement, known historically as the Balfour Declaration, laid the foundation for British and Western support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In November 1947, the UN, whose ranks were dominated by Western nations, many of whom were still involved in colonial projects, developed a plan to partition Palestine into three areas: one Jewish state, one Palestinian state, and an international zone under UN supervision that included Jerusalem. The plan was controversial. While the Jewish settlers constituted approximately one-third of the population, the UN plan granted them some 55 percent of the land.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a flourishing of European scholarship, literature, and art that focused on the Orient. It is important to stress that some Orientalists held great admiration and respect for the Orient and Islam. Thomas Carlyle, a prominent nineteenth-century British author, presented a famous lecture in 1840 on Muhammad. Contradicting the medieval Christian accounts of Muhammad as an imposter and false prophet, Carlyle insisted that Muhammad was a legitimate prophet and indeed a hero, a person of great vision who instilled hope in millions upon millions of people and whose impact qualified him to hold a place of honor alongside other transformative figures in history, including Martin Luther, Shakespeare, and Frederick the Great.

XREF: Contradicts simplistic post-Said readings of Orientalism as uniformly hostile — early Orientalist scholarship held genuine admiration, anticipating the tension Said would later critique. DEFINE: Clarifies that Orientalism was not monolithically derogatory, complicating the common conflation of all Orientalist scholarship with prejudice.

Many Orientalists, however, developed images of Muslim and Arab peoples that either perpetuated medieval stereotypes or else reflected more contemporary assumptions, bolstered at times by appeals to science, about the intrinsic cultural and even racial superiority of Europeans over Muslims. An example of the latter type of thinking can be found in the work of Ernest Renan, a French philologist and scholar of religion. In many ways, he represented the growing tendency in much of nineteenth-century Orientalism to move away from Enlightenment universalism, which tended to stress commonalities between all human beings (including Muslims), and toward a worldview that emphasized the fundamental differences between civilizations, with Western civilization seen as inherently superior to Islamic civilization.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism argument about the constructed binary between West and East.

Renan’s 1883 lecture “Islam and Science” reflects these assumptions, though the achievements of the Enlightenment inform his insights as well. Renan portrays Islam as a monolithic religion possessing a fixed essence and set of cultural traits that make it inferior to European civilization:

DEFINE: This illustrates the concept of essentialist Orientalism—treating a complex religion as having a single unchanging nature. XREF: Connects to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism and the broader tradition of Western intellectual framing of non-European cultures.

All those who have been in the East, or in Africa, are struck by the way in which the mind of a true believer is fatally limited, by the species of iron circle that surrounds his head, rendering it absolutely closed to knowledge, incapable of either learning anything, or of being open to any new idea. From his religious initiation at the age of ten or twelve years, the Mohammedan child, who occasionally may be, up to that time, of some intelligence, at a blow becomes a fanatic, full of a stupid pride in the possession of what he believes to be the absolute truth, happy as with a privilege, with what makes his inferiority. . . . The [Muslim] has the most profound disdain for instruction, for science, for everything that constitutes the European spirit. This bent of mind inculcated by the Mohammedan faith is so strong, that all differences of race and nationality disappear by the fact of conversion to Islam.

DEFINE: This is an Orientalist stereotype framing, not an objective finding — the claim captures what the source asserts about conversion's homogenizing effect, which itself is a product of the era's colonial worldview.

Renan depicts Muslims, with the exception of the occasional Muslim child prior to conversion, as lacking reason and intelligence simply by virtue of adhering to Islam. To be a Muslim is by definition to reject “the European spirit” and all that makes this spirit superior: reason, science, and the drive for knowledge. Fanaticism and irrationality constitute the unchanging essence of Islam and the Arab race.

Frederick Quinn makes the following observation concerning the depiction of Muslim women in many French Orientalist paintings: “A turn of an arm or of the head or a bit of curving flesh became sexually suggestive, representing the permissive East, a theme never far below the surface in such works. Languid women with fetching smiles, their nipples covered with see-through gauze, sans pubic hair, and reclining in inviting positions on comfortable divans became staples of the Orientalist artistic repertoire.” Quinn and other scholars today recognize that many Orientalist depictions of Muslim women reveal more about the European male imagination and its particular erotic and sexual desires than about the complex circumstances under which women in the Middle East or North Africa lived.

The European construction of Muslims as the ultimate “Others,” of course, was present since the Middle Ages. However, medieval Christians did not necessarily view Islam as an inferior civilization lagging behind the accomplishments of Europe. Rather, as noted in the previous chapter, medieval Europe found inspiration in the achievements of Islamic civilization in areas including philosophy, science, and music.

XREF: Challenges a common assumption that European condescension toward Islam predates modernity; contrasts with the later framing of Muslims as Others referenced in the passage.

But the political and historical context within which nineteenth-century Orientalism took shape does beg the question: what sort of relationship was there between European colonialism and Orientalism?

QUESTION: The passage poses an open question about the exact relationship between colonialism and Orientalism — worth pursuing the author's answer. Builds on: "Medieval Europe looked up to Islamic civilization's achievements"

With nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalism, increasing numbers of scholars, authors, and artists were convinced that Muslims belonged to a once great but now separate and intrinsically inferior civilization, one that not only lacked complexity and diversity but also offered little to benefit Western civilization. The fact that the tendency to essentialize Muslims in this way emerged at a time of significant European colonial expansion suggests that Orientalism was neither a disinterested enterprise nor an objective quest for knowledge of non-Western cultures and religions.

XREF: Connects directly to Edward Said's foundational thesis in Orientalism about knowledge production serving colonial power.

This third definition connects knowledge about the Orient to power over the Orient. Said draws on the insights of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and historian, to develop this connection between knowledge and power. Foucault rejected the Enlightenment’s confidence in the capacity of human reason to attain objective knowledge and truth. He did not believe there was any such thing as knowledge for knowledge’s sake, nor did he accept that the quest for knowledge is a disinterested enterprise. What we hold to be true is instead a product of a particular discourse.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's power/knowledge framework, which reappears throughout Said's Orientalism and in broader postcolonial theory. DEFINE: Defines the Foucault-influenced linkage between knowledge and power that underpins Said's third definition of Orientalism.

Said understands Orientalism as a discourse in a Foucauldian manner. Orientalism is a particular system of meaning with its own rules, truth claims, and premises, derived from the power that Western nations wielded or aspired to wield over the Orient. Orientalism is part of the power and hegemony exercised by the West over the Orient. This is not to say that Orientalism is a collection of lies, falsehoods, or myths that one can eradicate by doing one’s homework on the “real” Orient. Said insists that Orientalism is too formidable to be dispelled in this way

XREF: Connects to Foucauldian discourse theory — power/knowledge linkages and how systems of meaning produce truth rather than simply reflecting it.

Throughout the book, he returns repeatedly to a common theme in Orientalist writings: the assumption that the Orient is fundamentally different from and inferior to the West. If "the Orient is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different,'" writes Said, then "the European is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal.'"

DEFINE: Distills the core premise of Said's Orientalism thesis: the recurring binary that defines the Orient through deficiency against a 'normal' West.

Said’s Orientalism is not a book about the Orient per se. It is a book that analyzes Western discourse about the Orient, including Islam and Arab peoples, and how this discourse relates to Western domination over the Orient in light of the colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One of the most controversial arguments Said makes in Orientalism concerns the extent to which colonial interests permeate not just the writings of select nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors but almost any text written on the Orient in Europe or the United States.

Said’s nemesis did not fade from the scene as a result of Orientalism. If anything, Lewis became increasingly influential in certain political spheres. His ability to popularize and repackage Orientalist ideas in the last decades of the twentieth century gained him solid credentials in American foreign policy circles in light of the challenges posed by the Arab world to US political and economic interests. By making the case that Islam and the West are involved in a "clash of civilizations," Lewis not only inspired Samuel P. Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard University, to develop the clash of civilizations thesis on a larger scale but also helped American and Western politicians shift their focus to a "new" enemy, Islam, as an old enemy, the Soviet Union, was disintegrating.

XREF: Connects to the 'clash of civilizations' thesis popularized by Huntington, which became a major framing device for post-Cold War geopolitics.

Lewis argues that this aspect of Islamic thought set the stage for the intense rivalry with Christianity that began already in the seventh century and has lasted to this day. Islam held the upper hand in this rivalry until the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. Since then, Islam has been bested at almost every turn by Christian and post-Christian civilizations. Islam’s change of fortunes vis-à-vis the West provided the basis for the animosity and hatred that Muslims increasingly harbored toward their ancient rival.

XREF: Connects to broader islamic-Western relations and geopolitical rivalry narratives found in works by Lewis and Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis. QUESTION: Is Lewis's framing of post-1683 decline as the basis for Muslim animosity a defensible causal claim, or does it oversimplify complex historical forces?

After surveying the history of Islam’s tumultuous relationship with the West, Lewis turns to the question at hand: why do Muslims have so much hostility toward the West today? Lewis addresses a long inventory of possible causes of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism: American support for Israel; American backing of unpopular regimes in the Middle East; the West’s history of sexism, racism, and imperialism. Over and over again, Lewis rejects these candidates as viable explanations for the "roots of Muslim rage." Such hatred, he argues, cannot be explained by anything "we" in the West have done. The explanation must lie within Islam alone.

XREF: Connects to debates about Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis and critiques of essentialist explanations for political violence. QUESTION: Worth interrogating whether Lewis's dismissal of Western causal factors is a persuasive move or a rhetorical gambit.

Lewis ends his article with a section titled "A Clash of Civilizations." Here he finally explains the real cause of Muslim animosity toward the West: jealousy and humiliation in light of the dominance of Western civilization. Two Western developments in particular, secularism and modernism, have been the specific targets of Muslim anger.

QUESTION: Worth interrogating whether this explanation is reductive or fair; the clash thesis as framed by Lewis invites critical examination.

Lewis characterizes Islam as monolithic (sometimes referring to all Muslims simply as “the Muslim”), backward, irrational, and emotional (that is, full of rage). The West, by contrast, is dynamic, modern, progressive, and rational, with emotions fully under control. Lewis offers a clear Orientalist framework to help modern Americans and Westerners make sense of why “they” hate “us” and to legitimize a feeling of Western superiority and exceptionalism that, in turn, can help reassure the West in its ongoing efforts to maintain its dominance—political, military, and economic—over the Muslim world.

DEFINE: The passage illustrates what an Orientalist framework looks like in practice: monolithic stereotyping of Muslims versus an idealized West.

This clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is likely to continue, argues Huntington, mostly because Islam is prone to violence and bloodshed. Huntington points out that, almost everywhere you look, Muslims are entrenched in violent conflict with other peoples, from the Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans to Jews in Israel to Buddhists in Burma. Put simply, “Islam has bloody borders.”

QUESTION: Huntington's claim is heavily contested; worth examining empirical evidence and critiques of the 'bloody borders' thesis.

Like Lewis, Huntington invokes a number of classic Orientalist themes. He assumes that the West constitutes a distinct and superior civilization. He defines non-Western peoples mostly in religious or ethnic terms (Confucian instead of Chinese, Islamic instead of Egyptian, and so on). He promotes the imperial interests of the West at the expense of Arab and Muslim regions. And he characterizes Islam as violent and inherently prone to aggression. On this last point, his observation that “Islam has bloody borders” is a not-so-subtle suggestion that Muslims are responsible for all of the conflicts in which they find themselves, including clashes with Western powers.

Builds on: "Huntington claims Islam's bloody borders fuel civilizational conflict"

The world is not as simple as Lewis and Huntington want it to be. They desperately want to hold onto a world in which the difference between “us” and “them” is clear. What they ignore, argues Said, is that civilizational identity is not fixed but fluid. All civilizations and cultures, including so-called Western civilization, have intense, often contentious internal debates about how to define themselves. Civilizations are also shaped and transformed by all sorts of migrations and movements between peoples of different cultures. Finally, it is hard to imagine a culture today that, in the past or the present, has walled itself off from other cultures. In fact, every culture has been and continues to be involved in transformative exchanges, contacts, and conversations with other cultures.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial critiques of fixed civilizational boundaries.

At its heart, Said’s critique challenges the motivations of those, including Lewis and Huntington, who rely on a clash of civilizations paradigm to make sense of the world in general and the relationship between Islam and the West in particular. Such a paradigm feeds on conflict and division, thereby “increasing the rifts between people in order to prolong our dominance.” What we need is not conflict but community, not a clash but a coming together of people across cultural barriers to face the dangers that threaten the entire human race.

Orientalism and Islamophobia, however, are not identical concepts. We must keep in mind that some Orientalist scholars held deep admiration and respect for the languages, histories, and religious convictions of Muslim peoples. An Orientalist is not by definition someone who fears or detests Islam, though plenty of Orientalists did harbor such feelings. Moreover, many Orientalists were academics who studied Islam professionally. Orientalist thought was not confined to the academy. Artists, government officials, and travelers to the East also contributed to Orientalism. But it is difficult to understand Orientalism apart from its connection to the academic world. Islamophobia, by contrast, is not something that emanates first and foremost from the scholarly study of Islam or Arab peoples.

DEFINE: Distinguishes Orientalism from Islamophobia: one is an academic/intellectual tradition with varied registers, the other rooted in animus rather than scholarship.

Because both superpowers recognized the importance of the Middle East for furthering their Cold War objectives, they vied with one another to form alliances with regimes throughout the region. The Soviet Union generally sought alliances with Arab nationalist governments, such as in Egypt, whereas the United States preferred to throw its support behind absolute monarchies in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Moreover, in accordance with the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, the US government opted for a more interventionist policy, promising financial and military aid to Middle Eastern countries threatened by international communism.

XREF: Parallels contemporary great-power competition for influence in the Middle East, where similar alliance-forging dynamics persist.

Islamism arose in the twentieth century as Muslim reformers and organizations sought to create and implement a comprehensive social, economic, and political order rooted in Islam and in opposition to Western secularism. Already in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt as the first major Islamist organization, but it was not until the 1970s that political Islam became a major force in the Middle East.

DEFINE: Provides a working definition of Islamism as a twentieth-century movement opposing Western secularism.

When many Westerners today think of Islamism, they have images of a violence-prone form of Islamic fundamentalism. It is true that some versions of Islamism have adopted violent tactics. Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon are Islamist organizations that sometimes resort to violence to achieve their political objectives. Al-Qaeda is another, though members of Hamas and Hezbollah have distanced themselves from al-Qaeda’s tactics and political strategy. But plenty of other Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, have endeavored to pursue a more peaceful course, even if violence has played a role at times in these movements.

What explains the resurgence of political Islam in the 1970s? Two factors are worth highlighting. The first is the defeat of a coalition of Arab militaries from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War against Israel in 1967. The defeat resulted in the loss of Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to Israel. It also generated widespread frustration in the Middle East with the leadership of Arab nations and the inability of existing political regimes, including those grounded in secular nationalism, to exert power against Israel and Western interests. The second is the major economic crisis that swept through the Middle East in the 1970s and that capitalist economic systems seemed powerless to handle. The perception emerged that existing regimes were failing because they relied too much on Western political and economic models. Calls for a return to Islam and the establishment of Islamic states grew louder.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how failed secular nationalist regimes across the postcolonial world gave rise to religious and ethnic revivals.

As a result of the revolution and the hostage crisis, political Islam increasingly became the object of great suspicion if not outright hostility in US political circles. Islamism was becoming the enemy, the “Green Menace” (because green is the color symbolizing Islam) that would eventually replace the Soviet threat.

The United States had a vested interest in the conflict and devoted considerable resources, including weapons, training, and money, to Afghanistan in support of the mujahideen. President Ronald Reagan, like Carter before him, viewed the mujahideen as important Cold War allies and lavished praise on their courage, referring to them as “our brothers” and as “the moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers” (see image 5).

XREF: Connects to the broader history of U.S. proxy wars during the Cold War and the eventual blowback in Afghanistan.

The mujahideen are significant not only because they illustrate yet another instance of the United States’ willingness to encourage Islamism when it suited its larger political goals but also because the foundations of al-Qaeda emerged from the mujahideen resistance to the Soviets. A young businessman from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, began assisting the mujahideen in the 1980s. Bin Laden became increasingly involved in the war over the course of the decade, raising funds and recruiting additional fighters. His involvement in the war led him, along with an Egyptian physician named Ayman al-Zawahiri, to create the radical Islamist organization al-Qaeda (“the Base” in Arabic) as a means to organize and finance the Afghan resistance.

DEFINE: Defines al-Qaeda as 'the Base' in Arabic and traces its origins to bin Laden and al-Zawahiri's organizing of the Afghan resistance. Builds on: "The U.S. armed and praised Afghan mujahideen as Cold War allies."

What we see in both the Soviet-Afghan War and the rise of al-Qaeda is the emergence of a radical version of Islamism that developed a violent jihadist ideology in an effort to resist and defeat the two great superpowers of the Cold War. The United States may have supported this ideology during the Soviet-Afghan War because it was a convenient tool in undermining its Cold War nemesis, but, eventually, some of the mujahideen turned from ally to enemy. By the time of 9/11, the Muslim terrorist, with some assistance from the United States’ Cold War tactics, had replaced the Soviet communist as public enemy number one.

XREF: Echoes the familiar 'blowback' thesis linking covert US support in Afghanistan to later anti-American terrorism, connecting to wider scholarship on unintended consequences of Cold War policies. Builds on: "Al-Qaeda emerged directly from the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance."

In the speech, Bush assumed that Americans were asking one fundamental question: Why do they hate us? The question echoes Bernard Lewis’s concerns, discussed in chapter 3, about the “roots of Muslim rage.” Bush offered no critical analysis of how US policies and involvement in the Middle East have contributed to the grievances held by many in the region against the United States, not to mention why a small minority of Muslims may have acted on those grievances. Instead, he posited a clear divide between a benevolent and superior “us” and a malevolent and backward “them”: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Bush invoked the kind of circular reasoning employed by Lewis on “Muslim rage.” Muslim terrorists hate us because, well, they are full of hatred (and, thankfully, “we” are not). The clash between “us” and “them” is therefore inevitable.

XREF: Echoes Bernard Lewis's 'roots of Muslim rage' circular reasoning discussed earlier; also connects to Edward Said's critique of Orientalist 'us vs them' binaries.

Bush took pains in the address to point out that he was not referring to all or even most Muslims but rather to a radical minority within Islam so intoxicated with hatred that they have twisted their religion into a tool for terror. However, in doing so, he constructed a binary of “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” that eventually paved the way for a political Islamophobia in which any Muslim who is not with “us” becomes “our” enemy.

The frequent recourse to civilizational clashes between radical Muslims and the West is not surprising when one considers the individuals and ideologies influencing the Bush administration. In the aftermath of 9/11, prominent advisors to and members of the administration, many of whom were neoconservatives favoring an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East, looked to a certain cadre of like-minded academics and experts to provide explanations and to weigh in on strategies to deal with the terrorist attacks. One of these academics was Lewis, who, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, was “a Cheney favorite.” Lewis was also a longtime friend of Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, and Richard Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, both of whom were major architects of the Iraq War. Perle considered Lewis a mentor, and both Wolfowitz and Perle relied on Lewis’s insights in developing strategies for the response to 9/11, including the war in Iraq.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how academic/intellectual figures influence foreign policy decision-making. Pays off: "Bernard Lewis's ideas shaped US foreign policy toward Islam."

The clash of civilizations explanation reduced the conflict between radical Muslim terrorism and the West to something inherent within Islam (and thus something that can only be fixed within Islam). On this understanding, the irrational anger and hatred of Muslims toward the West leads some Muslims to use the teachings of Islam to justify their terrorist activities against innocent people. Neither the Bush administration nor the larger political establishment devoted much effort to reflecting critically on the history of Western involvement in the Muslim world, nor did they seriously consider whether the particular economic and political grievances toward the West articulated by many Muslims, not just the small minority of terrorists, might require a significant rethinking of foreign policy to minimize the chance of future attacks.

QUESTION: What specific Western policies and histories does the author have in mind that went unexamined? Builds on: "Huntington claims Islam's bloody borders fuel civilizational conflict"

I am not suggesting that critical reflection by the US government on this history and these grievances would remove the blame of 9/11 from al-Qaeda, nor do I condone in any way al-Qaeda’s ideology or tactics. I am suggesting that no effective plan to diminish the long-term threat of terrorism emerged in the months and years following 9/11 because the US government refused to take seriously how its own policies in the Middle East contributed to the conditions that gave rise to 9/11.

The Bush administration insisted that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein was harboring al-Qaeda members. As evidence was not forthcoming to corroborate these charges, and as criticisms of the Bush administration’s motives for war grew, the administration increasingly relied on an Islamophobic narrative to mobilize support at home and abroad. The narrative consisted of three broader justifications for war, each undergirded by an anti-Islam, anti-Muslim bias: to defend the United States against Muslim terrorism (because Islam is violent), to introduce democracy in Muslim countries (because Islam is antidemocratic), and to liberate Muslim women (because Islam is misogynist).

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on orientalism (Said) and the 'white men saving brown women' trope from Spivak.

President Bush and others in his administration often projected publicly the position that the United States was not at war with Islam and that Islam should not be associated with violence and terrorism. Barely one week after 9/11, Bush gave a speech at the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, in which he stated this position clearly: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is about peace.”

Yet so much of the rhetoric from the Bush administration and other political elites after 9/11 linked, explicitly and implicitly, Islam with violence. Within a week of the attacks, Bush used the extraordinarily problematic language of “crusade” to describe the upcoming War on Terror, though he quickly backed off, likely because of Muslim complaints that such language implied a holy war against all Muslims, reminiscent of the Crusades of the Middle Ages.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of how political rhetoric shapes public perception of religious groups, and to contemporary debates about Islamophobia.

This discourse has been aided by the many images in the media of Muslims committing acts of violence or terrorism. The list of events is quite long and, on the surface, appears to reinforce the link between Islam and violence: the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 to 1981, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Madrid and London train bombings in 2004 and 2005, the shootings in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, and the beheading of Western journalists by ISIS in 2014. Moreover, when one moves beyond individual episodes and takes into account the ongoing violent conflicts involving Muslims in the Middle East, it seems that Muslims are guilty as charged.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how media coverage shapes public perception of groups and inflates threat associations. SEED: Potential piece on how mediated representations, not direct experience, drive stereotypes of entire religious groups.

While prominent Muslim terrorists like bin Laden often invoke religious language and symbols, it is doubtful that religious ideology is the main driving force behind their violent acts. John Esposito argues that the causes of terrorism are more often than not rooted in political and economic grievances. Statements from bin Laden and other terrorists often refer to the long history of Western interventionism in Muslim-majority regions and to larger political grievances, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the presence of US military troops in the Middle East, US exploitation of the Middle East’s oil and energy resources, and the legacy of European colonialism. Even if we consider the possibility that the religious convictions articulated by Muslim terrorists are genuine, religion alone cannot explain their actions.

XREF: Challenges the prevailing post-9/11 framing that religious extremism drives terrorism; resonates with Robert Pape's work on suicide terrorism as linked to occupation.

We must also remember that jihad, which literally means “struggle,” has a long, complex history and cannot be reduced to the category of “holy war.” Jihad may connote the use of force, though whether this force is understood as defensive—to protect Muslims from external attack or threat—or expansionist has been a subject of debate in Islamic history. From the colonial period onward, many Muslim reformers and intellectuals argued that jihad means just or defensive war. On the other end of the spectrum, more radical Muslim thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, have understood jihad as permitting the violent overthrow of established governments in Muslim countries. All of these disagreements, moreover, reflect what some Muslim scholars call “the lesser jihad.” “The greater jihad,” they insist, pertains to the internal struggle against one’s own evil inclinations or desires. Some Muslims even insist that nonviolent jihad is the only legitimate kind.

DEFINE: Clarifies that jihad literally means 'struggle' and encompasses both the 'greater' inward spiritual struggle and the 'lesser' outward combat, with contested interpretations.

Finally, for all of the concerns expressed by Western political and public figures about Islam’s violent tendencies, these concerns were all but absent in certain episodes involving Muslims and violence prior to 9/11. During the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, the United States was actively involved in training the mujahideen in guerilla warfare tactics. In the same decade, the United States assisted Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s military in the Iran-Iraq War. This assistance included intelligence about Iranian military deployments, the means to develop chemical weapons, and diplomatic support to protect Iraq from UN condemnation in the use of poisonous gas against Iran. When it has served American interests, particularly in winning the Cold War and extending political and military influence in the Middle East, the US government has had no qualms about facilitating and contributing to violence in Muslim-majority regions.

XREF: Connects to broader Cold War proxy warfare literature and the mujahideen arms pipelines later linked to Al-Qaeda. Pays off: "The U.S. armed and praised Afghan mujahideen as Cold War allies."

In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in February 2003, Bush argued that “the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values” and that Iraq in particular “is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.” He suggested that “success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress toward a truly democratic Palestinian state.” This speech revealed Bush’s increasing dependence on neoconservative doctrines, including the use of US military force to impose democracy abroad, in order to make the broader case for war with Iraq. Democracy in Iraq would have a domino effect and inspire the people of other countries in the region to follow suit.

XREF: Connects to the broader neoconservative 'domino theory' of democratization applied to the Middle East, echoing cold-war era logic.

The language suggested that Islam itself was the true enemy of democracy. The new vocabulary was controversial from the beginning, but the decision to employ it was likely a political calculation that depended on larger assumptions held by many in the West about the inability of Islam to embrace democracy.

DEFINE: Explains the politically loaded language connecting the War on Terror framing to assumptions about Islam's compatibility with democracy.

On the surface, the perception that Islam is incompatible with democracy may seem justified. After all, democracy has had a rough go of it in many Muslim-majority countries. With decolonization, most Muslim nations shed the yoke of European colonial domination only to find themselves under strong authoritarian regimes ranging from monarchies to military dictatorships. These regimes, past and present, have consistently restricted or outlawed political opposition and violated human rights, including the rights of women and religious minorities. Such regimes continue to be the rule and not the exception. John Esposito estimates that only one in four Muslim-majority nations have some form of democratic government.

QUESTION: Which specific countries count as democratic per Esposito's estimate, and what criteria did he use?

Without denying the real difficulties of democracy taking root in the Muslim world, we should assume neither that Muslim nations are unique in wrestling with the full implications of democracy nor that there is something inherently antidemocratic about Islam.

QUESTION: What evidence supports the claim that Islam has no inherent conflict with democracy?

All of this illustrates that the United States has frequently chosen alliances with regimes and parties in the Middle East that have thwarted democracy.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of US foreign policy balancing democratic ideals against strategic interests in oil, Israel, and anti-Soviet/anti-Islamist alignment.

The reason the United States has supported authoritarian regimes for so long is not difficult to discern. In its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, the United States did everything in its power to establish alliances with governments that both supported its battle against communism and provided vital access to oil and energy reserves. Many of these governments were autocratic, but this mattered little when the stakes were so high.

XREF: Connects to foreign policy critiques regarding realpolitik trade-offs between security/energy interests and democratic values.

This history explains why Muslims are suspicious of US pledges to support democracy in the Middle East and beyond. It also undermines any Western political narrative that depicts Islam as an inherent enemy of democracy. Given both the democratic aspirations of many Muslims and the numerous ways that the United States and some European powers have undercut democratic processes in Muslim countries, Western politicians who suggest that Islam is the real obstacle to democracy are likely driven more by Islamophobia or ulterior political motives than by any genuine desire to promote and defend democracy in these regions.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of US interventionism and 'exporting democracy' narratives in the Middle East across multiple sources.

But do these observations mean that Islam is inherently misogynistic and that Muslim women cannot find freedom or full personhood in Islam? To conclude that Islam is by definition misogynistic is to risk promoting Islamophobia by ignoring the larger historical, political, and cultural realities both in Muslim countries and in the West. For starters, patriarchy and the oppression of women are not unique to Muslim societies or to practices within Islam. The history of Western Christianity is also one of patriarchy.

We must also realize that many oppressive and patriarchal practices popularly connected to Islam by Westerners either have roots outside Islam or are practiced by only a limited number of Muslim communities. FGM, for example, not only predates Islam but is also found among Christian communities in Egypt, the Sudan, and Kenya. Female circumcision, moreover, is not mentioned in the Qur'an, which may also explain why the practice is limited geographically within the Muslim world. In fact, about half of all Muslim women who have endured the procedure live in Egypt and Ethiopia—hardly evidence that FGM is an Islamic practice.

The prevalent Western perception that Muslim women are only passive victims completely lacking agency and having no major influence in their otherwise male-dominated societies also becomes problematic when one looks beyond the Bush administration's rhetoric of oppressed and imprisoned women. In politics, organizations such as Malaysia's Sisters in Islam challenge male privilege, combat discriminatory practices, and present alternative interpretations of Islam that further women's rights and egalitarianism. In recent decades, Muslim women have also served as heads of state, including Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, and Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh.

XREF: Challenges the passive-victim framing dominant in Western discourse cited in the highlight itself.

In fact, according to Gallup polling, majorities in most Muslim countries support the equal rights of women. For instance, 90 percent of those polled in Malaysia, 86 percent in Turkey, and 85 percent in Egypt believe that women should have the right to work outside the home if they otherwise qualify for the job. Large majorities also believe women should have the right to vote without interference from male family members: 93 percent in Turkey, 90 percent in Bangladesh, 89 percent in Iran, and 80 percent in Indonesia.

QUESTION: This Gallup data challenges common Western assumptions, but polling in these countries can have methodological limitations worth noting. XREF: Connects to broader debates about Islam and gender equality, and the gap between Western perceptions and local realities in Muslim-majority nations.

In 1950, some three hundred thousand Muslims lived in the twenty-seven countries that today make up the European Union (EU). Most Muslims at this time came from former European colonies. As a result, most lived in Britain or France, the two largest colonial powers in Muslim-majority regions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 2010, the Muslim population in EU countries, plus Switzerland and Norway, was 18.2 million, or 4.5 percent of the population.

The Pew study also projects that, based on current immigration levels and extrapolations from birth rate trends, the Muslim population in Europe by 2030 will be 29.8 million, or 7.1 percent of the population.

QUESTION: Projections depend on current immigration levels and birth-rate extrapolations; worth noting how sensitive these figures are to policy and demographic shifts.

First, it means that most European countries have a much higher percentage of residents with a Muslim background than the United States. The Pew Research Center estimated that, in 2010, there were 2.6 million Muslims in the United States, comprising 0.8 percent of the population. Projections for 2030 indicate there will be 6.2 million Muslims, constituting 1.7 percent of the population. The Muslim presence in Europe, comparatively speaking, is and will continue to be much more substantial and visible.

Second, the growth in Muslim populations across Europe since the mid-twentieth century runs parallel to secularization or, perhaps more aptly, de-Christianization. As Muslim populations grow and assert their religious identities in the public sphere, Christianity's public role and influence fade. In other words, the increasing presence and vitality of Islam is accompanied by the decreasing influence and presence of traditional Christianity. This trend is important because many Europeans have grown accustomed to thinking of religion as a private matter, not because they long to return to a period in which Christian leaders and institutions wielded greater power. Islam's presence and growth thus creates tension because it calls into question the secular values and assumptions that govern much of public and political life in Europe today. This tension feeds most contemporary conflicts between Muslim minorities and the majority populations of Europe.

The event that triggered the first major conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in Europe was the so-called Rushdie Affair, which followed the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, but has spent the better part of his life in Britain. Rushdie's ties to Islam throughout his adult life have been more cultural than religious. He has never considered himself a believer in or practitioner of Islam.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about free expression versus religious offense, and the politics of the author's cultural versus religious identity.

In the early years of hiding, the stress on Rushdie was enormous. The fatwa and the fear of assassination certainly were a large part of that, as was the continued violence, which included the bombing of bookstores in Britain and the United States and the murder of the book's Japanese translator. In one effort to put an end to the controversy, Rushdie announced at the end of 1990 that he had converted to Islam. As a sign of his renewed faith, he stated that he would not support the publication of a paperback version of the novel. The “conversion” did not have any effect on the fatwa, as Khomeini's successor reaffirmed the fatwa's irrevocable nature. Rushdie later renounced his conversion, describing it as the biggest mistake of his life.

QUESTION: Why would Rushdie believe a conversion could influence a fatwa issued by a religious authority, and what was the actual political calculus behind his announcement?

The burning of Rushdie's novel, while legally permissible, also made matters worse, as book burning raises memories of more sordid episodes in European history such as the Inquisition and Nazi Germany.

XREF: Connects to censorship debates, the Rushdie fatwa context, and historical book burnings (Inquisition, Nazi book burnings) as symbolic acts with political consequences.

Finally, the vocal support in some Muslim communities for Khomeini's fatwa eroded sympathy for their cause and contributed to the perception that Muslims were unable to accept or abide by the principles and freedoms embedded in a Western secular political order.

Rushdie possessed not only the freedom to voice his convictions but also the power to make his voice heard. Most British Muslims, by contrast, were members of an underprivileged community, one that had below-average education and income levels, lacked political and social influence, and held to a religious worldview at odds with the dominant culture. Because they possessed neither the power nor the status of a Salman Rushdie, their voices often were ignored or otherwise went unheard, and this reality fueled their frustrations.

XREF: Connects to general theories about why marginalized communities resort to extreme or symbolic acts when denied conventional platforms.

Put simply, Rushdie had the power to shape the public narrative of Islam in a manner that British Muslims themselves did not. Ironically, in his recently published memoir Rushdie comments on the difficulty of controlling how a story is told: “At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses . . . behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?” Rushdie's answer to these questions is that “everyone and anyone has, or should have that power,” and yet the Rushdie Affair is a prime example of the unequal distribution of this power. Rushdie's novel demonstrates how one person can have control over the most sacred stories of a marginalized religious community in Britain.

XREF: Connects to broader questions of who controls narratives, especially postcolonial and media power dynamics.

During and after the affair, Muslims created organizations to facilitate political involvement and to wield greater influence in European governments so that they would not be solely dependent on a handful of sympathetic allies in the political establishment. Muslims in Europe also began privileging their religious identities over their national ones, a development that contributed to tensions with majority populations who had grown accustomed to religion playing an increasingly smaller role in Europe.

The anger and resentment expressed by many Muslims during the Rushdie Affair, combined with vocal support for Khomeini’s fatwa from some Muslims in the West, created the impression that Muslims were incapable of accepting the values and ideals of a secular political order. This impression, in turn, gave rise to a political climate in which it became increasingly common to question multiculturalism—that is, the commitment of many European governments to accommodate the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity of immigrant populations, particularly Muslims.

Of course, raising questions about multiculturalism is not in itself tantamount to endorsing Islamophobia. Even today, Europeans across the political spectrum believe that multiculturalist policies have generally not succeeded in building bridges between Muslim minority communities and the majority population, though there is plenty of disagreement about why these policies have failed and whether they are worth revamping. However, once it became politically and culturally permissible to question the efficacy of multiculturalist policies, the door was opened for some in the majority population, including prominent politicians, to blame Muslims for most social ills and to question whether the dominant culture should tolerate a segment of the population that adhered to a backward, intolerant religion. The Rushdie Affair was thus a catalyst that generated the conditions in which first multiculturalism and then Islamophobia became such politically and culturally divisive issues in Britain, if not Europe.

The irony, according to Rushdie, is that the ones who are truly phobic and bigoted are those Muslims who are protected by the concept of Islamophobia, whereas enlightened individuals committed to criticizing Islam’s intolerance and narrow-mindedness are the ones labeled bigots.

Fortuyn was a sociology professor and former communist who eventually set his sights on Dutch politics. He became a prominent critic of Islam in the Netherlands in 1997 with his book Against the Islamization of Our Culture: Dutch Identity as Foundation. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Dutch commitment to multiculturalism at a time when this was not a popular position politically. The populist Livable Netherlands Party elected Fortuyn as its leader in November 2001, though he soon lost his leadership position after making critical comments about Muslims, including accusations that Muslims were incapable of respecting women, lesbians, and gays. He formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List, and prepared for the national elections, but he was assassinated on May 6, 2002, just prior to the elections. People immediately speculated that the killer was a radical Muslim, an assumption bolstered by Fortuyn’s outspoken views on Islam. As it turned out, the murderer was an animal rights activist, but this fact did not let Muslims off the hook. The initial speculation alone reinforced the Western narrative that connected Islam and violence.

QUESTION: Worth investigating further how quickly public narratives assign blame to Muslims before facts are known.

In making the film, Hirsi Ali clearly wanted her audience to be afraid of Islam’s power to perpetuate the abuse of women. She wanted her audience to recognize and accept that Islam was a threat to Western values. In her quest to manufacture a large-scale fear of Islam, she received help from an unlikely source—Muhammed Bouyeri. His decision to hunt down and kill Van Gogh seemed to confirm Hirsi Ali’s warning that Islam was a danger to the West.

XREF: Connects to wider discussions of how acts of terror retroactively validate political narratives and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Bouyeri grew weary of attacks on Islam in the Netherlands and took matters into his own hands. On November 2, 2004, while Van Gogh was bicycling to work, Bouyeri opened fire and wounded the filmmaker. Van Gogh tried to elude his attacker by running around a parked car, all the while pleading for his life, but to no avail. Bouyeri fired the final shots that killed Van Gogh and then approached his body, cut his throat with a small machete, and drove a knife deep into his corpse. Attached to the knife was a note that included threats to Van Gogh’s collaborator, Hirsi Ali, accusing her of operating as an "infidel fundamentalist" who "terrorizes Islam."

Builds on: "Fortuyn's assassin was an animal rights activist, not a Muslim."

First, multiculturalism suffered a huge setback with the murder. Pim Fortuyn may have paved the way for questioning multiculturalist policies, but, after Van Gogh’s murder, many in the Netherlands and throughout Europe felt that multiculturalism and tolerance of diversity had gone too far. Polls taken in the Netherlands within a year after the murder reflected the turning tide, with 40 percent of Dutch citizens expressing the hope that Muslim immigrants "no longer feel at home in the Netherlands," and more than 80 percent desiring greater restrictions on immigration. Another poll indicated that 51 percent of so-called native Dutch held unfavorable views of Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader post-9/11 and Fortuyn-era shifts in European immigration sentiment and multiculturalist backlash.

Second, as in the Rushdie Affair, freedom of expression became the primary framework within which major political and public figures interpreted the murder and the controversy over Submission. Legitimate criticisms of the film took a backseat to louder calls to defend this Western freedom at all costs. The Dutch prime minister identified Van Gogh as "a champion of freedom of expression."

XREF: Echoes the broader pattern of how Western responses to Islamist violence get framed, paralleling the earlier Rushdie Affair discussion in the same text.

Finally, the murder reinforced one of the core Western stereotypes of Islam: its inherently violent nature. Bouyeri articulated his motives in the context of his Muslim faith, giving the impression that Islam promotes violence against anyone who disagrees with its teachings. The fact that the media sometimes framed Bouyeri’s actions as a "holy war" bolstered the perception that Islam was at war with the West and that the battleground was now Europe.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of media framing, stereotyping, and how individual acts get generalized to entire religious groups.

Until the Madrid bombings, referred to as "11-M" in Spain, terrorist attacks on European soil had primarily been carried out by individuals and organizations involved in larger national conflicts, including the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom and Spain’s Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).

With terrorist attacks, it is not uncommon for voters, perhaps feeling vulnerable, to rally behind the ruling government and avoid significant change. For example, after 9/11, public approval for President Bush in the United States rose dramatically. This did not happen in Spain.

XREF: Connects to political science literature on the rally-round-the-flag effect, most famously studied following the 9/11 attacks.

No hard evidence surfaced in the trial linking the defendants to al-Qaeda. While one can reasonably assume that al-Qaeda’s ideology and methodology served as a source of inspiration for the 11-M attacks, the actual financing and carrying out of the bombings seems to have been independent of formal al-Qaeda support. Moreover, given the defendants’ insistence on their innocence throughout the trial, we have no confession from those convicted that points to a clear motivation. The timing of 11-M suggests that the perpetrators wanted to disrupt Spain’s national elections and to undermine its involvement in the War on Terror, but, in the end, it is impossible to move beyond speculation concerning the motives.

Why four young men who called Britain their home and who enjoyed the rights and privileges of British citizenship would carry out such horrific attacks is a question not easily answered. It is possible that they wrestled with an identity crisis. As second-generation British Muslims (for three of the four at least), they perhaps felt alienated both from mainstream British society and from the home country of their parents, victims of what Rushdie refers to as “double unbelonging,” and this may have made them more susceptible to radical Islamist teachings. But this is merely speculation.

QUESTION: This is flagged as speculation even by the author. Worth probing: is there empirical evidence connecting identity alienation to radicalization, or is this just a plausible narrative? XREF: Connects to Rushdie's concept of 'double unbelonging,' a broader theme about immigrant identity that appears across postcolonial literature and social theory.

Both Spain and Britain witnessed a rise in anti-Muslim incidents following the bombings. Long-term data on racially motivated crimes against Muslims does not exist in Spain, but information provided by the director of the National Police Force and the director of the Civil Guard for the period from January 2004 to May 2005 indicates a rise in Islamophobic incidents after 11-M. Examples of more egregious incidents include vandalism of mosques, a violent assault on a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, the murder of a Moroccan pedestrian by a automobile driver, and the murder of a Moroccan farm laborer.

XREF: Parallels backlash dynamics seen after 9/11 in the US, suggesting a recurring pattern of retaliatory violence against minority groups following high-profile attacks.

The cartoon controversy’s origins lie in the desire of two editors of a right-leaning Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to test whether self-censorship and concerns for political correctness regarding Muslims had gone too far in the Danish press and larger society. In particular, the editors were concerned that a children’s author was having difficulty finding someone to illustrate the Prophet Muhammad for a book, presumably because of the offense this would give to Muslims in light of the perception that Islam prohibits images of the Prophet. Flemming Rose, the newspaper’s culture editor, sent a letter to forty-two illustrators on September 19, 2005, requesting that they submit an illustration of Muhammad that would be published in the newspaper. The illustrators were “to draw Muhammad as you see him.” In the end, only twelve artists submitted cartoons or caricatures of Muhammad to the newspaper.

QUESTION: What does this episode reveal about how deliberate provocations to test taboos can escalate into global crises?

The most controversial cartoon, submitted by Kurt Westergaard, depicted Muhammad wearing a turban containing a huge bomb. Inscribed on the bomb in Arabic was the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.” Whatever Westergaard’s intentions, both critics and supporters of the Jyllands-Posten experiment interpreted the cartoon as associating Muhammad and thus Islam with violence.

XREF: Relates to debates about free speech, religious offense, and the 2005 Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy.

A small delegation of Danish imams traveled to the Middle East in December to generate international Muslim support for their opposition to the cartoons. They met with representatives of the Egyptian government and the Arab League. Around the same time, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held a summit in Mecca. While the original purpose of the meeting was to address the image of Islam in light of 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings, the agenda was amended to incorporate the topic of Islamophobia in light of the cartoons. The OIC condemned the cartoons as a sign of “the rising hatred against Islam and Muslims” and urged governments to respect all religions and not to use freedom of expression as a pretense for disparaging religions. The OIC also established the Islamophobia Observatory at the meeting in order to monitor and counteract Islamophobia. The OIC summit marked the internationalization of the controversy: because of this meeting, the global Muslim population became aware of the Danish cartoons.

XREF: Relates to how a regional incident becomes a global issue through organizational action and summit diplomacy.

In addition to the demonstrations, a boycott on Danish goods swept through the Middle East beginning in late January 2006 and lasting into the spring. Danish companies such as Arla, Scandinavia’s largest dairy producer, suffered significantly from the boycott. In fact, Danish exports across the board suffered huge losses during that period, decreasing between March 2006 and June 2006 by 88 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Iran, and 40 percent in Saudi Arabia. One estimate put the export losses on the one-year anniversary of the cartoon publications at one billion Danish kroner.

QUESTION: The specific percentage drops (88% Libya, 47% Iran, 40% Saudi Arabia) suggest a severe economic consequence worth investigating further. Did these markets recover, and did the boycott reshape Danish trade strategy?

But there is little doubt that the cartoon controversy reinforced negative perceptions of Muslims within the West. Evidence of this can be found in a Pew Research Center poll from 2006. The poll revealed that many non-Muslims in the West blamed the controversy on Muslims and their inability to respect different viewpoints. In France, 67 percent of those surveyed felt that Muslims and their intolerance were primarily at fault for generating the conflict over the cartoons. Similar majorities existed in other countries: 62 percent in Germany, 60 percent in the United States, and 59 percent in Britain.

QUESTION: The poll is from 2006, shortly after the controversy. It would be worth checking whether these perceptions shifted in the years since.

The cartoon controversy provides an intriguing bookend to this chapter in light of the many similarities it shares with the Rushdie Affair. Both controversies witnessed Western politicians and media portraying Muslim reactions to perceived insults as monolithic, with little attention to the diversity of Muslim responses and perspectives. Both controversies included Muslim minority communities with very little political representation responding to what they perceived to be demeaning and insulting representations of Islam by the cultural elite. Both controversies involved Muslims initially looking to existing laws, including blasphemy laws, to address their grievances, but to no avail. Both controversies eventually got out of hand as the conflicts played out on an international stage with the attention and participation of Muslim-majority nations.

XREF: Parallels the earlier Rushdie Affair material in this same chapter — the two controversies mirror each other in how Western media portrayed Muslims, and in how Muslims turned to blasphemy laws that failed them. Pays off: "Danish editor tested Muslim self-censorship by commissioning Muhammad cartoons."

Blasphemy laws, vestiges of a Christian past, also remain on the books in many European countries. Denmark's Criminal Code threatens with punishment, including possible imprisonment, anyone who “publicly mocks or insults the religious doctrines or acts of worship of any lawfully existing religious community.” Other countries with blasphemy laws include Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. Britain abolished its blasphemy laws in 2008.

More examples could be given of regulated speech in the West, including laws that prohibit publicly denying the Holocaust in countries such as Austria, Belgium, and France. The very existence of these laws illuminates the contradiction in ridiculing Muslims for not embracing freedom of expression while praising the West for its unyielding commitment to it. We can certainly debate the prudence or necessity of regulating certain forms of expression, just as we can argue about whether the less restrictive position on freedom of expression in the United States is preferable to the European tendency to impose greater regulations on hate or defamatory speech. But we should not pretend that Muslims who complain about being ridiculed for their religious convictions or who want existing laws to protect them from such ridicule are somehow violating cherished Western norms and values.

XREF: Connects to debates about blasphemy laws, the Rushdie affair, and the Charlie Hebdo controversy over double standards in free speech.

In an ironic twist to this modern history of Western censorship, just two-and-a-half years before the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten refused to publish cartoons satirizing the resurrection of Jesus because the Sunday editor feared the Jesus cartoons would “provoke an outcry.” The same newspaper that decried self-censorship and lampooned Muslim oversensitivity to ridicule did not waver in practicing censorship in deference to Christian sensibilities.

QUESTION: This irony could be explored further — why did Western media treat Muslim and Christian sensitivities so asymmetrically?

As indicated in chapter 1, a key component of Islamophobia is the tendency to portray Muslims as a monolithic bloc. Once Muslims are regarded as fundamentally sharing the same attitudes and commitments, it is not difficult to conclude that one violent Muslim, or one intolerant Muslim, makes all Muslims violent or intolerant. The events discussed in this chapter demonstrate how the actions of a few—Muhammad Bouyeri in Amsterdam, four young men in the London bombings, or a handful of imams from Denmark—are often presumed to be representative of all or most Muslims.

XREF: Connects to the monolithic-bloc framing of Islamophobia described in chapter 1 of this same source.

I analyze the arguments, motivations, and influence of prominent individuals and organizations that deliberately drown out the diversity of Muslim voices and consciously manufacture and exploit the fear of Islam in a manner unprecedented in mainstream political and media circles. I refer to this enterprise as "professional Islamophobia." Professional Islamophobia is constituted by a cadre of conservative politicians, right-wing activists and bloggers, and even disgruntled Muslims or ex-Muslims who make a career of demonizing Muslims and Arabs.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'professional Islamophobia' — a distinct coined term for organized, career-based demonization of Muslims. Builds on: "A small minority deliberately manufactures Islamophobia for profit or power."

In the piece, she associates plans to build the center with Islamic terrorism, employing the guilt-by-association principle that serves as the bedrock of Islamophobia: "Islamic jihad took down those buildings when they attacked, destroyed and murdered 3,000 people in an act of conquest and Islamic supremacism. What better way to mark your territory than to plant a giant mosque on the still-barren land of the World Trade Center? Sort of a giant victory lap. Any decent American, Muslim or otherwise, wouldn't dream of such an insult." Despite the fact that the developer and organization behind the proposed center had no ties to al-Qaeda or extremist forms of Islam, Geller connects them to the 9/11 attacks without hesitation.

DEFINE: The quote illustrates guilt-by-association as the core rhetorical mechanism of Islamophobia.

Neither the rally nor the overall campaign by Geller, Spencer, and SIOA prevented plans for the center from moving forward, but their efforts did succeed in making the project, and the Muslims who supported it, very unpopular in many political and media circles.

Pipes, Geller, and Spencer are the tip of the iceberg of anti-Muslim bloggers and activists in post-9/11 America. Much more could be said about other prominent participants in professional Islamophobia, such as Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-born Christian and founder of ACT for America who equates all practicing Muslims with radical Islam, and Frank Gaffney and David Yerushalmi, both of whom head organizations that are responsible for spreading misinformation about Islam and that seek to enact anti-Muslim laws, including the infamous anti-Sharia legislation that began sweeping through state legislatures in 2010. Readers interested in learning more about this network of right-wing bloggers and activists, including the network’s sources of funding, amounting to over $40 million, from hardline conservative foundations and donors, would do well to read the Center for American Progress’s report from 2011 titled Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.

XREF: Connects to the Center for American Progress report Fear, Inc., which documents this network's funding. Builds on: "A self-appointed cadre manufactures anti-Muslim fear as a profession"

The rise of radical right parties in Europe has gone hand in hand with the migration and immigration of Muslims in the postwar era. Particularly since the 1980s, the presence and visibility of Muslims and Islam have increased dramatically, which has contributed to some of the changing political fortunes of radical right parties. One study indicates that the radical right more than quadrupled its support in two decades. They moved from an average of 2 percent of the popular vote in 1985 to 8.5 percent of the vote by 2006. In the past fifteen years, they have constituted the second- or third-largest party in the parliaments of the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark. In Switzerland, the Swiss People's Party, a radical right party, has the largest representation in parliament. In other countries, including Belgium, Germany, France, and Austria, radical right parties have had a strong presence in both local and national politics.

QUESTION: Which countries' radical right parties quadrupled support in this window, and what specific anti-Muslim or anti-immigration platforms drove the surge?

A final group of individuals whose careers and fame depend on denigrating Islam are referred to by scholars as “native informants.”native informants: Muslim and ex-Muslim “insiders” who draw on their personal knowledge and experience of Islam to promote the belief that Islam is at odds with Western values and to reassure Western audiences that their fear of Islam is justified. Native informants are Muslim “insiders” who either have become disgruntled with Islam or have rejected it altogether. They draw on their personal knowledge and experience of Islam to “inform” the West about Islam’s “true” nature and to air the dirty laundry of Muslim communities. Native informants acquire considerable authority because their insider status gives them the credentials necessary to speak “authentically” about Islam. While they sometimes appear to address other Muslims in their writings and speeches, by and large their audience is the non-Muslim majority in the West. Their overall purpose is to reassure non-Muslims that Western misgivings and anxieties about Islam are justified, that Islam really is as bad and as dangerous as many Westerners suspect.

DEFINE: Defines the scholar's term 'native informants' — Muslim or ex-Muslim insiders who authenticate Western anti-Islam narratives.

Hirsi Ali and Manji believe that the failure of Muslims to embrace critical thinking is one of the main reasons so many women suffer abuse within Islam. The oppression of women is linked to Islam's inability to question its sources and founder. As a result, argues Hirsi Ali, Muslim men view women through the Arab tribal values that existed at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Women are basically the property of their fathers, brothers, husbands, or other men. “The essence of a woman,” Hirsi Ali adds, “is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality that makes Muslim men the owners of women.”

As a woman in the West I have access to education. I have a job, and I can change jobs as I wish. I can marry the man of my choice, or I can choose not to marry. . . . I can have an abortion. I can own property. I can travel wherever I want. . . . I can have an opinion on the moral choices of others and express my opinion, even publish it. . . . I can choose not to vote. I can stand for election to office or go into business. This is what makes the West so great.

Another example of Hirsi Ali's and Manji's failure to attend to evidence that counters their point of view involves the oppression of Muslim women, a theme that features prominently in their work. They are eager to point out the lack of education and the exclusion from political power that many Muslim women experience, but they make little effort to point to evidence that would complicate this picture. High percentages of women in Iran and Egypt, for example, achieve a college education or greater. In the United States, Muslim women are more likely to have a college or graduate degree than the overall population of women, including Christians. In politics, women have broken the glass ceiling and have served as heads of state in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.

XREF: Counters the one-dimensional picture of Muslim women's oppression often found in public discourse and some feminist-atheist critiques.

Hirsi Ali’s narrative is also missing any effort to place violence against Muslim women in a broader global context or to analyze the many possible factors that generate and perpetuate violence against women throughout the world, not just in Muslim countries. When reading or listening to Hirsi Ali, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that one in four women in the United States have experienced violent abuse from an intimate partner, and one in five have experienced an attempted rape. In Europe, one-third of all women report having experienced a sexual or physical assault. Such statistics are shocking, but they are also indicative of a global problem of violence against women that transcends religious and geographical boundaries.

XREF: The statistics cited (1 in 4 US women, 1 in 3 European women) connect to broader gender-based violence research and critiques of singular religious framings. QUESTION: What other global or systemic factors does the author suggest generate violence against women, and how might they apply across contexts?

What sets professional Islamophobia apart from the work of many contemporary politicians, journalists, and authors who occasionally tap into negative stereotypes of Muslims is its overt and unapologetic demonization of Islam. Participants in professional Islamophobia networks and endeavors cannot afford to be subtle in their characterizations of Muslims. Their careers literally depend on provocative rhetoric, exaggerated claims, and sensational narratives of backward, irrational, misogynist, and violent Muslims threatening the very foundations of the West. Almost every one of the building blocks of Islamophobia appears prominently in their writings, speeches, and interviews: Islam as monolithic, other, inferior, manipulative, and so forth. Nuance, complexity, and critical inquiry, by contrast, are absent from their work. The reason for this is not difficult to pinpoint. The fear of Islam, not the complexity of Islam, is what “sells” in the end.

Builds on: "A small minority deliberately manufactures Islamophobia for profit or power."

One can make the case that without the media’s attraction to those who traffic in professional Islamophobia, we would know little about Daniel Pipes, Geert Wilders, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This begs a larger question, one that is the focus of the next chapter: how much does the media contribute to the problem of Islamophobia?

DEFINE: Illustrates a definitional point: exposure is often mistaken for newsworthiness or legitimacy.

Crucial to any analysis of the media's portrayal of Muslims and Islam, therefore, is an understanding of what scholars refer to as “framing.” The sociologist Michael Schudson summarizes media framing in this way: “Journalists normally work with materials that real people and real events provide. But by selecting, highlighting, framing, shading, and shaping in reportage, they create the impression that real people—readers and viewers—then take to be real and to which they respond in their lives.” The news media creates frames of interpretation through which we understand “reality,” but the reality in question is a construction that reflects the biases and ideologies of individual journalists and the media organizations that employ them. The reality created by the media, moreover, is often constructed to attract consumers and to keep a newspaper, news website, or television network in business.

DEFINE: Explains the scholarly concept of 'framing' in media analysis via Schudson's definition.

When a news network airs stories about militant Muslims in, say, Pakistan, it is choosing to highlight one slice of the Muslim community in that nation, a slice that will appease the appetites of Western audiences who are attracted to stories involving violence or conflict. But by choosing not to air stories about Pakistani Muslims who fight for women's rights or who provide health care to the poor, the network creates the impression that extremist or violent Muslims are the norm in Pakistan. When other news organizations repeat this selective coverage, the result is a constructed reality that reduces all Pakistani Muslims to angry militants.

Scholarly studies of the Western news media's framing of Islam highlight two prevalent themes: terrorism and the oppression of women. Since 9/11, the media's interest in these themes has increased significantly, and its reporting has fortified the widespread conviction that Islam is defined primarily in relation to violence and misogyny.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader discussions of media framing in post-9/11 discourse. QUESTION: What evidence supports this claim, and how do such framings compare across different Western media outlets or periods? Builds on: "News frames construct reality reflecting journalists' biases and ideologies."

When news first broke of an explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, CBS News dispatched its terrorism expert, Steven Emerson, to the site to offer his analysis for viewers. Emerson reported: “This was done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait. Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East.” Other television news networks and newspapers, including ABC News, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsday, echoed Emerson's analysis and insisted that the bombing bore the marks of Middle Eastern terrorism. Although the mainstream media assumed that it was only a matter of time before investigators confirmed the identities of the Muslim culprits, as it turned out, the perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, a white, Christian American and Gulf War veteran with strong antigovernment convictions.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on media bias and the rush to attribute attacks to Muslim actors, anticipating post-9/11 coverage patterns.

By contrast, Muslim terrorists were frequently described as angry extremists, motivated primarily if not solely by religion. Speculation on mental health problems was sparse and in most cases nonexistent. When Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad opened fire at a US military recruiting office in Arkansas in 2009, killing one, Fox News reported that "Muhammad was targeting U.S. soldiers 'because of what they had done to Muslims in the past' and was angry about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." The same report suggested that the shooting "was part of what security experts call an alarming domestic trend" involving Muslim converts carrying out violent attacks in the United States. The New York Times initially focused on suggestions from experts, and even the defense lawyer, that Muhammad "was radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists in a Yemeni prison." The media's framing of Muhammad's attack, like other terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims, reduced the perpetrator to a simple-minded, angry Islamic extremist with no complex motivations or forces shaping his actions other than revenge and religion. The media exerts little effort to psychologize, humanize, or nuance Muslim terrorists in the same manner as white non-Muslim perpetrators.

XREF: Contrasts with the psychological framing media applies to white non-Muslim shooters; relates to biased coverage double standards. SEED: Potential essay angle on how terrorist framing shapes public perception and policy toward Muslim communities. Builds on: "Western news media disproportionately frames Islam around terrorism and misogyny"

In a study by Media Tenor, 975,000 news stories pertaining to Islam in both Europe and the United States were analyzed. In 2001, only 2 percent of these stories focused on Muslim militants and extremists, but this figure jumped to 25 percent by 2011. In the same period, the percentage of stories devoted to ordinary Muslims remained at 0.1 percent—no change from 2001 to 2011. This study, combined with the other studies discussed in this section, demonstrates just how fixated the Western media is on constructing Islam as a religion prone to violence and extremism.

Stories of Muslim women focus mostly on their oppression and status as victims. The stereotypical Muslim woman in the Western media is depicted as a victim of either violence or sexism (or both) at the hands of angry and misogynist Muslim men (and sometimes other women). As a victim, the Muslim woman is passive. She lacks agency and frequently even a voice. One would be hard pressed to discover Muslim women in the Western media who make choices and participate in activities that shape their own destinies. One would also have difficulty encountering the great diversity of Muslim women, with occupations including housewives, scientific researchers, and politicians, and with religious orientations ranging from Islamist to progressive.

Builds on: "Western news media disproportionately frames Islam around terrorism and misogyny"

Korteweg and Yurdakul argue that economic and social forces, combined with the immigrant experience and the integration policies of the receiving countries, contribute to the gendered violence from which some Muslim women in the West suffer. Moreover, when the media focuses on cultural or religious explanations for honor-related violence, it fails to connect the victims of this violence to other victims of gendered abuse and violence. It is worth repeating that in EU countries, one in three women have suffered from physical or sexual assault. In the United States, one in five women have been sexually assaulted, and one in four have experienced violent abuse by an intimate partner. Domestic abuse, and even domestic murder, are realities affecting large numbers of women with a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds.

XREF: Connects to broader feminist and migration scholarship on how structural marginalization, not culture alone, produces gendered violence. QUESTION: The claim that media framing isolates honor violence from other gendered abuse is a testable media studies hypothesis worth investigating further.

In Europe, the media's obsession with the supposedly oppressive nature of the veil is most easily seen in France, where a law enacted in 2004 banned the hijab in public schools. In the debate leading up to the ban, the media gave less attention to opponents of the law than it did to those politicians, public figures, and other commentators who argued that the law helped protect women from Islam's sexism. The media rarely solicited opinions from Muslim women or girls who wore the hijab and whose rationale for doing so did not confirm the narrative of oppressed Muslim women. The French media framed the debate as fundamentally about women's rights and equality, with the veil representing the antithesis of such values.

Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times, described Saudi Arabia as a "suffocating, strict, monochromatic world of white-robed men and black-robed women." She characterized the women as "faceless" and "ghostly," suggesting that their humanity is covered up by their black robes. Referring to the "ghostly women" of the United Arab Emirates, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle made this point more explicitly: "Sometimes you can see their faces. Sometimes just their eyes. Sometimes you see nothing at all of the humans beneath the black shrouds." A reporter for the Toronto Star described the horror she felt at the sight of Muslim women wearing chadors in Paris: "Those dead, shuttered, hollowed-eyed faces were the ugliest image of enslavement I have ever seen." She added that such a sight "was literally sickening." All of these descriptions share in common the assumption that Muslim women who wear the veil lack both an individual identity and a full sense of personhood. They are passive, voiceless victims who deserve our pity but otherwise have nothing to offer us except an opportunity to play the role of savior.

QUESTION: This highlights a common Orientalist framing worth interrogating — how does this dehumanizing journalism shape policy or public sympathy?

Not all Muslim women who make appearances in the Western media seem to fit the stereotype of the helpless, voiceless victim. Consider Malala Yousafzai, the teenage advocate for girls’ and women’s education in Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban in October 2012. Yousafzai became a media sensation in the West after the attempted assassination. Newspaper headlines hailed her courage in the face of terrorism and her unyielding commitment to girls’ and women’s rights. Once she began to recover, the honors quickly followed. Time magazine heralded her as one of the hundred most influential people in 2013. That same year, she gave a highly publicized speech to the UN on girls’ education, met with President Obama at the White House, and received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2014, she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Muslims as the threatening “Other” are found not only in the news but also on popular television programming and in films. Arab and Muslim characters have been a part of the American film and television industry’s history from the beginning, though depictions of these characters adapted to the times. With the United States’ rise to global superpower status after World War II, violence and terrorism became central features in representations of Muslims and Islam, mainly because of events in the Middle East that increasingly occupied the United States’ attention, including the establishment of Israel (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), the Arab oil embargo (1973), and the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis (1979–1980). These events, covered extensively by the news media, fed the popular image of Muslims and Muslim-majority regions as sources of anti-Western, anti-American violence and terrorism.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's orientalism and scholarship on media framing of Islam in American culture.

In many instances, Muslims feature prominently as loathsome terrorists. In the second season, Bauer tracks down a Muslim terrorist, Syed Ali, after a prayer service at a Los Angeles mosque. Bauer subsequently tortures Ali in order to get him to confess the whereabouts of a nuclear bomb. Ali proves resistant to torture, and when Bauer insists that he is able to inflict even more pain, Ali responds with great fervor: “Then I will have much more pleasure in paradise.” In the fourth season, the main terrorist group is called the Turkish Crimson Jihad. A Turkish family living in the United States is a part of this organization, working as a sleeper cell in the hopes of killing Americans. The family’s father in particular is portrayed as a zealous, extremist Muslim bent on jihad and willing to kill his own family to carry out his mission against America.

QUESTION: How representative is this depiction of the show's overall portrayal of Muslim characters across all seasons?

The portrayal of Muslims as terrorists in shows such as 24 and Homeland has led to some highly publicized criticisms. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) accused 24 of stereotyping Muslims and Arabs as terrorists, insisting that “repeated association of acts of terrorism with Islam will only serve to increase anti-Muslim prejudice.” The producers and writers of 24 responded by noting that the show had “not singled out any ethnic or religious group for blame in creating the characters.” They added that “the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States.” At one point during the show’s run, the Fox television network aired a public service announcement during a commercial break for one of the episodes. It featured the lead actor, Kiefer Sutherland, warning viewers about the dangers of stereotyping Muslims as terrorists.

XREF: Connects to broader media representation studies and debates about fictional shows promoting real-world prejudice. QUESTION: Did public service announcements demonstrably reduce anti-Muslim stereotyping among 24 viewers?

Scholar Evelyn Alsultany refers to these strategies as "simplified complex representations": "Simplified complex representations are strategies used by television producers, writers, and directors to give the impression that the representations they are producing are complex. . . . These representations appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural or post-race illusion."

DEFINE: Alsultany's term 'simplified complex representations' names the TV-industry trick of appearing to challenge stereotypes while actually reinforcing them.

Alsultany reminds us that these strategies, even when well-intentioned, reinforce stereotypes and narrow views of Muslims. They reinscribe a "good Muslim" versus "bad Muslim" dichotomy that simplifies more than it complexifies. "Bad Muslims" are typically terrorists, and "good Muslims" are the ones who support the US government in its battle against terrorism. But all Muslim characters in these dramas are defined primarily in relation to violence and terrorism (whether they are for or against these things). Non-Muslim characters, by contrast, have more diverse or nuanced storylines. For example, Homeland's main protagonist, Carrie Mathison, not only fights terrorism but also battles bipolar disorder. Her struggles with mental illness constitute an important part of her storyline. We rarely encounter Muslim characters struggling with any psychological disorder other than religious fanaticism.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on 'model minority' and 'good/bad' dichotomies in media representation across racial and religious groups.

Even when shows not focused on terrorism attempt to include Muslim characters, the old stereotypes are rarely far away. For example, consider the popular program Lost (2004–2010). Lost follows the survivors of a commercial airplane that crashes on a mysterious island with supernatural forces. One of the survivors is Sayid Jarrah. Sayid's character hails from Iraq, and we learn from various episodes that he is both a Muslim and a former soldier in the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991). Because terrorism is not the show's focus, Sayid is not portrayed primarily in relation to terrorism. Yet his character is portrayed in relation to violence.

All-American Muslim is a reality show that follows five Muslim families living in Dearborn, Michigan, known for its sizable Muslim community. Viewers have an opportunity to observe the daily lives of these families and how their faith informs who they are. The general manager of TLC, the cable network airing the program, stated: "We wanted to show there was diversity even within the Muslim community. These are families that might have beliefs that are different than yours, but we are all living similar daily lives and hopefully we will bring that to light." Unfortunately, the network canceled the show after one season. The show suffered from low ratings and from a controversy in which some sponsors pulled their ads after the Florida Family Association, a conservative Christian organization, launched a campaign against the program on the basis that it promoted "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values." Because the show did not include extremist Muslims, insisted the organization, it provided the public with an inaccurate view of Islam's true nature.

SEED: Excellent article angle: how representation of moderate religious communities becomes collateral damage in culture wars, and who controls the narrative of 'true' identity.

The sitcom Community faired much better. The show focuses on community college students in Colorado. One of the students is Abed Nadir, a Palestinian American. Abed's social awkwardness and fixation with popular culture are central to his character, but, notably, his Muslim faith is not. He is an excellent example of a character that pushes beyond simplified complex representations and the practice of defining Muslim characters in relation to violence or terrorism.

DEFINE: Distinguishes Abed as moving 'beyond simplified complex representations' — a representational framework for evaluating Muslim characters in media. XREF: Connects to the broader argument about how minority characters are defined by identity markers versus being allowed full personhood.

Türkisch für Anfänger focuses on the challenges facing the merging of two families after a German woman marries a man of Turkish background. Each parent brings two children into the marriage. On the husband's side, there is a daughter, Yagmur, who wears a headscarf and seeks to be a devout Muslim. The show contains storylines in which Yagmur wrestles with the challenges of reconciling her Muslim and German identities, yet the show avoids a simplistic resolution. Room is left for Yagmur to be both German and Muslim.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about cultural integration and hyphenated identity in multicultural societies, and to media representation of minority identities.

These shows represent the emergence of new television programming containing Muslim characters and storylines that are not confined to terrorism, violence, or the dichotomy between "good Muslim" and "bad Muslim." Television shows that traffic in Muslim stereotypes are still the norm, but these alternative representations are promising signs that popular television can play a more constructive role in how the West imagines and understands Muslims.

XREF: Connects to media representation studies and debates about stereotype-breaking in popular culture, possibly echoing Stuart Hall's work on representation. Builds on: "So-called "good Muslims" in TV dramas still reinforce stereotypes."

Muslim and Arab characters have been a part of the film industry from the beginning. Jack Shaheen, the foremost expert on Hollywood's portrayal of Muslims and Arabs, argues that the history of these groups in film is not pretty: "From 1896 until today, filmmakers have collectively indicted Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized religious fanatics and money-mad cultural 'others' bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews." Shaheen adds that Islam in particular gets hit hard in movies, increasingly so in recent decades: "Today's imagemakers regularly link the Islamic faith with male supremacy, holy war, and acts of terror, depicting Arabs and Muslims as hostile alien intruders, and as lecherous, oily sheikhs intent on using nuclear weapons." Shaheen estimates that, as of 2008, the number of films maligning Muslims and Arabs in one way or another exceeds 1,150.

One of the most egregious depictions of violent Muslims just prior to 9/11 is found in Rules of Engagement (2000), a movie produced in cooperation with the US Marine Corps and the US Department of Defense (DOD). Early in the film, we see a horde of Muslims demonstrating outside the US embassy in Yemen. Veiled women, bearded men, and children chant, wave anti-American banners, and hurl rocks and firebombs. Helicopters deliver marines to the embassy to protect it. Under attack from a few snipers, a colonel orders his soldiers to open fire on the crowd. The soldiers succeed in killing eighty-three protestors. The attack initially seems unjustified. An investigation ensues, revealing that the protestors were in fact armed with weapons and fired first on the marines. What seemed like a brutal slaughter of civilians was actually an act of self-defense. The investigator even uncovers an audio recording of a Muslim prior to the attack proclaiming: "[This is a] declaration of Islamic Jihad against the United States. . . . We call on every Muslim who believes in God . . . to kill Americans and their allies, both civilian and military. It is the duty of every Muslim, everywhere . . . to kill Americans." The movie portrays all Muslims in the crowd, even the children, as ruthless, anti-American terrorists driven by religious extremism. We are meant to cheer for the Marines as they are vindicated in their killing of the Yemeni men, women, and children. The film's director, William Friedkin, affirmed as much: "I've seen audiences stand up and applaud the film throughout the United States."

QUESTION: Was this depiction genuinely a mainstream trend, or an outlier shaped by Pentagon production involvement?

Rules of Engagement reveals the enduring strength and persistence of the stereotype of violent, hateful Muslims dedicated to destroying the United States and the West. The movie "works" even without the 9/11 worldview. But after 9/11, the damage inflicted by such stereotypes is much greater. Shaheen notes that during times of war and armed conflict, this sort of stereotyping meets little resistance. Western audiences see these disparaging characterizations as confirming the reasons for real-world events such as the destruction of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Put simply, movies with Muslim and Arab villains seem even more realistic after 9/11 because of the assumption that Muslims are our real-world enemies who attacked us on 9/11 and with whom we are at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

XREF: Connects to the broader debate about media stereotyping and how real-world conflict legitimizes fictional portrayals.

Similar observations apply to American Sniper, a film that follows the story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in US military history. Kyle is a Navy SEAL sharpshooter who is tasked with protecting his fellow soldiers during four tours of duty in Iraq by killing anyone who appears to pose a threat to them. Like Zero Dark Thirty, almost every Muslim who appears on screen is the enemy. In fact, Kyle opens fire not only on menacing Muslim men but on women and children too, and he does so with little remorse. He repeatedly refers to the people of Iraq as "savages" and sees himself as a Christian crusader (with a crusader's cross tattoo on one of his arms to prove it). While Clint Eastwood, the film's director, is willing to probe some of the complexities of Kyle's character, such as the toll that sustained participation in violence takes on Kyle's marriage and psyche, Eastwood never challenges Kyle's Manichean worldview of "evil Muslims" versus "righteous Americans."

XREF: Parallels Zero Dark Thirty, also discussed in the surrounding text, suggesting a broader pattern in post-9/11 war films.

Other films with sympathetic portrayals of Muslims include Babel (2006), Paris, je t'aime (2006), and Mooz-Lum (2010). Babel traces the events following an accidental shooting of an American tourist on a bus in Morocco. Many of the Moroccan characters—including a fellow bus passenger, doctors, and local villagers—come to the aid of the American. In the French film, Paris, je t'aime (Paris, I Love You), an Arab Muslim teenager named Zarka teaches a young French admirer, François, that her hijab does not hide her beauty but represents what real beauty is—her identification with Islam. In Mooz-Lum, a young African American Muslim, Tariq, wrestles with his religious identity in light of both a strict and traumatic upbringing and the events of 9/11. The film adopts Tariq's point of view and demonstrates the challenges and complexities of Muslim American identity in the post-9/11 era. All three films provide Muslim characters that are relatable and sympathetic. They represent a slow but growing trend in movies challenging the violent, misogynist Muslim stereotype that has plagued Western cinema for much of its history.

The act expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance programs and to detain immigrants suspected of supporting terrorism.Passed overwhelmingly by Congress in October 2001 and renewed or extended several times since then, the act expanded the US government's power to wiretap and conduct surveillance without prior cause, to access private records without oversight, and to detain indefinitely immigrants suspected of supporting terrorism, among other provisions.

DEFINE: Describes the USA PATRIOT Act's expansion of government powers without naming the act directly.

The men were interviewed, fingerprinted, and photographed by federal officials. According to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), between September 11, 2002, and June 1, 2003, almost 128,000 Arab and Muslim men were registered at their US port of entry, while approximately 83,000 Arabs and Muslims already residing in the United States were registered. While the DHS initially indicated that targeting men from these nationalities was necessary for national security, in 2011 the department reversed course and suspended the program, noting that collecting such data "no longer provides any increase in security." A grand total of zero terrorism convictions resulted from the program.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 civil liberties literature and surveillance-state critiques.

After 9/11, the FBI adopted a preemptive strategy in its counterterrorism measures. It relied increasingly on informants and agents provocateurs, individuals tasked with inciting others to engage in terrorism so that they could be identified and arrested. In other words, the FBI secretly infiltrated Muslim communities, targeting individuals who were not engaged in criminal activity in an effort to transform them into terrorism suspects. The idea was to stop terrorism at its roots, before it had a chance to materialize and do damage, but it was based on the assumption that Muslims were already guilty of terrorism. On this model, the job of law enforcement was to induce Muslims to actualize their latent terrorist tendencies.

An FBI informant named Shahed Hussain, posing as a wealthy Pakistani businessman, lured four men from Newburgh, New York, into a plot to bomb two synagogues. Hussain was responsible for creating the plot, for overseeing the surveillance of the synagogues, and for providing fake weapons to the men. All four men were African Americans from impoverished backgrounds. One had a mental illness. Another had a brother in desperate need of a liver transplant. Hussain preyed on their vulnerabilities and used financial incentives to convince the four to join his plot.

QUESTION: This raises serious questions about entrapment and the ethics of FBI counterterrorism operations targeting vulnerable individuals.

Entrapment involves the government inducing individuals to commit a crime they would not otherwise commit. But entrapment defenses are difficult to pull off in court. The government only has to prove that the accused were predisposed to carry out the acts, even if the defendants demonstrate that the government induced them to do so. Predisposition operates on the assumption that Muslims are prone to terrorism. Juries readily embrace the notion of predisposition, and, as a result, the entrapment defense usually does not work.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of counterterrorism tactics and racial/religious profiling in the criminal justice system.

The NYPD's program depended on a theory of radicalization elaborated in its 2007 report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report spells out four stages of radicalization: preradicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization. Descriptions of these stages are telling. For example, Muslims in the preradicalization stage are young (under the age of thirty-five), middle-class men. They are recent converts with little or no criminal history. Oftentimes, they are not particularly devout, at least at this stage. As these men move through the other stages, they become more devout and politically active. They may stop smoking or drinking and grow a beard. At this point, the document assumes, Muslims are clearly on the path toward radicalization.

The report also points to "Radicalization Incubators" that set Muslim men on a path to radicalization. These are places such as mosques, cafés, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, and bookstores. We now know that these are exactly the places that the NYPD sent spies and "mosque-crawlers" to monitor Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader surveillance-state literature and the NYPD's post-9/11 counterterrorism programs.

Journalists brought details of the NYPD's secret surveillance program to light in 2011. The news generated considerable criticism from Muslims and civil rights organizations, particularly regarding the program's overt reliance on racial and religious profiling. In the midst of the controversy, the chief of the NYPD intelligence division admitted that the program had not produced one criminal lead since its inception.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of counterterrorism surveillance effectiveness versus civil liberties costs — a recurring theme in intelligence and policing literature. Builds on: "NYPD monitored Muslim gathering places named as radicalization incubators"

In Britain, for example, according to data from 2008, blacks were 7.4 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than whites, while Asians were 2.3 times more likely than whites to undergo these procedures. Both Asian and black Muslims have complained that the practice is discriminatory and symptomatic of legalized Islamophobia.

These restrictions raise an important question, one articulated by scholar Liz Fekete: "Are we seeing a new form of religious profiling? A new offence: 'Demonstrating for Palestine while Muslim'?"

QUESTION: The framing 'Demonstrating for Palestine while Muslim' opens an important question about how speech restrictions intersect with religious identity — worth exploring further in context.

European security and police forces often aided and abetted the United States in using secret and indefinite detentions to battle terrorism. We have evidence of law enforcement agents throughout Europe arresting and detaining suspects, often Muslim men, and then turning them over to US custody without judicial process. Some suspects became victims of extraordinary rendition, the process by which they were transferred from US custody to countries or locations where they encountered the possibility of torture.

XREF: Connects to documented cases like Maher Arar and the CIA's black-site rendition program. QUESTION: Which specific European countries and how many documented rendition cases could be named?

The Swedish Security Police suspected the men of participating in terrorism and, with permission from the Swedish government, secretly apprehended the two men in December 2001. The police drove them to an airport outside Stockholm and handed them over to masked CIA agents. The agents stripped the men of their clothing, inserted suppositories into their anuses, dressed them in disposable underpants and overalls, chained their hands and feet, and put hoods over their heads. The two men were then put on a plane for Cairo, Egypt, where they were imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. Al-Zery was released in 2003 and Agiza in 2011.

DEFINE: This is a concrete example of extraordinary rendition, a practice where suspects are secretly transferred to other countries for interrogation and torture.

One report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that the actual number of hate crimes in the United States is anywhere from nineteen to thirty-one times higher than the FBI’s numbers. Approximately 56 percent of hate crimes are not reported to the police, and more than half that are reported are mislabeled as other types of crimes. This means that the FBI statistics represent the most conservative estimate of anti-Muslim hate crimes.

The Collective against Islamophobia in France recorded a significant increase in anti-Muslim incidents from 2010 to 2013. In 2010, there were 188 incidents. This number rose to 298 in 2011, 469 in 2012, and 691 in 2013. What explains the upsurge? The increase was likely due to the intense political campaign against face veils that led the French Parliament to approve a ban on them in 2010.

QUESTION: The causal link between political rhetoric and discriminatory incident reporting is worth examining more closely — correlations with media coverage, policy cycles, and reporting culture could deepen the picture.

These instances from Britain and France reinforce the view that anti-Muslim hate crimes spike whenever there are highly publicized episodes casting Muslims in a negative light.

The title of the manifesto, “2083—A European Declaration of Independence,” reflects Breivik’s convictions that Europe is at war with Muslims. The year 2083 refers to the forthcoming four-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vienna. This battle witnessed the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the hands of European Christians. For Breivik, the battle is significant because it marked the end of the Muslim empire’s attempt to take over the lands of Christendom. Unfortunately, argues Breivik, Muslims are once again on the march, attempting to colonize Europe as part of a “demographic jihad.” Through immigration and breeding, Muslims are determined to create a “Eurabia.” Breivik sees himself as a participant in a crusade to seize military and political control of Western Europe in order to “save millions of European lives from the war that most certainly awaits us when the Muslims in any given country become the dominating force.” Islam, after all, is not really a religion but “a political ideology that exists in a fundamental and permanent state of war with non-Islamic civilizations, cultures, and individuals.”

XREF: Connects to research on lone-actor terrorism narratives and historical myth-making, plus 'Eurabia' conspiracy theory literature.

His arguments reflect the positions articulated by the US professional Islamophobia industry. In fact, many of the key figures discussed in chapter 6, including Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, and Robert Spencer, feature prominently in Breivik’s manifesto. Spencer is a particular favorite—Breivik cites him 162 times.

Pays off: "A funded anti-Muslim network operates across American politics."

Despite Breivik’s fear of a Muslim takeover of Europe, he targeted non-Muslims, particularly people he identified as symbols of the political establishment. Since the government was to blame for the Muslim threat, an assault on the government was necessary to save European civilization. But without a doubt, Islamophobia fueled Breivik’s killing rampage. Bias against Muslims was translated into a hate crime deliberately carried out against non-Muslims. After the Norway shootings, no one seemed safe from the threat of anti-Muslim hate crimes.

XREF: Counterintuitive link between Islamophobia and attacks on non-Muslims; connects to broader dynamics of scapegoating and displaced violence in radical ideologies.

The restrictions primarily target Muslim clothing and worship structures, the two most visible symbols of Islamic identity in public space. But even in countries that have not enacted restrictive laws, controversies over what Muslims can wear and build are not difficult to find.

The French hijab ban (2004) refers to a law passed by the French Parliament in 2004 that banned "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. The ban included not only Muslim hijabs and headscarves but also large crosses, skullcaps, and symbols from other religious traditions and communities. Nevertheless, the context of the ban was an ongoing debate over clothing worn by Muslim schoolgirls dating to the late 1980s.

QUESTION: Does the even-handed scope of the ban reflect genuine secularism or a targeted restriction aimed at Muslim dress?

The factors that led to the law are more complex and cannot be reduced only to prejudice against Muslims. The French principle of laïcité is deeply embedded in modern French identity and reflects an overall tendency to privatize all forms of religious expression. Moreover, there is a longer history of the government fighting to exclude religious expression and symbols from public schools, dating back to the late nineteenth century and the Third Republic's campaign to rid schools of significant Roman Catholic influence.

But, without a doubt, anxiety over Muslims and their ability to embrace a French identity and French values drove much of the support for the law. The fact that neither the government commission nor members of the French Parliament paid much attention to arguments made by Muslim girls and women about why they wore headscarves was indicative of the hostile political climate for French Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of secularism (laïcité) as a cover for religious discrimination in European governance. Builds on: "France's 2004 hijab ban applied to all visible religious symbols."

The prevailing assumption was that Muslim girls were coerced into wearing a garment that symbolized women's inferiority. Evidence that complicated this picture made little difference. Remember that the two sisters in 2003 removed from gym class came from a family that discouraged them from wearing headscarves. Moreover, some girls wore the hijab because they did not want to be treated as sex objects. They saw tight clothing, short skirts, and exposed skin as evidence of sexual exploitation, not liberation. But the idea that a law was needed to liberate oppressed Muslim girls, irrespective of their own views, was persuasive, and it received broad support across the political spectrum.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of policymaking driven by assumptions rather than evidence, and Western savior narratives about non-Western women.

In 2010, a law banning face veils passed both chambers of the French Parliament almost unanimously. The law, which took effect the following year, prohibited all forms of dress concealing the face in public space. Face veils could be worn in the private sphere—homes, houses of worship, personal automobiles—but wearing them most anywhere else would result in a fine and mandatory citizenship training.

In Novara, Italy, the town council, controlled by the far right Northern League, passed an ordinance in January 2010 prohibiting face veils in public space.

The answer lies in the ability of minarets to occupy and define public space more expansively than mosques. Minarets can reach soaring heights and dominate surrounding structures. They can also be seen at greater distances as they rival other towers and buildings in the skyline. Minarets can also have, at least in theory, an acoustical presence. If the Islamic call to prayer, or the adhan, is issued from a minaret, it conveys an Islamic presence just as powerfully as the physical structure. … The possible sound of the adhan in Arabic being broadcast from minarets taps into anxieties that Muslims are taking over public space and imposing a foreign religion (and language!) on other Europeans.

In Cologne, the minarets generated just as much controversy as the mosque itself. The local Muslim community and the architect responded by lowering the two proposed minarets to allay fears that they would compete with the spires of Cologne Cathedral. In fact, a pamphlet published by the Turkish organization behind the mosque provides a scale drawing of the mosque and its minarets, placing them alongside other prominent buildings in Cologne. The minarets reach a height of 55 meters, much shorter than the almost 160-meter height of the cathedral's spires, and nowhere near the height of Cologne's tallest structure, the Colonius, which measures almost 270 meters. But such a campaign to allay fears over the minarets' height reveals just how much anxiety accompanies the prominent presence of an Islamic structure. We see examples of this anxiety in other locations, such as Pforzheim, Germany, where a minaret was allowed only if it were lower than the steeple of a local church.

In other minaret controversies, the fear of the call to prayer is more central. Normally, such a fear would be irrelevant since, in many localities in Europe, noise ordinances prevent the call to prayer. But, in recent years, we are seeing more allowances for it. In 2010, local authorities in Rendsburg, Germany, gave the mosque permission to issue the call to prayer on Fridays. In 2013, the Fittja Mosque in Stockholm became the first one in Sweden to receive permission to broadcast the adhan from the minaret. But there are also notable instances of resistance to such efforts. For example, when the Central Oxford Mosque proposed to broadcast the daily call to prayer from its minaret in 2007, local residents mounted a fierce opposition. Mosque leaders eventually backed off the proposal.

In 2008, two far right parties succeeded in banning the construction of minarets and even mosques in the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Vorarlberg. This marked the first instance of an outright ban on Islamic worship structures in Europe.

DEFINE: Clearly establishes the historical fact of when and where the first European ban on Islamic worship structures occurred.

The Swiss People's Party campaigned fiercely in favor of the amendment. One of the party's major spokespersons, Oskar Freysinger, invoked the specter of an Islamic conquest taking the form of minarets, referring to them as "the flags that generals place on strategic military maps to identify a conquered territory." This militant image found expression in the campaign's most infamous poster, depicting a Swiss flag populated with minarets in the form of missiles. The party warned that minarets would open the door to Sharia law and to the oppression of women. In fact, the same poster also contained the image of a veiled woman in the foreground. Minarets and the loss of freedom for women became intertwined in the campaign.

Despite opposition to the initiative from the Swiss government and several prominent Christian religious organizations, the campaign to ban minarets succeeded in the referendum held in November 2009. A double majority was needed for the referendum to pass—a majority of voters and a majority of cantons had to approve the ban. In the end, 57.5 percent of the voters approved, as did twenty-two of twenty-six cantons.

The ban met with strong criticism outside of Switzerland. The Vatican, the UN high commissioner for human rights, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference condemned the ban, as did many political leaders. Far right parties throughout Europe, by contrast, welcomed the ban and expressed hope that similar bans in the future would take effect in their countries. Their optimism was not misplaced. Polling in the weeks following the ban indicated that support for similar bans across Europe was gaining traction. Approximately 59 percent of those polled in Belgium favored a minaret ban, as did 46 percent in France and 37 percent in Britain. The Swiss ban galvanized far right politicians throughout Europe, providing them with a possible blueprint for minimizing Islam's presence in the public sphere.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on Islamophobia in Europe and the diffusion of restrictive policy models across national borders. SEED: Potential essay angle: how a single national referendum becomes a policy blueprint exported across a continent.

Our discussion of the surveillance, religious profiling, detentions, deportations, hate crimes, and impediments to the free exercise of religion touches on the most prominent instances of the discrimination, exclusion, and even violence experienced by Muslims. While this is not an exhaustive list, it is a reminder of some of the overwhelming challenges facing Muslims who seek to live as productive members of Western societies. It is also a reminder that racism and bigotry are not confined to individual attitudes and actions but are systemic and take institutionalized form. The perpetuation of Islamophobia by government agencies and non-Muslim citizens reveals the magnitude of the problem. But is the problem insurmountable, or are there effective ways to combat Islamophobia? That is the question that concerns us in the final chapter.

This is a point that Ingrid Mattson makes by referencing Islamic law. Mattson, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Western Ontario and former president of the Islamic Society of North America, notes the distinction in Islamic law between “simple ignorance” and “complex ignorance.” The former refers to inadequate knowledge on a matter resulting from a lack of information. The latter refers to assumed knowledge on a matter even though one is mistaken or has faulty information. With complex ignorance, one has cognitive frames that will not allow correct information to enter the mind and to transform one’s thinking. This means that an entire deconstruction process must take place before one can be open to receiving correct knowledge.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'simple ignorance' (lacking information) from 'complex ignorance' (holding faulty cognitive frames that resist correction), a distinction from Islamic law via Mattson. XREF: Connects to cognitive science notions of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and how entrenched belief structures resist updating.

Mattson argues that complex ignorance explains why simply providing the larger public with correct information about Islam is ineffective. She refers to her own experience of public speaking engagements after 9/11 in which many people would sit through her lectures on Islamic teachings and practices, only to respond at the end with incredulity. They were convinced they knew more about Islam than she did, even though her education in and experience of Islam far exceeded theirs. Mattson’s observations on complex ignorance of Islam shed some light on why responding to the Islamophobia industry by presenting straightforward facts and data will have a limited impact.

XREF: Connects to the backfire effect and research on motivated reasoning in political psychology.

I gave a talk in Kansas City some years ago, and somebody stood up and said, “What the heck is wrong with you Muslims?” My response was if the only thing I knew about Kansas City was the first minute of the local news every night, I would say to you, “What the heck is wrong with you people in Kansas City?” If the only thing I know is the murders and rapes I hear about on the evening news, then I have a very skewed view of who you are.

QUESTION: A striking analogy that reframes anti-Muslim bias as a media-perception problem rather than a group-trait problem. Could chase how this framing lands differently across audiences. SEED: Potential essay: 'The City as Muslim' — how out-of-context worst-case sampling distorts views of any out-group, using Kansas City as a personalizing device.

In her research, she discovered that negative, threatening images and stories remain with us in ways that positive news stories do not because our brains are set up to prioritize information that is existentially vital: “There’s nothing more important than a threat to your life and to your security and safety. Even if there are one hundred stories about Muslims doing good things (denouncing terrorism, engaging in humanitarian work, etc.), this information will not stick with people.” For Mattson, this explains why most Americans know the name Osama bin Laden but have no idea who Tawakkol Karman is. Karman, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, is a Muslim making positive contributions. But her story is not threatening, nor does it fit into the cognitive frames many in the West have developed about Islam (that is, Islam is violent, Islam is opposed to Muslim women having prominent public roles, and so on). Her story does not stick.

We should approach the media with the same caution with which we would approach any drug that has the potential to do great harm to our minds or to alter our perceptions of reality.

While the Qur’an has its share of violent passages, she notes that the same is true for Jewish and Christian scriptures. None of the Abrahamic traditions have a monopoly on violent texts.

Esposito notes that data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup reveal the degree to which Muslim Americans are economically, educationally, and politically integrated into society. Muslim youth have high rates of college education and are economically equal to if not better off than many non-Muslims. Muslim Americans, in other words, are not operating as alienated outsiders in the United States, despite the bigotry and discrimination they experience. Polls indicate that they are full participants in American political and social life.

QUESTION: The integration data contrasts with the narrative of alienation pushed by anti-Muslim rhetoric — worth tracing the disconnect between lived integration and the perception of it.

Mogahed wants more Westerners to know that Islam does not motivate extremist or violent behavior any more than other religions do. Her work at Gallup gave her the opportunity to oversee numerous public opinion polls among Muslims. The findings confirmed that Muslim religiosity did not correlate with the tendency to sympathize with terrorism. If anything, higher levels of religiosity were linked to a propensity among Muslims to reject terrorism. “Islam as a net influence is the reason there is so little terrorism,” Mogahed argues. “Islam as a net influence is the reason we don’t have more hate and animosity between Muslims and the West.”

XREF: Connects to the broader literature debunking the religion-motivates-terrorism assumption, e.g., Gallup polling on Muslim public opinion. FICTION: Could inform a character who is wrongly presumed radical due to devoutness, when devotion in fact steers them away from extremism.

Patel’s advice to non-Muslims concerned with combating Islamophobia is to pay particular attention to how prejudices are formed and dismantled and to proceed strategically. “Do not castigate your run-of-the-mill Islamophobe,” Patel says. “Castigate the Islamophobes who know what they are doing. Castigate Pam Geller, David Horowitz, and others who are playing Wizard of Oz and who are creating Islamophobia.” Patel argues that most people who harbor prejudice against Muslims have a very limited knowledge base and are making judgments about Muslims based on that shallow pool of knowledge. Their intent is not malicious, so it therefore serves no purpose to call them racist.

QUESTION: How does one reliably distinguish ignorant prejudice from deliberate promotion of it in practice?

For those who are participants in the Abrahamic traditions, Ellison believes that more effort spent on discussing commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will make a difference. This includes talking about the shared skeletons in the closet, such as the violent passages that can be found in the scriptures of all three traditions. But it also means discussing the shared love and common prophetic figures in the traditions.

XREF: Connects to broader interfaith and comparative religion conversations around shared scripture and violent passages.

Dare to question and to address the differences on key issues with Muslims if and when they exist. "These questions," Ramadan maintains, "signal that you are supportive of Muslims who are victims of discrimination but also that your support is not a blind support for everything." Both Ramadan and Francois-Cerrah take to heart one of the more common criticisms of the concept of Islamophobia discussed in chapter 1, that calling attention to Islamophobia has the potential to stifle legitimate criticisms of Muslims and Islam. Their response is that non-Muslims can fight Islamophobia without abandoning a critical engagement with Muslims.

DEFINE: Clarifies the concept of Islamophobia advocacy — it need not preclude legitimate criticism, addressing a critique raised about the term.

Ramadan observes that Muslim Europeans are gradually settling down and engaging their neighbors and local governments. This constitutes a paradox for Muslims. In the near future, it means greater tension. “It's because Muslims are getting out of the social and geographical ghettoes and are becoming more visible,” Ramadan argues, “that there is this impression that Muslims in Europe are not integrating.” More visibility and activity from Muslims in the public sphere means that anxiety over Muslims will continue to rise to the surface. As the majority becomes more accustomed to the visibility of immigrant and religious minorities, and as there is more personal interaction with Muslim minorities, conditions will improve.

QUESTION: Ramadan implies tension eventually subsides with familiarity — but is there evidence that prolonged visibility actually reduces anxiety, or might it entrench it? XREF: This resembles contact hypothesis literature in social psychology (Allport) and the notion that integration begets backlash before acceptance.

Patel also thinks that Europe, more so than the United States, faces difficult times ahead when it comes to Islamophobia. This is primarily due to added tensions around issues of class and education. Muslims in Europe occupy lower rungs on the socioeconomic ladder and possess lower education levels than Muslims in the United States, and this complicates their relationship with non-Muslims in Europe.

Islamophobia is a massive problem that permeates many elements of Western societies. We have a long way to go before Islamophobia becomes as unacceptable in Western societies as other prejudices. But there is reason to hope for a better future.

Marjorie Dove Kent is the executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), an organization that mobilizes Jews to combat racism and economic inequity in New York City. The organization participates in a larger coalition called the Jews Against Islamophobia Coalition that arose in response to the Park51 controversy in lower Manhattan in 2010.

XREF: Connects to broader narratives about interfaith solidarity and responses to Islamophobia in post-9/11 America.