Islamophobia Awareness Month is an annual event that takes place in November in the United States and Canada. The campaign was initiated by the Muslim advocacy groups in the US in 2012. The stated objective of the campaign was to increase awareness of “Islamophobia” and promote religious tolerance.
The Muslim advocacy groups are a part of the Muslim Brotherhood at work in the form of CAIR, IAMC, ICNA, 5Pillars, etc. The height of appeasement is that just when Israeli defence forces are at war with the Hamas terrorists, and because of that anti-Semitic cases have risen to more than 1000 per cent in various European cities, the West reiterates its commitment to raising awareness of Islamophobia Awareness Month in November.
Muslim reformers worked hard after 9/11 to make people aware that Islamophobia was a misnomer for both the cottage industry of anti-Muslim hate and genuine cases of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination. The human rights advocacy groups were attempting to divert attention from the genuine criticism of regressive practices in Islam.
They were putting up a smokescreen for the existing and prevalent anti-Semitic, anti-Hindu hatred that exists in Muslim communities across the globe. The advocacy groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood had understood the repercussions that Muslims were going to face in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy. Not only had Muslims begun exploring their culture, theology, and religion, but even non-Muslims tried to understand what inspired pilots to fly planes into buildings, killing hundreds of innocent people.
The challenging questions from both the global community and those within the Muslim faith, including dissenters, sceptics, and genuinely concerned believers, could not be avoided. These questions were not new, as they had been posed by Muslim freethinkers, agnostics, and Islamic skeptics for centuries. However, the Asharite tradition, which prioritised the literal interpretation of texts over rational discourse (Mutazalite), effectively fostered a culture that suppressed critical examination and has persisted into the 21st century. This culture contributed to the emergence of the Islamophobia industry.
We never hear about Christian, Jew, or Hindu dissenters being labelled as Christian-phobic, or Hindu-phobic, or any other kind of phobic term coined for any other community or group, but to quote Gad Saad, Canadian evolutionary psychologist, professor, and author it is only the “Noble Faith” which objects to criticism and labels anyone practising freedom of expression as Islamophobia.
The Muslim-on-Muslim violence since the beginning of the 20th century has never received the same scrutiny that is reserved for other religions. Since 632 AD, the violence has engulfed not only those cultures, regions being conquered by the Islamic Conquest, but also those that would adhere to the beliefs and practices of their ancestors despite conversion.
Any disagreement brought on violence, be it the early Muslim converts leaving the fold of Islam, prompting the First Rightly-guided Caliph to go to war with the tribes (the Ridda Wars or Wars of Apostasy) or later assassinations, torture, ostracization, discrimination of Muslim heretics. The concept of blasphemy and laws regarding it were developed in the early centuries of Islam and fortified during the Abbasid dynastic rule, two centuries later in what became known as the ulema-state alliance to scholars.
In subsequent centuries, anyone raising doubts about the origins of scriptures, or expressing their scepticism about the claims that mullahs make about the Islamic faith, or even Muslims questioning certain disagreeable and revulsive practices such as triple talaq, halala or muta marriages were declared apostates, the punishment for which is death (wajib-ul-qatl) in 32 Muslim-majority countries.
At the start of the 21st century marked by the September 11 attacks; it was remarkable to see the cottage industry of human rights unfolding before our eyes. At that horrendous time our grandparents, parents, and peers were horrified at the tragedy, realising it was Osama bin Laden’s Wahhabi interpretations that had sent 19 pilots from various Middle Eastern countries to fly planes into buildings, killing thousands of innocents.
They started reiterating to us how Islam had been hijacked, that this was not the core message, that these were murderous savages, that radical, political Islam was far removed from the spiritual Sufi one that we all had been practising for decades if not centuries.
However, both the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and the West, along with our home-grown Jamaat-i-Islami influenced advocacy groups in Asia, introduced the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ with the intention of stifling any discussions or critiques. In Europe, which was already grappling with the historical legacy of World War 2 and a collective sense of responsibility for past instances of fascism and colonial racism, the term was embraced without opposition.
The Left which had by then become the “regressive left” (totalitarian and fascist in nature) had allied with the similarly ideologically driven Islamists and the world became careful of addressing issues within Muslim culture, retreating to the best thing they always do — appeasement of the ‘Noble Faith’.
We, in India, are familiar with the vote bank politics and appeasement of elite Muslim political groups since Independence by leftists masquerading as liberals. The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 found that the majority of Indian Muslims, one of the largest minorities in Asia, were at the bottom of the development index.
Since the ransacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and Napolean’s defeat of Egyptian forces in 1798 and successive subjugation of the Middle East and North Africa by colonial powers throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Muslim world has been in denial of the backwardness of their societies.
Instead of self-reflecting, progressing, and acknowledging what went wrong (quoting Bernard Lewis) and studying what went right with the West and other developing countries, the Middle East doubled down and insulated itself further into the new ideologies of Qutubism, Wahhabism, and Salafism.
In the Indian subcontinent, we had the misfortune of Aurangzeb who reversed syncretic traditions and space for freethinking created by the more adaptive and assimilated Mughal rulers. His legacy of the Fatwa-e-Alamgiri gave us the Jamaat-i-Islami, Maududi’s child which resulted in the cutting up of the subcontinent into two Muslim countries, West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the largest, bloodiest mass migration, violence, and displacement of refugees in the history of the modern world.
Presently, Middle Eastern nations that are seen as ‘evolved,’ including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iran with its dissenting stance, and Turkey with its Western influences, are taking the necessary steps that should have been initiated after the defeat by Napoleon.
They are moving towards the opening up of the Muslim world and recognising the societal advancements toward modernity, both in Western nations and in the Eastern regions such as India, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Korea.
They could now invest those petrodollars in creating freethinking spaces in the Muslim world to study ideas, concepts, and methods that govern the above-mentioned regions, reversing the effects of Wahhabism exported by them to the rest of the world.
This is precisely why the Islamist extremists within Islam have established the cottage industry of ‘Islamophobia’ – to hinder the establishment of the ‘closed Muslim mind’ (Robert R. Reilly). Islamophobia is a misnomer; this needs to be repeated indefinitely. Ideas, and theology do not have any rights, people do.
Muslim-on-Muslim violence since 632 AD has taken more lives than non-Muslims and continues to do so with its blasphemy laws, its takfiri-ism (the habit of giving certificates of Muslimness to dissenters and marking them as targets for wajib-ul-qatl, (justified for murder).
The West is observing Islamophobia Awareness month this November, and allowing their silence, the violation of their right to freedom of expression, and their murders. It is also encouraging the radical and political supremacist Muslims who want to impose Sharia laws globally. It is unacceptable.