Many people don’t believe that discrimination and marginalisation of Muslims (or people who are perceived to be Muslim) exists, believing instead that any bad treatment Muslims receive, is deserved due to their adherence of a problematic ideology. Of the people who do believe it exists, many trace Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim hatred as we prefer to call it at Insaf, back to the fateful events of 9/11. And even fewer people are aware that it long predates 9/11, and can trace its history back to the Middle Ages.
Anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia is a sneaky construction: it is not just about Muslims, but also people who are perceived to be Muslim. It has a racialised element – because even though anyone can be religious, it is typically experienced by people who “look” like they are from Muslim countries. In predominantly white countries in the Global North, anti-Muslim hatred is perpetuated through anti-terrorism legislation, immigration policies and restrictions on religious clothing, all of which disproportionately target Muslims.
To help understand how it operates, we first have to learn to understand it as a system of oppression that upholds its ideology through structures of power, rather than just the microaggressions that will be all too familiar to Muslims growing up in non-Muslim countries. It is these wider structures of power, like the criminal justice system, our schools and the labour market that hold the power to create negative outcomes for Muslim people based on their ideological beliefs about us.
Many people would have you believe that we can separate ideological objections to (perceived) tenets of Islam and the perception of Islam as a global political force that seeks to challenge dominant Western values from the individual marginalisation and rejection of Muslims. This is a cop-out, and an argument used in bad faith. While any belief system is open for criticism, in the context of Muslims and Islam, people use this argument as a shield to further entrench Islamophobic beliefs that have real-life negative consequences for Muslims.