Politics can aggravate Islamophobia, says prominent scholar

 

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish scholar based in Washington, says there is a need to protect Muslims from prejudice and injustice and build bridges with non-Muslims. (X pic)

PETALING JAYA: Politics can aggravate Islamophobia and Muslims have a role to play to forestall such hatred from spreading, according to prominent Turkish scholar Mustafa Akyol.

He said politicians fuel Islamophobia when they espouse a “us-versus-them” narrative and inadvertently create among Muslims a hatred or prejudice against non-Muslims. He said he has observed such instances in many parts of the world, including Turkey.

He said there was a need for a political and civil vision that defends Muslims against prejudice and injustice as well as builds bridges with non-Muslims by promoting mutual understanding and respect.

“This will help treat both Islamophobia, as well as phobias among Muslims against other groups,” he told FMT in an interview in conjunction with International Day to Combat Islamophobia which fell on March 15.

Akyol said that there were two kinds of Islamophobia.

The first kind is rooted in the pathological hatred some groups have against Muslims, he said. Akyol cited the hate white supremacists in the West harboured for Muslim minorities “for simply being there” or Serbian ultra-nationalists who hate Bosnian Muslims for the Serbian defeats by the Ottoman Empire centuries ago as examples.

When it came to such blind hate there was little to do other than condemnation, legal protection, and self-defence, he said.

The second type of Islamophobia arose partly from concerns and reactions to some terrible things done in the name of Islam today by extremist groups or authoritarian regimes.

Innocent people being lynched in Pakistan over false accusation of blasphemy, or women deprived of education in Afghanistan by the Taliban would lead people who would otherwise have no qualms about Islam develop a negative view of the religion, he said.

In such instances, Akyol said, Muslims needed “to do things effectively”, by explaining that these extreme examples do not represent all Muslims.

The community should also criticise violent or oppressive interpretation of Islam, as it only puts faith in a bad light, he added. “Unless we do the latter, Islamophobic propaganda will find more ears in the West and elsewhere.”

Akyol is a senior fellow on Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington and has written several books on Islam and liberalism. - FMT