Who exactly is Feisal Abdul Rauf? This is the question countless people are asking themselves, in the wake of the Park 51 founder’s skyrocketing national profile. The din over the Ground Zero Mosque has somewhat subsided but the Islamophobic hysteria that it produced remains radioactive.
Fear and paranoia have become the new parameters for every policy. While the attacks occurred in the US, other western countries also immediately passed repressive laws that were essentially aimed at targeting Muslims
Germany has a notorious reputation for its racist and discriminatory attitude toward minorities. It has refused to accommodate a large minority community that has lived in Germany for generations.
The renaming of the Center is a particularly eye-catching facet of this enterprise. The Cordoba House, named for Al-Andalus’s achievements in erudition and cultural pluralism, is now the rather legalistic Park 51 Center, shearing off the historical allusions to past Islamic civilizations.
How widespread is Islamophobia in Europe, especially in Germany where a three-month pregnant Muslim mother, Marwa el-Sherbini was stabbed 18 times in a crowded courtroom in Dresden last year, can be seen
A year after they were banished into the political wilderness, America’s neo-conservatives are back. To show they are serious, they held their political-fest in the very city they love to hate: Washington, DC. From February 18–20, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC)...
The US has intensified its war on Muslim citizens. This was clearly expected because its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going well. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, one could understand that US policy would be driven by fear...
KindHearts officials have denied being connected to any terrorist group ever since federal agents sealed the charity’s office in 2006...
Muslims have naturally expressed concern over this latest assault on the Islamic sacred text...
American ‘televangelists’ (missionaries or preachers who reach large audiences by television) are able to influence public opinion heavily; unfortunately they tend to be not the most honest people. Since September 11 last year, televangelists and zionists have launched yet another campaign against Islam and Muslims...
These are tough times to be a Muslim in North America, especially living in the US. Muslims travelling from Canada to the US at the beginning of September to attend the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) annual convention in Washington DC were told bluntly by US customs officials that Islam and America do not mix...
The brutal murder of a hijab-clad woman in a German court last month has once again exposed the deep-seated racism and Islamophobia that rage in Europe and North America...
Abu Rideh is a man who has never been charged with any offence, terrorism or otherwise; he has never been asked a single question about his alleged involvement with terrorism nor has he ever been told why he is suspected of being a threat or shown any evidence that is being used against him.
“You’re going to remember this day for the rest of your life” — these words were uttered by anti-terror police officers to intimidate and terrify British Muslim Babar Ahmad during the brutal assault inflicted upon him in a pre-dawn raid on his home on December 2, 2003. They were right; Ahmad never forgot that day and spent the last five years struggling to ensure that it would live in the memories of the British public forever.
The British police service can no longer be described as “institutionally racist”, according to Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Phillips made his comments in a speech marking 10 years since the Stephen Lawrence murder report, which originally coined the phrase.
The war in Bosnia that resulted in the deaths of some 300,000 people, most of them Bosnian Muslims, may be over but old hatreds still run deep, and not too far beneath the surface. Theoreti-cally, the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina is made up of three peoples: the Bosnians, Croats and Serbs.
Islamophobia has been a political tool of convenience that has been used at least since 1492 CE and is still in use by Western imperialist powers. For the past 200 years it has also been adopted by Zionists. Both groups willingly accepted it as part of their historical makeup and have continued to use it as a means of advancing their respective agendas of domination, occupation, exploitation, torture and killing of Muslims, including the genocide of their language, religion and culture.
Generations of university graduates have been deliberately deprived of any encounter with Islamic civilization. It is nothing less than an egregious disservice to students — no educational institution can strive for excellence if it allows such a disservice to continue.
While other forms of racism are frowned upon, Islamophobia is actively being promoted as an acceptable form of political behavior in the West. Muslims are a soft target and in such an environment, denigrating them carries little direct political costs.
The long history of encounters between Western civilization and Islam has produced a tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving ways, the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. There is a lot of literature cataloguing (and sometimes correcting) these stereotypes. It is not my intention to rehash this corpus here, though I do rely upon some of the more important works. What I want to do instead is focus on a particular dimension of these encounters, and examine why the West has consistently constructed and perpetuated negative images of Islam and Muslims. My focus will be on the utility of Islamic imagery in Western civilization.
