The announcement that the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations is to launch a media campaign to create a better understanding of Islam and Muslims in the US is welcome, though not before time. The cancer of anti-Muslim feeling in the US had begun to spread well before 9/11. Since then, it has been on the rampage. If anything, the assessment in a recent Cornell University survey that around half of Americans have a negative view of Islam and want the US government to curb the political activities of Muslims in the country is almost certainly a considerable underestimation of the problem.
Islamophobia is a double poison. If not stopped it will so destructively impact relations between the US and Muslim countries that the “Clash of Civilizations” will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Not that Islamophobia is purely an American problem; it is active in Europe, India, parts of Africa, and in too many parts of the non-Muslim world. There, in its second venomous outpouring, it is at its most cruel. It is Muslims in non-Muslim societies who feel the effect; traditionally dressed Muslim women screamed at in supermarkets in middle America, spat at in parks in middle England, their veils torn from their faces in France or Australia or Netherlands; it is Muslim homes daubed with offensive slogans, mosques vandalized, a community fed a constant diet on TV and in the press on how backward Muslim society is. This is Islamophobia is action.
But Islamophobia does not mean hatred of Islam; it means an irrational fear of Islam. Fear can stem from ignorance — and a media campaign should help rectify that — but it also comes from experience. We can tell the West that it has nothing to fear from Islam but the actions of terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam tells something else. It is vital the West learn that Islam is a religion of peace, that militants have departed from orthodox Islam. Their principal targets are Muslim states, which they want to conquer and take over.
But saying all this will not be enough if the West does not also see the Muslim world actively spurning these deviants and crushing them. It is something that only the Muslim world can do. Saudi Arabia has in fact been in the forefront of the battle to destroy these deviants, but in the wider campaign to counteract Islamophobia it has not helped that, in Indonesia, radical imam Abu Bakar Bashir was released from jail after serving just 26 months for links to the 2002 Bali bombings or that in Jordan four MPs paid condolences to the family of arch-terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. Even though the four have since been arrested, their actions indicate there is support for terrorism.
A campaign to end Islamophobia in the West is vital both for the good of the millions of Muslims living there and for Muslim-Western relations, but it will not succeed while the murderous actions of a miniscule minority send a different message. The destruction of militancy has to go hand in hand with countering Islamophobia.
