Islamophobia Essay
Essay about Islamophobia
In many cultures and religions throughout history, disparities in skin color, cultural belief systems, and religious beliefs have served as the focal point of hatred, prejudice and xenophobia. In the United States, a passionate history of actions of distrust and suspicion against groups of individuals who look different from them or whom they do not comprehend has been founded in acts of racism and racism-related activities. Many people believe that the current phenomenon of Islamophobia is a contemporary issue that has its roots in the September 11th terrorist attacks. Historical study, on the other hand, reveals that the propaganda teaching the Muslim terrorist dates back to the 1940s, following the Arab-Israeli war, and is therefore not new (Salem).
However, Islamophobia is a modern-day term established to represent what is viewed as the current crisis harming the quality of life among Muslim Americans; this is primarily due to widely circulated misconceptions and discriminatory behavior experienced in a place they have now come to call their home. The evolution of Islamophobia is an interesting story to follow since it is strongly founded in political ambitions and cultural ignorance, and it is mostly pushed by misrepresentations shown in the news and media, among other things. It is the purpose of this article to investigate the identity of the Middle East and how it has been twisted by the American people, resulting in a fear of Islam and its adherents.
Understand the origins of the United States’ perception of Islam, as well as how that perception evolved, is essential to understanding the development of the American perception of Islam in the modern era. Despite the fact that Arabs and Middle Easterners have been portrayed as savages with no sense of morality in the media for quite some time, the United States and the Middle East have had political interactions dating back to the Cold War (Mamdani). In order to gain an advantage over Central Asia and the Soviet Union, the United States Helped Afghanistan’s inhabitants in training and militarizing themselves, invoking the historic, religious legitimacy of jihad, which had not been practiced for nearly four centuries (Mamdani). That the United States is, in fact, responsible for the inception of contemporary jihad means that the terror group that has been seizing the people of Afghanistan and other Islamic countries for at least two decades is a product of the United States’ foreign policy (Mamdani). Contrary to popular belief, this is the same terrorist organization that has morphed into the terrorists that the American people are now afraid of. Mamdani presents a persuasive case that the United States was a contributing factor to the events of September 11, 2001 by failing to dissolve the very militia that they had formed to defeat the Soviet Union (Mamdani).
The September 11th terrorist act, carried out by a terror cell that has become synonymous with Muslims or Islam, was the true stage-setting event that propelled the Islamophobic state of the United States of America (Salem). Due to the misrepresentations and misunderstandings of what Islam is that have been propagated by the United States government and media sources, the ostensible war on Afghanistan has fast transformed into a war against Islam (Bayat). Furthermore, the United States took use of the nation’s economic imbalance and shaky political platform to justify its war, claiming that they were attempting to free the very people who had been demonized by Western civilization in order to justify their actions. Since September 11, 2001, debates have erupted over whether there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, and whether there is a distinction between them (Mamdani). These discussions are frequently misguided and result in increased persecution of the Muslim community because they begin to associate the word “terror” with a single religion or group of people, rather than with the extremists who are terrorizing civilians in both the United States and Middle Eastern countries, as is the case today (Mamdani).
This became painfully clear after many Muslim Americans were regarded as criminals and jailed for months on end following the September 11th attacks. Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?, which depicts the lives and experiences of young Arab Americans following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, serves as further evidence of this argument. Read the book here. Most notable was the story of Rasha, a young woman who was jailed with her family for ninety days. Rasha’s story was one that struck out to me (Bayoumi). This woman’s narrative of her treatment while detained, which was described as harsh and accusatory, was a tale that echoed the opinions of many American residents around the same time period (Bayoumi). It is likely that those who identify with or support these government entities would be subjected to the same treatment and allegations if the government investigated and pursued Muslim Americans based on their birthplace and culture.
Given that news organizations and other media outlets are responsible for reporting local, national, and international news, it is only inevitable that they would have a hand in the development of Islamophobia in the United States of America. While Muslims and the Middle East had long been connected with negative connotations before September 11, 2001, it wasn’t until then that the media began portraying them as barbaric heathens devoid of morality and ethics (Salem). When people from the Middle East were portrayed by mainstream media as victims who sorely needed salvation and understanding of western civilization, the concept that the Westerner is superior to those from the Middle East was born. The erroneous perception of Islam has been around since the 1940s (Salem). As time and warfare advanced, so did the public perception of the people who lived in Islamic countries. As previously said, the Cold War and the events that followed resulted in a new stereotype: that of the cruel, uncivilized, and callous Muslim (Salem). Professor Jack G. Shaheen performed an amazing job of exposing these prejudices in mainstream media by writing a book critically assessing about one thousand movies and their depictions of Arabs. Professor Jack G. Shaheen is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (Salem). His investigation determined that the media was actually Helping in the spread of negative opinions of Islamic countries among the American public (Salem).
Beginning in the 1990s, the media re-evolved the public perception of Arabs by connecting them with terrorist organizations (Salem). Examples include the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when the media prematurely reported that it was carried out by someone of Middle Eastern descent before thoroughly analyzing and sifting the circumstances (Salem). Even when it was known that the assailant was an American Christian, Muslim terrorists continued to be regarded as a larger threat than domestic terrorists in the United States (Salem). After moving into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the media continued to be unrelenting in their arguments for the pictures of Islam that they presented. The media, much as with political objectives, utilized stories of poverty and civil unrest to further persuade the American people that their freedoms were in jeopardy because at any given moment, crowds of Arabs may stage an uprising that would be capable of overthrowing any government agency (Bayat). It is unclear whether a group of Arab intellectuals released a study that significantly pushed the agenda of Western civilization, consciously or unknowingly. This report spoke openly and candidly about the lack of freedoms, democracy and development of the Middle East, which sent U.S media into a frenzy, claiming this report was one of the “most important publication of 2002” (Bayat 30-31). Later, the media would attribute these conditions to the revolt of terrorists in those locations, which was later proven to be unfounded (Bayat).
Orientalism is a term used to describe the attitudes that Westerners have toward the Middle East. It is informally described as the manner in which Westerners relate with the Orient (Abu-Lughod). But Orientalism is widely based on assumptions of the Middle East rather than based off true knowledge and facts revolving the culture, interactions and practices of Islamic nations (Abu-Lughod). Surprisingly, many believe that reform of the Islam nation should be focused on the fundamentals incorporated into Westerners’ sense of freedom, but the Middle East has no desire to identify with Western society (Abu-Lughod, Bayat). They would rather have the American people understand who they are, what they practice and why their society function as it does. Those from the Middle East do not view the Islamic nation as a place of complete disarray and criminalized community, but rather as a home that has failed to evolve in the same manner as other civilizations regarding education, health, poverty and equity (Bayat). They do not identify with the freedoms and evolution of gender roles that have been the main focus of Western policymakers (Bayat), which tend to be the changes that the American public would like to enforce upon them. Instead, the Islamic people see themselves as family oriented with great hospitality who need a political stage to help advance themselves in areas that they identify with (King-Irani). Much of their daily lives revolve around their relationships with their family, friends and neighbors on a much deeper level than Western society realizes (King-Irani).
The issue with how Muslim Americans and Muslims in the Middle East are viewed is that they do not have a major platform to address these misconceptions (Salem). According to Mamdani, the three main factors revolving around Muslim stereotypes are (1.) American orientalism research has been mainly focused on dominating the Middle East rather than understanding them, (2.) the absence of action by the Middle East to address these stereotypes and (3.) American Muslim communities have done little to fight the degradations with a focus on local enrichment rather than on a national level (7-8). Without addressing the stereotypes of the Muslim community, there can be no progression in the relations between those of Middle Eastern descent and the Western society. Islamophobia can only be demolished by open discussions and the willingness to understand those who have different ways of life, morals and values.
References
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 18, 1989, pp. 267-306
Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Bayoumi, Moustafa. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Penguin, 2008.
King-Irani, Laurie. “Kinship, Ethnicity, and Social Class.” Understanding the Contemporary Middle East, edited by Deborah Gemer and Jillian Schwedler, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004, pp. 431-466.
Mamdani, Mahmood. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, 2002, pp. 766-775
