Islamophobia
\r\nWhen more than ever human beings needed to recall their codependence and their unity of fate, there remains a virtual cacophony of mutually intolerant and dismissively opinionated voices willing to tear the human community apart. At a time when wisdom dictates that human beings steadfastly hold on to humane and humanistic principles—to the very basics learned after the trauma of centuries of mindless religious wars, ethnic exterminations, and ideologically driven cleansings—hordes of cacuminal voices are heard every day calling for "new standards" for the "new age" of asymmetrical warfare. The "new standards" is usually a catchphrase for diluting or loosening the restrictions of humanitarian law and human rights law so that people may kill, abuse, and torture each other more effectively. The dilution of human standards, or put differently, the standards of what human beings may lawfully do to each other, is hardly surprising in an age when so many people have allowed themselves to become the willing audience in a spectacle of hyperbolic performances of horror shows where threats and fears are peddled like commercial commodities. People have become "slaves to the pleasures of the ear," hearing only what affirmed the biases of their egos and the prejudices of their anxieties. Particularly in the West, but also in the rest of the world and at times in the Muslim world itself, what became a part of the pleasures of the ear was a form of Islam-bashing that questioned the worthiness and role of the Islamic religion, as if Islam were a newly born fad or cult phenomenon that has yet to prove its contributions to humanity.
\r\nObviously, it is not Islamophobic to critically analyze Islamic history, theology, or law or ultimately to reject the belief system espoused by Islam. Islamophobia, as prejudice or the performance of bigotry, is when a great canvas holding numerous complexities and subtleties, whether historically, legally, or theologically, is used to present a largely invented and artificial caricature of whatever is designated as Islamic or Muslim. However, Islamophobia, like other forms of prejudice and bigotry, invariably leads to a morally reductive attitude in which the value and worthiness of human beings are diminished or discounted because of presumed flaws attributable to inherent characteristics such as people's religion, ethnicity, race, gender, or culture. Such reductive attitudes, as history has shown time and again, become part of a process in which, usually in response to an anxiety of being under threat from others, it becomes far less morally objectionable to trample over the rights of the feared "other" and to ignore the suffering of the victims of bigotry. Islamophobia invariably leads to a reductive moral attitude in which it becomes both easier to exterminate Muslims and also to come to fear extermination by Muslims. In short, fear leads to hate, and hate is the root of most evil.
\r\nCompiled From:
\r\n "Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari'ah in the Modern Age" - Khaled Abou El Fadl