In February, the UK authorities appointed a working group to supply a definition of “anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia”, which ought to have accomplished its work by the top of August. In the summertime, Conservative MP Nick Timothy and a phalanx of like-minded teams waged a marketing campaign towards any such definition, which they argued would stymie free speech for individuals who want to criticise Islam.
Since then, the federal government has been cowed into silence and delay. Final week, the BBC revealed a report suggesting that the definition is not going to use the phrase Islamophobia in any respect, opting as an alternative for “anti-Muslim hostility”.
This can be a mistake; hatred of Islam lies on the very coronary heart of racism in direction of Muslims. And whereas the British state fails to even title Islamophobia, Muslims face an unprecedented degree of hazard. The unwillingness of the British authorities to call and confront Islamophobia is a scandal, one that’s barely seen by mainstream media.
Earlier than the October 7, 2023 assault on Israel, the variety of reported assaults on Muslims in England and Wales was already excessive and stood at 3,432. Within the 12 months as much as March 2024, it went up by 13 p.c, and an additional 19 p.c by March 2025. These most up-to-date figures exclude London, as a result of adjustments in crime recording by the Metropolitan Police, so the rise might be larger.
Based on the newest information, with out London, 24 p.c of non secular hate crimes focused Jews, and 44 p.c had been dedicated towards Muslims. As well as, Muslims are persistently extra more likely to be victims of assault, stalking and harassment.
It’s considerably miraculous that Islamophobic assaults within the UK during the last two years haven’t resulted in anybody being killed. Mob violence in the summertime of 2024, which adopted the homicide of three women in Southport by a non-Muslim attacker, was marked by the focusing on of mosques from the beginning. This 12 months, there have been a number of assaults on mosques, together with arson. In December, police in Northern Eire arrested a number of members of the so-called “Irish Defence Military” over a plot to assault a mosque and migrant housing in Galway, the Republic of Eire.
Within the face of the rise in hate crime, the UK authorities doggedly campaigns towards anti-Semitism – because it ought to – however will not be investing wherever near the identical political capital in defending Muslims. The state’s strategy to defining each types of racism make this unevenness very clear.
In December 2016, the UK adopted the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which is extremely controversial as a result of its conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. In contrast, the UK authorities has dragged its ft on adopting any definition of Islamophobia.
The draft definition that the BBC revealed on December 15, which doesn’t point out Islamophobia, is deeply insufficient, and certainly harmful as a result of it provides a clean cheque to those that wish to assault Islam. This lack of safety was inevitable. Within the working group’s phrases of reference, the federal government insisted on “the unchanging proper of British residents … to criticise, categorical dislike of, or insult religions and/or the beliefs and practices of adherents”.
Think about, for a second, that the federal government specified {that a} definition of anti-Semitism ought to permit individuals to insult Judaism. Even a cursory historic understanding of anti-Semitism clearly reveals that hostility to Jews and Judaism have been inseparable throughout millennia: From the medieval Blood Libel, which accused Jews of killing Christian youngsters for ritual functions, to at the moment’s “substitute idea” that Jews are orchestrating the corruption of the so-called “white race”.
Equally, Western persecution of Muslims has been intrinsically related with, and pushed by, opposition to Islam, from medieval occasions till the current. Whether or not through the Reformation of the sixteenth century in Europe or the colonialisation of North Africa and Asia within the nineteenth century, Western thinkers and political leaders generally noticed Islam as an inherently imperialist and violent faith, devoted to world domination, both via holy struggle or conspiratorial strategies.
Within the sixteenth century, German theologian Martin Luther labelled each Jews and Muslims as “fanatics”, that’s to say, religion-inspired violent revolutionaries. Within the 18th century, the French scholar Alexandre Deleyre wrote that when “authorities is totally based upon faith, as among the many Muslims; then fanaticism directs itself mainly outwards, and makes this individuals an enemy of humanity”.
The leaders of the French and British empires had been obsessive about the notion that Islam bred an inherent potential for revolutionary violence, which needed to be guarded towards via surveillance, censorship, and a politics of “moderation”.
The persisting affect of this conception of Islam as a supply of violent conspiracy is definitely traced via the twentieth and twenty first centuries within the West, most clearly for the reason that begin of the “struggle on terror” within the early 2000s. These concepts reduce throughout the political spectrum and sit on the centre of the UK’s migration panics since 2015, when struggle and the rise of ISIL (ISIS) prompted an exodus of refugees from the Center East.
The hatred of Islam, based mostly on centuries of Western thought of that faith as an existential menace to Christian civilisation, is the basis of a panoply of Islamophobic concepts: That Muslims are all potential terrorists, oppressors of ladies, intercourse predators, and obsessive theocrats.
On this context, to assert that Islam will not be a goal of Muslim-hating vitriol truly facilitates racism. It provides carte blanche to those that assault Islam with a searing ardour – a hostility that fuels to verbal and bodily violence towards Muslims. To have a good time such assaults because the expression of “free speech” is to glorify hatred.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
