The anatomy of Islamophobia

Despicable, frightening and differentiated by their false faith - Peter Osborne's book is a brave and substantial attempt to correct enduring misconceptions that have shaped Western view of Muslims

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam

Author: Peter Osborne

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, London

Pages: 514

Price: Rs 1,772

The term “Islam” in popular usage conflates the faith with its billion-strong followers, shapes them as a monochrome collective, and ascribes several characteristics that the entire community is believed to share: backwardness, fanaticism and, above all, violence.

There is much to confirm this view – mistreatment of women and abuse of human rights in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and by the Taliban; the wanton violence of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State; the savage 9/11 assaults on the US, and the all-too-frequent attacks launched on ordinary people by self-styled “lone-wolves”, who have supposedly self-radicalised through the internet.

This book is a brave and substantial attempt to correct the enduring misconceptions that have shaped the Western view of Islam and the Muslims. It explains the politics involved in important recent events, and exposes the ignorance and prejudice that have informed views and perceptions in the West.

Peter Osborne’s study goes back several centuries when European militaries confronted Muslim armies that vanquished them repeatedly, took over the sites most holy to Christendom, and ruled over large parts of Spain and Southeast Europe. These encounters gave rise to the idea of the Muslim as the despicable and frightening “Other”, differentiated by his false faith, his fake prophet, and his licentiousness, violence and cruelty.

These negative perceptions have endured, being re-affirmed when, over the last two centuries, Western powers conquered the Muslim lands, and saw in these victories the racial and civilisational superiority of the West.

The Cold War brought about a positive, though short-lived, change – with Arab monarchies allying themselves with Western powers, “Islam” was viewed as a “natural ally” against “godless Communism”. This led to the organisation of a “global jihad” to confront Soviet troops in Afghanistan – the US led this enterprise, and was supported by its allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

This state-sponsored jihad attracted several thousand youth from nearly all Muslim countries and communities, who were indoctrinated in extremist Islam, trained in Western weaponry, given battlefield experience, and, finally, rewarded with victory over the “godless” enemy. In later years, as Al Qaeda flourished and finally assaulted its principal sponsors on 9/11, few Americans knew that this scourge had been originally spawned by their own country.

After the Cold War, the neo-cons, American intellectuals who were committed to the interests of Israel over those of their own country, framed “Islam” as the new enemy of the West. Led by the writings of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, they painted this foe as a formidable monolith that posed an existential threat to Western interests.

This thinking found a ready acceptance in Western political establishments, media and academia and influenced popular opinion. This sanctioned the cruelties heaped upon Iraq after the 1991 war — the sanctions-inspections regime, the no-fly zones, and “dual containment” that included Iran as the enemy. Half a million Iraqi children died due to the denial of food and medicine.

This pattern of wanton violence by Western powers continued in the 2003 attack on Iraq, this time accompanied by the crude and shameful abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by American service personnel. The occupation also nurtured jihad, exemplified later by the Islamic State, as the most effective instrument of resistance to US fire-power and pervasive cruelty.

Despite this Western culpability, it is negative perceptions of Islam that have become deeply entrenched in the Western psyche. Islamophobia has come to define domestic politics in several Western countries, occasionally moving from the far-right to mainstream politicians and parties. As Mr Osborne has pointed out, in the UK it is difficult to find politicians attending events organised by Muslim groups. In France, in the run-up to elections in 2020, the otherwise liberal Emmanuel Macron quite robustly demonised “Islam” in his competition with the right-wing Marine Le Pen.

Mr Osborne has made a valiant effort to set things right in this monumental work. But despite its length and the numerous sources cited, there is very little analysis in the book. The author would have done well to explain the violence by lone-wolves — shootings by Major Nidal Malik (2009), by the Chechen brothers at the Boston marathon (2013), and the Pakistani origin couple, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (2015).

Or the Charlie Hebdo killings in France in 2015, the truck driver’s attack in Nice on Bastille Day, 2016, as also the beheading of the school teacher, Samuel Paty, in 2020. All of these have done much to affirm the negative image of the faith and its followers in the minds of most people, who already carry deep prejudices and hostility.

Again, while Mr Osborne has discussed the story of the “grooming gangs” in the UK — when several persons of Pakistani origin were found guilty of sexually abusing under-age white girls — the narrative gets lost in the detail and it is difficult to figure out how pervasive the abuse was.

Finally, amidst rising populist politics in several Western democracies, Mr Osborne should have contextualised Islamophobia — presented it as a part of the “Othering” of hate-objects by the right-wing, whose bigotry also embraces racism, misogyny, gay rights, and so on.

Thus, the confrontation in the West is not just between Muslims and the rest, but involves a larger contest between the narrow width of nativist identity and the broad accommodativeness of Enlightenment values.

The reviewer is a former diplomat