If the nearly uniform narrative offered in a spate of recent books about “Islamophobia” is to be believed, Western Muslims, who enjoy freedoms denied to their brethren in most places in the world, are being tyrannized by hateful white Westerners afflicted with an irrational “phobia” of Islam and its adherents, which drives them to blithely reenact the crimes their ancestors perpetrated in previous centuries against indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere.

In these books, Muslims living in the West are the hapless victims of oppression, and their non-Muslim neighbors are the eternal oppressors. Accordingly, these oppressors can only offload their burden of civilizational guilt (and the punishment it invites) by confessing their sins (and those of their ancestors), engage in acts of contrition, and convert, either to Islam itself or to a political agenda that acquiesces in Islamist assaults on the rights historically accorded to citizens in Western democracies. Under this arrangement, the only rights that need to be protected are those of Muslims; non-Muslims have no rights, only rules and liabilities.

To stay out of trouble under this arrangement, non-Muslim Westerners must offer effusive praise for Muslims or remain silent about all things Islamic. They must agree to have their speech policed by a coalition of Islamists and their leftist political fellow travelers and the public institutions this coalition has either captured or rendered ineffective. To enforce this silence, non-Muslims who dare speak about the relationship between Islamic doctrine, Islamism, and jihadist violence are lumped in with Islamic terrorists who “misunderstand” or “pervert” their faith and kill people in its name. In the upside-down environment created by the “Islamophobia” charge, people who speak critically of Islam, Muslims, Islamism, or Shari’a need to be monitored as much as—if not more than—the Islamists and jihadists themselves.

The precipitating event for the publication of these recent “Islamophobia” books and the popularization of the narrative they offer, appears to be the candid, unrestrained, and, in some instances, admittedly hyperbolic discussion of Islamic violence and unregulated immigration into the United States that erupted during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The authors of these books deploy the “Islamophobia” accusation in a transparent effort to put the genie of free speech about these issues back into the bottle from which it escaped with Trump’s rise to power.

This desire to put an end to free speech about Islamic violence and oppression is particularly evident in Sarah Beth Kaufman’s To Be Honest: Voices on Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban,[1] a play whose dialogue is based on real-life interviews with residents of San Antonio, Texas. “The shock of the November 2016 election ... made a play about political rhetoric surrounding Islam, race, and immigration all the more urgent,” writes Stacey Connolly, a theater scholar who helped bring the play to the stage.

The dialogue in the play skillfully juxtaposes expressions of fear by non-Muslims over Islamic violence with condemnations of jihadist violence by pious, non-violent Muslims who tell us these problems have nothing to do with Islam. Jihadist groups that have been murdering Muslims and non-Muslims alike “are not Muslim really,” one Muslim interlocutor declares. “There is nothing in the Islamic religion [to] make people kill each other.” The message is that the problem is not with jihadists or Islamists but with non-Muslims who needlessly fear these movements and falsely associate them with Islam. According to this logic, it is not Muslims who need to come up with new ways to understand their faith’s traditions but non-Muslim Westerners.

The effort to place the onus for self-criticism and analysis on Westerners, white Westerners in particular, and protect Islam and Muslims from criticism is also on display in Sherene Razack’s Nothing Has to Make Sense.[2] The author argues that Muslims have become “the monsters of Western civilization” and that anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies are an attempt to reformulate and reinforce the identity of Europeans, beleaguered by the loss of their empires, and whites experiencing anxiety at the loss of their hegemony in the United States. As a result of this process, “Genocidal projects against Muslims are proliferating.”

By way of demonstrating the proliferation of “genocidal projects against Muslims,” Razack cites Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and China’s egregious mistreatment of the Uighurs. This, of course, begs the question: how is violence perpetrated by Saudi and Yemenite Muslims in the Middle East and Chinese communists in Asia rooted in the alleged “Islamophobia” of Europeans and North Americans?

To Razack, the answer is simple and straightforward: these and other manifestations of violence (e.g., Hindu hostility toward India’s Muslims) is part of a “global system of whiteness.” The irony is palpable. The author of a text warning against anti-Muslim bigotry is herself engaging in an act of bigotry by posting a counterfactual, torturous, and convoluted causal chain between “white” people in Europe and North America and the suffering in India and Yemen, where precious few “white” people live.

The obsession with whiteness is particularly evident in Ismail Adam Patel’s The Muslim Problem,[3] which portrays “Islamophobia” as a response to the declining status of British whites. In his claim, concerns over the violent Muslim reaction to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses[4]—which included the book’s public burning in Britain, the killing and wounding of scores of people in Pakistan, and the issuance of a fatwa for Rushdie’s death by Ayatollah Khomeini—fail to sufficiently explain the “problematization” of “Muslim political activism.” And to demonstrate that these concerns were part of a white, British agenda to maintain hegemony over the former colonized peoples of the defunct British Empire, Patel would have his readers ignore that the anti-Rushdie protests in Britain were part of a far larger, violent global assault on the right to free speech that has had a real impact on intellectual life in the West in the years since. As Robert Spencer notes in Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech,[5] Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered in 1991, and thirty-seven people were killed in an arson attempt on Rushdie’s Turkish translator in 1993.[6] As late as 2016—nearly two decades after the publication of The Satanic Verses—a group of media outlets in Iran raised $600,000 to reward Rushdie’s potential assassin in accordance with Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa.[7] Small wonder that an entire social class of European intellectuals has been driven into hiding by “mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology.”[8] This, in turn, means that the fear elicited by Muslim acts of violence is neither a “phobia"—an irrational fear—nor an expression of bigotry. It is a perfectly reasonable response to events witnessed numerous times on a global scale as part of a systematic attempt to “prohibit the free discussion of Islam” in Western societies (described by Daniel Pipes as “the Rushdie Rules”).[9]

By contrast, not only have Christians not embarked on a similarly violent, global campaign over offenses to their faith, but Christian leaders have affirmed the “anger” of Muslim rioters. In 2012, for example, Olav Fykse Tveit, then general secretary of the World Council of Churches, condemned the short film The Innocence of the Muslims, which was perceived by some Muslims as a denigration of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and which had been used as a pretext to attack U.S. embassies throughout the world. Declaring the film “gratuitously offensive to Muslims and the faith of Islam,” Tveit claimed that the violence in response to the film was not “the appropriate response” because “it plays into the hands of those who wish to foment tension” and could “lead to negative stereotyping of Muslims and an increase in Islamophobia.” Tveit did not name who he believed specifically wished to “foment tension,” but his statement strongly suggested he was angrier at—or less afraid of—the non-Muslims who made the film than the Muslims who rioted in response to its release.[10]

More alarmingly, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney blamed the film for the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi by an al-Qaeda local affiliate—on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. Amplifying this deliberate misrepresentation, President Obama stated a day after the attack: “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.” Becoming more explicit two weeks later, he said, “I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video.”[11]

Similarly misconceived is Maha Hilal’s claim in Innocent until Proven Muslim[12] that “Islamophobia” is “based on the social construction of Islam as violent, barbaric, uncivilized, and opposed to normative democratic values.” This construction, Hilal argues, sets “the general rule that Muslims have no human value or at least none worth preserving.” The author then uses this logic to explain some truly condemnable and tragic events—such as the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the murder of civilians in Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers, and civilian deaths in drone strikes in that country—as proof of Western bigotry.

As unsatisfactory as it is to acknowledge that soldiers do at times commit war crimes and that civilians are often killed in wars, not every tragedy endured by Muslims in these conflicts can be explained by bigotry. Rather than a manifestation of “Islamophobia,” the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions were a response to 9/11, a jihadist assault that traumatized the American people (and millions throughout the world). Nor were these invasions a deliberate assault on Muslims and Islam, for the obvious reason that the U.S.-led war coalition included a string of Muslim states (Turkey, Albania, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan, to name a few), just as the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait a decade earlier comprised an assortment of Christian and Muslim nations.

A little self-reflection on the part of Muslim intellectuals on the consequences of 9/11—and other jihadist outrages—would go a long way toward contextualizing the fear some people have of Islamic radicalism and Muslims. But in Hilal’s book, self-reflection and self-correction are reserved for non-Muslims and non-Muslims alone. This becomes evident when she takes umbrage at Obama’s appeal to Muslims to confront extremism in the wake of the December 2015 San Bernardino jihadist attack, in which (she claims) the president conditioned Muslim Americans’ incorporation into America’s moral community on their becoming “willing participants in the fight against terrorism.” She laments,

Had Hilal paid greater attention to Obama’s exhortation, she would have easily realized that he went to great lengths to dissociate Islam and Muslims from the San Bernardino atrocity. According to Obama, ISIS “does not speak for Islam” and jihadists “account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world—including millions of patriotic Muslim Americans who reject their hateful ideology.” He also asserted that Again, the irony is palpable. The author of a book demanding that Muslims be accorded the fruits of the social contract underpinning Western democracies mischaracterizes Obama’s hopeful expectation that Muslims would both enjoy the fruits of this social contract—and defend it—as an act of oppression. Martin Luther King was a hero for calling on white people to be guided by their higher angels as he enlisted their help to defeat white racism during the civil rights movement, but when President Obama tries to enlist the help of Muslims in the fight against extremism in their community, it is misrepresented as an example of anti-Muslim oppression.

Along these lines, The Terror Trap,[14] a compilation of essays by a coalition of Muslim organizations with Islamist ties (some with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami[15]) exhibits similar obtuseness, this time about the impact of 9/11 (and other acts of Muslim violence) on American attitudes toward Islam and Muslims. While the book briefly acknowledges the trauma caused by 9/11, it portrays the hunt for the terrorists in its wake as a recapitulation of slavery and anti-Black racism. Because law enforcement officials (whose antecedents were “slave catchers”) knew how to oppress Black people, journalist Adam Hudson asserts that

The result of this logic is that when Americans (and members of other Western democracies) attempt to protect themselves from Islamic terrorism or defend their freedoms from the encroachment of Shari’a, their actions are a repeat of every bad thing these countries have done in the past—not a response to current circumstances.

By contrast, another collection of essays, Islamophobia and Acts of Violence,[16] edited by Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, does offer an oblique and grudging acknowledgment that “Islamophobia” is a response to Muslim-perpetrated acts of violence.

In a chapter titled “Trends and Catalysts of Anti-Muslim Hate Crime and Bigoted Attitudes: A Multidecade Analysis,” Brian Levin reports that spikes in anti-Muslim hate crime correspond to “catalytic events, like the 9/11 attacks, and derisive political statements and media references tied to those events.” He further adds that hate crimes against Muslims “contemporaneously spiked against Muslims” in the aftermath of the San Bernardino attack, the June 2016 Orlando massacre by a perpetrator who swore allegiance to the leader of ISIS, and Trump’s rhetoric surrounding his travel ban proposal against seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Interestingly enough, Levin notes that

This begs the question whether it was “Islamophobia” that fueled the alleged anti-Muslim violence or whether it was a general sense of disorder precipitated by the 9/11 attacks that fueled violence against all minority groups.

It takes some careful reading, but Levin’s chapter reveals that attacks against Muslims in the United States remain, in absolute terms, fairly low, and that when spikes do occur, it is after Muslim-perpetrated attacks in the country. In other words, “Islamophobia” and the violence to which it gives license are fueled by jihadist violence—not the existence of an “American Islamophobia Network” condemned elsewhere in the book.

With Levin’s chapter, the vicious cycle is exposed. Some Muslims engage in terrible acts of violence inspiring fear on the part of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Then, when this fear becomes manifest, other Muslims and their allies on the Left, such as Levin himself, condemn people for being inevitably afraid.

Turpin-Petrosino herself acknowledges this point in the final chapter, where she portrays “Islamophobia” as a “sardonic outcome regarding the perversion of Islam by radical Islamists.” Acts of violence perpetrated by these people, she reports, are “likely strengthening, with each act of terrorism that they commit, the justification for the Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment expressed in the non-Muslim world.” What she fails to admit, however, is that radical Islamists want people to be afraid of Islam and its adherents in the hope of forcing non-Muslims to convert or submit to a regime of Islamic supremacism. And the constant leveling of the “Islamophobia” charge feeds into this strategy by making people fearful of even talking about the problem.

To her credit, Turpin-Petrosino does admit that “the actions of extremists fuel the suspicion toward Islam and impede its recognition as a religion that is on par with Judaism and Christianity,” and that the most likely victims of Islamist violence are Muslims themselves. With these admissions, however, she inadvertently reveals the “Islamophobia” charge to be what it has been all along—a sham accusation intended to put Islam into a separate category, where its tenets and the behavior of its adherents are protected from criticism and scrutiny.

No religion other than Islam is accorded such protection in the West in the modern era. Christians and non-Christians alike have been documenting Christianity’s violent oppression of Jews and women for decades without sanction from the academy, the media, or public officials.[17] In fact, the critiques leveled in these multitude texts have become dominant themes of discourse in academia and served as the basis for professorial (and activist) careers. But critiques of Islam are portrayed as bigoted attacks on the faith and its followers with real-world consequences, including death, for their authors.

The efforts to silence any discussion of Islam through the “Islamophobia” canard are taken to an absurd extreme in Peter Morey’s edited volume Contesting Islamophobia.[18] Taking Martin Amis to task for “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a short story published in the New Yorker in 2006 and republished in a collection of fiction and non-fiction in 2008, contributors Nath Aldalala’a and Geoffrey Nash claim that

To make matters worse, the authors state: Wading through this post-modern Latinate reveals a salient contradiction. On one hand, the authors are offended that Amis puts Atta’s crime in a Muslim context, while on the other, they are offended that Amis is not interested in “the religious aspect of Atta’s personality” and portrays him not as a religious figure but as merely a nihilistic killer.

Unlike Kaufman’s play, which claims that jihadist violence has nothing to do with Islam, in this essay, Amis is censured for portraying a jihadist killer as an atheist and apostate from Islam without any evidence. Which is it? How are we supposed to talk about 9/11 and subsequent attacks? As having something to do with Islam, or as having nothing to do with the faith? The answer is: “Don’t talk about it at all.”

It may be useful to view the silence about Islam demanded by those who level the “Islamophobia” charge as the modern-day equivalent of the closure of the “door of interpretation” and the attendant imposition of a regime of taqlid, or “unquestioning acceptance to authority.”[19] Mustafa Aykol reports that this use of coercive power to keep Muslims in line enfeebles “Muslim societies, which do not learn how to respond to criticism with reason and civility.”[20] Alarmingly, this coercive power is now being deployed in Muslim-minority environments on the non-Muslim majorities by Islamists and their leftist allies.

This intellectual oppression was starkly illustrated in Alberta, Canada, when, in July 2022, a member of the New Democratic Party called on newly appointed Collin May to resign as chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and Tribunals because of critical comments he made about Islam in a review of Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History.[21] The National Council of Canadian Muslims took a softer approach, reportedly “working with May to see that he better serves Muslim communities.” In response to the controversy, May stated that he got it wrong about Islam “especially in light of important recent and diverse scholarship that is working to overcome misconceptions regarding Muslim history and philosophy.”[22]

May’s scourging—apparent contrition and rehabilitation—harkens back to the Chinese Communist Party confessionals and the heresy trials in Medieval Europe in which ecclesiastical authorities leveled the accusations and turned the defendant over to temporal authorities who meted out the punishment. It is an encroaching medievalism midwifed with the help of progressives.

In his bracing and well-documented Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech, Robert Spencer acknowledges that to some observers, the coalition of Islamists and leftists is an example of politics making strange bedfellows because one group wants to impose a “repressive moral code” while the other promotes “a moral libertinism.” He explains,

Spencer, who was the target of Islamist violence in Garland, Texas, in 2015[24] and an attempted poisoning in 2017 by leftists in Iceland offended by his writings about Islam,[25] writes authoritatively about how non-Muslims have “become the principal enforcers of Sharia blasphemy laws in the West.” For example, former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton supported the passage of U.N. Resolution 16/18 at the Human Rights Council. This resolution, put forth by the Organization of Islamic Conference, called on countries to ban speech that promoted the “defamation of religion"—a clear attack on free speech.

He also documents how Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker who produced The Innocence of Muslims in 2012, was punished for the riots his film “caused.” Spencer reports:

This is an act of tyranny in defense of a religious tradition and community badly in need of reform.

All these books taken together, reveal how, under the “Islamophobia” regime, religions, ideologies, and institutions rooted in the Western tradition are forced to tolerate withering critique, but anything rooted in Islam is protected from scrutiny or criticism. The fact that prominent Muslim intellectuals demand such protection for their religious community bespeaks a troubling insecurity about the ability of Islam to survive in the marketplace of ideas that, despite the best efforts of Islamists and leftists, remains, for now, alive in Western democracies.

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[1] To Be Honest: Voices on Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2022), 130 pp., $24.95.

[2] Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 276 pp., $112 ($28, paper).

[3] The Muslim Problem: From the British Empire to Islamophobia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 289 pp., $119.99.

[4] London: Viking Penguin, 1988.

[5] Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security Policy, 2021), 130 pp., $9.99.

[6] Ibid., p. 8.

[7] Reuters, Feb. 22, 2016.

[8] Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2011), p. 295.

[9] Daniel Pipes, “Bibliography—My Writings on Salman Rushdie and the Rushdie Rules,” Aug. 19, 2022.

[10] Dexter Van Zile, “Dignity ... Or Dhimmitude?” The Algemeiner (New York), Sept. 14, 2012.

[11] Efraim Karsh, “Obama’s Middle East Delusions,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2016.

[12] Innocent until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, The War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience since 9/11 (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 336 pp., $29.99.

[13] “Transcript: President Obama’s address to the nation on the San Bernardino terror attack and the war on ISIS,” CNN, Dec. 6, 2015.

[14] The Terror Trap: The Impact of the War on Terror on Muslim Communities since 9/11 (Washington, D.C.: Coalition for Civil Freedoms, The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University, the ICNA Council for Social Justice, CAGE, Center for Islam and Global Affairs, Muslim Justice League, and United Voices for America, 2021), 192 pp., Free download.

[15] Andrew Harrod, “Islamist Academics and Activists Shill for Jailed Jihadists: They deserve anathematization,” The American Spectator, Apr. 16, 2022; Sam Westrop, “Catalogue of ICNA’s Links to Jamaat-e-Islami,” Islamist Watch, Mar. 19, 2019; “Islamists, Apologists, and Fellow Travelers: Middle East Studies Faculty at Georgetown University,” Campus Watch, Dec. 2017; Martha Lee, “British NGO with Jihadist Ties Complains of ‘Persecution’ in France,” Focus on Western Islamism, Mar. 29, 2022.

[16] Islamophobia and Acts of Violence: The Targeting and Victimization of American Muslims (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 240 pp., $50.

[17] See, for example, Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1964); Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984).

[18] Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2019), 296 pp., $130 ($39.95, paper).

[19] Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 70-1.

[20] Mustafa Aykol, Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (New York: St. Martins, 2021), p. 211.

[21] New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

[22] CBC (Toronto), July 16, 2022.

[23] Spencer, Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech, p. 24,

[24] Ibid, p. 28.

[25] Dexter Van Zile, “An American Citizen Was Poisoned in Iceland and American Media Doesn’t Care,” The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Dec. 16, 2019.

[26] Robert Spencer, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2017).