Guest Blog by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
Part 2: Where does Islamophobia come from?
It is important to think about the root causes of Islamophobia, otherwise solutions will only address the ways it manifests. If we only think about getting people to report or punish people for Islamophobic harassment after the fact of it happening, we do not address the root causes which lead to harassment or aim to stop it before it happens. Similarly, if we consider Islamophobia a result of negative media portrayals, we may focus on sharing positive stories or reporting to the Press Standards board after the fact. We don’t get to the heart of the reason why those stories exist in the first place.
Considering root causes
A useful way to find out the root causes of Islamophobia is to ask who or what benefits from it. Who or what benefits from a story told about Muslims as threats, barbarians and misogynists? On the surface, it’s hard to imagine that anybody benefits. But there are two clear groups of beneficiaries. Those who benefit financially and those who benefit ideologically.
- Financial benefit – arms sales and policing
In terms of financial benefit from Islamophobia, we are thinking about those who profit from the depiction of Muslims as threatening and barbaric. One example of this would be companies who manufacture weapons, products and services sold in wartime. Demand for their services has increased massively due to the global ‘War on Terror’ which was sparked by the idea of a threatening Muslim enemy abroad.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, private contractors were used more than national militaries for supplies. By 2020, the US had 22,562 contractor personnel in Afghanistan, twice the number of troops. The personnel were paid directly by the US government. Pentagon spending has totaled $14 trillion since the start of war in Afghanistan, with 33-50% of this money going to private . Find out more about these sales here and here. The top five defense contractors in the US made an 872.94% return on profit. You can see more about the full break down here. Defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by nearly 60% during the Afghanistan war.
Apart from weapon manufacturers, there are other services that have grown in light of Islamophobia. Anti-migrant sentiment across Europe has been fueled by Islamophobia[1] and has led to more migrants being detained in Immigration Removal Centers. In the UK, such centers are run by a handful of private companies like G4S, Mitie, Serco and GEO Group. Mitie won a £500 million contract for management of removal centers among other things. CorporateWatch have found that detention is extremely profitable because detainees are paid £1 an hour for work that they do. Read more here and here.
- Financial benefit – media corporations
Another beneficiary of financial gain from Islamophobia, are media corporations who sell countless papers and get endless clicks on stories. This Islamophobia is rarely based on reality. Every single one of the following headlines, reported over less than a month in 2016, were found to be misleading or false, requiring retraction or rewriting after being reported:[2]
- The Times, 9 November 2016: “Islamist School Can Segregate Boys and Girls.”
- Daily Express website, 18 November 2016: “Anger as less than A THIRD of Muslim nations sign up to coalition against Isis.”
- The Sun online, 1 December 2016: “SECRET IS SAFE: Half of British Muslims would not go to cops if they knew someone with Isis links.”
- The Daily Express site, 2 December 2016: “New £5 notes could be BANNED by religious groups as Bank CAN’T promise they’re Halal.”
- ITV News, 2 December 2016: “Half of UK Muslims would not report extremism.”
- Sunday Times, 4 December 2016: “Enclaves of Islamsee UK as 75% Muslim.”
- The Mail on Sunday, 4 December 2016: “Isolated British Muslims are so cut off from the rest of society that they see the UK as 75% Islamic, shock report reveals.”
- The Sun online, 4 December: “British Muslims are so cut-off from society they think 75% of the UK is Islamic, report reveals.”
Considering these headlines were based on fabricated information, it is worth asking why newspapers have so consistently run with such Islamophobic stories. Journalist Samanth Subramanian’s analysis[3] finds two possible reasons. One, time pressures of news cycles which lead to biases being drawn out based in institutional racism. Or two, that publications “angle their coverage towards sensationalism … because they suspect this strategy will be profitable”.
While no news editors would admit to such a callous goal, The Leveson Inquiry found many examples of journalists being made to rewrite stories with anti-Muslim bias: “This didn’t stop, even when I was in tears because I hated what I was being forced to do passionately” one anonymous reporter testified. The journalist Richard Peppiatt, who quit the Daily Star in 2011 over its “hatemongering” against Muslims, told Leveson that the newspaper knowingly published made-up stories and quotes.
To read more about journalists and media personalities benefiting financially from Islamophobia, read The Islamophobia Industry by Nathan Lean.
- Ideological benefit
Another way we can think about the root causes of Islamophobia is to ask who benefits ideologically from it. Within this, there are two groups.
The first are the governments who have been able to build up tools of coercion, such as extra policing powers to “counter extremism”. These powers can eventually be used against any form of dissent or free speech. Schedule 7 and Prevent can be rolled out and expanded against any form of dissent. In 2020, as part of deterring young people from ‘extremist’ views, police suggested ‘anti-capitalism’ was an extreme stance alongside antisemitism and racism that should not be taught in schools in England. This demonstrates how the government could use the processes set up in the name of surveilling Muslims, to eventually surveil and prevent any type of free-thinking or free speech. This is incredibly authoritarian. Read more here.
After the Queen’s death in 2022, we saw people with blank placards or merely questions like ‘Who elected you?’ arrested. This may have seemed ludicrous, but we ended up in a situation where the police have extortionate coercive power and are normalized to police dissenting opinions. A direct result of decades of state power being expanded in the name of policing Muslims and other racialised groups. Read more here.
In fact, we have seen the most stark example of this in recent months with the arrest of thousands of peaceful protestors holding signs stating their support for Palestine Action, a group targeting weapons manufacturing sites to halt the making and transfer of weapons that kill Palestinian children. The government have been able to make mass arrests under terrorism powers which were initially built and expanded on the basis of invoking an Islamophobic ‘threat’. Now, this has built an apparatus through which the state can decide to ‘proscribe’ any organisation that threatens the status quo, thereby criminalising all support for them.
The second set of forces which ideologically benefit from Islamophobia are those institutions whose role in violence is hidden by Islamophobia. The idea that Muslims are naturally threatening, violent and patriarchal means that we rarely explore or interrogate the root causes of acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims. Instead, we make Muslimness itself the cause of violence. This is unlike our analysis of any other type of violence. When a white man commits a mass-shooting in the US we ask why. But when a Muslim person perpetrates an act of violence, we see the cause as him being Muslim. So, we don’t ask why.
This scapegoats Muslimness and Islam and hides the social, political, economic and other factors that produce violence. In this way, Islamophobia benefits the structural forces which produce violence in society, such as poverty or imperialism. In fact, the MI5 and FBI themselves have stated that western foreign policy is the root cause of acts of ‘terrorism’ across the world and often the very thing that such acts of violence are responding to. (Read more in Violence comes home: an interview with Arun Kundnani | openDemocracy or Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror.)
The Islamophobic narrative means that we see Muslim perpetrators of violence as exceptionally violent. Yet, we do not consider it violent when western governments bomb civilians, use drones to strike weddings and hospitals, or indeed sell the weapons of genocide to states that occupy and kill. This violence is often hidden and protected by Islamophobia which misdirects our scrutiny towards Muslims and away from politicians, decision-makers and institutions.
The fact that institutional problems, financial gains and media sales can be hidden and underpinned by Islamophobia, reminds us that when we talk about Islamophobia we are talking about a system of racism. This system operates from the level of government to economy, to school.
Written by Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan; writer, poet, playwright and public educator
Notes:
[1] https://www.mei.edu/publications/europes-islamophobia-and-refugee-crisis
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/18/miqdaad-versi-very-polite-fight-against-british-media-islamophobia
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/18/miqdaad-versi-very-polite-fight-against-british-media-islamophobia
