Special Report on Islamophobia
The Evolution of Islamophobia in American Culture: Background
Islamophobia has deep cultural roots in Western societies, including the United States, and is inextricably tied to anti-Arab sentiments. Tensions between the Islamic world and the West begin virtually from the inception of Islam as a faith and its rapid expansion throughout the Near East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. The concept of a realm of "Christendom," the precursor to the later emergence of a self-defined European geographical and cultural region, set itself against the rising Islamic empires. In other words, "Christendom," and later "Europe," was defined essentially as that which was not Islamic, its immediate and bordering rival. Obviously, the most significant political and military expression of this rivalry was the crusades, in which European Christians attempted to seize control of the Holy Land and eliminate Muslim dominance, along with several confrontations on the border areas of the two regions, especially in France, Spain and the Balkans.
On the other hand, it is hardly the case that these two camps – Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East – were completely discrete entities that were homogenous and simply and inevitably locked into violent confrontation. This is a dangerous misperception shared by figures as divergent as Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton University (who coined the phrase, "clash of civilizations") and Ossama bin Laden. In the West, Lewis and the many scholars, commentators and politicians his thinking has influenced have propagated the idea that there is an inherent and implacable conflict between the West and the Islamic world, which are relatively stable entities defined, especially on the Muslim side, mainly by their mutual rivalry. In fact, however, the West and the world of Islam have been implicated in each other's cultural make-up, development and sensibilities from the outset. Neither is homogenous, and both include veritable universes of cultural, social and religious diversity over vast swathes of space and time. Both have exchanged and borrowed heavily from each other, with the Renaissance in Europe, for example, virtually unthinkable without both the direct influences of the Islamic world, and the indirect influences of classical texts it had preserved from permanent obliteration and retransmitted to European consciousness.
However, this reality of mutuality and cross-cultural infusion has often been elided by notions of the other as a fixed, negative and hostile rival suffering from serious defects in culture, religion and collective character. There is no question that many of the worst attitudes expressed in contemporary American Islamophobia have their roots in the traditional expressions of suspicion and deep distrust along this divide. The classic study of western attitudes towards and representations of the Islamic world is, of course, Orientalism by Edward Said (Vintage Books, 1979). Though Said undoubtedly went too far, as he later admitted, in locating the origins of "orientalist" representations of the Arab and Islamic worlds by Europeans in the works of Homer, the bulk of Said's study focused on 19th and 20th Century scholarship and art regarding the region, and attempted to draw a connection between the knowledge and representation Europeans asserted over the Arab world on the one hand and their imperial projects in the region on the other. To know and to represent the Other, Said argued, is to assert power over the Other. It is worth noting that recently Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit attempted a reverse reading, but from a similar methodological framework, looking at Japanese, German, Russian and Muslim negative representations of western Europeans in Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Penguin Press, 2004). Said and others characterized the essential elements of Western representations of the Arab and Islamic worlds as sensuous, over-sexualized, indulgent, luxurious, feminized, barbarous, cruel, despotic, fanatical, fatalistic, irrational, violent and dangerous. Plainly, many of these essential tropes can be seen in contemporary American forms of Islamophobia, and there is no question that the United States inherited this tradition, along with all other essential elements of Western culture, from its European cultural origins.
In addition, medieval scholarship often involved Christian, Muslim and Jewish polemics against the other monotheistic faiths, which were often badly and mutually misunderstood and misrepresented. Rigged "dialogues" and other tendentious literary forms were employed to "prove" the invalidity or error of the other faith(s), on all three sides. This tension was especially dynamic between Muslims and Christians, as outlined in Norman Daniel's masterful Islam and the West: the Making of an Image (Edinburgh University Press, 1960). These polemics included themes that have remerged in a striking manner in contemporary American Islamophobic discourse, such as the alleged sexual depravity of the Prophet and/or his followers, or the notion that Islam is not a monotheistic faith, as it claims to be, but is actually a form of polytheism or animism. Such themes are common in that part of Evangelical Christian discourse that is hostile to Islam, but can also be found in more unexpected quarters, such as Commentary magazine, which is published by the American Jewish Committee, and David Horowitz' Frontpagemag.com website.
