Trend of Islamophobia around the world.
For quite sometimes, Islamophobia has been growing strongly
in the West and has continued to
take root through intensive campaigns and public discourses
disseminating fear of Islam, and
through a significant number
of incidents targeting Muslims,
mosques, Islamic centers, Islamic attire, and Islam’s sacred symbols. Reports and evidence reveal
that negative sentiment toward Islam and Muslims keeps expanding in the minds of mainstream
Westerners, through mistrust
toward Islam and its adherents.
There are clear indicators showing
that more and more Westerners
are in doubt that Islam is a religion
of peace; they feel suspicious
over religious activities conducted
in mosques and Islamic centers,
while associating Islam with the
ongoing phenomena of extremism and terrorism.
Particularly during the last few
years, Islamophobia has reached
an intractable point as it continues
to grow, despite up-and-down
graphic from time to time. This is
reflected in the wide scale of negative narratives against Islam, as
well as through incidents targeting
mosques, Islamic centers, Muslim individuals and communities,
and women wearing the veil or hijab. Mosques and Islamic centers
are the most common target, as
a significant number of incidents
of vandalism and arson involving
mosques and prayer facilities are
occurring in the U.S., Canada,
Germany, Sweden, UK and Netherlands.
The current main hotspots of
Islamophobia remain the U.S. and
Europe. In the U.S., the Islamophobia trend is the most concerning in terms of scale. Racist graffiti, pig carcass dumping,
threatening mail, Holy Quran defacing, physical assaults, and verbal insults are among the frequent
incidents. Also, quite recently in
the U.S. there was an atmosphere
of overwhelming chaos, as the
early days of President Trump’s
administration had made clear
that Islam is a major Public Enemy. Among the most notorious
instances was the issuance of a
xenophobic order that flies in the
face of America’s self-proclaimed
values of freedom and equality.
The policy was called Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry
into the United States, and it suspended entry for nationals of certain Muslim countries.
Meanwhile in Europe, the bleak picture of Islamophobia was seen in intense campaigns
waged by populist-right wing parties amidst
ongoing elections.
Islamophobia has existed since very long
ago, meaning that Muslims were targets of
negative stereotyping and prejudice in all its
forms and manifestations for quite some time.
It is particularly since the attacks on the World
Trade Center in 2001 that the phenomena
has increased drastically at global level, since
when Islam was seen as a serious threat in
certain parts of the world.
The rise of ISIS in the last few years has
made the situation even worse, as Islam
was then portrayed as a religion of intrinsic
violence whose disciples had a tendency
to spread harm to the followers of other religions. In many Western countries Islam is
even considered as an ‘alien’ religion prone
to bloodshed, a stigma that triggers intolerant
attitudes amongst non-Muslims.
These negative stereotyping eventually
ended up into negative sentiments, dread or
hatred of Islam that includes multi-form discrimination against its adherents, manifested
into the exclusion of Muslims from economic,
social, and public life.
Islamophobia, therefore, is not an issue
that ‘stands alone’, for it is very close connected with other issues which reciprocally
feed the phenomena. In simpler words, 9/11
was a problem of terrorism; ISIS was problem
of radicalization and violent extremism, while
Islamophobia was actually something else,
but it was so affected by those issues in term
vice-versa.
Terrorism and violent extremism both had
boosted Islamophobia elsewhere, which was
the fact, and the fast-growing Islamophobia
had nurtured extremism and terrorism, which
was just another fact. By consequence, addressing the issue of Islamophobia must be
undertaken in parallel with efforts to tackle
other ‘related issues’ which is unfortunately
not an easy matter.
The main task of the Islamophobia Observatory is to ‘monitor’ those events on day-today basis, scanning the minds, public feelings, incidents, and everything that serves
as possible indicator of Islamophobia. All of
the information were then gathered and presented in this report with the expectation that
the Member States would have a picture on the trend of Islamophobia around the world
during the reviewed period; and hopefully this report could be used as materials for making
policies and decisions on relevant issues.
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