Donald Trump has violated almost every rule of political and social decorum in recent months. His inflammatory rhetoric now resonates across the world, finding echoes among Hindu supremacists in India and far-right politicians in Europe. Trump and his vociferous supporters seem to be setting up rancorous conflicts within and between societies.
In the process, however, Trump has made a little-acknowledged — and even vigorously denied — phenomenon seem incontrovertible: Islamophobia, the prejudice that blames an ancient religion for the crimes of some present-day murderers and fanatics and that makes a diverse population of 1.5 billion people look suspect in the eyes of the rest.
This bigotry has flourished, largely unchecked, for some years now. It raised its grisly head in even proudly liberal New York during the controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque" before running into some principled political opposition. The occasional resistance to it in the mainstream media — such as Ben Affleck's exasperated response to Bill Maher or Reza Aslan's brisk education of a befuddled Fox News presenter — goes viral simply because it is so rare.
In a bizarre twist, the very people who promote, unwittingly or not, Islamophobia — such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who condemns Islam as a "nihilistic, destructive death cult" — also vehemently deny its existence. They claim that they're being attacked unfairly for wanting to reform Islam, which is evidently incompatible with Western values of democracy and human rights.
But a fundamental incoherence marks the rhetoric of those auditioning for the role of Islam's Martin Luther. They never quite clarify what it means to "reform" a religion as variously and extensively practiced as Islam. They assume that Islam is a cult of doctrine-bound believers, like communism; and, like the Leninists of the past, they hope that ruthless assertion of the correct party line, preferably laid down by them, will discipline all 1.5 billion adherents.
The Islamophobes also mash together complex political issues — Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism in Java, failures of Indian secularism in Kashmir, racial discrimination in Republican France — into a simple rhetorical question: Is inherently violent and intolerant Islam compatible with the modern world?
This quasi-accusation assumes that the modern world, whose record includes savage wars between secular imperialist powers and atheistic totalitarianisms, as well as genocides and devastating economic crises, was doing just great until it collided with a seventh-century faith. The Islamophobes also conflate terrorism — a tactic used by people of all faiths and ideologies since it was patented by the Russian revolutionaries of the 19th century — with Islam. They point, as evidence, to murderous groups like Al-Qaida and ISIL, which invoke Islam as their motivating force.
But this attempt to identify Islam's allegedly vicious core — by taking the proclamations of fanatics at face value — merely begs some more questions. Much blood has been shed in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity since the Jacobins instituted the reign of terror. People invoking democracy and human rights as their motivating force most recently have caused havoc in the Middle East. Does that make those of us who believe in democracy the pathetic dupes of an inherently murderous faith?
