Roll Number: CS-071

Prejudice Against Islam

Prejudice
Against
Islam

By S.M. Mesum Abbas Rizvi

CIS Department

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Table of Contents:
1. Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------ 4
2. Dimensions of Islamophobia ---------------------------------------------- 6
1) Private Islamophobia ---------------------------------------------------- 6
2) Structural Islamophobia ------------------------------------------------- 7
3) Dialectical Islamophobia ------------------------------------------------ 9
3. Violence Against Muslims Around the World -------------------------- 10
1)Chapel Hill Shooting ----------------------------------------------------- 11
2)Discrimination on Hijab ------------------------------------------------- 12
3) Verbal Assaults ---------------------------------------------------------- 13
4) Islamophobic Monks ---------------------------------------------------- 13
4. Aftermath of 9/11------------------------------------------------------------ 15
5. Need for Tolerance and Compassion ------------------------------------- 16
6. Conclusion ------------------------------------------------------------------- 17
7. References -------------------------------------------------------------------- 18

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1. Introduction:

All praises are for Allah who created the pious selves of Panjitan-e-Pak(A.S.). Indeed,
He is the sole creator who created everything from nothing.

He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth! When He decrees a matter, He
simply tells it, “Be!” And it is! (2:117)
Prejudice against Islam or more commonly known as Islamophobia, is not a recent
social evil, in fact it could be seen throughout the history bearing different faces.
What is Islamophobia? And how did this idea find its way in our and western culture?
This definition was given by Prof. Imran Awan and Dr. Irene Zempi in the report to
the 46th Session of Human Rights Council which they recommend should be adopted
by the United Nations as a working definition of Islamophobia [1]:
“A fear, prejudice and hatred of Muslims or non-Muslim individuals that leads to
provocation, hostility and intolerance by means of threatening, harassment, abuse,
incitement and intimidation of Muslims and non-Muslims, both in the online and
offline world. Motivated by institutional, ideological, political and religious hostility
that transcends into structural and cultural racism which targets the symbols and
markers of a being a Muslim.”
The significance of this definition is two-fold: firstly, it emphasizes the link between
institutional levels of Islamophobia and manifestations of such attitudes, triggered by
the visibility of the victim’s (perceived) Muslim identity. Secondly, this approach also
interprets Islamophobia as a ‘new’ form of racism, whereby Islamic religion, tradition
and culture are seen as a ‘threat’ to the British/Western values. Accordingly, this
conceptual framework indicates that victimization can be ‘ideological’ and
institutional (for example pertaining to ideas and concepts that victimize individuals
or groups) or it can have material consequences for those who are victimized (for
example through verbal and physical abuse). Within this framework, Islamophobia
can be interpreted through the lens of cultural racism whereby Islamic religion,
tradition and culture are seen as a ‘threat’ to ‘British values’ and ‘national identity’,
whilst ‘visible’ Muslims are viewed as ‘culturally dangerous’ and threatening the
‘British/Western way of life’. The notion of cultural racism is largely rooted in frames
of inclusion and exclusion, specifying who may legitimately belong to a particular
national, or other community whilst, at the same time, determining what that
community’s norms are and thereby justifying the exclusion of those whose religion
or culture assign them elsewhere. From this premise, there is such a strong attachment
to ‘our’ way of life that creates boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’ founded upon
difference rather than inferiority, however it would be inappropriate to say that
inferiority doesn’t play any part in any cultural or religious racism. In light of popular
debates about British values and national identity, immigration and community
cohesion, color racism has ceased to be acceptable; nevertheless, a cultural racism
which emphasizes the ‘Other’, alien values of Muslims have increased. In this
context, cultural difference is understood as ‘cultural deviance’ and equated with the
notion of cultural threat. Racism takes many forms and links this reality to
contemporary perceptions of Western superiority and to this end, legitimized violence
towards Muslims. This new form of racism can be interpreted as racism of ‘reaction’,
based on the perceived ‘threat’ to traditional social and cultural identities. This form

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of racism can also be understood as a racism of ‘surveillance’ on the premise that

cultural difference slides into the demonization and stigmatization of ‘Other’ cultures
in the interests of protecting ‘us’ (the non-Muslim Self) from ‘them’. This line of
argument suggests that the key element of contemporary racism is the attribution of
negative cultural characteristics to ‘Other’ minority groups. These ‘negative
attributes’ of (western) society can only be terminated by collective goodwill of
leaders and sense of equality among common individuals of majority. In this context,
Islam and Muslims find themselves under siege. Muslim men have emerged as the
new ‘folk devils’ of popular and media imagination, being portrayed as the
embodiment of extremism and terrorism, whilst Muslim women have emerged as a
sign of gender subjugation in Islam, being perceived as resisting integration by
wearing a headscarf or face veil. Such stereotypes provide fertile ground for
expressions of Islamophobia in the public sphere. Following this line of argument,
Islamophobia manifests itself as an expression of anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim hostility
towards individuals identified as Muslims on the basis of their ‘visible’ Islamic
identity. Expressions of Islamophobia include verbal abuse and harassment, threats
and intimidation, physical assault and violence (including sexual violence), property
damage, graffiti, offensive mail and literature, and offensive online and internet
abuse.
Metro Detroit, a major metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Michigan, has the largest
and most diverse Muslim American and Arab American communities in the United
States. The diversity and expansiveness of these communities stems from two
centuries’ worth of immigration history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigrants
from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and British India moved to the area for
new economic opportunities or to escape unrest. A strong economic draw was the
automotive industry, particularly the Ford Motor Company. Many of these
immigrants found a home near Ford’s plant in Highland Park. In 1921, a group of
Arab, South Asian and European Muslims established the first purpose-built mosque
across the street from this Highland Park plant. Mosques, as well as the churches built
by Christian Arabs, became support networks for newly arrived people.
The growth of these communities waned with the passing of the 1924 Immigration
Act, which extended “national origins” quotas that drastically cut the number of
immigrants into the United States from places outside Western Europe for the next
four decades. This was just one of many examples in which immigration restrictions
targeting Middle Eastern and Muslim populations had been part of broader pieces of
legislation. With the introduction of former President Richard Nixon’s 1972
government surveillance program, Operation Boulder, the government’s attitude
began shifting towards viewing Arab Americans and Muslim Americans as terrorists
and security threats. This was obviously one of many Islamophobic acts seen in U.S.
till today.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims and Arab
Americans became the center of targeted hate, anger and racism. According to the
FBI [2], hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. spiked … from 28 such incidents
nationwide in 2000 to 481 in 2001. During this time Islamophobia was on the rise.
This was backed by many policies and government practices that led to racial
profiling and rhetoric that pushed more fear and hate.
Decades later in 2017, former President Donald Trump furthered an Islamophobic
narrative when he signed an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven
predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days, suspended
entry to the country of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other

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refugees from coming into the country for 120 days — exemplifying how deeply
embedded the notion of viewing Arabs and Muslims as security threats is in American
history.
Basically prejudice is a consequence of fear and hatred towards a particular
individual, idea or belief. And this fear and hatred is fueled by none other than
political leaders of the west and the media that displays a direct and indirect
renunciation for Islam by linking Islam to terrorism especially after the 9/11 and such.

2. Dimensions of Islamophobia:
Dimensions of Islamophobia is best described by Khaled A. Beydoun in his book
American Islamophobia.

Private Islamophobia:
Private Islamophobia is the fear, suspicion, and violent targeting of Muslims by
private actors. These actors could be individuals or institutions acting in a capacity not
directly tied to the state. An example is Fox News, which has built its brand in great
part around demonizing Muslims, capitalizing on “scaremongering about Islam” to
help solidify and even expand its share of the American television news market
during an era of rising Islamophobia.[3] The Gatestone Institute in New York City, a
rightwing think tank focusing on the Middle East, Muslims, and Islam’s
incompatibility with Western societies, is another example of a purveyor of private
Islamophobia.
Private Islamophobia can target specific individuals, Muslims and non-Muslims as
seen in Chapel Hills. For example, the wave of armed and unarmed anti-Muslim
protests held across the United States in September 2015 were staged in front of, and
targeted, community mosques—centers where Muslims congregate and worship,
particularly on Fridays, Islam’s holy day.[4] Islamophobes also vandalized, desecrated,
and burned down mosques, the most salient symbols of Muslim American life, during
the same year, which witnessed a horrific uptick in attacks on U.S. mosques.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported seventy-eight attacks on
U.S. mosques in 2015, the highest number since the immediate aftermath of the 9/11
terror attacks.[5] Many of these attacks took place in heavily concentrated Muslim
neighborhoods and enclaves, indicating that the culprits were not necessarily targeting
specific institutions, but rather the entire communities that surrounded them. Muslim
Americans, and the faith they practice, were under attack, and the most visible
representations of Islam bore the brunt of the frightening uptick in hate crimes
recorded in 2015.
Non-Muslims are also vulnerable to private Islamophobic violence. Since Muslim
identity is racialized as Arab or Middle Eastern, an embedded caricature of Muslims
guides how private Islamophobes imagine and identify adherents of the faith. A wide
swath of non-Muslim groups and communities, most notably non-Muslims from
South Asia, the Arab world, Middle Eastern nations, and Latinx states, and
particularly Sikhs, are often profiled as Muslims and victimized by private
Islamophobes. Muslim men are stereotypically perceived as brown, bearded, and
turbaned—a getup few Muslim American men actually comport with but one that
aligns with the physical appearance of a specific non-Muslim demographic, Sikh men.
In America, the trouble with wearing turbans, a spiritual mandate for Sikh men, is

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their nexus to the ingrained stereotype of the Muslim terrorist and the hatred that
stereotype activates.
The murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, six
days after the 9/11 terror attacks is a lasting reminder of how Sikhs—a non-Muslim
faith group with origins on the Indian subcontinent—are often the victims of private
Islamophobia. Sodhi, who wore a turban and kept a full beard in line with his
religious convictions, fit the caricature of the Muslim terrorist subscribed to by many
Americans. Frank Roque, the man who killed Sodhi, was guided by this caricatured
portrait and shouted, “I stand for America all the way!” after taking Sodhi’s life.
Sodhi, a non-Muslim, became the first victim of private Islamophobic murder in the
wake of 9/11.[6][7][8]
Well after 9/11 and the violent murder of Sodhi, Sikh men continue to be routinely
perceived as Muslims and targeted by private Islamophobia. [9] Arjun Sethi, a Sikh
American civil rights lawyer and professor, states, “In post-9/11 America, Sikhs have
become an easy target. Our articles of faith—a turban and beard—make us acutely
vulnerable to profiling and bigotry, Islamophobia and hate violence. But we continue
to resist and push back, alongside other communities of color, in particular Muslim
Americans.”[10]
This private dimension of Islamophobia dominates popular and even scholarly
understandings of the term and is the form that monopolizes mainstream media
framing and coverage of Islamophobia. However, if we confine our understanding of
Islamophobia to the irrational actions of hatemongers like Frank Roque, or the
economic or political agendas of institutions like Fox News or the Gatestone Institute,
how do we account for the laws and policies that similarly cast Muslims as
unassimilable, suspicious, and potential terrorists? Are these policies part and parcel
of the broader system of Islamophobia, or are they distinct and exempt from
condemnation?

Structural Islamophobia:
Structural Islamophobia is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of
government institutions and actors. This fear and suspicion are manifested and
enforced through the enactment and advancement of laws, policy, and programming
built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security
threat. These laws, policies, and programs may be explicitly discriminatory, like the
first and second Muslim bans, which explicitly restricted immigrants from Muslim-
majority nations from entering the United States. [11][12] Others may seem neutral,
having been framed in generally applicable terms, when in practice they are
disproportionately enforced against Muslim subjects and communities. Although
thought to be a novel form of bigotry against Muslims, close investigation of
structural Islamophobia illustrates that it is anything but that. Again, Islamophobia is
the modern spawn of Orientalism[13], “a master discourse that positions Islam—a faith,
people, and imagined geographic sphere—as the civilizational foil of the West.”
Connecting Islamophobia to Orientalism is a vital first step toward understanding that
Islamophobia is deeply entrenched, fluidly remade and reproduced, and deployed by
the state to bring about intended or desired political ends.
Structural Islamophobia is manifested by historic policy and state action against Islam
and Muslims, and most visibly today, by the abundant laws, policies, and programs
enacted to police Muslims during the protracted war on terror. Following 9/11, law
scholar Leti Volpp observed how terror attacks involving a Muslim culprit spur the
immediate “redeployment of Orientalist tropes.” [14] These tropes are embedded within

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popular representations of Muslims, such as news coverage or depictions in film. But

more saliently, they are embedded within the institutional memory of government
agencies, including the judiciary[15],the legislature, and the executive branch—most
notably, in the Department of Homeland Security and anti-terror law enforcement
during the protracted war on terror. These foundational stereotypes, which portray
Islam as harmful for the American values and society and Muslim identity as foreign,
subversive, and harboring an inherent propensity for terrorism, move state agencies to
enact policies that profile and closely police Muslim citizens and immigrants. Such
policies assign the presumption of guilt to Muslims at large, and in turn diminish the
civil liberties of Muslim Americans.
While a number of government policies fit within the structural Islamophobia
classification, the PATRIOT Act[16], counterradicalization programming, and first and
second Muslim bans are four of the most vivid examples. In the aftermath of 9/11, the
Bush administration established the Department of Homeland Security with the
mission of not only expanding its domestic counterterror program, but also entirely
overhauling and restructuring it in specific response to “Islamic extremism.” Modern
American national security and the counterterror state were remade to reflect the
belief that Muslims pose a threat, and to reflect how that threat is imagined and
exaggerated. Structural Islamophobia is not exclusive to the federal government; it is
also advanced on the state and city levels. However, state and city governments
typically follow in the footsteps of the federal government, as illustrated by war-on-
terror policy and strategy.
President Obama ushered in the second phase of the war on terror. His administration
extended the restrictive immigration policies enacted in the wake of 9/11 by President
Bush (the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System, or NSEERS) and
formally installed counter-radicalization policing in 2011, which expanded the
surveillance state and “localized” state scrutiny of Muslim subjects by enabling local
law enforcement to monitor “homegrown radicalization.” Although Obama was
heralded as a progressive president who declared that “America and Islam are not
exclusive, and need not be in competition” during his celebrated Cairo speech on June
4,2009,[17] his administration expanded the surveillance of Muslims beyond the degree
established by the Bush administration.
Finally, structural Islamophobia was made more transparent and brazen during the
third phase of the war on terror, ushered in by the Trump administration on January
20, 2017. By issuing the executive orders on immigration, promising to enact a
Muslim Registry (and to revitalize NSEERS), remaking Countering Violent
Extremism into the more hardline Countering Islamic Violence, and seeking to
designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization—a measure that would
severely cripple Muslim American civic and advocacy organizations with tenuous,
imagined, or fabricated ties to the transnational political group—Trump made the
war-on-terror objectives of the state the most explicitly anti-Muslim they have ever
been. However, the Trump administration should not be viewed as a marked departure
or outlier, but rather as a more transparent and brazen step in a progression that has
been, in great part, enabled by the stated war-on-terror aims and programs of the
previous two administrations.
Perhaps the best way to think about structural Islamophobia is by analogizing it to
structural racism. Both are cultures embedded within government institutions. Both
have pre-existing narratives and propagate stereotypes based on understanding people
in flat, damaging, and subhuman terms, stories that are then institutionalized at every
level of public and private organizations, institutions, and agencies. These stories are

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manifested in seemingly benign decisions or routine functions that bring about a

discriminatory end, and sometimes through actions whose explicit intention is to bring
about a discriminatory end.
How do we explain the relationship between private and structural Islamophobia?
How does the latter endorse or influence the actions of individuals and actors that
participate in the former? What do we make of the dynamic, or dialectic, between the
state and its polity with regard to authorizing and emboldening Islamophobia? And
how does the fluid exchange between government structures and citizens perpetuate
Islamophobia as a broad system of bigotry and violence? Let’s explore these and
additional questions next.

Dialectical Islamophobia:
The final dimension of Islamophobia is the least detectable, but it is the very thread
that binds the private and structural forms together. Dialectical Islamophobia is the
process by which structural Islamophobia shapes, reshapes, and endorses views or
attitudes about Islam and Muslim subjects inside and outside of America’s borders.
State action legitimizes prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and
stereotypes of Islam and communicates damaging ideas through state-sponsored
policy, programming, or rhetoric, which in turn emboldens private violence against
Muslims (and perceived Muslims).
Islamophobia at its core is the presumption of guilt assigned to Muslims by state and
private actors. But it also must be understood as a process, the one by which state
policies endorse popular tropes. This ongoing process is most intense during the
aftermath of terrorist attacks like the 9/11 attacks or the April 15, 2013 Boston
bombings, points in time when structural Islamophobic policies are typically enacted,
advanced, or zealously lobbied for.
Moments of national mourning, particularly after a terror attack committed by
Muslims or individuals perceived as outsiders, also spark a desire to exact revenge
and perpetrate violence against anybody and everybody perceived to be Muslim, or
more generally, not American. This mass anger, typically enforced through acts of
vigilante violence directed at innocents, is also often endorsed and emboldened by
formal policy that deems Muslims to be suspicious and to be members of a faith that
ties them to the terror acts. For example, four days after a suicide bombing in
England’s Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017, a man shouted that “Muslims should
die,” then lunged toward two girls, one of whom was Muslim, on a train in Portland,
Oregon, with knife, and fatally stabbed two of the men who stepped in to defend the
girls.[18] Only hours after an ISIS-inspired attack in London on June 3, 2017, a
headscarved Muslim American woman, Rahma Warsame, was savagely assaulted by
an Islamophobe in Ohio, leaving her with missing teeth and a broken nose and jaw.
[19]
These victims were a continent away from the terror incidents that drove
Islamophobes to attack them.
Stories like these are all too common, particularly in the wake of terror incidents, and
exhibit the Islamophobic base narrative that holds all Muslims guilty of every terror
attack. Expectations that Muslims disavow or apologize for acts of terror [20] highlight
this narrative. Mainstream media coverage is replete with headlines such as “Muslims
Must Do More against Terrorism” and “Why Aren’t Muslims Condemning ISIS?”
confirming the baseless tie between terrorism and Muslim identity, and further
emboldening the private backlash against any and every Muslim.

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The state’s rubber-stamping of widely held stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, through
the enactment of surveillance programs, religious and racial profiling, restrictive
immigration policies, and the war-on-terror campaign, is the cornerstone of dialectical
Islamophobia. This exchange—by which citizens absorb the suspicion and
demonization the state assigns to Muslims by way of (structural Islamophobic) law or
state action—is an ongoing dialectic that links state policy to hate and violence
unleashed by private citizens.
While cases of private Islamophobias are generally framed as a deviant act committed
by one deviant actor entirely divorced from the state, dialectical Islamophobia reveals
an underlying thread that connects the (seemingly) deviant actions of hatemongers
with the state’s repeated message that Muslim identity alone is grounds for suspicion
that justifies vigilante action by private citizens. If the law is laden with damaging
stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, and American citizens are expected and instructed
to obey the law, the dialectic between the state and the citizen—and the hostility the
state authorizes—is made clear.
Most of the attention devoted to Islamophobia fixates on sensational stories of private
Islamophobia. Stories about “intensifying calls for the exclusion of Syrian
refugees,”[21] anti-Muslim rallies spearheaded and staged by fringe militants, mosque
arsons, and the spike in violence against hijab-clad Muslim women that took place
after Trump’s presidential victory[22] dominate mainstream news, social media, and
even academic research. This preoccupation with sensational stories of private
Islamophobia obfuscates the process by which structural Islamophobia authorizes and
mobilizes private bigotry toward Muslims. Like other forms of bigotry, Islamophobia
is contingent on media representations, political rhetoric, and most saliently, formal
law, policy, and programming. The fluid expansion of structural Islamophobia,
through the advancement of the war on terror, communicates to the broader citizenry
that Islam is to be viewed with suspicion. And under a president who openly states, “I
think Islam hates us,”[23] it is easy for many people to believe that Islam is utterly
irreconcilable with American culture, and that those who identify as Muslims are not
part of the collective “US” or “we.” Structural Islamophobia marks Muslims and
Muslim Americans as, at best, possible threats, and at worst, as terrorists in our midst.
These state designations prompt the passions and stir the suspicion of private citizens,
increasingly motivating them to take action.
Therefore, structural Islamophobia should also be viewed as a latent call to action
transmitted from the state to its citizens. The state is alerting the people to be on the
lookout for suspicious Muslims, and when the time comes, to take action. Craig
Hicks, a perpetrator, was just acting on what war-on-terror policy and such instructed
him about the threat posed by Muslims like Deah, and particularly Deah’s new bride
Yusor and her sister Razan, who wore “the flag of Islam” around their heads. Even if
they were backpack-toting, pizza-eating, wide-eyed college kids, driven by the very
same aspirations held by non-Muslim students at high schools and college campuses
across the country, Yusor, Razan, and Deah were ultimately Muslims, which meant
that according to the highest laws of the land, they were members of an enemy bloc
bent on menacing the world. As Muslims, the three students gruesomely murdered in
Chapel Hill were said to be part of an enemy race, a caricature of Muslims embedded
within the memory of political institutions centuries before it was implanted in the
mind of Craig Hicks.[24]
3. Violence Against Muslims Around the World:

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Islamophobics can be seen channeling their extreme hate on law abiding Muslims
through physical violence. The kind of acts and the degree of violence seen in the
history of U.S. and Europe are unexplainable to an impartial mind. Recently a Muslim
was told not to pray at a Canadian train station.[51]

Chapel Hill Shooting:

Yusor Abu-Salha was far more than the headscarf she carefully wrapped around her
head every morning and removed every night. The twenty-one-year-old was a fresh
college graduate, having just earned a degree in biology from North Carolina State
University. She had plans to attend the University of North Carolina School of
Dentistry—her top-choice program. She had just married twenty-two-year-old Deah
who was working toward a career in dentistry. He himself was a second-year student
at the UNC School of Dentistry and had helped his wife piece together a compelling
application so that she could follow in his footsteps. In fact, the young couple
frequently talked about establishing their own dental clinic and one day lending their
skills to help poor patients in the Middle East, as well as serving neglected patient
communities at home in North Carolina. These are dreams that young people in their
early twenties often have. But anybody who knew Yusor and Deah also knew that
these two possessed the drive and work ethic to convert these dreams into reality.
Yusor’s younger sister, nineteen-year old Razan, who roomed with the young couple
in their Chapel Hill apartment, certainly believed that her older sister and brother-in-
law would one day make good on their dreams. Razan, who loved watching Animal
Planet, had dreams of her own, which included becoming an architect, something she
began to work toward as a freshman at the NC State School of Design. Yusor, Deah,
and Razan were three young Muslim Americans with their entire lives ahead of them,
with dreams not unlike those held by other young people their age. On February 10,
2015, the dreams of these three Muslim American students were permanently deferred
and violently put to rest. Sometime before 5:00 p.m. on that day, a forty-four-year-old
neighbor, Craig Hicks, executed Yusor, Razan, and Deah.[25] The two girls were shot
in the head and Deah was sprayed with bullets by Hicks after an alleged “dispute over
a parking spot,” several news outlets reported. Yet the execution-style murder of the
three students, and the blood that poured from their heads and stained their apartment
carpet, evidenced that this was no parking dispute, but a hate crime—a hate crime
aimed squarely at the faith of the three. The gruesome facts, and the history of tension
between Hicks and the three students, revealed that hate was at the heart of this
murder. One didn’t need a law degree to draw this conclusion. Although they lived
next door to him, Hicks did not regard Yusor, Razan, and Deah as neighbors. In fact,
he did not even perceive them primarily as college students. He perceived them,
rather, as outsiders, interlopers, and foreigners—above all, as enemies of the state
who warranted the suspicion and scowls he routinely darted their way when they
crossed paths in the hallway, the common areas, or in the parking lot—and on that
Tuesday afternoon inside the Finley Forest Condominiums in Chapel Hill, he believed
they deserved extra-judicial punishment in the name of patriotism. Hicks decided to
take the law into his hands by executing them. While the students grew accustomed to
Hicks’s stares and scowls, they likely could have never imagined that their hate-filled
neighbor would become their reaper.
However, the ideas and images Hicks consumed about Islam, terrorism, and the hijab
on television would mobilize his hate into unspeakable violence. But what role did
war-on-terror law and policy, founded on the narrative that Muslim identity correlates
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with terror suspicion, have on the murder of these three Muslim American students?
Was Hicks’s fear and hatred of Islam irrational, or was it fueled by the stereotypes of
the faith and its followers he regularly heard on the radio and watched on television,
and, therefore, rational? Furthermore, was he a deviant actor whose horrific acts were
the result of his own motives alone? Or was Hicks collaborating in the broader
national project of policing, prosecuting, and punishing Muslims—the formal mission
of the war on terror, that ambiguous and unconventional war authorized by
counterterror laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, Countering Violent Extremism, and,
two years after the triple murder, the Muslim ban enacted by President Trump? Could
Hicks’s murder of the three students, fondly remembered as “our three winners” by
their family members and Muslim American activists, be tied to formal state policy?
To what degree does a broadening and deepening body of national security,
immigration, and local law enforcement policy—policy that holds Muslim identity as
presumptive of terror suspicion— encourage Hicks and other hatemongers to express
their private Islamophobia through words or slurs, violence, or votes? What are the
connections between the state policies and structures tasked with policing Muslim
citizens and immigrants and the acts of individuals who target, victimize, and in the
case of Yusor, Razan, and Deah, murder Muslims?
The media coverage following the murders at Chapel Hill profiled Hicks as an
irrational actor who was not influenced by the legal structures that aimed to cast
Muslims as presumptive terrorists, a characterization that aligns with the prevailing
understanding of Islamophobia as a “dislike of or prejudice against Muslims”
generally exhibited by individuals. However, this narrow framing not only overlooks
the state’s role in authorizing and emboldening the unfathomable acts (of private
Islamophobia) undertaken by individuals like Craig Hicks, but it also overlooks the
mutually reinforcing relationship between the state and media institutions.
Furthermore, understandings of Islamophobia that tie it exclusively to private actors
also fail to acknowledge that Islamophobia is structural. It is propagated by law and
perpetuated by policy, policy that fluidly communicates damaging stereotypes and
misrepresentations about Muslims to the broader polity, which has the effect of
endorsing popular views and misconceptions, and at the extreme, emboldening hate
and violence directed at Muslims and individuals incorrectly perceived as Muslims.
Framing Islamophobia as more than merely hate held or violence inflicted by private
individuals, and tying it to government structures and legal pronouncements and
policies, is vital for uncovering and understanding the roots of Islamophobia.

Discrimination on Hijab:
Islamophobics usually tend to assault verbally or physically based on what they
perceive as Muslims. This woman out of the blue, in a public transport, started to
severely criticize a Muslim woman on wearing a Hijab. [26] The offender went on to ask
the women that “Why you wear it for a man who marries a six-year girl?”, then
another passenger steps in and asks her to mind her own business. Islamophobia’s
main root could be found in ignorance. How could one hate something, one which he
knows nothing of? Like accusations on Prophet S.A.W.W. has become a common
trend. Without doing proper research on Islam they tend to make wild accusations to
our dearest and insulting them out of the blue which can be seen as nothing more than
a way to hurt someone instead of a constructive argument or freedom of speech which
they pose it as in their self-defense. But how these people get so much hatred, is their
hatred to be tied to them solely and we are to turn a blind eye on all these events as it

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is done by a single person and has no ties anywhere or it is cultivated in the roots of
the society by its leaders? Countries banning Hijab in Europe like Austria, Denmark,
France, Germany, Netherlands, Bosnia and Herzegovina, what could be seen by the
actions of these countries? How a Hijab offend the law of any country when all these
countries uphold the charter of U.N. of which Article 1 clearly defines one of the
objectives of the UN as promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for
fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.
Now the States General of the Netherlands enacted a ban on face-covering clothing,
popularly described as the "burqa ban", in January 2012.[27] The burqa ban came into
force on 1 August 2019 in schools, public transport, healthcare, and government
buildings. Now these are obviously the actions of legal bodies, there is no perpetrator
now to shift the blame solely on that individual, these authorities are the main cause
for spreading hatred and causing prejudice and violence. When the ban was enacted
some transports and non-Muslims also protested against it [28] which is strongly
implying that hatred is coming from none other than the individuals who swore to do
right by the citizens, Muslim citizens. This could be seen in Austria as well when in
2017, a legal ban on face-covering clothing was adopted by the Austrian parliament.
[29][30]
Headscarves were also banned in 2019 from primary schools, but Kippas worn
by Jewish boys and the turban worn by Sikh boys were exempted in the legislature. [31]
In 2019, Austria banned the hijab in schools for children up to ten years of age. The
Austrian legislators said their motivation was promoting equality between men and
women and improving social integration with respect to local customs, and parents
who send their child to school with a headscarf would be fined €440 ($427 or £386 as
of 2022).[32] Now if this could not be seen as an Islamophobic act on behalf of
authorities then I don’t know what is.

Verbal Assaults:
From South to North America from France to Sweden we could see the prejudice in
the actions of legal and local bodies against Muslims, which is in fact a direct and
indirect source of hatred of common citizens. This 34-year old pregnant woman, who
was a Muslim of course, was taking a London bus with her mother and 3-year-old
child when suddenly a woman starting to call her names and also called her ‘ISIS’,
she also said, “Go home and make a bomb on the internet”. As if this wasn’t enough,
the offender went on to threaten her to kick her in the uterus and kill the child. [33] The
Muslim woman was a Moroccan-Italian who arrived in the U.K. six months prior this
incident. She told the Evening Standard she didn’t understand what the woman was
yelling. This is not new, over 500 incidents were reported in 2015 in the U.K. Many
of the cases weren’t even reported and a very few were even recorded, still we can
find videos and images of these abuses on social media platforms every day, a couple
being abused[34], a fasting Muslim being called names at [35], a woman abusing a
Muslim while he’s praying[36] and many more[37][38][39][40].

Islamophobic Monks:
This can also be seen in Myanmar, where Muslims comprises of less than ten percent
of the total population of the country, where they receive hate and prejudice from the
Islamophobic Monks and who, most of them, renounce Islamic laws and call it a
danger to their ideology and practices. In July 2014 a Buddhist woman, Phyu Phyu
Min, filed a police report in Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, charging that
two Muslim co-workers raped her. [41] Before long, a local website picked the story up.

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“It started from a website called Thit Htoo Lwin with a story that a cook from a house
was raped by two brothers,” says, Maung Maung, a local Muslim leader. It wasn’t
until a prominent Buddhist monk named Ashin Wirathu more commonly known as
The Buddhist bin Laden.[42] published the claim on his Facebook page that the
allegations went viral. Wirathu, known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, wrote this subject
line: “The Mafia is Spreading and Coming to Town”. He is well-known for his
Islamophobic and anti-Muslim attitude more so than for his Buddhist religion. [42][43][44]
[45][46]
The consequences were lethal for his actions. Within 24 hours, on July 1st,
2014, angry Buddhist mobs armed with sticks, knives, and torches marched through
the streets of Mandalay. They circled the local mosque, Muslim-owned businesses,
and the teashop where the accused worked. “There were motorcades and shouting,
‘Kill the Kalars.’ Kalars means Muslims,” says Samar Nyinyi, a Muslim civic leader
who witnessed the violence. “Folks from the cars spit on Muslims openly in the
daytime and after that, folks came with swords and spears.” One Buddhist and one
Muslim man were killed in the ensuing two days of violence, dozens were injured,
Muslim shops ransacked, and a mosque badly burned. But the original allegation of
rape that seemingly incited the violence – the one that Wirathu posted on his
Facebook page – was part of a carefully orchestrated lie. The rape never happened.
Phyu Phyu Min later rescinded her original rape allegation. The government
announced that the rape case did not take place at all. They provided evidence for that
and itself said that it wasn’t true. It said the report was fabricated. Phyu Phyu Min is
now in jail, serving a minimum 21-year sentence for fabricating the rape.[47]
This is not the first time allegations of rape have been used to incite communal
violence in Myanmar. Claiming that a Buddhist woman has been raped, an “honor
crime” in the country, has become common to mobilize anti-Muslim mobs. These, in
turn, often lead to retributive rape. In June 2012, violent clashes broke out after a
young Buddhist girl was allegedly raped and murdered by three Muslims. [48] In
retaliation, 10 Muslims were lynched. State media further stoked anti-Muslim
sentiment by invoking the derogatory word “Kalar” in their coverage. Fueled by
media and clerics deadly riots that followed left around 200 dead. Later, human rights
organizations documented widespread and systematic rape of Rohingya women by
military and security forces. In August 2013, a Muslim man was arrested for the
attempted rape of a Buddhist woman. Eye-witnesses said they were arguing but
denied he tried to rape her. When police refused to hand him over to Buddhist mobs,
they burned down Muslim homes and shops.
In many of these cases, Facebook was used as a vehicle to publicize the unverified
rape allegation. Since Facebook became legal in Myanmar, after the country emerged
from military rule in 2010, its popularity has not only spiked but also gave rise to a
new era of hate speech. But anti-Muslim propaganda is not only spread online.
Facebook is important, but they do have many other channels, including distributing
pamphlets, VCD videos, and organizing speeches in very rural villages. They now
have a new channel called the ‘Dammah School’ – it’s like a Sunday school, and they
are organizing young people and kids from Buddhist society in many rural places and
teaching them to hate other religions, that Muslims are the terrorists, they are rapists
and they will invade your country and the usual tirade.
Nationalist monks are appealing to these irrational fears of the Buddhist population,
and then adding in this layer – this idea that the Muslims are coming for our women.
The tragic irony is that rape is a crime that’s rarely prosecuted in Myanmar, yet, it’s
used to instigate violence against entire populations of people. Wirathu is attempting
to leverage fears of a Muslim takeover for political gain. The influential monk who

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played a role in sparking the resulting violence, still posts on Facebook. Whipping up
hatred has become a Wirathu trademark. He is a prominent figure in the Ma Ba Tha, a
Buddhist monk-led organization that commits itself to preserving the religion in
Myanmar. The group interprets Islam as a serious threat, working to pass
discriminatory legislation while threatening those who promote interreligious
harmony. Wirathu was jailed in 2003 for hate speech that incited anti-Muslim riots. [49]
But since his release in 2010, he’s kept busy acquiring political power and military
backing. President Thein Sein has even called him the “Son of the Lord Buddha”. [50]
This is the one thing that can truly make people commit truly horrific crimes, he’s
attempting to leverage fears of a Muslim takeover for political gain and inciting
people to violence, and furthermore he’s not being held accountable for it.
These types of clerics and monks, for their own personal gain, spreads hatred and
causes death and persecutions to God knows how many and when these hatemongers
are appreciated by political powers their ideas get fortified in the minds of the
common and give courage to all persecutors of Islam to do what they do best.

4. Aftermath of 9/11:
After 9/11, Muslims and people of Arab and South Asian descent became targets of
government practices that result in racial profiling and it continued since the War on
Terror continued and, events like Manchester Arena bombing and Westminster
Bridge attack worsened things even more for Muslims.
In June 2002, then Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a “Special
Registration” requirement that all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries
report to the government to register and be fingerprinted. In May 2011, the Obama
Administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it was
indefinitely suspending the program under which this requirement was established.
According to a statement that same month from the American Civil Liberties Union,
the program never received a single terrorism-related conviction despite tens of
thousands of people forced to register.
The Trump administration exacerbated these preexisting problems by further
propagating anti-Muslim prejudice. On the topic of the racial profiling of Muslims,
former President Donald Trump stated, “I think profiling is something that we’re
going to have to start thinking about as a country.” [52] On January 27, 2017, Trump
signed Executive Order 13769 which banned citizens of seven predominantly Muslim
countries from visiting the United States for 90 days, indefinitely prohibited the entry
of all Syrian refugees into the U.S., and blocked the entry of all other refugees for 120
days.[53] The Supreme Court ultimately upheld Trump’s travel ban[54], though President
Joe Biden rescinded the policy on his Inauguration Day.[55]
The total number of reported hate crime incidents in the U.S. decreased by over 18
percent between 2000 and 2009, but during the same period, the percentage of hate
crime incidents directed towards Muslims increased by over 500 percent.
Furthermore, the number of assaults against Muslims in the U.S. peaked at 127 in
2016[56], which exceeded the previous peak of 93 assaults in 2001. Think tank New
America has found that anti-Muslim activity, including hate incidents against
mosques and Islamic centers, media reports of anti-Muslim violence, and anti-Muslim
actions and statements by government officials, has “increased markedly since late
2015.”[57] Additionally, according to South Asian Americans Leading Together
(SAALT), there have been “over 484 incidents of hate violence and 252 incidents of

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xenophobic political rhetoric aimed at South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle
Eastern, and Arab American communities around the country” since 2016. [58] Even
France and Austria, in 2022, maintained their efforts to criminalize politically-active
Muslims and Islamic organizations and institutions.[59] Dr. Farid Hafez noted that
France’s systematic crackdown on French Muslim society resulted in “as many as
24,887 Muslim organizations and businesses placed on a secret blacklist and under
strict monitoring, and 718 Muslim-owned organizations and businesses including at
least 4 schools, 37 mosques, 210 businesses, and two organizations closed. About €46
million ($46.2) were confiscated by the French government.” [60] Rights activists noted
that these actions were contributing to towards a “systematic suppression of Muslim
civil society” across the continent.[61]
5. Need for Tolerance and Compassion:
Islamophobia is structural but those who are part of the ‘big scheme’ are also people,
so why so hate towards Islam? Why not just leave it alone like any other religion? The
answer to these questions lie in itself, why one calls something wrong before even
familiarizing oneself with it? Why without even thinking straight answer is ‘you’re
wrong’? Because, in his heart, he knows it’s right and he don’t want to leave what he
has because of the developed affection towards it. The same thing is for Islam when
one’s views are proven wrong or one feel it’s right; their conscience tells it’s right,
resorting for revolting against it seems to be right as a proof their affection to their
current belief. So the more oppressed party is right greater the opposition is, and
nothing is more right than Islam.
Ahmed Maeno, a Japanese converted Muslim, when asked on an interview by
Towards Eternity that, “What do you think the reason is to people attack Islam so
violently, so ruthlessly”, he went on to reply, “In my opinion one of the reasons for
that is because they know, they understand that Islam is true and because they
understand straight away inside themselves … Islam is truth, they know they have to
accept it but if they accept it would be burden on them.”[62]
Even a Marine who served in Somalia, Philippines and Middle East said he had
developed an extreme hate towards Islam and consequently towards Muslims got his
opinion changed when he chose understanding over extremism.
Richard McKinney planned to make an IED and blow up Muncie Islamic Center in
his own words he says, “I was gonna make my own IED and I was gonna set it across
the Islamic center over in a bank’s parking lot and I was gonna dial it in. And just
watch the show.”[63] Filled with such hatred what really stopped McKinney from
committing such atrocity.
His daughter came home from school one day started praising this Muslim boy and
his family for their excellent behaviour and kindness towards her. First he went on an
Islamophobic rant but when he saw his daughter alienated from him he just saw in his
conscience and decided to give the Muslim community one more chance. The same
Islamic center he wanted to blew up, he went there for answers and they handed him
the Qura’an.[64] Ever since then he was surprised and shocked how when he thought he
found a problem in Islam, they clear it. Now he’s a practicing Muslim.
That is all, all one need to do is give another chance, they won’t regret it.
People are encouraged to be inquisitive about everything but what they really miss out
is the impartial perspective they need to maintain while dealing with any idea that is
alien or dear to them. Nowadays these Orientalists go about making themselves the
standard for the world while rhetorically promoting more than 200 illegal settlements

16
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of Israel in Palestine, giving a silent treatment to Kashmir-issue and ignoring Muslims

around the globe.
Not until and unless a society is willing to listen and believe that “I can be proven
wrong”, hate could never end and peace could never be attained. Hazrat Ali (A.S.)
once said:
Peace could never be attained unless there is justice.
We can see the biased behaviour of superpowers in the U.N., how the whole world
stood up with Ukraine but when it comes to Muslims everyone is silent and the world,
it has no peace.

6. Conclusion:

Prejudice against Islam is structural or in plain words pre-planned. It is legal bodies

and authorities that are to be blamed for this violence against Muslims, as we saw in
all the incidents recently how they were framed as private Islamophobia and denied
from any ties to the state. We saw Chapel Hills, we saw Myanmar; how fake rape
cases are blamed on Muslims by clerics for political gains, we saw how unsafe a
common Muslim is in the streets of Europe and America. Islamophobia could never
be erased from its roots until every bigotry has leaved the mind of such. A close mind
is curse not only oneself but to others also. Muslims in this world should show
patience and calmness and deal with these situations with best etiquettes because as
Qura’an sets the standard for the best person; who have the best akhlaq. Be the best
Muslim and who knows maybe someone will become Ahmed Maeno or Richard
McKinney because of you.

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 Prejudice Against Islam

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2. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/usahate/usa1102-04.htm
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4. Kalia Abade, “Anti-Muslim Protests—Some Armed—Planned for at Least 20 Sites across the
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13. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/orientalism#:~:text=The%20most%20important%20feature
%20of,own%20authority%20to%20represent%20themselves.
14. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/
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justice-vol-32-no-1-2012
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community/
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18. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-muslims-portland-idUSKBN18N080
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muslims-denounce-extremism/
21. https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/23/shirin-sinnar-preparing-american-muslim-
daughters-for-what-awaits/
22. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/muslim-women-wearing-hijabs-assaulted-
just-hours-after-trump-win-n681936
23. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/index.html
24. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34385051
25. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/02/11/three-killed-in-shooting-
near-university-of-north-carolina/

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 Prejudice Against Islam

26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4neOxyWXfM
27. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/8765673/Netherlands-to-
ban-the-burka.html
28. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/01/dutch-police-signal-unwillingness-enforce-
new-burqa-ban
29. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/burqa-ban-takes-effect-in-austria/tfohzpd5x
30. https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article164642964/Oesterreich-stellt-Tragen-von-Burka-
und-Nikab-unter-Strafe.html
31. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/oesterreich-beschliesst-kopftuch-verbot-an-
grundschulen-a-1267656.html
32. https://www.tageblatt.lu/nachrichten/international/oesterreich-verbietet-kopftuecher-an-
grundschulen/
33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4neOxyWXfM
34. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TRuprp7YwE
35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Hr03bxzns
36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrpaFAloL7Q
37. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uajDK88nANk
38. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9zzmi5PPFw
39. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INy4gaUrCL4
40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUXz9xEjs6I
41. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/10/28/rape-used-as-a-weapon-in-myanmar-to-
ignite-fear
42. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1532846/world
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muslim-monk
44. https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/who-is-ashin-wirathu-a-vitriolic-monk-freed-by-
myanmar-s-military-49865
45. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/12/only-takes-one-terrorist-
buddhist-monk-reviles-myanmar-muslims-rohingya-refugees-ashin-wirathu
46. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58471535
47. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-conviction-idUSKBN0MG11920150320
48. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/6/19/death-sentence-in-myanmar-sectarian-killing
49. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/5/29/myanmar-arrest-warrant-issued-for-anti-muslim-
monk-wirathu
50. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/explosion-injures-four-burmese-bin-laden-gives-
mass-sermon-flna6c10703204
51. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-65060730
52. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/trump-us-should-consider-profiling-
muslims.html
53. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/02/01/2017-02281/protecting-the-
nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states
54. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf
55. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/27/biden-reversed-trumps-muslim-
ban-americans-support-that-decision/
56. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/15/assaults-against-muslims-in-u-s-
surpass-2001-level/
57. https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/anti-muslim-activity/
58. https://saaleadingtogether.medium.com/this-week-in-hate-multiple-incidents-of-hate-
against-muslims-during-ramadan-b897deddd6dd
59. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/austria-raids-muslim-families-suffering-two-
years
60. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/analysis/analysis-islamophobia-in-europe-is-a-growing-
structural-challenge/2733479

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 Prejudice Against Islam

61. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/europe-muslim-civil-society-suppression-
governments-accused
62. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1hY190uX3s
63. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQG-oIMSbco
64. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/08/us/marine-mosque-islam-blake-cec/index.html

20