Islamophobia vs. Antisemitism
The battle for Western minds
The Turkish state puts out a lot of literature on Islamophobia in the West these days. The Directorate of Religious Affairs publishes books on it, the state broadcaster TRT airs documentaries, SETA, the main pro-government think tank, has a team publishing regular reports on the issue. The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) published a report on the far-right in Western countries, which also addressed Islamophobia.
The primary target audience for this content is at home, but much of it is also dispatched into the English-speaking world. If you’re in a Western country, go on YouTube and type in “Islamophobia.” Chances are you’re going to get a lot of TRT World coverage.
In the West of course, the focus is once again on the Middle East. Since Hamas’ October 7 attacks and Israel’s violent response, people aren’t debating as much as accusing each other of competing forms of prejudice. There’s a lot of watchdog reports with scary charts and tripe-digit numbers trying to tally offenses. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded antisemitic incidents by about 400% year-on-year in October last year. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that Islamophobic incidents in the U.S. increased 216% during a similar timeframe.
I think antisemitism has a significant advantage here. Most institutions define it through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which controversially, brings Israel into the picture. Many of the common criticisms levied against Israel, including that “the state of Israel is a racist endeavor” can be deemed antisemitic under the IHRA definition. That’s powerful legal protection, even if it’s increasingly difficult to enforce.
An accusation of Islamophobia, on the other hand, doesn’t cut very deep. It still feels flimsy, lacking social and legal force. If you’re going after someone who said something derogatory about Muslims, you’re probably better off accusing them of racism.
People even question the concept itself. The internet is full of essays claiming to debunk Islamophobia. Many of these accounts seem particularly outraged by the implication of a symmetry between Islamophobia and antisemitism. The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has called the concept of Islamophobia “disgusting.” The writer and podcaster Sam Harris likes to preface any mention of Islamophobia with the unattributed quote “a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”
These people are understandably protective of the taboo on antisemitism, which after all, has developed painstakingly after centuries of prosecution. They now see Muslims showing up and trying to crowbar their way into a similarly protected position using disingenuous arguments. Muslim societies, they suggest, aren’t really interested in creating pluralistic environments. They’re famously stubborn about their religion’s claims for universal truth. The concept of Islamophobia is therefore a great con, a Trojan horse sent from places like Turkey to turn the Western mind against itself.
Is that true? Not really, but there is something to it, and I want to explore what that is. Islamophobia is certainly real and I do think it’s comparable to antisemitism. The difference is that antisemitism had time to be established as a taboo in Western discourse when such things were possible. Islamophobia now lays claim to a similar status, but suffers inevitable conflicts. Both taboos are being deployed in disingenuous ways, and are probably going to erode further.
Let’s briefly think about where antisemitism and Islamophobia come from. Both originate as ideas within “Christendom,” and have only recently become secular concepts.
The history of antisemitism is amply studied and theorized. Christians held the pharisees responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus and vilified them. The Jews had refused the universal message of Christianity and stubbornly stuck to their tribal identity. European societies relegated Jews to the peripheries, keeping them out of land ownership, guilds, as well as military and state services. Jews often had to act as money lenders, which didn’t help their reputation.
By the 19th century, European thinkers translated Christian antisemitism into a secular context. The French writer Ernest Renan, for example, thought of Jesus as the first white man — the transitional figure between the semitic and European races. Racial theory in the 20th century, most notably with the Nazis, built on this type of antisemitism. Jews were now a parasitic presence sapping the strength of an otherwise dominant people. The taboo on antisemitism was gradually enshrined into Western culture (especially in the 1980s) after the Nazis were defeated.
There’s obviously a lot to say about these processes, but here’s the important part: the taboo on antisemitism could only form as Christianity and Judaism secularized. Both had to learn to see their theology as cultural heritage rather than divine law. The Western taboo on antisemitism really crystallized between the 60s and the 80s, a sweet spot when Americans Jews were distinct, yet not very religious, and Israel’s elite was still fairly secular.
What about Islamophobia?
Medieval Christians certainly considered Islam to be evil. Remember that the Ottoman Empire, as Islam’s central state, was far larger than any single European kingdom. It also had a history of Westward conquest and was in many ways more advanced than European societies, so it made sense for Europeans to fear it. By far the best work I know of on the subject is Noel Malcolm’s Useful Enemies, a meticulous account of how how Christian writers formed an image of the Ottoman Empire. As the name of the book suggests, Malcolm argues that European thinkers used the image of a hostile Islamic empire in arguments between themselves. They “shame praised” each other, meaning that they praised the Ottomans in order to shame their fellow Christians into submission (much the way Muslims do today). As the Ottomans declined, however, this literature took on a derogatory tone. Ottoman power was now directed against its own subjects. The concept of the “oriental despot” as a superstitious brute came about in the 18th century, when the Ottomans were losing wars to the Russians. (See this recent post by
for more in this vein.)Western thinkers secularized their historical Islamophobia just as they secularized their antisemitism. We might think of it as a particularly acute subcategory of Orientalism. In our lifetime, it provided the cultural background to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, universally recognized as disastrous decisions. “We could have hit Saudi Arabia, we could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could” Thomas Friedman said in his infamous “suck on this” monologue. Historical Islamophobia was an outward-oriented phenomenon, but since there is now a growing population of Western Muslims, contemporary strands are also inward-oriented. Western far-right leaders are often antisemitic as well as Islamophobic.
So Islamophobia has secularized, but what about Islam? For antisemitism to become a taboo in the West, Judaism had to become more secular. Muslims and progressives want Islamophobia to become a taboo without Islam becoming more secular. By and large, Muslims insist not only on a largely unreformed religious practice, but also on the political identity the religion brings with itself, a form of solidarity with the “Islamic World,” (no matter how imaginary.)
Pondering the issue, I went back to read Islamophobia: the Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, a 2011 volume edited by John Esposito of Georgetown University and İbrahim Kalın, who was at the time head of SETA, a think tank close to the AK Party government in Ankara. Readers of this blog will know of Kalın. He has risen up in the world since, becoming a senior foreign policy advisor to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and as of last year, head of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), Turkey’s main spy agency abroad and at home. This is someone who has been at the heart of Turkish foreign policy for about 15 years.
Kalın wrote a lot about Islamophobia in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but his chapter in this volume, entitled “Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism” is his main contribution from these years. Kalın begins the chapter by citing evidence about growing Islamophobia in the West, and how the War on Terror that followed 9/11 has made the problem worse. He then gets into his main claims (feel free to skip the quotations if you like, I explain them below):
The main argument of this chapter is simple, yet saddled with implications for the future of multiculturalism on the one hand and Muslim-West relations on the other. Given the growing complexity of cultural and religious identities in late modernity, multiculturalism has deepened in Western societies and produced new modes of identity and social agency. Yet, multiculturalism, I argue, has also reached its limits in the current debate over Islam and Muslims. The debate is shaped and largely determined by the secular-liberal ideals of the European Enlightenment, which cannot accommodate a non-Western religion such as Islam. What turns Islam into a distant and marginal member of the multiculturalist world of Western modernity is the narrow scope of the liberal political system, which defines secularization as the only emancipatory power in the modern world.
Here’s how I read this: multiculturalism only works when religions - especially Abrahamic ones - step back from their claims to truth. Christianity and Judaism have done so. They’ve become cultural, rather than genuinely religious identities. Islam, as a “non-Western religion,” is not shaped by the ideals of the European Enlightenment, and hasn’t given up on its claim to be “true.” It therefore genuinely doesn’t fit into Western Multiculturalism.
I found it refreshing that someone like Kalın is willing to take an actual Islamist position on this. He doesn’t try to pretend that Western multiculturalism, when correctly applied, should incorporate Islam as it exists today. He is willing to say that there are irreconcilable differences between the two. Western Multiculturalism, he argues, divides the world into secular (civilized) and religious (barbaric) halves. He sees Islamophobia as a refusal to recognize Islamic practice as an individual choice, broadly categorizing cultural attributes of Islam as a form of enslavement. Kalın is a bit obtuse about this, but the thrust of his argument is that the West will only have overcome Islamophobia once it opens back up to faith.
Clearly, the inclusion and integration of Muslim societies in the West require a radical revisiting of some fundamental assumptions of Western liberalism and secular multiculturalism.
This turns much of Western thinking upside-down. Islamic faith isn’t backwards, Western secularism is, and we’ll be waiting for you once you’ve outgrown your spiritually barren moment. That’s why the book is subtitled “the Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century.” The challenge in the 20th century, Kalın likes to say across his writing, was overcoming antisemitism. The challenge of the 21st will be overcoming Islamophobia. Kalın explicitly places Islamophobia into the slipstream of antisemitism, but the direction of travel has reversed: while antisemitism was overcome through secularism, the path to overcoming Islamophobia appears to be de-secularization.
I should note that the remainder of the chapter is pretty disappointing. Kalın just goes through a laundry list of Islamophobic events in the West, inserts some vaguely leftist critique of “globalization” (he’d call it “neoliberalism” today), and suggests that multipolarity can fix these problems. It’s very much like him to throw a radical idea out there and bury it with banalities. He has gone much further in his Turkish-language writing since then, arguing that Western civilization is morally and politically bankrupt, and that Islamic civilization will rise again. He’s a much better political operative than he was a scholar.
Kalın’s way of thinking about Islamophobia is very performative. I simply can’t take the insistence on faith seriously. Looking at Turkish politics today, I see a deeply secular regime that’s merely replicating the West. There are no Islamic models in policy areas like economics or defense. Islamists — just like far-right politicians everywhere — put up arguments of de-secularization to craft a narrative of exceptionalism. In the case of Kalın’s Islamophobia policy, the purpose is to position Turkey in a way that it can police Islamophobia in the West, just as Israel has done in relation to antisemitism. This might have worked at previous points in history, but it’s unlikely to do so now. There is a reason that both of these taboos are violated more often today, and it’s not just the Gaza war. The political environment that used to enable them no longer exists. That’s why the accusation of antisemitism is also losing its bite.
In the abstract, Islam is just as Western as Christianity and Judaism. Perhaps social reality will catch up over the next few generations. The taboos on Islamophobia and antisemitism would then align and strengthen over time, not through state involvement, but despite it.