“Islamophobia from the likes of Boris Johnson must be punished – and this is how to do it”, writes Dr Suriyah Bi in the Guardian.
How do we properly punish Islamophobes? As a lecturer in cultural geography at Oxford University, I have used my research skills to draw up an index of Islamophobia to help police, prosecutors, victims and analysts work out when to take legal action and how to map out the routes towards such action. Importantly, this is the first time an index to measure a hate crime has been proposed and it remains an open project. It is inspired by the way crimes such as domestic violence are processed, placing victim testimony and experience at the heart.
Published last week, this index of Islamophobia is accompanied by a pathways-to-prosecution form, which helps identify the laws breached and scores each hate crime on the basis of intensity, intention, impact and recklessness.
How might it work? Let’s look at some flagrant examples of Islamophobia, including Boris Johnson’s infamous comments on burqa-wearing Muslim women as “letterboxes”, the distribution of violence-inducing “Punish a Muslim Day” letters, a headscarf being torn from a Muslim woman, and being called Shamima Begum in the workplace.
The middle two of those would be crimes by any definition (incitement to violence and assault), and the final one is a verbal insult which should not be a crime but which would and should be considered unacceptable behaviour in any decent workplace.
The first one consisted of Boris Johnson making a less than reverential quip about the appearance of women wearing burkas in the process of defending their right to wear them.
When someone suffers from a fear of flying, the usual strategy to help them overcome it is to educate them about how planes work and how safe air travel is, combined with getting them to experience flight in a supportive and friendly environment, so that they can come to realise that their phobia is irrational.
Given that Dr Bi is a lecturer at Oxford, one would think that, as a Muslim herself and an educator at one of our most prominent universities, she would be ideally placed to advise and promote a similar strategy of education and familiarisation in order to dispel Islamophobia. However she appears to think that a strategy of punishment would be more effective.
I was going to stop there. Nice bit of snark, that. I could rely on the reader to supply the conclusion that the correlation between knowledge and fear of flying is negative while the correlation between knowledge and fear of Islam is positive because flying is actually safe while Islam is actually dangerous. But in the spirit of Chr…, er, “the holidays”, let’s look a little deeper.
Over this century, the ideology that has motivated the greatest quantity of massacres, persecution and other violence is, by far, Islam. It has not always been so. For most of my lifetime that place of dishonour was held by Communism. Before that there have been many other prime persecutors, including my own religion, Christianity. Islam has been in the top spot before; probably several times over the centuries. One can certainly argue, as I do, that some ideologies are more prone to this than others. Nazism is the most obvious example of an ideology that simply said “Evil, be thou my good”. The historian Robert Conquest was so great an enemy of Communism that he was called “Anti-Sovietchik No.1”, but even he described Nazism as worse than Communism, and asked to justify why, said, “I feel it in my gut.” If ever a Nazi showed mercy it was because he was tempted away from the tenets of his faith. At the other end of the spectrum, to get from the words and actions of Jesus (“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you”) to the horrors of anti-Jewish pogroms and the Inquisition took a great deal more twisting than it did to get from the words and actions of Mohammed to Muslims executing unbelievers and blasphemers. They were merely doing as Mohammed himself did. That said, there are Hadiths and Koranic verses that enjoin believers to tolerance and mercy. I do not doubt that there are millions of examples of people doing good and refraining from evil because their Muslim faith told them to. The time in my life when I knew most Muslims was when I was a teacher. Most of my pupils and some of my fellow-teachers were Muslims. My Muslim colleagues were great, and the Muslim kids were a little better behaved and nicer to teach than the non-Muslim ones, on average.
To get back to Dr Suriyah Bi, if she ever decided to try persuasion rather than punishment as a means to turn people away from Islamophobia, she would have something to work from. There are plenty of Muslims who you, dear reader whom I am guessing is not a fan of Islam, would like if you got to know them. Perhaps equally important, if more Islamophobes and Islamosceptics got to know more ordinary Muslims, and vice versa, the two groups of people would learn to see each other as less “group” and more “people”. There is something like a healthy state of society when Imran A and Frank B can have a spat via Nextdoor posts or office intranet in which their differing religious beliefs and skin colours do not matter one whit.
Get to know some of Those People so that They only irritate you in the same way that everyone else does! As a strategy to get people to rub along together – that metaphor again – it is as old as time. It may or may not bring about actual amity; the relationship will be different for each of the innumerable pairs of individuals who meet as colleagues or neighbours, but it certainly has a better record than compulsion.
So why doesn’t Dr Bi try something along those lines first, instead of the “pathways-to-prosecution form”? Because members of different racial or religious groups getting to know each other as individuals is the biggest threat to the power of the Woke. As I said in a post called “A Cambridge Education”:
For the Woke, that [lecturers fearing to give one-to-one tuition to minority students lest a careless word is perceived as a racial transgression] is not a bug but a feature. The last thing they want is for minority students to flourish at Cambridge or any other British university. Where would the cadre come from then? The plan is for minority students to emerge angry and embittered at the way their tutors and lecturers never seemed to quite trust them.
I had saved the following tweet by Dr Wanjiru Njoya a few days back and did not think of its applicability to this post until later:
This is exactly what will happen, if it hasn't already. All the polite and friendly questions you might have thought of asking black people are now on the microaggression list so you can't ask any of that. In fact it's safest if you don't speak to them at all. https://t.co/mkAZPE2Q0M
— Wanjiru Njoya (@WanjiruNjoya) November 30, 2022