Salim Mohamed Badat
Its most dangerous achievement has been the dehumanization of Muslims to such an extent that Muslim life is rendered cheap, disposable, and unworthy of grief. This is not abstract theory. It is visible, brutally and unmistakably, in Gaza.
From its earliest days, Islam unsettled entrenched hierarchies. Emerging in the seventh century, it confronted exhausted empires not only with armies but with meaning.
It rejected priestly intermediaries, racial privilege, and imperial divinity. Early Christian polemicists, unable to dismiss Islam as paganism, reframed it as heresy and fraud.
Prophet Muhammad (saw) was cast as an impostor not because of evidence, but because Islam’s coherence and rapid spread threatened theological authority. Islamophobia began as fear dressed up as doctrine.
That fear escalated into sanctified violence during the Crusades, when Europe unified itself through a manufactured religious emergency.
Muslims were portrayed as subhuman occupiers of “holy land,” despite centuries of coexistence in Jerusalem. The massacre of civilians in 1099 was celebrated as divine will. Islamophobia here became permission, permission to slaughter, dispossess, and cleanse while claiming moral superiority.
The later mercy shown by Muslims under Saladin did not fit the narrative and was therefore erased.
As European power expanded, Islamophobia adapted to new needs. Orientalism emerged as a supposedly academic project that framed Muslims and the lands of Islam as irrational, static, violent, and morally corrupt.
As exposed by Edward Said, this was not neutral scholarship but a system of knowledge designed to dominate. The Muslim world was invented as Europe’s opposite, thereby justifying conquest as benevolence.
Colonial rule institutionalized this worldview. Across Algeria, India, Egypt, and Southeast Asia, Islam was identified as the core obstacle to empire.
Mosques were surveilled, scholars exiled, Islamic law dismantled, and education reshaped. Resistance was labeled fanaticism; submission was framed as proof of inferiority. Islamophobia became routine administration.
In the modern era, Islamophobia was militarized. Western powers funded, armed, and cultivated militant groups within Muslim societies to advance strategic interests. Organizations such as Al-Qaeda and later ISIS amongst others were created by CIA and Mossad, emerged from proxy wars, foreign occupation, and deliberate destabilization.
Once unleashed, these groups were presented as the authentic expression of Islam itself. Their violence, often inflicted on Muslims mostly, was used to collapse an entire faith into a single image of terror.
This framing was reinforced by repetitive talking points designed to provoke disgust rather than understanding.
The hijab was framed as proof of oppression, while Muslim women’s own voices were ignored. Polygamy was stripped of its ethical limits and historical context and presented as moral degeneracy, while Western societies normalized serial relationships without scrutiny. The accusation that Prophet Muhammad (saw) married a child which has proven false was weaponized through modern moral lenses, divorced from historical reality, scholarly discourse, and comparable practices across civilizations, including Europe itself.
These claims were never meant to invite dialogue. They were designed to make Muslim humanity negotiable.
The consequence has been catastrophic. Islamophobia has trained societies to rationalize Muslim death. Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza. An entire population has been subjected to siege, bombardment, and mass killing, while Western media has largely failed to cover the slaughter with honesty or moral urgency.
Language is carefully engineered to obscure reality. Massacres become “clashes.” Collective punishment becomes “self-defense.” Muslim children become numbers. This is not a failure of journalism alone; it is the result of centuries of dehumanization. A people long portrayed as violent, irrational, and expendable can be annihilated in plain sight while those responsible continue with impunity.
Figures such as Tommy Robinson operate within this ecosystem as amplifiers rather than anomalies. The UAE and others have funded an Islamophobia industry of media platforms, think tanks, and political lobbies. Some of these networks align with hardline pro-Israel interests that seek to shield occupation and apartheid from scrutiny by equating Muslim resistance with terrorism.
This exposes how Islamophobia functions as geopolitical armor, protecting power from accountability.
At the end of this long historical arc stands a crucial reality that Islamophobia cannot tolerate: resistance. Despite sanctions, demonization, and decades of pressure, Iran has positioned itself, rightly or wrongly in the eyes of the West, as a state that refuses submission to imperial dominance.
Its resistance to U.S. hegemony, Zionist expansionism, and Western dictates has made it a permanent target of demonization.
When history is viewed honestly, a pattern emerges across centuries. Islamophobia is not ignorance. It is governance through narrative. It determines whose lives matter, whose deaths are mourned, and whose resistance is criminalized.
And yet, Islam remains.
Not because Muslims are flawless, but because Islam continues to challenge tyranny, racial hierarchy, and the worship of empire. Every civilization that defined itself against Islam eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Islamophobia persists because Islam refuses to submit. Gaza bleeds because of that refusal. Iran is sanctioned because of it. And the lie continues, because the truth remains dangerous to power.
Writer exploring the intersection of faith, politics and justice
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