Tackling Islamophobia

In the New York Times recently, writing about the eruption of hatred for Muslims in the United States, Frank Rich asked what seems an increasingly pertinent question: "How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?"

Americans who are shocked by what the columnist Maureen Dowd calls a "weird mass nervous breakdown" accuse the usual suspects — right-wingers whose "fear and disinformation" is "amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment".

But anti-Muslim toxins were injected into the mainstream well before August this year, and not by right-wingers alone.

Best-selling authors such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be the "new heroes", as the writer Peter Beinart puts it, of the Republican party's crusade against Muslims. But "professional" former Muslims have long provided respectable cover for the bigotry and, more often, plain ignorance of mainstream western commentators on Islam.

Most of these ex-Muslim "dissidents" lucratively raging against Islam in the West wouldn't be able to flourish without the imprimatur of influential institutions and individuals in the United States and Europe. Ali, who wishes to be the Voltaire of Islam, commands rapturous endorsements from not only right-wing crazies such as Pamela Geller and Glenn Beck, but also Tina Brown.

Ali seems useful only to her bellicose neo-conservative employers in the United States and their ideological kin in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And her recent exhortations to Muslims to convert to Christianity make her sound more like Billy Graham than Voltaire.

Yet the mildest criticism of Ali's naivety triggers a tsunami of vitriol from her army of prominent supporters. In recent months, columnists and critics such as Clive James and Melanie Phillips have rebuked Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for not joining the chorus of praise for Ali, and for being "soft" on apparently closeted jihadists like the academic Tarek Ramadan.

‘Age of the zipped lip'

Many of these Islam watchers championed the misbegotten wars that have already killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and ruined innumerable more lives. But they still present themselves as virtuous and lonely warriors, indefatigably rooting out the internal enemies of western civilisation, who tend to be either Muslims sinisterly reluctant to embrace the true American patriot's worldview or politically correct liberal-lefties too scared to hear, let alone speak, the truth.

Thus the writer Paul Berman, a self-described "laptop general" who first stalked Ramadan and hounded Buruma and Garton Ash in the New Republic, once the principal periodical of liberal America, and then expanded his 28,000-word indictment into a much-reviewed book, could recently lament in the Wall Street Journal that we are living in the "age of the zipped lip".

Oddly, this persecution complex afflicts people with the easiest access to mass media and the greatest influence on public opinion. Defending Martin Amis, who had fantasised in the London Times about subjecting Muslims to multiple humiliations, Ian McEwan protested that left-wingers were closing down the "debate" on Islam.

As it turns out, millions of angry Americans have opened up an equally unedifying "debate" on Islam. "You look them [Muslims] in the eye and flex your muscles," Ali exhorted the West recently, "there comes a moment when you crush your enemy."

Certainly their critiques of Islam, always redolent of tabloid wisdom, can no longer be passed off as acts of moral courage. And it may be too optimistic to expect them to go to Muslim countries, or befriend a few Muslims, and then discover, as E.M. Forster did, that: "Islam is more than a religion... it is an attitude towards life which has produced durable and exquisite civilisations."

The stigmatisation of racial and religious bigotry counts as one of the very few instances of moral progress in the previous half-century. It's not, alas, an irreversible advance, and the witch-hunters of today can still occasionally have a field day. But it is their intellectual accomplices who will invite the severest contempt of posterity.

Pankaj Mishra is author of Temptations of the West.