Paul Banks’ op-ed “Islam: Faith-based Misogyny” (Student Life, 10/27/03) is a turning point in Islamophobia. You might say, it is not the first time that this kind of public slander on Islam “coincides” with the start of the holy month of Ramadan. I agree. You might say, it is typical for the Palestinian -Israeli conflict to be reduced to religiously motivated aggression on the part of the Palestinians without attention to social and political realities that need to be addressed. I agree. Or, you might say it is not the first time that all Muslims (that is 1.5 billion, a fifth of the population of the globe) are reduced to a few murderers obsessed with controlling women and with violence. I agree with that, too. So what is distinct about the article that indicates a turning point in the status of Islamophobia?
After the horrendous events of September 11, the excessive dehumanization of Muslims (which some thought would now require no further justification) started to backfire. Many Americans wondered if such a despicable event could be blamed on a religion that has been one of the major torch-bearers of human civilization. The result was, and continues to be, a sweeping wave of attempts across the nation to learn about Islam. Those of us who respond to these demands on a daily basis know how tremendously positive this urge to learn has been.
This is the context that explains the turning point in Islamophobia reflected in Banks’ article. It is not just “the mock camps that have turned the eyes of Washington University toward the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict” that bother him; it is the larger fear that Muslims can no longer be easily dehumanized. It is this sense of despair that drives the writer to resort to eight-rapes- a-day statistics in Pakistan (don’t even bother to compare with one every fifteen minutes in the US), and the beheading of a seven year old by a crazy father. Sifting through murder columns of Middle Eastern magazines (complete with gory details) is not enough; he has to tell us of the Turkish father who, having stabbed his daughter 15 times, does not even clean the murder scene himself. He forces his younger daughter to do it. Paul Banks is desperate to persuade.
No one will start leafing through their copies of the Qur’an in search of a verse that might explain the motivation of this father, certainly not those who follow the news of local violence here, not to mention those who might have watched “Bowling for Columbine.” The strategy is bankrupt. Yes, some Iranian women are murdered and like many other parts of the world there is a social and political battle to be fought in Iran. But Iranian women do other things, too. They form the majority of the university students in Iran. Some function as judges in the supreme court. Many write best-selling novels, and a good few win first prizes in world film festivals. The same is true of Turkey: some women get killed, but some others run major businesses, work as influential academics, and even run the country as prime minister. What is new?
This confused list of murders does not prove anything. One like it can, unfortunately, be compiled about violence against women anywhere in the world. Women are the prime target of blind violence that justifies itself in many different names across the globe. The kind of verbal violence offered by Paul Bank does not help anyone. The only good thing about it is that it indicates a high level anxiety about the signs of decline in Islamophobia.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the global conflicts that are plaguing us all, it is that vicious attacks – whether of physical or verbal kind – will not get us anywhere. Violence has to be condemned in all forms, including the use of inflammatory language.