What do Tommy Robinson, LBC Radio, the Conservative Party and Sadiq Khan have in common?
The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.
It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.
The origins of this unsavouriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism programme, William Shawcross described the organisation as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.
Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.
How can we best understand this concept of Islamophobia? One of its problems is how it seems to mean whatever the likes of the IHRC dislike at any given moment. The literal meaning, though, is implicit in the word: Islam-phobia. It suggests an irrational fear of Islam, prompting questions of whether fear of Islam is itself irrational (a view that would match Islamic doctrine) or whether versions of that fear can be rational.
From the Islamist scene in Britain, a group called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) has placed itself at the forefront of efforts to identify and combat Islamophobia. It provided significant support for a landmark report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, co-chaired by current Health Secretary West Streeting MP.
MEND stated that Islamophobia was:
“…a prejudice, aversion, hostility, or hatred towards Muslims and encompasses any distinction, exclusion, restriction, discrimination, or preference against Muslims that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”
This, you might say, is a maximalist position. In a cutting response to the APPG report for Policy Exchange in 2019, Trevor Phillips, John Jenkins and Martyn Frampton noted that “the comprehensiveness of the behaviour that MEND seeks to place beyond the pale is striking”. A whole smorgasbord of other potential definitions can be found in the APPG publication. Some of these definitions came from academics. One came from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a grouping of Muslim governments from around the world. The OIC described Islamophobia in 2007 as “the worst form of terrorism”. In a follow-up report, it said:
“Islamophobia signifies the contemporary proliferation of discrimination against Muslims and distortion of Islam and is partly due to the ignorance and lack of understanding of Islam in the West. It would be an unfortunate error of judgment in believing that Islam is linked to terror; that it is intolerant of other religious beliefs, that its values and practices are not democratic; that it favours repression of freedom of expression and undermining human rights.”
The APPG report makes similarly bold claims, the core one being that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The behaviours it deemed Islamophobic include those which are already illegal, such as threats of violence, and discrimination at work. But the report also claims that Islamophobia encompasses Muslim students failing to win places at top-level universities, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted questioning whether young girls should be wearing the hijab. And if you think these definitions are overly expansive, then you might already be an Islamophobe. Another example of Islamophobia, the report says, is “accusing Muslims… of exaggerating Islamophobia.”
Islamophobia is a total wrong, it appears: blasphemous but also irrational and immoral; rooted in Western racism and ignorance. And from it arises the error of thinking there is any link between Islam and young Muslim men yelling “Allahu-Akbar” (“God is Great”) as they plunge knives into passers-by on European streets. As the OIC points out, this would be unfortunate. Not wrong, inaccurate or unfactual, but unfortunate and an error of judgement.
These claims are worth unpacking, not least for how they demonstrate the characteristic Islamist fusing of a so-called “mediaeval” religion with the techniques and styles of Western secular modernity, particularly progressive social science.
From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.
These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the ideas that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.
The West’s ignorance of this perspective matches the Islamic notion of “jahiliyya”, which describes the age of ignorance before the Prophet Mohammed received the word of God. Applied to Western countries, it supposes that we are in a pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Mainstream Left-wing history and social science see things in a similar way. In this view, Muslims and other immigrants serve as a motor of change, bringing us to a higher historical state.
In this way, the notion of Islamophobia helps to bring together Islamic and Western intellectual traditions. It converts Islamic law — or merely the desire of Islamists to punish those who displease them — into secular rationalist and moral language, helping to mobilise both Muslims and non-Muslims in support. In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality. This makes it an effective tool. Critics of Islamophobia often speak of how it gets “weaponised”. This assessment is accurate, for the concept is consistently used as a prop to punish, but also to deter and bring others onboard via the appearance of strength. At the very least it is a form of social technology, working to advance the group’s aims, to build the size and strength of the group, and to weaken its opponents.
In this regard, the lack of an agreed definition can be a strength. The nebulousness of “Islamophobia” grants maximum flexibility to those who deploy this weapon. It is a weapon that can be used freely to denounce anyone who displeases Islamists and their allies. It can be invoked against the authorities, to intimidate and win concessions. And it can be used against fellow Muslims, as a more ecumenical version of takfir. (Takfir is excommunication from Islam, or society, potentially meriting death).
If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect. We must bow to Islamists’ authority to decide the boundary between right and wrong in relation to Islam. This fits into the Islamic distinction between the “dar-al-harb” (the House of War) and the “dar-al-Islam” (the House of Islam): assigning all bad things in the world outside Islam, to a state of war. Through this framing, Islamists can bypass inconvenient issues like the “grooming’”(or “rape”) gangs and Islamic terrorist attacks. The culprits are not the individuals involved, but external forces: lax morals in Western society, colonialism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and discrimination against Muslims in the West.
“If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect.”
This distinction between the House of War and the House of Islam helps explain another of the Islamists’ tendencies: that of inveigling themselves with the authorities one minute and denouncing them in the strongest terms the next. There is a tension here. Islamists see the West as a place which, while not of Islam at the moment, at least has or might have arrangements with its representatives. At the same time, the House of War is implacably hostile to Muslims and must be fought against. The APPG report points towards the latter in describing Britain as an “Islamophobic environment”: it is another way of describing a House of War.
In this framing, like the closely related idea of systemic racism, everything is touched by Islamophobia and so everything will have to be changed to defeat it. From the track record of advocates, their maximalist approach and their intolerance of differing views, they will likely never be satisfied.
Nevertheless, the British state is trying to satisfy them. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, recently set up a group “to deliver a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia within six months”. Explaining the creation of this group, the government said that “incidents of anti-Muslim hatred reach[ed] the highest number on record in 2024.” The group’s chair, the former Conservative minister Dominic Grieve KC, said the group’s task was to balance the pressing need to impose a definition on behalf of British Muslims “with the unwavering requirement to maintain freedom of thought and expression under law for all.”
Eventually the Government will have to decide: between censorship and freedom. If a definition is indeed agreed and, as activists demand, operationalised, the effects will be significant. Media reporting will become even more fraught with risk, leading to a more aggressive culture of self-censorship. Academic work likewise: further undermining the culture of truth-seeking in universities. To resist the demands of Muslim activists in the workplace will become perilous for both bosses and employees, clearing the way for Islamic practices to be embedded in daily routines while others are blocked for being discriminatory. At Michaela School, for example, the activists have been temporarily set back, but will eventually win.
It seems that Western traditions of free speech and inquiry, already straining under repeated attacks, will no longer apply in relation to Islam and Muslims in British public and institutional life. And so gradually, seemingly inexorably, Britain will continue its weary progress into becoming an Islamic state in all but name. Islamophobia is a crucial tool in the battle to make that happen: a startlingly effective social weapon.
