Islamophobia has a long history rooted in Europe. Muslims have been depicted as monsters and malevolent from medieval tales to Renaissance paintings, Shakespearean dramas, and Hollywood films. Television networks such as Fox News amplified the centuries of anti-Muslim ideas and images in the era of mass media, perpetuating dehumanizing representations that have contributed to violence against Muslims.
Anti-Muslim tropes depicting Muslims as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving were deployed to justify Western colonialism and imperialism. In India, the British colonialists tapped into these tropes to promote the myth of the hypersexualized and predatory Muslim, as part of the divide-and-rule policy that led to the 1947 partition and casts a long shadow on the relationship between communities in South Asia.
The centuries-old othering processes were a precursor to modern-day Islamophobia. In 2022, the growing anti-Muslim hysteria prompted the United Nations (UN) to designate March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. The UN recognised that Muslims faced verbal and physical attacks, religious profiling, unequal access to jobs, housing, health care and education, and limits on expressing their religion publicly.
How Medieval Myths Shaped Anti-Muslim Stereotypes
Western Kentucky University religious studies associate professor Sophia Rose Arjana’s Muslims in the Western Imagination, a pathbreaking work, presented the first genealogy of the depiction of Muslim men as monsters, delineating belonging and exclusion in the West. It showed how Muslim men have been depicted as malevolent human characters as well as wicked non-human imaginary creatures from medieval to modern times.
Arjana surveyed medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature, art, and cinema to examine the dehumanizing representation and to analyze the impact of such representations on perceptions of Muslims today. She studied the demons and giants of the Middle Ages, hunchbacks with filed teeth featured in film 300 (2007). Arjana concluded that the constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme first formulated in medieval Christian thought.
Arjana showed that Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism and anxieties surrounding foreign bodies. It involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily differences. Arjana argues the dehumanizing constructions are deeply embedded in Western consciousness as internalized beliefs and practices and contribute to the culture of violence against Muslims, which has spread beyond the Western world.
The Evolution of Anti-Muslim Stereotypes
Jonathan Lyons’s book Islam Through Western Eyes is another important work on this subject. It analyses 1,000 years of the West’s anti-Muslim ideas and images formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders. Lyons writes that the ideas have been perfected in the newsrooms of television networks such as Fox News. He blames the grand totalising narrative for preventing the West from engaging in any meaningful or productive way with Muslims.
The Crusades, Lyons links with the formulation of these ideas, were no ordinary wars but a divinely argued attempt to eradicate Islam and Islamic civilization through subjugation. The wars coincided with what has been described as ‘the Dark Ages’ when Europeans languished in intellectual darkness mired in barbarism while the Muslim world carried the light of learning and played an important role in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Anti-Muslim tropes, part of what Palestinian-American academic Edward Said called Orientalism, justified Western colonialism. Orientalism, a school of thought among British colonial administrators and scholars, demonised Muslim men as sexually aggressive, violent, and uncivilized. Eviane Leidig of MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society writes that the centuries-old ‘othering’ finds echoes in far-right conspiracies, such as non-Europeans, specifically immigrants from Africa or the Middle East, replacing Europeans.
From ‘Grooming Gangs’ to Social Media: How Islamophobic Narratives Persist
The specter of ‘grooming’, or a series of child sex abuse cases in the UK, has to be seen against the backdrop of constructions of the hypersexualized Muslims and violent rape imaginaries foregrounded in sexual, gender, and family dynamics integral to the fear of demographic change. Leidig writes that European/North American far-right milieus circulate images, videos, and discourses on social media that depict Muslim men as predatory and violent, targeting white girls. Muslim male hypersexuality is an integral element within myth-making far-right movements that project the Muslim ‘other’ as barbaric, savage, and deviant.
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, in his embrace of the far right, uses his social media platform X to fuel Islamophobia. He singled out Muslims over ‘grooming gangs’ in the UK, despite data showing that 83% of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white. Only seven percent of the convicts were Asian, or people with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia, broadly in line with the country’s overall demographics.
The Europeans overcame the ‘Dark Ages’ and embraced rationality and science to become the guiding lights for the rest of the world by fostering liberal multiculturalism. Anti-Muslim ideas have, however, persisted, and most overtly in France despite the liberty, equality, and fraternity enshrined in its Constitution. It has manifested in the ban on religious clothing deemed inappropriate in the classrooms every few years.
Laïcité or Discrimination
The ban on full-length robes or abayas, which Muslim girls and women wear, at the start of the new school year in August 2023, was another infringement of the right to Muslim religious expression in France. The argument that such bans are necessary to protect the republic from religious interference per the strict version of French secularism does not withstand scrutiny.
A minuscule proportion of 12 million pupils in France wore the garment was clear on day one of the implementation of the ban. Just 298 students across France came to schools wearing the robe, and most of them were persuaded to change it. Only 67 were sent home when they refused to change. Just a handful of students wearing a piece of cloth did not warrant now-familiar French hysteria about Muslimness in the name of protecting France’s secular tradition.
France’s strict form of secularism (laïcité) was enshrined in 1905, restricting religion to the private sphere. But it makes exceptions for some religious accommodations, except for Muslims. The law separating church and state does not cover France’s Alsace-Moselle region, where Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Judaism are officially recognized religions. Religion is taught obligatorily in public schools there, and the government also pays the salaries of the clergy of the recognized religions.
France’s Uneven Application of Secularism
The law forbids the government from financing new religious buildings across France. But it allows it to pay for maintenance of those built, mostly Catholic churches, before 1905. The French state subsidizes mostly Catholic religious and some Jewish private religious schools. Catholic holidays are a part of the school calendar. Public school cafeterias serve fish on Fridays as part of a Catholic tradition.
Muslims also face discrimination, demonization, and biases in jobs and housing with no redressal mechanisms. France’s strict rules were meant to protect the right to religion and the right not to believe and the state’s neutrality in religious affairs after a struggle against authoritarian Catholicism. Secular Republicans wrested control of schools from Catholic influence at the beginning of the 20th century.
France’s right and far-right welcomed the abaya ban while French Muslims saw it as another attempt to unfairly target Islam and stigmatize Muslims, particularly against the backdrop of President Emmanuel Macron’s Islamophobic conduct. Macron has attempted to create a ‘French Islam’ for the state to regulate the practice of the faith by an ethnically diverse Muslim community. A series of laws weaponised against Muslims has worsened the problem. The law on Republican principles has clauses that say anyone convicted of thought crime, ‘apologie of terrorism ‘, would automatically be added to a terrorism watch list. Even children have been taken into police custody under the law, turning the Republican ideals the French swear by on their head.
