Islamophobia and Antisemitism

In a hundred years from now when historians and scholars of religion look back on the perceptions of Muslims between the later half of the 20th and the first half of the 21st Century I wonder what conclusions they will come to? Will they look at contemporary perceptions of Muslims in the same light that scholars now view the Antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th Century?

The rise of Islamophobia in public discourse and the intersection between it and Antisemitism has been examined before on the Bulletin and by news agencies (e.g., here and here), though I do not have the space nor the time to rehash these positions here. I raise the issue because of a recent blog post I read by University of Toronto professor Dr. Ivan Kalmar. In his post Kalmar discusses his recent rejection by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a study on the connections between Islamophobia and Antisemitism. Apparently, he and several other distinguished scholars were unsuccessful in their application to study the “important parallels as well as differences between these two forms of hatred.” As Kalmar writes:

Our research was meant to demonstrate that in the imagination of the mainly Christian Western world, they have been intertwined for centuries. We think that important parallels exist – along with major differences – especially between how Muslims are defamed today and how Jews were defamed about a hundred years ago, before antisemitism progressed to the Nazi genocide.

No one is predicting a Holocaust of Muslims, yet there are still moral lessons to be learned. We do not want to subject anyone, Muslim or otherwise, to the hostility and humiliation that Jews suffered, or to ignore the potential that such mistreatment, if unchecked, has to grow to ever more monstrous proportions.

What Kalmar and his colleagues wanted to study was how Islamophobia and Antisemitism are linked in the Western Imagination; they sought to trace out these parallels in order to avoid future hostility and humiliation to Muslims. They did not want to sanction the violence committed in the name of Islam by self-proclaimed radicals (whether in Iraq or in Madrid) but show how this violence is used to justify the creation (and subsequent subjection) of a ‘dangerous Muslim Other.’

Sadly, Kalmar and his colleagues were turned down by SSHRC for the exact same reasons they wanted to conduct their study in the first place: religious essentialism. As Kalmar relates, the SSHRC reviewers felt that the comparison between Islamophobia and Antisemitism was unfair because, whereas the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy is delusional, Muslims clearly are engaged in violent acts.

Read the rest here