Global Islamophobia and fascism-compatible democracies

The present-day global institutionalization of Islamophobia shows that this phenomenon is no longer confined to certain regions. Islamophobia can confront us in places where Muslims are a minority, in places where the existence of Muslims has remained only in memories, in places where there is not a single Muslim, and even in places where Muslims are the majority.

Most of those who analyze Islamophobia studies see it as media manipulation or, in some places, as a tool of governing minorities. The dominant understanding of Islamophobia simplifies it as simply the whole of attitudes and actions against Muslims, or as a conceptual category that brings to the fore those who do wrong to Muslims. Yet such a view ends up being very prone to turning it, in some way, into a reaction to the wrong behaviors of Muslims as well. The problem of the globalization of Islamophobia should in fact be addressed with a geopolitical approach that understands it as a subject of international relations that is trying to rebuild the contemporary world order entirely.

These words belong to Salman Sayyid, the author of two powerful books titled "Fear of Fundamentalism: The End of Eurocentrism and the Rise of Islamism," published in Turkish in 2000, and "Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order," published in 2017. The words he said in his speech at the opening session of the "2nd International Islamophobia Conference," organized last weekend by the Center for Islam and Global Affairs of Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, are a good explanation of the inconceivably numerous and bizarre manifestations and practices of Islamophobia these days.

Sayyid also added that a development called "global democracy" is something that today's world order cannot accept. Westerners love democracy in their own countries, but they see the Muslim countries or the Latin American countries being democratic as an open threat to their own order. For them, dictators whom they can control are much more suitable for the world outside themselves.

The only country in the world order at present that they hoped to control in the same way but could not because of its advanced democracy is Turkey. They have problems with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who represents the only proper democracy in the Islamic world, and precisely for this reason, instead of such a democracy, they have no problem at all with Sisi's Egypt, which recognizes no rules and has trampled human rights underfoot.

For this reason they are conducting inconceivable campaigns to discredit Erdoğan as the head of the only functioning democracy of the Islamic world. That what drives these campaigns, or an instrument they resort to in pursuing these campaigns, is Islamophobia is clearly visible today. Islam really does frighten, but not by killing, by threats, by extremism. By its democratic potential, which always carries the possibility of being a problem for their own world order... That is why Islamophobia has a direct connection with geopolitics.

Perhaps a disappointing truth about democracy, but democracy has no priority, such as preventing fascism, racism and massacres in other countries. Not only that, even in their own Western countries democracy is not something incompatible with fascism. Democracy, as we see in today's Europe, can perfectly well harmonize with fascism. It can harmonize very well with xenophobia.

The extreme parties that best use hate speech against immigrants, not always but most of the time, gain an advantage and are able to come to the fore in democracies, come to power or become partners in power. In today's Europe, examples of democracy that can be given in this manner have multiplied immensely.

That is, fascism-compatible democracy, xenophobia-compatible democracy, socialism-compatible democracy, etc. If democracy, which can harmonize with everything and has no values of its own, is questioned as to whether it is compatible with Islam alone, what does this mean, and for whom?

Of course this does not ignore the need that is felt now in the Muslim world for democracy as a form of government, as a political participation and a way of circulation of powers, and as a mechanism that ensures the oversight of institutions. But it undoubtedly always tells us that democracy is not enough, that we must have much more than it.

In fact, this kind of use of Islamophobia has a side that brings the deconstruction of Western democracies, that takes off their masks. Today's world is witnessing examples of Islamophobia becoming more widespread with each passing day. For the Western world, we can expect Islamophobic discourse and practices to deepen further as demands for democracy in the Muslim world increase.

This contradiction will be one of the dominant paradoxes of the world of the future. For, as Sayyid also says, Islamophobia is not caused by terror committed in the name of Islam. What causes it is nothing other than the destructive, genocidal nature of the Islamophobes themselves.

Because a logic that also lends Islamophobia legitimacy will begin to work within the functioning of democracy itself. The reactions that were not shown to the unprecedented savagery and hate-driven massacre of Muslims in New Zealand are an effect of increasingly regarding Islamophobia as normal, and of considering it legitimate together with its consequences.

And as a typical example there is the treatment to which the Muslim Dr. Muhammed Abu-Salha, whose two daughters and son-in-law were killed in ABD, was subjected by members of Congress in recent days, before the justice committee of the ABD Congress, while recounting what he had been through as an example of "hate crimes and rising white racism." An incident that deserves to be examined as a completely separate example. In response to his daughters' being savagely killed by a racist enemy of Islam on the grounds that he could not tolerate seeing headscarved Muslims, the questions, the audacious statements trying to excuse his killer, right in the face of the grieving father...

Without any doubt, this incident is even more grave than the massacre itself. Let us dwell on this incident a little more, as a lesson, but of course later...