Islamophobia as a form of racism and discrimination

The UN's proclamation of 15 March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia is very important. For years Turkey had been leading the efforts to create awareness around the world about Islamophobia, which has been steadily on the rise, and to set international measures against it in motion.

In particular, we can say that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has raised this issue on every platform and has taken on a pioneering role in bringing the issue onto the world agenda and defending the rights of Muslims who have been subjected to Islamophobic attacks. At the UN podium, at the G20 meetings and on every platform in Europe in which we have taken part, he brought up this issue and tried to have it accepted as a global problem.

Besides examples of discrimination in the USA and Europe, attention was always drawn especially to situations in which Muslims are subjected to the open oppression of non-Muslim regimes, such as Kashmir, Myanmar, Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh and East Turkestan. But separate attention was also given to the injustices that peoples in some Muslim countries suffer because of democratic differences of opinion. The most important reason behind Turkey's falling out with many countries is the injustices suffered by people in these countries even though almost all or the majority of their populations are Muslim.

This was precisely the main theme at the conference of Sabahattin Zaim University. Unfortunately, when we come to this part of the matter, we see that what Muslims suffer from Muslims is far greater than what they suffer at the hands of non-Muslim societies or rulers where they are minorities.

ISLAMOPHOBIA CONFERENCE IN AZERBAIJAN

On the occasion of 15 March, the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the Baku International Multiculturalism Center and the Center for Analysis of International Relations (AIR Centre) also organized a conference with the main theme "Islamophobia as a Special Form of Racism and Discrimination: New Global and Transnational Challenges."

The most striking aspect of the conference is that such a meeting was held in Azerbaijan for the first time. This is perhaps a result of the UN's having proclaimed such a day. But there is also undoubtedly a connection between the end of the occupation, with Turkey's support, by a country part of whose people had been in exile for 30 years because their country was occupied by Armenia, and its beginning to turn to Islamophobia studies.

This topic also brings with it a people's rediscovery of its own Muslim identity with a new spirit. In particular, France, with its conspicuous role both in history and today in Islamophobic aggression, has entered into open solidarity with Armenia against the victory in which the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh was ended. In doing so it in fact exposes how hard it worked for the continuation of the occupation in the MINSK Group, formerly established as a so-called solution group. At the Baku conference, France's violations and policies on Islamophobia became a special subject of discussion. But not only in terms of hostility to Islam, but also in terms of the dimension of racism that can very well be applied to other non-Muslim peoples. In terms of racism and colonialism.

France has seen the Enlightenment and democracy as a means of regarding itself as superior to others

and has never refrained from instrumentalizing both values for its own imperialism.

That is why, at the Islamophobia conference in Baku, the latest Corsica ruling of the French courts was also taken up in a special session, even though the Corsicans are not Muslims. What is valid in both cases is racism. In France's relationship with Islam, what is at issue is, rather than a fear, an arrogance, a condescension and a hatred, all of which stand out as racism.

But having said racism, we must also devote separate attention to the evolution the concept of race itself has undergone in European history. Even in France, the definition and shaping of the French race in its present sense came about through a certain discourse. That is, there is no such thing as a French race; it was produced as a functional element in the age of nationalisms and made to be adopted by a certain people. That is, even when we say racism, what superiority is hurled for has no basis, no counterpart. It is a matter consisting only of words and discourse. Precisely the process by which idolatry is defined in the Qur'an is at work: "Those you worship are nothing but names that you have named" (Surah Yusuf: 40).

In one of the sessions, Prof. Ferid Advicks, President of the Bosniak Academy of Sciences, was asking the crucial question against the European Identity that is built today on excluding Islam as eastern-Asian: "You see Islam as outside European identity because it is Asian; tell me, where do you suppose Christianity or Judaism geographically came from?"

That Christianity and Judaism, which came from the lands of Palestine, are considered European even in Hegel's texts, while Islam, whose setting sun gave birth to the Western Renaissance, is seen as essentially and eternally eastern, shows first of all how shallow racism is, and how it makes people shallow and stupid.

However much Islamophobia rests on a racist discourse, the struggle against it is not one that will content itself with defending Islam alone. On the contrary, consistent with the role Islam has constantly played in history, and in continuity with it, Muslims do not only struggle against the racism directed at themselves. They take a principled stance against every kind of racism.

There is a danger of the theme of Islamophobia being perceived, even seen, as a plea for compassion on behalf of Muslims or, in Nietzsche's phrase, as a "morality of the weak." Yet what Muslims demand through Islamophobia studies is not compassion but justice. The discourse of Islam is a challenge to the oppressors of the world, a discourse that aspires to revive humanity, for the good of all people.

Muslims are not like some Jews, who after rousing humanity against the danger of Antisemitism turn around and go in pursuit of practicing racism against others themselves. Indeed, they see Islamophobia as another form of anti-semitism, because in essence both are racism, and what falls to a Muslim is not only to oppose racism against himself but to oppose every kind of racism.

Let us remember that even at the times when it was strongest, Islam defended freedom and justice against racism and against pressure on religion and belief, and put forth its practical examples, constantly repeated, as a structural model.

Today too the theme of Islamophobia promises, should promise, hope not only to Muslims but to all the oppressed of the world, to people subjected to racist discrimination.

Otherwise the discourse cannot go beyond being a confession of weakness and a begging for compassion.