Islamophilia as bad as Islamophobia

What happened in Stockholm in front of the Turkish Embassy with prior permission by the Swedish government is sheer Islamophobia, with no ifs and buts. Islamophobia is inappropriate and illegal acts meant to demean the religion of Islam out of misplaced fear of the religion. It is a full package, with its own history, economy, politics and industry.

Before we discuss how it could or should be countered, we need to be clear that Islamophilia is not an answer to it. Islamophilia is quite opposite to Islamophobia in multiple ways and leads to a rise in misguided emotions in Muslims about their religion. Islamophobia and Islamophilia are born out of a single source – misinterpretation of Islam. Both are equally detrimental to the modern society.

On January 21, Rasmus Paludan, a political failure in Denmark and Sweden, launched a lengthy diatribe linking the problems Swedes face to the struggle migrants wage to be a useful part of global society. An evaluation of his diatribe shows how desperately he tried to lock Swedes in geographical borders in this age of digitization. It is a perfect case of xenophobia.

His words are words of a loser who has no regard for fairness of competition among human beings of different colours and geography for a better life. Competition is one of the three main pillars of democracy. If competition is compromised, democracy is compromised. Analogies are being drawn, and duly so, between such hate speech and the Nazi narrative. That a crowd of about a hundred of his followers was also collected to listen to him is proof that Sweden has a long way to go before it shakes off its Nazi past.

Paludan has a history of hate speech and is a serial burner of the Holy Quran. The excuse he used this time was Türkiye’s push for hard bargains to allow Sweden and Finland to become members of NATO.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both the small European countries have been striving to become NATO members for fear of security threats. Russia had cited Ukrainian permission to set up NATO stations on its soil as the main reason for the invasion, though. Traditionally, it does not suit smaller countries like Finland and Sweden to be part of big military alliances. These alliances naturally suit big countries.

But the rise of far-right tendencies in Sweden has fanned its ambitions to be jingoistic, throwing caution to the wind. Islam is as much a target of these far-right tendencies as any other non-Swede or non-Christian religion or people. The fault lines accentuated when floodgates of refugees were lifted after the war in Syria back in mid 2000s. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted a humane stance on accommodating these refugees, encouraging other European countries to follow suit. Hence, Sweden also became home to a large number of Muslim refugees.

Though tens of thousands of these refugees are now leaving neighbouring countries of their concentration like Jordan and Lebanon, their number is not coming down in European capitals. It is giving rise to similar myths about refugees we in Islamabad used to harbour about Afghans after their influx here in the wake of 9/11. We believed here that it was because of them property prices, crime rate and unemployment of native people skyrocketed. Now that a majority of them has been repatriated and their katchi abadis bulldozed and replaced by costly residential areas, crime rate, property prices and unemployment have still been on the rise.

Since mid-2000s, up to 70 per cent of mosques in Sweden have been attacked or received threats. Reports have been published about ghettoization of Muslims in nearby Denmark. Extremists sow these reports as seeds of hate against the West in Muslim societies. Mindful of its implications, Jeddah-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has been advocating for making laws to stem this hate wave.

Sadly, the complex government system of Sweden stonewalls all these efforts. Different far-right parties are so thickly involved in the decision-making process that voices of reason are stifled. Swedish academia has dedicated a considerable amount of research to bring out this deplorable situation, drawing a causal relationship between Islamophobia and populism.

However, the OIC was not a total failure as last year it succeeded in convincing the United Nations to declare March 15 as an International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Muslim countries are now condemning Paludan’s actions, protests are being staged in Pakistan, Türkiye, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Türkiye has even summoned the Swedish ambassador to lodge a protest, and cancelled the visit of a Swedish minister to Istanbul. Calls are also being issued in Pakistan to go hard on Sweden. The protestors will decide how hard is hard enough as there is no standard to measure it. Everyone is grappling in the darkness with no one out there to direct their energies in the right way.

Paludan has unleashed a fury in the Muslim world, and if it turns violent it would be what he wanted. The Swedish prime minister has already issued an ambiguous statement on this crime and his deputy is still urging authorities to curb ‘Islamists’. The fate is in the fire. Cautious against extremism, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has called Paludan’s act “absurd and disgraceful”. “This is a provocative act… It …serves the advocates of extremism,” he said.

Anything less than countering Islamophobia in Europe is counterproductive and falls in the category of Islamophilia. Muslims in Europe send handsome amounts of money to religious leaders of different strands in the countries of their origin. This money sometimes lands in the wrong hands. In Pakistan, necessary filters were put in place to stop it from being used in extremist activities in post-FATF era.

It will be a service to religion if these funds are used to create awareness about Islamophobia in Europe. The International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) was the launchpad of Paigham e Pakistan, an initiative aimed to counter extremism. A considerable amount of research has been dedicated to Islamophobia here and the university is producing a good number of PhD scholars in this field.

There is a need to present this work at international forums to facilitate a fruitful debate on this theme.

The writer teaches mediatization at International Islamic University Islamabad