But Robin Richardson, who edited the Runnymede report and currently works for the educational consultancy Insted, maintains that the think tank simply borrowed the term from previous usage. In a recent paper, he traces the phrase to Alain Quellien's use of the French word islamophobie in 1910 to criticize French colonial administrators for their treatment of Muslim subjects.

Richardson claims that post-colonial theorist Edward Said was the first to use the word in English, when he wrote in 1985 about “‘the connection … between Islamophobia and antisemitism’ and criticized writers who do not recognize that ‘hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand’ with antisemitism and ‘has stemmed from the same source and been nourished at the same stream.’”

“In its earliest historical usage, the term ‘Islamophobia’ described prejudice and hostility towards Muslims—not an ‘irrational fear of Islam,’” Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry, told me. “Critics of the term often lambast it on the basis of an etymological deficiency, insisting that it thwarts the possibility of critiquing Islam as a religion while simultaneously suggesting the presence of a mental disorder on the part of those who do.”

“Religions differ, and their specific differences matter,” Harris explained. “And the truth is that Islam has doctrines regarding jihad, martyrdom, apostasy, etc., that pose a special problem to the civilized world at this moment in history.”

“We deny this at our peril,” he added.

Harris and Maher, who has issued similar criticisms of Islam, have their defenders, but others have challenged their claims. In a testy exchange on CNN, for instance, the author Reza Aslan described Maher’s views on Islam as “facile” and called out the media for referring broadly to “Muslim countries” when discussing violent extremism and the oppression of women. “[In] Indonesia, women are absolutely 100 percent equal to men,” he observed. “In Turkey, they have had more female representatives, more female heads of state in Turkey than we have in the United States.”

"We're not talking about women in the Muslim world, we're using two or three examples to justify a generalization. That's actually the definition of bigotry," Aslan said.

But is the term 'Islamophobia' itself, with its connotations of a psychological disorder, an offensive word?

“Offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder,” said William Downes, a linguist with a focus on religion at York University in Toronto. “The key question is offensive to whom?

“The term might be offensive if it reminded the Islamic community ... that there were those in society who actively disliked it and feared it because they identify it with a terrorist threat or an existential threat,” he continued, noting that using the word contributed to “othering” Muslims as a group.