Published by CJ Werleman Independent, a crowdfunded and independent investigative journalism project that seeks to expose and end injustices against Muslims around the world. Please SUPPORT his fight against injustice and the Islamophobia Industry by clicking HERE.

Like all forms of racism, Islamophobia constructs and informs a seductive narrative, one that is easily digestible, and one that promises to make the complex more palpable.

Hello, my name is CJ and I’m a recovering Islamophobe.

Islamophobia is a form of racism that only Islamophobes deny exists. “I’m not a racist because Islam isn’t a race,” they tell themselves. But Islamophobia is not only real, it’s also the unwanted bastard child of white supremacy, no different to its siblings anti-Semitism, Acrophobia, and xenophobia.

In other words, the fear of Muslims resides in the same place as white man’s fear of Jews, people of African descent, and migrants — all of which have been shaped by Western civilization’s torid history of colonial abuse and ongoing discrimination and persecution of minorities.

In case the point needs further emphasis — Islamophobia is most definitely real, most certainly one of the great threats to attaining or maintaining a cohesive society, and it’s engulfing the world, including nation states that have long been considered the bastions of pluralism and tolerance.

The numbers speak for themselves:

anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States were up 91% in 2017.

950 attacks on Muslims and mosques in Germany in 2017.

More than 500 Islamophobic incidences were reported in Spain in 2017.

A record 1,678 anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported in London in 2017, representing a 40% increase from the year prior.

In 2017, India recorded the most number of anti-Muslim hate crimes since 2010.

Then add to all of this to the systematic and state sponsored persecution (ethnic cleansing) of Muslims in China, Kashmir, and Myanmar.

So, what turns an ordinary, even liberal and educated person into an Islamophobe?

Well, I can speak only for my own experience, and in doing so hope to warn others away from a path I once took.

I was an Islamophobe for a four year period spanning 2005 to 2009. These respective year dates are significant because 2009 was the year I began writing my third book — Koran Curious: a Guide for Infidels and Believers, while 2005 was the year I witnessed an al-Qaeda (Jemaah Islamiyah) terrorist attack in Indonesia, an event I described in great detail in my most recent book The New Atheist Threat: Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists, which also explains my journey into and out of Islamophobia.

Essentially, an Islamist terrorist attack turned me into an Islamophobe, whereas studying the Quran, researching Islam and Islamic cultures helped cure me.

In many ways I was radicalized into anti-religious extremism (Islamophobia) the same way many are radicalized into religious terrorism or violent extremism. Quintan Wiktorowicz, a Rhodes College professor, maps out the path to religious radicalization as a 4-step process:

Cognitive opening: an individual becomes receptive to the possibility of new ideas and worldview; Religious seeking: the individual seeks meaning through a religious idiom; Frame alignment: the public representation proffered by the radical group “makes sense” to the seeker and attracts his or her initial interest. Socialization: the individual experiences religious lessons and activities that facilitate indoctrination, identity-construction, and value changes.

“The first three processes are necessary prior conditions for the fourth (socialization). In other words, if an individual is not open to new ideas, does not encounter the movement message, or rejects the movement message after initial exposure, he or she will not participate in the kinds of movement activities necessary to fully disseminate the ideology and convince an individual to join,” observes Wiktorowicz.

Clearly, the terrorist attack I witnessed created the cognitive opening, making me “receptive to the possibility of new ideas and worldview.” But while I was not seeking a religious explanation to the death and destruction I had seen on Jimbaran Beach, Bali, in 2005 — I did turn to anti-religious individuals and groups, and the narratives espoused by the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett — did indeed “make sense” to me in that moment, and from that that point my “values changed,” and I adopted their anti-theistic, anti-Islam identity.

Islamophobia is seductive because it feels good — for it allows you to believe it’s they who are backwards and barbaric and it’s we who are enlightened and civilized. It’s the great lie told by all colonial powers to justify the pacification and subjugation of those who stand in the way of our capitalist exploits and imperial projects. It allows you to forget the the horrors and injustices carried in our name against the less fortunate other.

Islamophobia allows you to pretend European colonialism never destroyed civic, social, and political life in the Muslim majority countries it occupied. It allows you to pretend violence in Muslim majority countries is the product of “ancient rivalries” and not the legacy of colonial divide-and-rule strategies.

Islamophobia also allows you to pretend the problems within our own societies are not the products of our choices, but rather the import of an external Other. “It’s not us, it’s them, and if we can just rid ourselves of them, then all will be good,” they say.

The good news is Islamophobia is indeed curable. I was cured by understanding Islam from Muslims themselves, rather than by those who wish only to profit from the demonization of them. I was cured by taking a closer look at our role in the cycle of violence. I was cured because I became aware I was unwell, and if I can cure myself of this disease — Islamophobia — then you can, too.

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