The polarized politics of Islamophobia

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn at the National Prayer Breakfast, February, 2017, Washington, DC. Pool/ABACA ABACA/Press Association. All rights reserved.The line of demarcation has
been drawn. Is fear of Islam rational? or a mental illness, a phobia? Against the soon-to-be
National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn’s claim that fear of Islam is rational, we have the common and damning
denunciation of Islamophobia.

My perspective is unusual; I
am a historian of modern Europe and a human rights lawyer who works in the
Islamic Republic of Mauritania. My work defending human rights is born out of requests
from Muslim Mauritanians who believe deeply in the promise of human rights – the right to freedom from
enslavement, the right to equality before the law, the right to freedom of conscience, the right to freedom of
expression, the right to property, and so forth. These are fundamental values that have guided the United States
from its revolutionary era and that are enshrined in the major international human rights
treaties.

The much celebrated book of
Karima Bennoune, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, tells the story of
numerous Muslim human rights defenders. All of them are fighting for the
fundamental values that animate our American democracy. The polarization of
politics – from rational to fear, or phobia – silences this human rights
movement. The human rights defenders find themselves on a small isolated island, an ideological no man’s
land.

By all rights the defense of
human rights should be integral to western politics. And yet we find ourselves
in a political dynamic so highly polarized that one camp is insisting rational
people should fear Islam, and on the other hand, in the urgent need to defend
people under attack, we see an uncritical embrace of all Muslim traditions. We
see, for example, college students enthusiastically
defending a sex-segregated Muslim prayer circle at the University of Michigan.
The students are rightfully motivated to defend a minority culture that is
under attack, but the nuance is lost — the male supremacism of this sex-segregated prayer
circle goes uncriticized.

Probably
some of those students defending the prayer circle are advocates of women’s
rights. But the men they are defending, do they believe in women’s rights? Just
to be clear, this male supremacism
is shared by most conservative religions, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim.
The advocate for human rights, which include women’s rights, is critical of all
these male supremacist ideologies.

Those politicians who believe
that fear of Muslims is rational, meanwhile, argue, why is the left so stupid
as to defend conservative Muslims? Why do they defend this culture that is so
deeply at odds with western values? This culture that believes in veiling
women, in stoning adulterers, in cutting off the hands of thieves, in executing blasphemers
and apostates? The nuance is lost. There are numerous Muslim defenders of human
rights. Indeed, the stereotyping of Muslims and blanket denunciation is itself
a human rights violation.

The nuance is lost, abandoned
in the polarized ideological battle that, along with the 45th president of the United States, Donald
Trump, has slammed hard onto center stage of national politics. Human rights defenders are out
in the cold at this moment, we have compromised allies on the left and the
right.

When I defend my Mauritanian
client, Mohamed Cheikh Mkhaitir, against blasphemy charges and fight to get his
death sentence repealed, I risk being viewed as an ally of Pamela Geller
and her politics of polarization. Those on the left cannot hear of human rights
troubles in Islamic societies, they are preoccupied with defending Muslim
immigrants against hateful discrimination. Those on the right gleefully seize on any scandal
in the Muslim world as further evidence of its irredeemable nature.

The western world, so caught
up in its own objectives and internal clashes, easily abandons human
rights advocates for Muslim communities. This is true not only in domestic
politics, but even more so in international policy. The long alliance with the
Kingdom of Saud is only the most glaring example. We could go on: US support for the Saudi war
in Yemen, US tolerance for Israeli war on Gaza and other aggressions against
Palestinians, US unprovoked war on Iraq and its ill-advised invasion of
Afghanistan. Human rights defenders in the Islamic world often find themselves
fighting oppressive governments that are allies of the United States. And then
they have to fight again, when the architects of such international policy
deride Islamic culture as incapable of supporting
human rights.

As
of January 20 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the
United States, when General Flynn assumed office as National Security Adviser,
the defenders of human rights for Muslims find themselves in political no man’s
land.