Just a week since US President Trump retweeted a British far right group’s slanderous messages about Muslims, the US Supreme Court has ruled that his blanket ban on travelers from six Muslim countries can remain in force. The travel ban was one of the more controversial features of the Trump election campaign, and at the time was to be a ban on all Muslims entering the country.
Such policies, along with most of the anti-terrorism legislation in the West today, have very little to do with safety and preventing acts of violence, but rather aim to generate a state of fear and anxiety about all Muslims, wherever they may be.
Muslims are acutely aware of the constant stream of negative media stories about Islam, as the inevitable atmosphere that such reporting generates takes its toll every day. A new term, Islamophobia, has entered into the vernacular to describe the apparently irrational fear that non-Muslims are increasingly displaying in their words and behaviour. However, when we consider how the dramatic increase in such reporting has coincided with a very noticeable revival of Islamic sentiments among the world’s Muslims, particularly among the youth, it becomes clear that this is no coincidence.
The Western colonialist states used to hope that Muslims had long forgotten Islam, relegating it to a mere personal religion, but their hopes have been dashed, as the Muslims started to become aware of the destruction that the colonialists were bringing to our lands.
More frightening than that for the colonialists, however, was that this awareness is increasingly coupled with an expectation that Islam can provide a solution.
The Ottoman Islamic State was destroyed at the hands of the colonialists nearly a century ago, but now the return of political Islam to the world stage has become an imminent expectation.
While the Islamophobia of the ordinary people is a direct result of the way Islam and Muslims are talked about by the media and politicians, the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim words and deeds of the media and politicians themselves are their very deliberate attempt to harden the hearts of the population against Islam and Muslims.
Their aim is to create such suspicion about Muslims, that any and all draconian actions against politically aware Muslims in the not too distant future will be accepted.
It is upon this background that we read about the security agencies’ apparent “incompetence” in leaving so many of the alleged attackers to undertake their violent attacks on civilians, once again reinforcing the public perception that Muslims are a security threat to ordinary people. With such a barrage of news about how Muslims are dangerous, it is no wonder that people are starting to believe it.
Muslims must not only reject the blatantly false narrative that Islam is responsible for any of the violence against civilians that the world has witnessed, we must also straighten the record, exposing the reality of the colonial legacy.
It is imperative that the world understands how the capitalist West is currently trying to hide its crimes against humanity, grabbing at straws to muddy the name of Islam, hoping that it can continue to exploit the world at any cost.
وَمَنْ أَحْسَنُ قَوْلًا مِمَّنْ دَعَا إِلَى اللَّهِ وَعَمِلَ صَالِحًا وَقَالَ إِنَّنِي مِنَ الْمُسْلِمِين
“And who is better in speech than he who invites to Allah, does righteous deeds, and says, ‘I am one of the Muslims’.” [Fussilat: 33]
