(An AI-generated image of a towering mosque in London.)
Current discussions in and outside of the British parliament have centred on the official adoption of the definition of Islamophobia crafted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, set out in its report of 2018 titled Islamophobia Defined. That definition is “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” Despite the report’s absence of intellectual merit, and what seems like an effort to achieve a foregone ideological conclusion, its definition has gained widespread support. Regardless of any definition, and there are some of them around, the term Islamophobia has also already gained widespread societal currency. There are many well-argued objections to the adoption of conceptions of Islamophobia and they need not be repeated here. Rather the intention is to point to how far Islamophobia has become a cultural currency in Britain.
Is Islamophobia a form of blasphemy?
Islamophobia has often been regarded as some sort of blasphemy. Although not quite accurate, it is understandable because of the plenty of well documented examples of the outrage from Muslims when there are suggestions, even if unproven and unverified, that Islamic doctrines have been disparaged. The fatwa against and attempted murder of Salman Rushdie for writing a book that was meant to be a critique of Muslim attitudes is arguably the most famous example. The so-called Danish cartoons of Mohamed, the prophet of Islam, are another such case. The murderous reaction to the publication of caricatures of the prophet by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo is yet another.
Blasphemy is a Christian theological concept and difficult to apply straightforwardly to Islam, which has its own set of norms that are brought to bear against perceived attacks on the religion. While the English law concept was akin to sedition in that it applied to prosecute attacks on the established church, by the 20th century it had become tempered and for most part remained unused. Its lack of sync with a “secular age” as well as its asymmetrical application to specific Christian doctrines made it an embarrassing relic of a past age, and the common law offence was eventually abolished by statute in 2008.
This all makes sense when viewed from a narrow perspective of a secularized and tolerant Christian culture in which comprehension has been lost as to why someone can or should be persecuted or prosecuted for having unauthorized views of a religion. Agitated Muslims did also try to use the English blasphemy law against the publishers of The Satanic Verses, posing to protect against insults, not merely to the prophet of Islam and its revelation, but also those from the Jewish and Christian traditions. They were rebuffed by the English courts. This background partly explains the tendency to think about Muslim reactions as an analogue to Christian blasphemy, which underplays the differences between them. Confusions also arise when Muslim demands are increasingly ride on the Western sociological idiom of racism, as the APPG’s definition does.
The way British institutions initially reacted in protection of Salman Rushdie then would probably not be repeated today, as we see from the disappearance of the Batley teacher after being accused without foundation of inappropriately portraying Mohamed. Even a schoolchild can be falsely accused of scuffing a Qur’an and his mother forced to apologize to a gathering of Muslim men in the presence of the police. The pattern of accusing and homicidal condemnation, already familiar from South Asia, has already established itself in Britain.
Anyhow, Islamophobia is not merely blasphemy, although some sense of blasphemy may be being retained by those clamoring for Islamophobia to be used in British legal systems. This clamour began several decades ago when in 1999 Pakistan introduced the notion of “defamation of Islam” in the United Nations which was later diluted to a neutral sounding “defamation of religion” after objections from Western states made it unlikely to find favour. As Prof. Lorenz Langer has admirably documented, the defamation notion, pushed by one or other member country of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), did obtain the support of the majority of the international community for some years. Resolutions against defamation kept on being passed until they eventually began to lose support once objections by Western countries began to limit their appeal.
As Prof. Yvonne Sherwood has shown, etymologically, defamation and blasphemy are related in the sense that they both refer to bringing something into disrepute. They are both related to the Greek and Latin terms for reputation or fame. Pakistan’s original motion was motivated by a wish to disassociate Islam from terrorism which, as it argued, were both increasingly being linked in the public mind, and that was a couple of years before 9/11. So, although a link between blasphemy and defamation can only be a suggestive one, it is possible to see a connection if one considers the reputational damage a negative association can do for a religion such as Islam that wants to spread in the world. One way to do that is to present Islam in secularized terms so that its gains popular currency. It would seem preventing reputational damage in secular language is the work assigned to the term Islamophobia, which has also been increasingly grasped onto by the OIC states in their campaigns. The UN General Assembly has even agreed unanimously to observe an international day to combat Islamophobia.
Destigmatizing Islam
Any prohibition on Islamophobia would include but go beyond a narrow conception of blasphemy, read as an attack on religious doctrines, which is itself objectionable because of its coercively compelling acceptance of those doctrines even when they aren’t sincerely held or when those being subject to them have nothing to do with Islam. The APPG’s report amply testifies to the wide framing of Islamophobia. The report covers the writings of several academics from which it draws support. Claims made in the joint submission of evidence by two of them are enough to make the point. The academics are Dr Ben Whitham then of De Montfort University and Dr Nadya Ali of University of Sussex. The report favourably cites their submission to the APPG that Islamophobic actions and behaviours:
“Are predicated on [sic] perception of the victims ‘Muslimness’. Such an understanding of Muslim difference combines biological attributes (skin colour) with religious and cultural practices including clothing (hijab, niqab, skull caps, kurtas), eating (halal meat, inhibitions on alcohol and pork) and a strong imaginary about the ‘radical otherness’ of so-called ‘Muslim practices’. These have included (but are not limited to), Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Forced Marriage (FM), veiling, a supposed propensity for electoral fraud, the imposition of sharia law, and child sexual exploitation.”
It should be obvious that the issues covered in their notion of Islamophobia go well beyond any conception of blasphemy. However, the language of the “radical otherness” of Muslims used by Whitham and Ali is hard to decipher. It is surely inconsistent to claim, as Muslims may do, that they have a different conception of religion, morality, law, etc. and, at the same time, deny that they are not somehow ‘other’ to others within the population.
The claim by the two academics makes more sense once linked to the list of the “so-called ‘Muslim practices’” they mention, from FGM to child sexual exploitation. The objection seems to be founded on the negative association of Muslims made by those in the population who choose to speak out against them, Muslims among them. This is presumably what the academics mean by “radical otherness” – for people to notice and attribute to Muslims certain behaviours that critics evaluate negatively. A prohibition on Islamophobia would therefore require those who reasonably believe are obvious facts to suspend their belief or to at least keep quiet about it. The APPG’s report quotes the same academics as saying that “there is no ‘good faith’ criticism of Islam”. Suspending belief or keeping silent would naturally eliminate criticism and, where needed, prosecutions to protect victims, stop the perpetrators, and reform them. But these are the consequences of the sort of multiculturalism advocated by Prof. Tariq Modood whose thinking has influenced the APPG report. For Modood, the primary interest of multiculturalism lies primarily in turning the negative and stigmatic status of non-European origin ethnic and related identities into a positive feature.
Recognizing Islamophobia in the legal system would take matters further because it would entail using what the Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser described as the “repressive state apparatus” of the legal system to punish those who dare to speak against objectionable practices and attitudes. Despite all of the problems mentioned by its critics, the notion of Islamophobia has already gained wide cultural currency. The institutions of which Althusser spoke, the apparatuses of both the ideological (opinion forming such as the media) and repressive kind (those such as a legal system where force can be used) are already engaged in using the term in some sense or another.
For example, Islamophobia Awareness Month is observed across British universities every November, and by many schools, National Health Service trusts, the police and corporations. Bristol University has had a well-publicized case of a professor, Steven Greer, being disadvantaged at work and being threatened after an accusation of Islamophobia made by a student Islamic society. Greer described the charge as false, a judgement with which a QC who investigated the matter for the university eventually agreed. The report of the QC (now KC) is embargoed by Bristol University despite a freedom of information request by the present writer. It would have helped us know just what definition of Islamophobia was being used by the QC when exonerating Prof. Greer.
Hardeep Singh’s report for Civitas clocks more than 50 British local authorities led by parties of various shades as having adopted the APPG’s definition. The Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party (SNP), and the Green Party have all adopted it. The Muslim Vote campaign group asked Muslims to cast their vote in the July 2024 elections on condition that candidates pledge to implement the APPG’s definition, though in what form is unclear. The question arises whether this wide subscription to the notion of Islamophobia is meant to encourage people to think of Islam in positive and uncritical terms only and of Muslims only as victims.
An Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group was set up under David Cameron’s government to lead work to develop a definition of Islamophobia. The Conservative government had however refused to adopt an official definition of the term right up to the end of Rishi Sunak’s term. The Working Group’s deputy chair, Imam Qari Asim, was removed from his role in 2022 because he supported a ban on a film about the Prophet Mohammed's daughter, and the Working Group seems to have frozen work at some point. Individual and prominent Conservatives have, however, lent support to the APPG’s efforts. Baroness Warsi who has just recently left the Conservative whip in the House of Lords was the chair of the APPG. Former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve KC, wrote the foreword to the APPG’s report, at a time when he was the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. This ought to be worrying since the Secretariat to the APPG was provided by the Islamist organization MEND. Wes Streeting, currently Health Secretary, was chair of the APPG.
Another prominent group closely involved in advocating legal restrictions on speech is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Under the Tony Blair government it became the go-to organization for consulting about Muslims in Britain. These relations were broken off by the same government after one of the MCB’s officeholders signed a declaration that appeared to condone violence against British armed forces if deemed necessary to support Gaza. In her study of Muslims in Britain, Innes Bowen says that the MCB is linked to the Jamaat–e–Islami, the premier of the many Islamist organizations of Pakistan inspired by ideologue Abul A'la al-Maududi. In their classic compilation on Islamist thought, Euben and Zaman describe Islamism’s credo as being the public institution of Shari’a.
Legal advances
In his book, British Islam and English Law, Patrick Nash points out that, prior to its distancing from the Blair government, the MCB was successful in achieving changes to British laws including on religious hatred, religiously aggravated offences, and religious discrimination. It was an advocate for what became the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 which was passed barely a year after the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. The Act introduced religious hatred related offenses, amending the Public Order Act. The MCB was however met with disappointment at section 29J of the amending provisions which preserved freedom of expression including the freedom to criticize religious beliefs or its practitioners. Section 29J reads:
“Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.”
This is a very important limit to legal liability but one of its perhaps less noticed elements is that it seems to correctly reflect how wide the notion of “hate” is in the English language. Hate can include sentiments such as antipathy or dislike which should hardly be the subject of legal restrictions. One might quite benignly say “I hate doing my taxes”, without fearing legal action. Yet, we so often see nowadays how blithely those advocating for restrictions on what they deem Islamophobia equate it to anti-Muslim hate, or merely saying they prefer the term anti-Muslim hate instead of Islamophobia as Kemi Badenoch has done. These options, predicated on penalizing “hate”, all stretch potential legal culpability beyond reasonable limits. Unfortunately, section 29J applies only to the offences introduced because of the 2006 Act, while other offences such as section 4 of the Public Order Act, also widely drafted, remain outside its scope, as do the many other offences to do with communications as well as the Equality Act 2010, Britain’s civil anti-discrimination law. One hopes though that the wording of section 29J might be relied on to gauge the limits of restrictions on free expression when interpreting Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Islamism has come some way in its long march through British legal institutions. In July 2024 the Judicial Office, an “arms-length body” of the Ministry of Justice, issued a new edition of the Equal Treatment Bench Book (ETBB). Chair of the Judicial College, Lady Justice King, says in her foreword that the ETBB is a key work of reference, used daily by the judiciary in England and Wales and admired and envied by judiciaries across the globe. Not many will have noticed this new edition because the country was then preoccupied with the general election. It carries mention of Islamophobia as the term that “has come to be used by many within and outside the Muslim community to mean anti-Muslim racism in its broadest sense. While, most obviously, it refers to hate crime which is targeted towards Muslims, it can be extended to cover all attitudes and actions that lead to discriminatory outcomes for Muslim citizens.” The ETBB cites the APPG’s report and definition of Islamophobia and, perhaps not unjustifiably, says that the term “has gained traction in private and public spheres and is the term of choice among most British Muslims to describe their experience.”
The ETBB also cites the MCB who have submitted that although hate crimes against Muslims have grown, they are an underestimate. Although this way of reporting the alleged rise in hate crimes relies on self-reporting, the ETBB does not say so. The MCB is also cited in its reporting of the situation of Muslims being in relative economic and housing disadvantage. This insertion into a section on Islamophobia makes sense if it is a way of suggesting that this disadvantage is a result of discrimination or hate without directly saying so. The ETBB’s drafters don’t betray any awareness of the Islamist credentials of the MCB or the secretariat of the APPG. Rather it presents the APPG definition as widely subscribed to and in a way that places it beyond doubt and criticism.
What happens now?
The current response of the Labour government to the demands to make the APPG’s definition more official than it already is seems obfuscatory. In its reply to the objections to the Islamophobia definition expressed by the Network of Sikh Organizations, the Minister for Faith, Lord Khan has accepted that “the definition proposed by the APPG is not in line with the Equality Act 2010, which defines race in terms of colour, nationality and national or ethnic origins.” This description lacks clarity and refers only to the Equality Act and not other laws. Although widely interpreted as a concession by the government, that isn’t its only possible reading. The statement does not say one way or another in what direction the government intends to move. If it finds it too difficult to implement the definition in a statutory form, one route it might take is to introduce “soft” changes in the policies that guide the implementation of law, the ETBB illustrates. For example, prosecution policy could be changed as could Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance or code of practice. There is therefore nothing conclusive about the statements coming from the government and there may yet be all to play for.
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