Today in NRO Andrew McCarthy writes:

The term was used by the Runnymede Trust in the U.K. back in 1992, in a report entitled A Very Light Sleeper, which then led to a report, also by Runnymede, entitled, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, in 1997. Christopher Allen points out that it was used in the U.S. in Insight in 1991, but somewhat differently from the way the term is employed today.

The single piece of evidence that Islamophobes cite that “the Muslim Brotherhood” coined this term comes from the personal recollection of one Abdur Rahman Muhammad:

Muhammad said he was present when his then- allies, meeting at the offices of the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Northern Virginia years ago, coined the term “Islamophobia.”

Muhammad said the Islamists decided to emulate the homosexual activists who used the term “homophobia” to silence critics. He said the group meeting at IIIT saw “Islamophobia” as a way to “beat up their critics.”

That quote comes from CT huckster Stephen Emerson‘s website. Let us assume that this account is completely true. Even on this man’s account, IIIT decided to make use of the term “Islamophobia”, like many have in the last decade. Note the absence of a date, or any kind of corroboration. Also note that IIIT is not the Muslim Brotherhood. And note that the term pre-dates 9/11 by almost ten years.

Claire Berlinski gave this myth some life in 2010, and bears some responsibility for it.

Of course, it is only one small detail in the overall paranoia-inducing fantasy that all (that is, every last one) of the mainstream American Muslim organizations are “fronts” for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Matt Duss and Eli Clifton and others have rightly called out National Review’s Rich Lowry for continuing to publish anti-Muslim bigots and provocateurs. On that note:

In a new review of Robert Spencer’s new book, Daniel Pipes tells us that the revisionist history which posited a relatively late date for the composition of the Quran and which casts doubt on the existence of the Prophet Muhammad was a “secret” whose existence Spencer (and author Tom Holland, reviewed here) has “ended”.

This revisionist history has remained a virtual secret among specialists. For example, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, authors of the synoptic Hagarism (Cambridge University Press, 1977), deliberately wrote obliquely, thereby hiding their message.

Now, however, two scholars have separately ended this secrecy: Tom Holland with In the Shadow of the Sword, and Robert Spencer with Did Muhammad Exist?

Two points: First, the idea that Cook and Crone (or any other scholar) meant for their work to be somehow hidden from general scrutiny is so fantastical I hardly know how to even address it. Second, Cook himself  has moved on from that book, which was from earlier in his career. He is a major historian of the Islamic intellectual tradition, so perhaps Pipes should drop him an email and ask him if Muhammad existed. He won’t like the answer.

Robert Spencer writes an extended book report on the work of Wansbrough, Cook, Crone, and others, and Pipes sells it as a brave unveiling of some shrouded history which previous scholars were too timid to proclaim openly. This is what passes muster at a flagship conservative publication?

And just to add a dose of creepiness Pipes ends his review with:

While reading a fawning review in Tablet of Bernard Lewis’ autobiography by David Goldman, I was struck by a sudden turn regarding the origins of Islam:

It is a career-killer (and perhaps a killer of more than a career) to challenge the authenticity of the Quran and the received story of the Muslim conquests, yet a vast body of research over the last several decades makes it impossible for a rational observer to accept the Muslim account at face value.

Not one example is given of a person whose career has been killed for being non-Muslim (and hence by definition challenging the Quran’s divine origin). Take a look at the tenured faculty of any major Islamic Studies program in this country and then talk to me about killed careers. So, Harvard and Yale and Princeton Islam scholars are all Quran authenticating Muslims?

Then, Goldman suggests that the scholars working on the Corpus Coranicum, an effort to create a critical edition of the Quran, are in engaging in “an enterprise … fraught with personal risk to the researchers.” Has a single researcher on this project expressed that view? Does Goldman know the history of Muslim study of the Quran, including cataloguing of textual variants and alternate readings going back over a thousand years? Clearly he does not. It is for some reason more useful to him to repeat things like, “The fragility of Islam … lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran.”

This is followed by:

If the critics are correct, then Islam cannot coexist with rational inquiry and has no future in modernity.

Hear that Muslims? Please believe us when we say that we have no objection to Islam as such, except that you have no future if you continue to be Muslim.

And I am genuinely perplexed by the following:

Muslim girls who complete high school breed like Europeans. Modernity’s great precondition, namely education, leads to a demographic tailspin in the Muslim world, which appears to jump from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood.

Let’s just imagine a theoretical reviewer who wrote something like, “Jewish Haredi girls breed like Mexicans.” I’d be offended by that. How about you?

I bet Goldman will love Robert Spencer’s new book.

Update:

I just noticed that Martin Kramer decorates the comment section with praise: “Fine review.” Good to know. Hey, how is Kramer’s career? Is it killed?

This piece by Philip Giraldi at Antiwar.com is one of the best pieces I’ve seen in a while on the underlying motivations of Islamophobia. Giraldi goes beyond the who and the what and describes why Islamophobia makes sense for certain centers of power. His discussion does not encompass all the important causes, but it describes some of the important ones quite well:

The arguments being made are not necessarily intended to convince anyone other than those who are already more than half onboard, but they are designed to keep the issue of how Muslims are not quite like the rest of us on the back burner to so that the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and other Arabs will somehow always seem suspect. It also fuels other narratives that the neoconservatives and their friends support, like perpetual warfare against Islamic countries to bring about regime changes, suggesting that there is something that is not quite right in the way that Muslim countries govern themselves.

and:

The fact is that the Islamophobia we are currently seeing really has two objectives. First and foremost it is to protect Israeli interests, making Muslims appear to be a threat and a group that is irredeemably un-American, while Israelis are presented as people who are more or less just like us. That means that only one voice will be heard on the Middle East, which is precisely what has taken place. The second objective is to justify the seemingly unending series of wars in Asia, presenting the local people as lacking in the civilized moral and political values that we all hold dear.

Listen to this piece from NPR from about 45 seconds in, where they play a clip from the radio interview of Gingrich remarking on Obama and Islam. He uses the phrase, “consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church.”

There is a fundamental problem with the fact that in English we do not ordinarily differentiate between Islam the religion and Islam the civilization, as we can do in the case of “Christianity” and “Christendom”. The clip is significant because Gingrich did not say, “radical Islam,” “radical Muslims,” or even, “Muslims,” or other more specific designations.

Gingrich is not stupid. He relishes the equivocality of the word “Islam.” It gives him, and others like him, the cover to smear and attack people with the plausible deniability of saying (afterwards, if challenged) that he only meant radical Muslims, using the ambiguity of terms to pull this off.

Gingrich probably doesn’t have strong opinions about Islam as such, but he is playing to those who do.

Robert Spencer and his kind assure us that this is not at all about Muslims in general. Right. Here is his reaction to the story on “Roger”, the convert to Islam who is a high-ranking CIA official.

The question is this: some might liken Roger to a top American official joining the Nazi Party during World War II. Others would liken Roger to a top American official marrying a German immigrant during World War II, and coming under unjust suspicion as a result. German Americans, of course, could oppose and fight against National Socialism unequivocally, without any lingering allegiance to it; Muslims who profess to reject and abhor Islamic terrorism, however, still profess belief in a book and a prophet that have inspired Islamic violence and supremacism worldwide, even among believers who have no institutional connection to al-Qaeda or any other jihad group.

So the message to Muslims is that to be peace loving Muslims you must reject the Quran and the Prophet. That is, you must cease to be Muslims entirely.

Just to offer a little concrete perspective on how outlandish “honor killing” or “honor murder” is in the context of Islamic law, it is worth considering the four-witness rule for adultery in the Quran. In order to find someone guilty of adultery, one must produce four eye-witnesses to the act of penetration (that is, if it were on film, it would be rated NC-17, not R).

At the time of the revelation of Quran 24:4 which mentions the four witnesses (this evidentiary requirement is also mentioned in 4:15), some contemporaries of the Prophet balked at the idea. The traditional commentaries record a man objecting, saying that if he walked in on his wife with another man, he would then have to go find four people and bring them back to see it, giving the adulterer plenty of time to make his exit. The Prophet held firm and said that this was indeed the requirement, no flexibility. (There are other problems with the way Muslims have interpreted the laws on adultery, but that is a larger, separate question.)

In Islamic law, if the accuser does not produce four eye-witnesses, they are lashed for the accusation. A spouse may accuse without four witnesses, but the accused can counter the accusation with an avowed denial.

Nothing in the traditional books of law or commentary give even a shred of credence to “honor” or “shame” except in a broad philosophical sense, and certainly not as a license for vigilantism. If a man has to be content with his own accusation (which his wife can simply deny) even if he sees the adultery himself, that does not leave a lot of room for the kind of blood-cleansing that these “shame killings” (that’s a better label) represent, especially when they are perpetrated for vague offenses like being too western or marrying someone the family did not choose. The only latitude that is given to family in matters of criminal law is the choice, exercised by the next of kin, between accepting blood money for a relative’s murder or demanding capital punishment be carried out by legitimate authorities.

These “honor murders” are not an extreme form of Islam at all. They are just tribal garbage, which is why they occur amongst both Christians and Muslims of the same cultural inheritance, as in Jordan. It’s hardly the first transgression to acquire a theological veneer while being motivated by anything but religious commitment.

This was the tail end of a rather long email exchange, this particular one occasioned by Pamela Geller’s praise for the urinating Marines. I’m generally against publishing emails, but this alarmed me and I want it out there in case he pulls a stunt. Spencer will likely cry foul, but he’s free to publish the entire exchange if he likes. I will do myself if he tries to use selective quotation to smear me. The email exchange began when he mischaracterized some things I said on Twitter, and I contacted him requesting that he amend his post on his blog.

Most recent first:

Spencer wrote:

On the contrary, you are the one who has ignored reasonable questions I asked you and brushed by substantive points I made in response to your own points. Then you accuse me of being incapable of reason? You have a fine capacity for projection.

What will you do at Holy Cross if I come up to you? Howl for the police? I shall bring a video camera in case you decide to play the faux-victim game of which your colleagues are so fond.

On Jan 12, 2012, at 1:10 PM, Caner Dagli wrote:

Incredible. You couldn’t even rise to saying, “Maybe what she wrote is in bad taste.”

Under no circumstances should you try to contact me if you visit Holy Cross. These last few exchanges have shown me that you are incapable of reason. At best you are a dupe, and worst just a standard issue hypocrite.

On Jan 12, 2012, at 1:00 PM, Robert Spencer wrote:

With what? That this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing the body to prepare it for burial? Actually I doubt that that is what these Marines had in mind. Geller is of course engaging in satirical hyperbole, which she does with verve and bite. Leftist writers often engage in something analogous to this, although none of them are as intelligent, quick-witted or talented as she is, but when she does it, they suddenly become blunt literalists incapable of recognizing satire or irony, and schoolmarmishly insist that she assuage their hurt feelings.

In any case, I certainly did not recommend you meet her, but only asked if you had done so, since you seemed to know all about her real beliefs and motivations. In fact, she is an individual of extraordinary vision and perceptiveness, with a courageous and indefatigable commitment to freedom. I am proud to know her and work with her.

On Jan 12, 2012, at 12:31 PM, Caner Dagli wrote:

So you still think I need to meet Geller before coming to some kind of judgment about her?

“I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.”

From the New Yorker website. This is one of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject. Here she describes a woman who on Anderson Cooper’s show said the following about the Muslim stars of the show:

I’m not saying that they can’t be Americans. But then I’m also—what I’m saying is that they’re not true Muslims. So, I mean, I would ask the question to them: Are you living by the Koran, are you living by the prophet Mohammed, are you doing what you’re commanded to do?

Davidson comments:

Be scary, or you are not “true,” never mind how solid you seem and all the facts and dimensions of your life. We are in a dangerous place when people can be told, to their faces, that they are not real—that their identities make no sense, and that they are impossible Americans.