Abdullah Hakim Quick – Is Islamophobia Justified
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Hello, welcome to this long stuff Toronto shelter. I want to get right into our topic for today Inshallah, which is the whole idea of Islamophobia. So as you know, in the previous
year, Islamophobia skyrocketed in Canada, and in North America as a whole, the numbers have also increase, especially after the October incidents that have happened in Philistine talk to me a little bit more about Islamophobia. And let's define it first. Yes, so the definition of Islamophobia is that phobia is a fear, it's a version dislike, it's usually illogical. For instance, you have arachnophobia. So you have people who are afraid of spiders. And sometimes they may have had an incident, but maybe just stories or some illogical understanding. But this fear grips them whenever they see the shape of a spider, or the movement of a spider. And so that's arachnophobia.
So you have different types of phobia. So in this case, you can go back to the time of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him when the Quraysh wanted to destabilize his message. And they did it by by trying to call him crazy Majnoon or a poet or a magician. So they were putting out negative propaganda against the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in order to not just kill him, they couldn't do that, but to kill the message. So to create a fear in the people a dislike for this individual. And that was really the beginning of it. And you see it in different points, probably the unit, the clearest example of it is in 1095, and Claremont in France, and that is when Pope
Urban, you know, he called the First Crusade. And so this was Europe, now, the Christians of Europe, attacking Muslims in the Middle East. And the basis of it was not necessarily religious, it was really economic. But he used the fact that these Saracens are these Muhammad sins, devil worshipers, were actually destroying the True Cross of Christ, they were taking over the holy land. And he said, God Wills it, and that you will get special rewards. So he created a type of fear, almost mystical type of supernatural relationship with Muslims, they were like monsters. And so that creates that phobia. And it drove the people to actually fight. And so you will see that these type of images
were used over the centuries, against Muslims in the 20th century. It's, it comes into the media. And this is really coming into our time, you know, with a media, structured images around Islamophobia, with Arabs, and people from the east became villains. So it creates this, this this image and terror, it terrifies people, and creates inside of them, the ability to accept lies. So really, to understand the sun biphobia, just like racism, you need to look at three parts. One is the theory, Islamophobia. And that is what we just discussed. But second is the expressions of Islamophobia.
So it can be expressed in different ways. You may call names, you may discriminate on the job, you may kick somebody out of your house, of course, the most extreme form is violence, and you're in genocide, but then it's also institutionalized. That's when it becomes institutionalized within a society where Muslims are discriminated against by law, where it actually becomes part of the society. So so it's Islamophobia is, you know, is a multi dimensional phenomenon, which impacts people based upon where they live, based upon their understanding their relationship with Muslims, but unfortunately, in the West, especially we see in Canada and the United States, it is rising
rapidly. It's actually a good a good, really a question to come from a crisis. So you you describe it as an irrational fear. But the truth is, like, if you think about Islam is as an actual way of living it is very threatening to those who are in power outside of, I guess, really Islam itself, right. I mean, if you think about it from in terms of the economic, I guess, really impact that Islam would have on Western countries and Western worlds, those circular worlds, right? You're looking at a huge impact on the money in terms of you know, the impermissibility of Riba,
alcohol, Xena, all these things that a lot of people actually see. And so the question I always ask is, Is it really irrational for people to actually be fearful of the fact that Islam is coming to threaten their way of life? Well, if you divide people up into two pots, you know those who control which is a small minor
At the business people, the bankers, the highly educated, yeah, you and then the masses of the people. For the for the for the business people, it is rational, because Islam is an alternative civilization, you know, which has its own economic system, which will take out the interest. If they sell drugs, or they sell alcohol, it's going to destroy their business, if they sell pork, you know, if they've based their movies and their money on *, yeah, then it's going to destroy it so that that's rational. But for the overwhelming majority of the people, it's irrational in the sense that they don't really know what Islam is. So so so it's not something that they've thought out. But
it's they're just responding based upon images or stories that have been told to them, just like somebody is saying that spider is a monster, it's going to kill you. But the spider is actually cleaning up your house. Yeah, the spider is killing all the insects around and maybe protecting your life. But because the story of the spider, who could kill the child or the tarantula, who crawled over the bed, and they show the movie of the tarantula, that sticks in your mind, when you see that poor little spider, you know, in your bathroom, you know, cleaning up the insects, us in your house. So that's irrational. So so if you look at the tool, you can see, it's rational in one sense. But
for the overwhelming majority of people, unfortunately, it's not rational. It's just an impulse. They just responding to a beard, responding to a turban, responding to the cop responding to Islamic images, to the point where even speaking Arabic, for some people hearing Arabic being used is scary to them. Because they saw a movie, you know, that they would there was a movie that came out long time ago to make a long story short, yeah, a group of terrorists in New York City, you know, and they would, you know, they would blow up, you know, their enemies. And just before they would blow them up, they would make with? Yeah, so you said the first thing they would first make wudu and then
boom, yeah. So now, the hero of the movie is chasing the so called terrorists, and they run into a Turkish bath. And then they look and the person is naked making Do you washing up now? So so he says to his friends, you got 20 seconds.
So that's a response that came in and it's really scary to see. Now, the next day, the person who watched that movie goes into Central Park and sees a group of Muslim bragging about making withyou in the fountain right. Now, what happens inside of them fear. The first thing it may be, they are suicide bombers. You see, so that irrational fear that comes when these people are the least violent in that whole pack. They're about to pray to God. But the person doesn't know that