Because the very word "Islamophobia" was invented to serve as a political tool to silence the critics of Islam!
Your question deserves a bit longer of an answer and I will provide just that. However, before we begin, it is important to clarify what I meant by the above sentence in bold.
The world "Islamophobia" is generally defined as: "dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force."
That kind of a definition has multiple layers of problems associated with it. For example:
· It conflates between dislike of a religion with a dislike of individuals.
· It makes it sound like there is something wrong with you for not liking a particular religion.
· It assumes that the criticisms or even fear of Islam arrives from "pre-judging" as opposed to "judging" after one has studied the issue.
Just think about the fact that Christianity has been mocked and trashed all around the western world for a long time now yet there are no such words like "Christianophobia". You'll find people trashing communism or capitalism all day long. Yet! Nobody thinks its therefore clever to then call them "Communistophobic" or "Capitalisophobic" and conflate that with hatred for individuals. People have disliked various religions or ideologies since the dawn of time. We have all been always fine with that and still are. Except for when not liking the religion of Islam, or some strands of it, is concerned. That is when the double standard takes over and some people start using buzz words to stop you from speaking out against things you don't like.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Another big problem is the assumption of that definition that criticisms of Islam, or even at times of Muslims, have to come from a place of prejudice. You can point out why for however many violations of human rights, you don't like the religion of Islam. You can quote from the Qur'an, Hadith or the Sirat. None of it will make any difference to some of these people. They will still try to accuse you of being prejudiced. A lot of the time, especially when the critic is white, they will start trying to brand you as a racist for pointing out all the outrageous violations of human rights found throughout the Islamic literature or even the versions of the . The funniest fact about such definition is perhaps the last part of it. What it implies is that it takes prejudice on our part to dislike a religious ideology which seeks political control! Like it is immoral for us to not want to be governed by someone else's religious laws.
Having said all that, we may now shift our focus to what I think is the underlying reason for some leftists to call people "Islamophobic" when they hear any criticisms of Islam. I think the following are some valid reasons:
· Sometimes there are genuine bigots who hate individuals Muslims and speaks ill of Islam for that one reason.
· Some people are so ideologically driven that the truth is irrelevant to them. As such, these people tend to use buzz words to malign people and silence them. When they realize that they really don't have any counter-arguments, they choose to use this form of name calling to win the debate.
· I have discovered that there are many extreme-far-left people who think about coming to the defense of minorities as something intrinsically good. Even when the minorities are in the wrong. As such, no matter what outrageous doctrines of Islam or aspect of the Islamic Shariah you may critique, these people will try to brand you as racist/bigot/Islamophobe. The ironic thing is that they are absolutely without any compassion for the struggles of the minorities among the minorities, example, us ex-Muslims. Some of them even go as far as brand us ex-Muslims as bigots/whatever if we critique Islam.
Much like the far-right extremists, these leftist ideologues have no rhyme or reason to their accusations. They go after the critics of Islam for more or less the same type of reason as their far-right counterparts. Ideology! That's it! That is what drives them to such irrational behavior.
