U.S. Muslims More ‘Islamophobic’ than General Public

[Valin]

Focus on Western Islamism

Dexter Van Zile

September 12, 2022

Muslims living in the United States are more likely to harbor “Islamophobic” attitudes than the general public according to a recent survey conducted by a Muslim think tank. And while “Islamophobia” has been on a downward trend in non-Muslim communities in the United States since 2018, Muslim belief in “Islamophobic tropes” has increased since then.

“The one and only group that has been trending up have been Muslims, in fact, in their internalization of these tropes and their own endorsement of them,” said Dalia Mogahed, director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), a Muslim headquartered in Dearborn, Mich.

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To ISPU’s obvious dismay, 24 percent of American Muslims believed that their co-religionists are more prone to violence than non-Muslims, while only nine percent of the general public believes this to be true. According to the ISPU, White Evangelicals and Catholics — are more “Islamophobic” than Muslims. But even the “Islamophobia” of these two groups has remained steady or decreased over the years.

But Muslims — unlike every other group surveyed — have become more “Islamophobic” in the years since 2018. “In 2022, we find Islamophobia is on the decline among other groups, but not among Muslims,” the report states.

According to the study, Muslims who identified as white exhibited more “Islamophobia” than Muslims who identified as Asian, Arab or black. In response, Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, suggested that the “Islamophobia” of white Muslims was a consequence of their living in the United States, a country “driven by conservative politics centered on whiteness.”

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Adrian Calamel, an analyst specializing in the Middle East and Islamist activism in the West, said that ISPU and its supporters are engaging in a sleight-of-hand by portraying white Muslims as “Islamophobes.”

“They’re trying to portray Muslim self-criticism as white supremacism,” he said. “This is a clear attempt to stifle reform Muslims in the West.”

Calamel is suspicious of how ISPU’s survey asked Muslim respondents to describe themselves along racial lines. It would have been better to ask Muslim respondents to report their national origins. With the category of “black” Muslims, the ISPU report obscures differences in attitudes between Muslims from Somalia and African Americans who belong to the Nation of Islam, for example.

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