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The myth of the murderous Muslimaljazeera.com /indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013127211920494.html

Haroon MoghulHaroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student atColumbia University.

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Islamophobia promotes a "racialised view of Islam" - the actions of the few represent the "intentions"of the whole.

Last Modified: 03 Jan 2013 10:02

Muslims are subversive jihadists. The Middle East is perpetually unstable. "Islam has bloodyborders." If you've already made up your mind, you'll find a way to twist the facts to support your conclusion. And if the facts don't do the job, you can always hire new ones.

In the last year, American anti-Muslim hate groups have increased threefold . As playwright Wajahat Ali and others have found, the farther we move away from the September 11 terrorist attacks, theworse discrimination, prejudice and violence against Muslims become.

There's a simple enough reason for this: Islamophobia has become an industry . In the absence of alternative narratives, which can make sense of Muslim extremism, place it into context and guide

American domestic and foreign policy, we are stuck with the voices we have - too often, these havebeen unqualified and uninformed.

It will take us a long time to get past the damage done by years of well-funded Islamophobes , whohave dominated the media landscape (finally answering, incidentally, why it is that "Muslims don't domore to condemn terrorism" - nobody was listening). But the resistance to bigotry has already begunand has already scored a number of successes.

There is only so long, after all, you can lie to people.

The boy who cried Islamist

Islamophobia promotes a racialised view of Islam, viewing Arabs and Middle Easterners and Muslimsgenerally as one interchangeable, subversive, homogenous mass; the actions of the few representthe intentions and aspirations of the whole. Thus we were led to believe there could be a plausibleconnection between bin Laden and Saddam. The resulting cost in American lives, treasure andcredibility, is hard to quantify. This is Islamophobia's fruit: poisonous policies.

For reasons of strategic shortsightedness alone, Islamophobia would be discredited soon enough.But there's another reason: Islamophobia doesn't correspond to reality. The more likely an Americanis to know a Muslim, the more likely she is to have a positive view of Islam. Exposure underminesprejudice. That is, meeting real Muslims pushes aside the media narrative that is so pernicious andharmful. Why? Because much of what Islamophobia peddles is hyperbolic, fanciful, or meaningless.

Let's see how Islamophobia does its damage. The value extends beyond anti-Muslim bigotry, by theway. The same type of "reasoning" is employed by all bigotries - radical Muslim voices, who require a

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So Muslims, who ruled over vast desert spaces and many sparsely populated areas of the world, stillkilled something of the equivalent of one-quarter of the world's population in 1800. When the firstMughal emperor Babur conquered north India - from another Muslim dynasty, I might add - his armyis estimated to number around 10,000; his opponent's army is estimated at several times than that.

Is it conceivable that Muslim empires, such as the Umayyads , Ottomans and Mughals , who ruledover majority non-Muslim populations, could have contributed to the killing of huge percentages of the world's population while staying in power for centuries? How would they, as minorities, havebeen capable of sustained carnage for decades at a time? When did they get the time to build huge

public works projects, establish towns, rebuild cities, fund wells, hospitals, mosques, pools andfountains?

What technological advantage did they have that made them so superior to their enemies that theycould sustain such a bloody and vicious record - for 1,000 years? The Mongols exploded out into theworld and caused horrific damage, but they managed that for only a few centuries and left nothing of the kind of legacy the great Muslim empires did. Indeed, the Mongols ended up adopting the religionof the peoples they conquered, whereas the reverse happened early in the Muslim period.

A most post-modern warfare

And thus we are left with an implausible and absurd suggestion that jihad killed 270 million people.But even with all this, still three more points need to be stressed, because in recognising their significance, we recognise the ultimate absurdity of the Islamophobic worldview.

First, more Muslims died fighting each other than died in battles against non-Muslim dynasties. Armies were often mixed too, which drives bigots off the wall; when the Ottomans were defeated atVienna in 1683, they were finished off by a charge of Polish Muslim cavalry, allied with their enemies. Where do these casualties fit in? Should we arbitrarily decide that "intra-Muslim jihad"killed 50 percent of the total number? Why not, considering most of Islamophobia's made up? Howwere Muslims who so often fought each other also able to fight everyone else?

Unless of course it's not about Islam versus non-Islam.

"Islamophobes link events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuriesapart and want us to take it seriously."

Second, this isn't real history. It's dumping "facts" on the unawares, hoping that the sheer flood of information covers up the lack of an explanatory framework. Not only does the Islamophobe playloose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples, but she ties events together withoutattempting to explain why. If jihad is really the most murderous ideology ever and it is equal to Islam,then why would so many people become Muslim? What motivated their violence? What sustained it?

And how come most Muslims live peaceable lives?

Bigots make up history because actual history undermines them.

Third, let's say for the sake of argument Muslims killed 300 million people over a 1,000 year span.That doesn't mean anything. One could just as easily construct a counter-narrative that works likeIslamophobia does: arbitrarily, ignorantly and entirely unself-consciously. I mean, we'd link disparateevents based on the religious (or cultural) identity of the culprit.

We could construct a narrative of Western perfidy in response.

According to Charles Mann's 1491 , which explores the pre-Columbian Americas , nearly 100 millionperished during the European "Age of Discovery", making that the most violent contact betweenpeoples in human history. Nothing in Islamic history remotely compares. With the typical sloppinessof the Islamophobe, we could note how Western ideologies like Communism and Nazism ledconservatively to the deaths of another 120 million people; we could note the brutal colonial

exploitation of Africa and Asia, in which millions more perished and then breathlessly announce,"Five Hundred Years of Western Civilisation Kills Hundreds of Millions!"

We could toss in the fact that the West has invented weapons of mass destruction and used them inways no other parts of the world have. ( Chemical weapons in World War I; aerial bombing wasinvented by the Italians against Libyan civilians; and, of course, only America has used nuclear

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weapons , and twice, both times against civilian targets.) But this would be stupid, because itassumes that people in different times and places are the same, responsible for each other's actionsand should only be judged by the dark chapters of their history.

Osama bin Laden portrayed the history of Islam and the West as one long narrative of confrontation,as do many intemperate and extremist voices. He chose to ignore all the countervailing evidenceand ignored the differences between times and places, peoples and their leaders. He downplayedand dismissed the achievements of Western culture and civilisation, of which there are so many I'mhard-pressed to know where even to begin. Penicillin? Goethe? The modern museum?

Islamophobes play a similar game, linking events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart, and they want us to take this seriously. And so you get numbers like "270 million" or "300 million". And these are brought up talismanically, as if they constitute overwhelming proof. TheIslamophobe is completely and congenitally incapable of reflexivity. They cannot, in other words,look in the mirror; their mind has been made up, and what history is marshalled is not to engage indiscussion but to preclude it.

The jihad on accuracy

There is this last little problem.

The Muslim proportion of the world's population has accelerated dramatically in the past centuries

and continues to do so today; during our 600-1600 AD window, there were far fewer Muslims in theworld, proportionally speaking. Which means we have to figure out what everyone else was up to.

What about the people killed by other peoples - or, the biggest killer of all back then - disease and itsmost vulnerable victims, infants and the young? Where do we put the Crusades, the Aztecs and theIncans, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mongols (good heavens), Slavs and Byzantines, theChinese, Korean and Japanese?

Add them all together, and more people were probably killed than ever lived, which is about asaccurate as you can expect this kind of nonsense to be.

Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and

Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University.Follow him on Twitter: @hsmoghul

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The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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