Islamophobia? Really?
(The following is an excerpt from Mr. Fitzgerald’s upcoming book, Islamizing Europe: Is the Conquest Inevitable? from New English Review Press, August 5th.)
by Hugh Fitzgerald (August 2025)
The word “Islamophobia” must be held up for inspection and its users constantly asked precisely how they would define that word. They should be put on the defensive for waving about what is clearly meant to be a scare-word that will silence criticism.
So let us ask them, which of the following criticisms of Islam is to be considered “Islamophobia:”
- Muhammad is a role-model for all time. Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and had sexual intercourse with her when she was nine. I find appalling that Muslims consider this act of Muhammad to be that of the man who is in every way a role-model, and hence to be emulated. In particular, I am appalled that virtually the first act of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a very orthodox and learned Shi’a theologian, was to lower the marriageable age of girls in Iran to nine—because, of course, that was Aisha’s age when Muhammad had sexual relations with her. Khomeini himself married his wife when she was fifteen.
– - I find appalling that Islam provides a kind of Total Regulation of the Universe, so that its adherents are constantly asking for advice as to whether or not, for example, they can wear their hair in a certain way, grow their beards in a certain way, wish an Infidel a Merry Christmas (absolutely not!).
– - I find appalling the religiously-sanctioned doctrine of taqiyya—a doctrine that has its sources in the Qur’an itself (3:28 and 16:106). Taqiyya is the religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about the faith of Islam, and about the beliefs held by its adherents. It has its origins in the need of Shi’a Muslims to hide their faith from their much-more-populous rivals, the Sunnis.
– - I find appalling many of the acts which Muhammad committed, including his personally taking part in the massacre of 600-900 members of the Qurayza, his inspiring the assassination of at least three of those who mocked him, including Abu Afak, a 120-year-old Jewish poet, Asma bint Marwan, a female poet, and Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, a Jewish poet, by in each case asking aloud “who will rid me of this person” and his loyal followers, taking the obvious hint, did as he desired.
– - I find appalling the hatred expressed throughout the Qur’an, the hadith, and the sira for Infidels—all Infidels. They are described as “the most vile of created beings” (98:6) and the Qur’an is full of commands to wage violent jihad against them, merely for the crime of not being Muslims.
– - I find nauseating the historic imposition of the jizya, a capitation tax on Infidels, the requirement that they wear identifying garb on their clothes and dwellings, that they not be able to build or repair houses of worship without the permission of Muslim authorities, that they must ride donkeys sidesaddle and dismount in the presence of Muslims, that they have no legal recourse against Muslims for they are not equal at law—and a hundred other things, designed to insure their permanent, as the canonical texts say, “humiliation.” A practice from the past, you say? Or a practice that in many ways can still be detected, in the shabby treatment of non-Muslims all over the Muslim world, from the mistreatment of Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites, Armenians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, who are still living in Muslim countries, to the disguised jizyah of the Bumpitura system in Malaysia, which forces non-Muslims to hire and share profits with Muslim employees who may have contributed nothing to the financial wellbeing of a particular Some Muslims even seem to regard the welfare benefits they receive in the West as a form of jizyah.
– - I find appalling the mass murder of 60-70 million Hindus over 250 years of Mughal rule, and the destruction of tens of thousands of Hindu (and Buddhist) artifacts, temples, and temple complexes, many of the them listed in two fat volumes edited by Sita Ram Goel.
– - I find the long history of the persecution in Iran of the Zoroastrians, which has led to their decrease in population to a mere 15,000, out of an Iranian population of 85 million, something to deplore. The great scholar of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce, offers piquant details of that persecution, including the deliberate torture and killing of dogs (which are revered by Zoroastrians), even by small Muslim children who are taught to so behave, in order to make Zoroastrians miserable.
– - I find the record of Muslim intellectual achievement singularly unimpressive, and I attribute this to the failure to encourage free and skeptical inquiry, which is necessary for, among other things, the development of modern science. I find convincing the argument that there continued to be some intellectual activity in non-Muslim lands for a few centuries after their initial conquest by Muslims, as long as the Christians and Jews (in the Middle East) were still a significant and fructifying influence, and that when that ceased to be, such activity came to an abrupt end.
– - I deplore the prohibition on sculpture or on paintings of living things. I deplore the horrific vandalism and destruction of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist sites, from the thousands of temples, right up to today, with the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, pre-Islamic archeological sites vandalized all over Iraq, and in Europe itself, churches and statues in public are now the object of Muslim attacks and destruction.
= - I deplore that part of Muslim jurisprudence which renders all treaties between Infidels and Muslims worthless from the viewpoint of the Infidels, though worth a great deal from the viewpoint of the Muslims, for they are only signing a “hudna,” a truce-treaty rather than a true peace-treaty, and because they must ultimately go to war against the Infidel, or press their jihad against the Infidel in other ways. Given the model of the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya that Muhammad concluded with the Meccans, an agreement that was to have lasted ten years but which he broke after 18 months, no Infidel state or people can ever put their trust in a treaty that Muslims make with Infidels.
– - I deplore the speech of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, so roundly applauded several years ago, in which he called for the “development” not of human potential, not of art and science, but essentially of weapons technology and the harnessing and encouraging of Muslim “brain power” for the sole purpose of defeating the Infidels in war.
– - I deplore the fact that Muslims are taught, and clearly many have taken to heart, the idea that they should offer their loyalty only to fellow Muslims, the umma al-islamiyya, and never to Infidels or to the Infidel nation-state to which they have sworn an oath of allegiance—apparently such an oath must always be an act of perjury, because such Muslim loyalty to a non-Muslim polity is impossible.
= - I deplore the ululations of pleasure over acts of terrorism, the passing out of candies, the evident delight shown by celebrating crowds in Cairo, Ramallah, Khartoum, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and of course all over Saudi Arabia, when news of the World Trade Center attacks became known. Only in Iran, with a populace increasingly disaffected from Islam, was the attack greeted with silence. I attribute statements of exultation about the “Infidels” deserving such an attack to the fact that Muslims are taught to view the world as in a state of permanent war between the Believers and the Infidels.
– - On that score, I deplore that mad division of the world between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, and the requirement that there be uncompromising hostility between the two until the final triumph of the former, and the permanent subjugation and incorporation into it of the latter.
– - I deplore the sexual inequality and mistreatment of women, which I can show has a clear basis in the canonical Islamic texts, and is not simply, pace Shirin Ebadi and other quasi-“reformers,” a “cultural” matter.
= - I deplore the fact that Infidels living in Muslim lands feel, with justice, insecure, but that Muslims treat the Infidel countries in which they now live, and their indigenous inhabitants, too, with disdain, arrogance, and endless demands for the indigenous non-Muslims to yield to what Muslims want—whether it be to have crucifixes removed in public places, or to change the laws of laicity in France so that hijabs may be worn in schools and government offices, or to demand that “hate speech” laws be expansively interpreted in order to shut down criticism of Islam.
= - I deplore the emphasis in Islam on the collective, and the hatred for the autonomy of the individual. In particular, I believe that someone born into Islam has a perfect right to leave Islam if he or she chooses—and that there should be no punishment for this free exercise of conscience, much less the murderous punishment so often inflicted.
– - I deplore the fact that while Muslims claim that Islam is a “universalist” religion, it has been a vehicle for Arab imperialism, causing those conquered and Islamized in some cases to forget, or become indifferent or even hostile to, their own pre-Islamic histories. The requirement that the Qur’an be read in Arabic (one of the first things Ataturk did was commission both a Turkish Qur’an and a Turkish tafsir, or commentary), that Muslims turn toward Mecca, in Arabia, five times a day in prayer, that at least once in every Muslim’s life, if he has the means to do so, he should go on the Hajj to Mecca, and the belief many Muslims hold that the ideal form of society can be derived from the Sunna of 7th century Arabia, and that their own societies are worth little by comparison, imposes an Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism that convinces those conquered non-Muslims, now sporting Arab names, that they, too, just like their conquerors, are Arabs.
– - I deplore the attacks on ex-Muslims who, if they publicize their apostasy, often must live in fear. I deplore the attacks on Salman Rushdie and his translators, including the murder of his Japanese translator, the attempts on the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the absence of serious debate about the nature of Islam and of its reform—except as a means to further beguile and distract Infidels who are becoming more wary and harder to bamboozle.
– - I deplore the emptiness of the “Tu Quoque” arguments directed at Christians and Jews, based on a disingenuous quotation of passages—for example, from Leviticus—that are completely ignored and have not been invoked for two thousand years, and I deplore the rewriting of history so that Christianity can be blamed for atrocities with which it had nothing to do, so that a Muslim professor can tell an American university audience that “the Ku Klux Klan used to crucify (!) African-Americans, everyone standing around during the crucifixion singing Christian hymns(!).”
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The KKK hung—lynched—its victims. It never crucified its victims. Crucifixion remained a practice inflicted by Muslim Arabs. Nor did the KKK lynch mobs sing “Christian hymns.” This is a story made-up so as to be able to charge that Christians, too, can be accused of the same barbarity, based on Christian doctrine, as that we accuse Muslims of, based on their texts and teachings.
– - I deplore the phony appeals of the “we all share one Abrahamic faith” and “we are the three monotheisms” when, to my mind, a Christian or a Jew has far less to fear from any practicing polytheistic Hindu or Buddhist than from fellow monotheists who are Muslim.
= - I deplore the fact that Islam is based on the idea of world-conquest, not of accommodation, and that its adherents do not believe in Western pluralism except insofar as this can be used as an instrument, temporarily most useful, to protect the position of Islam until its adherents have firmly established themselves in the Bilad al-Kufr, the Lands of the Infidels.
= - I deplore the view, in Islam, that it is not a saving of an individual soul that is involved when one conducts da’wa or the Call to Islam, but rather, something that appears to be much more like signing someone up for the Army of Islam. The recruit need not have read all the fine print; he need not know Islamic tenets; he need not even have read or know what is in the sira and hadith or much of the Qur’an; he need only recite a single sentence. That does not show a deep concern for the nature of the conversion (sorry, “reversion”).
= - I deplore the sentiment that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.” I deplore the sentiment “War is deception” as uttered by Muhammad. I deplore Muhammad’s remark that “I have been made victorious through terror.” I am appalled at what has happened over 1350 years in vast swaths of territory formerly filled with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists, much of which is now today almost monotonously Islamic. I do not think Islam welcomes any true diversity, if by that is meant the possibility of full equality for non-Muslims.
= - I deplore the fact that slavery is permitted in Islam, that it is discussed in the Qur’an, and that it was suppressed in 19th century Arabia only through the exertion of British naval power in the Gulf; that it was formally done away with in Saudi Arabia only in 1962; that it still exists in Mali, and the Sudan, and even Mauritania, where Arabs enslave black Africans; that it may still exist, away from prying Western eyes, deep in the Arabian interior. Certainly the treatment of the Thai, Filipino, Indian and other female house workers in Arab households in the Gulf amounts to slavery. Muhammad, the Perfect Man, bought, sold, and traded slaves. It is no accident that there has never been a Muslim William Wilberforce.
I could go on, and am prepared to adduce history, and quotations from the canonical texts. And so are the many thousands of Infidels who have looked into Islam, or in their own countries had a close look at the Muslim populations, recently arrived, which have made their own existences, as non-Muslims, far more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous than they would otherwise be.
If this is “Islamophobia,” then please show me exactly why it is irrational (i.e., not based on facts or observable behavior, or a study of history) to dislike or even hate Islam. If you cannot show that, then perhaps that word should not be invoked. But if you do invoke it, be prepared to have copious quotations from Qur’an and hadith and sira constantly presented to audiences so that they may judge Islam for themselves, without the “guidance” of apologists for Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim.
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Hugh Fitzgerald is the author of Islamizing Europe: Is the Conquest Inevitable? and a long-time contributer to Jihad Watch.