Mick Hartley

Pakistani journalist Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, interviewed at Spiked:

The term Islamophobia is duplicitous. I would even say it’s deceitful. Islamophobia means an irrational fear of Islam. But Islam is an ideology. It should be as open to critique as any other.

There are at least 12 Muslim-majority countries that impose the death penalty for blasphemy. Plenty more Islamic countries have harsh sentences for criticising Islam. For the UK to in any way limit criticism of Islam, and to hide behind the concept of human rights as the term Islamophobia does, is an insult to the many victims of Islam in those countries. I think it’s very concerning that many British Muslim groups have offered their full-throated support for Labour’s Islamophobia definition….

Denmark has made it illegal to burn the Koran. Sweden criminalises this through other laws. The problem is, once you tell any particular community that it will be accommodated if it reacts violently, it will only provide more motivation to act violently. The more space you cede to anyone upholding Islamist values, the more space they will demand. It’s never going to be enough. The question is, how much of your world are you prepared to give away?

It's worth revisiting Pascal Bruckner, from 2011:

At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term "Islamophobia" formed in analogy to "xenophobia". The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. This term, which is worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world…

On a global scale, we are abetting the construction of a new thought crime, one which is strongly reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union dealt with the "enemies of the people". And our media and politicians are giving it their blessing. Did not the French president himself, never one to miss a blunder – not compare Islamophobia with Antisemitism? A tragic error. Racism attacks people for what they are: black, Arab, Jewish, white. The critical mind on the other hand undermines revealed truths and subjects the scriptures to exegesis and transformation. To confuse the two is to shift religious questions from an intellectual to a judicial level. Every objection, every joke becomes a crime.

And my take:

A fundamental principle of Western thought is the separation between a person and their beliefs. This is not a fundamental principle of Islamic thought. Quite the contrary: born a Muslim, you die a Muslim. The notion that you might change your mind is so alien that the punishment for apostasy – in theory, if not necessarily in practice – is death.

The charge of Islamophobia deliberately obscures that separation between a person and their beliefs. It accepts the Islamic vision of an immutable union of person and religion. We should refuse to accept those terms. A person's ethnic origins may be Pakistani, Arab, Kurd, European, whatever, and to criticise or abuse them for that is racist and unacceptable. Their beliefs, whether in Islam, Scientology, UFOs, or any other ideology, creed or cult, is an entirely different matter, and should be open to criticism, debate, scepticism, up to and including ridicule. That's the way we do it, and that's what we should be defending. Worship who or what you want, wear what you want, think what you want, but don't expect to be spared from being offended by the opinions and beliefs of others. The charge of Islamophobia is, precisely, an attempt to make criticism of Islam illegitimate – and that attempt should be resisted. We should be free to criticise Islam just as we criticise Christianity, socialism, capitalism, or any other system of beliefs.