pho•bi•a ˈfōbēə [Noun]: An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something. A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation the affected person will go to great lengths to avoid, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed.
In this day and age when cultural and religious tolerance is trying to prevail in this crumbling intolerance, a new form of phobia is taking over the local masses, and that is in the form of coining the term ‘Islamophobia.’
The above definition of phobia manages to capture the disappointing mind-frame of an ill-educated American armed with an irrational fear towards people of a certain faith, and will go to great lengths to avoid any “danger” coming his or her way. Albeit, in this case, the danger is practically non-existent. Religious discrimination against Muslims is an ever-evolving issue, and we need to address it now more than ever before.
People have, time and again, confused intellectual understanding with experientialism. While few people do offer sympathy to this phobia, the rest fail to understand the gravity of this situation. Try cornering a devout but good-hearted Christian for the wrong-doings of the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church, and you may make his blood boil. Now consider the well-staged use of this term by the media and people that tag the second largest community of religious group as terrorists and this puts things into perspective.
Classifying and segregating people based on their beliefs and choices has always been an innate behavior pattern of humans, albeit, this demeaning terminology may just have some horrifying repercussions. The Quran never explicitly ordered Muslims to kill and murder others, just like the Holy Bible. And yet the followers of Islam are vehemently cornered for the work of few extremists.
While the term was coined in 1918 by the Algerian intellectual Sliman ben Ibrahim in French, the terminology – islamophobie – was used to describe the fear of Islam by liberal Muslims and Muslim feminists. Unfortunately, by the end of the century, the term had sculpted to become the torchbearing word for devout racists across America.
For a country peppered with trigger-happy people, in 2015, there were at least 355 mass shooting incidents in the United States. Only three of these, or .008 percent, were committed by Muslims. While many people have argued about the recent onslaughts of terrorist attacks to be the reason behind the rise of Islamophobia, the fear is horribly displaced. Statistically, the chances of an American being killed in a terrorist attack by someone claiming that Islam sanctions their actions is 1 in 20,000,000, remarkably lower than the chances of them being killed by a cow, 1 in 173,871. Islamophobia isn’t real, people, cow phobia is.
