On Friday, Jan. 26, the Muslim Chaplaincy at the Claremont Colleges collaborated with the Bayan Islamic Graduate School to host a conversation with Dalia Mogahed about the rise of Islamophobia in the United States. This is following Israel’s escalating attack on and destruction of Gaza that intensified following Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, which has since resulted in the deaths of over 25,000 in Gaza. The event was held at the McAllister Centre for Religious Activities.
Mogahed is the first Muslim-American female Presidential Advisor, appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009. She is the former executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and is a frequent expert commentator in global media outlets and international forums.
According to Laura Muna-Landa, assistant vice president for Communications & Community Relations at The Claremont College Services, Mogahed was asked to speak at Friday’s talk because of the recent upsurge of student activism regarding the violence in Israel and Palestine across college campuses.
“In response to the heightened activism on college campuses amid the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mogahed was invited to provide students with an opportunity to gain insights into global and local matters impacting their lives, both as students and as global citizens and to encourage constructive activism,” Muna-Landa said.
During the talk, Mogahed described Islamophobia as a manufactured phenomenon.
“Islamophobia is one phenomenon that I don’t think — I don’t believe — is native to America,” Mogahed said. “The phenomena that exists today and is growing, unfortunately, I want to say is not something inherent to the United States. It’s something that is new, relatively new and manufactured, not organic.”
Mogahed explained that Islamophobia not only impacts Muslims, but also American society as a whole, linking the phenomenon to political manipulation, other forms of bigotry, acceptance of authoritarianism and violence.
“Islamophobia is a threat to every American, not just the one percent who identify as Muslim and not even the other hundreds and thousands who are mistaken for being Muslim, like Sikhs and Hindus and other brown people,” Mogahed said. “When I say every American, I mean it.”
Mogahed cited an unreleased study that she was involved with at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, which found that the strongest predictor of Islamophobia is anti-Jewish sentiment, describing them as “two branches on one tree.”
“The strongest predictor of self-reported prejudice against Muslims is when someone said that they had prejudice against Jews; they were 30 times as likely to also have prejudice against Muslims,” Mogahed explained. “There was no single variable that had a stronger predictive power than how someone felt than when someone felt negatively toward Jewish people.”
Mogahed then explained how Islamophobia is linked to the acceptance of authoritarianism, referring to an Islamophobia Index that she helped create at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.
The index measured the level of public endorsement for anti-Muslim stereotypes. The higher that endorsement was and the higher Islamophobia rose, the more likely people were to accept authoritarian actions by the government, such as shutting down freedom of speech and association.
Mogahed argued that the perpetuation of these stereotypes contributes to the dehumanization of Muslims, which fuels Islamophobia and harmfully impacts society.
“Islamophobia makes us less safe, less free and as it grows, it fuels other types of bigotry,” Mogahed said. “The dehumanization of the people of Gaza and of Palestinians is fueling Islamophobia at home, where a six year old child was stabbed by his own landlord 26 times and where three young men no older than my children were shot, because they were speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs.”
Mogahed urged audience members to stand against Islamophobia by becoming critical consumers of media and political rhetoric and by recognizing common stereotypes of Muslim individuals. She went on to provide examples of some of these stereotypes.
“[The stereotypes are that] Muslims are more violent than other people; Muslims are more misogynistic than other people; Muslims are barbaric; Muslims are inherently hostile toward America; And the fifth is they are collectively guilty,” Mogahed said. “These are the five key tropes that when people endorse them, when people promote them, they produce bad things for democracy as a whole.”
According to Mogahed, another way to combat Islamophobia is through religious literacy. She explained that this can equip people with information they wouldn’t otherwise know, allowing them to go and spread this information and educate others.
“If I know about the faith that is being demonized and blamed, I’m not gonna fall for that propaganda,” Mogahed said.
Audience member Noon El Mosalami PO ’24 said that while the talk brought up some interesting points, there is still more that needs to be discussed when it comes to Islamophobia.
“Mogahed talked a lot about anti-Muslim racism and its rise and its roots, like settler colonial era Europe and the ways that a lot of people continue to be marginalized by the U.S., by these systems that perpetuate harm,” El Mosalami said. “But we also need to discuss a lot more about how we even got here, the kind of trajectories that we want to get towards and what it is that U.S. imperialism really means, what is it to represent so much of our [Islamic] culture backwards.”
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