The Qur’an is being studied for clues to the militant Muslim mind. There was no such rush to buy the Bible or the Torah when some Afrikaners or Serbs or Jewish settlers were justifying their actions in the name of fulfilling their God’s mission. Even more instructive of our troubled times is that anti-Islamists are quoting the Qur’an, selectively and out of context, exactly as Osama bin Laden does — they to “prove” that Islam is a militant faith and he to justify his murders. What are we to make of this axis of evil?

Islamophobia is not confined to overt bigots. The broader public is complicit in varying degrees. Anti-Islamic screeds have been bestsellers in the US and Europe. And poll after poll has quantified broad-based hostility to Muslims.27 What is said and tolerated about Muslims would at once be denounced as hatemongering if applied to other people. Replace the words Muslim and Islam in public pronouncements with Jew and Judaism, or Christian and Christianity, and see how it reads.

“Clash of Ignorance”

“What we have is not a clash of civilizations but a clash of ignorance,” the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, told me in 2005. “You can be an educated person in the Judeo-Christian world and know nothing — I mean, nothing — about the Islamic world. The presumption in democracies is that the electorate is capable of commenting on major issues of national or international importance, and that our leaders are educated in the subject matters that they need to know about in order to lead. So unless there is a better understanding of the Islamic world, democracies are not going to be able to express themselves on Islamic issues.”

Much of the present anger at Muslims is clearly rooted in post-9/11 fears and has led to a demonization of Muslims on a scale not seen in modern times. When Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim elected to Congress, announced in 2006 that he would take the oath of office on a Qur’an, a firestorm broke out, with commentators accusing him of being unpatriotic, un-American and, in the words of one, “undermining American civilization.”28 In 2007, when the New York Department of Education approved an Arabic-English school — to add to the nearly seventy other dual-language schools already in existence — critics equated the Arabic language with Muslims, and Muslims with madrassahs (religious schools), and madrassahs with terrorism. The irony was that the Khalil Gibran Academy was named after the famous Lebanese American poet and artist who was, in fact, a Christian and had lived in New York in the early twentieth century.

The anti-Muslim hysteria is more dangerous than the bigotry against the Japanese in World War II or against the Chinese a century ago, says Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of law at UCLA. In a 2002 interview with me, he identified four sweeping Islamophobic themes: