Xenophobia: a fear of strangers

A side issue at the climate summit held at Glasgow for two weeks beginning on October 30 and ending two weeks later was the handling of the massive displacement of people likely to result from the warming of the globe because of climate change. It is not only the expected rise of surface temperatures that would force people out of the inhabited areas that would no longer be lived in for most people. Those who can leave would leave and head towards places within reach in the countries in which they reside. Heavy rains and floods associated with global warming are another reason why people may decide to relocate. Rising seas are another result of global warming that would displace millions of people. The continued existence of a number of small islands in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean may simply disappear and go under water. Some of the delta regions in Bangladesh and parts of coastal India may bring water hundreds of miles into the land through which these mighty rivers pass. This would also result in outmigration. A significant increase in surface temperatures may also persuade people to move. Some of the small towns in Sindh’s desert areas have become unlivable.

Some of those who are looking for more livable places may head towards Western Europe and North America. That this could happen was shown by the refugee crisis of a decade or so ago that brought more than a million people to Germany and a fewer number to France, Italy, Britain and Sweden. The people who sought refuge in Europe were mostly from the Middle East, escaping the wars that were being fought in the area. This movement has had serious political and social consequences. They were based on two types of fears: Xenophobia and Islamophobia. Both are fears, the first of foreigners and the other of Islam. Almost all the migrants to Europe in the opening decade of the 21^st century were Muslims.

What makes people afraid of foreigners is the subject of a recent book, Of Fear and Foreigners: A History of Xenophobia, by George Makari, a psychiatrist and historian of considerable repute. In his telling of this phenomenon, it is not only among the White inhabitants of Europe and America that were subjected to it but has a long history in the East as well. “Xenophobia no longer applied to some rare medical illness or broad rivalry between Western nations,” he writes. It also “served as an explanation of the fearsome trouble Western globalists might encounter in the East, where an irrational, violent hatred of all outsiders might take hold.” In fact, it was the ferocity of the way what came to be called the “Boxer Rebellion” that unfolded in South China and led to the adoption of the term “xenophobia” by those who investigated the incident and wrote about it. This fear of foreigners as well as contempt for the people who looked differently led to extreme behaviour on the part of several Western nations that encountered people they refused to recognise as belonging to the human race. As a song in the musical South Pacific, sung by a young man who had relocated from Philadelphia in the American state of Pennsylvania to an island in the Pacific and had fallen in love with a local girl, puts it: “You were taught to hate when you were six or seven or eight, to hate all those your relatives hate — people whose eyes are differently shaped and their skin is of a different shade.”

What could be the solution to such an entrenched problem? This is a question with which Makari ends his investigation. “Radical egalitarianism poses the greatest threat to xenophobia,” he suggests. But he doesn’t tell us how this would be adopted in the countries that have now succumbed not only to these fears but also about the fear related to the invasion of their faith by foreign religions. There is considerable anxiety regarding the encroachment of Islam into their countries and into their systems of beliefs.

Some of these reactions invited concern from some Muslims who were in a position to take action to stop the attacks and harassment of their communities. Representative Ilhan Omar came into the United States with her family as a refugee escaping the targeting of Muslims in her country, Somalia. Her family settled in the state of Minnesota and she was elected to Congress from a constituency in that state. Minnesota has a large Somali population. She is one of three Muslims who are now in the US Congress. Anti-Muslim hatred has reached “epidemic proportions”, she said while explaining why she along with Representative Jan Schakowsky from the state of Illinois have crafted a bill for consideration by Congress.

The Combating International Islamophobia Act asks the State Department to establish an office headed by a special envoy to be appointed by the secretary of state. The office would record instances of Islamophobia, including harassment of Muslims and vandalism of their mosques, schools and cemeteries worldwide. These would be included in the reports the department would write and publicise. The reports would also highlight propaganda efforts by state and non-state media “to promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Muslim people”, says the draft of the bill. The State Department in collecting data and reporting on it would not only focus on the situation in the United States. Its reach would be global and include material from and analysis of the situations in China, India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

In their effort to draw support for their bill, Omar and Schakowsky quote extensively from the report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur. Ahmed Shaheed, the independent expert, said that in 2017, thirty per cent of Americans saw Muslims “in a negative light”, and that 4 in 10 people in surveys conducted in Europe in 2018 and 2019 “held unfavorable views of Muslims”. Since nine-eleven, 69 per cent of more than 1,000 American Muslims surveyed said that they had experienced bigotry and discrimination, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a report. In 2021, as many as 500 instances of anti-Muslim hate and bias have been documented in the United States, CAIR said in a mid-year review. Representative Omar was targeted by a number of extreme right-wing groups. Their attacks are “informed by the fact that I am a Muslim, and there are so many Muslims in the US that have experienced anti-Muslim violence since 9/11”, she said.

Would the writing of a report in Islamophobia and publishing its content check the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in such predominantly White countries as those in North America and Western Europe? The answer is not clear. Islamophobia is being exploited for political purposes by politicians such as Donald Trump in America and Viktor Orban in Hungary. But demographic trends in these places do not favour these fear-causing politicians. Several European countries have entered the demographic phase of zero population growth. This means rapid aging of populations. Declining populations cannot be economically dynamic. The only choice the Europeans have is to admit people from the populations that have much larger proportion of youth. This is the case for most Muslim countries in the European neighborhood.

In 2017, Pew Research, a Washington-based think-tank, projected that the Muslim proportion in the population in Europe could be between 7 and 14 per cent of the total depending on the number of migrants allowed into the region. The lower proportion assumed that European nations will be able to totally close their borders to migration; the higher proportion means relatively open borders.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2021.

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