Trego's Mountain Ear

I’m listening to the word islamophobia being tossed around the air waves.  It seems as carelessly coined a word as homophobia – and years ago, I had to explain that homophobia was a word that misused the term phobia.  Here’s the definition, copied directly from the net:

phobia /fō′bē-ə/

noun

1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.
3. Any morbid uncontrollable dread or fear.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

The critical thing about a phobia is that it has to be “persistent, abnormal and irrational.”  My fear of rattlesnakes isn’t irrational if I am in an area where they are present – though my situational awareness makes me more likely to spot them than folks who aren’t so snake-scared.  I blame my grandmother’s stories.  I live in Grizzly country – yet I consider the .45 on my belt as caution, not a phobic reaction.  One of the nice things about rattlesnakes is that you don’t have to concern yourself with a stray round – the legless critters usually are touching their backstops.

Anyway, Jackson was a great kid – I thought back to a comment I had heard in the Civil Rights days: “Would you want your sister to marry one?”  Jackson was black – but my non-existent sister could have found a lot of whites that couldn’t match him as a human being.  He was also gay as all hell, so I could never use him as an example to those long-deceased bigots.

With a generation between our ages, his question – “Why was your generation so afraid of gay people?” took a bit of thought to answer.  He had accepted the word ‘homophobic’ as meaning a ‘persistent, abnormal and irrational’ fear of gays.  After all, Jackson had been admitted to a Ph.D. program – years before he had learned the definition of phobia in a psych class. 

Bottom line was that, as we talked about the word ‘homophobic’ I began to realize that it had been adopted in the academy with the psychological meaning, but originated with that second definition – ‘a strong fear, dislike or aversion.”  Emphasis on the dislike or aversion.  Over the generation that separated Jackson and I, the language, the meaning had changed.

So I’m kind of prepared to look at ‘islamophobia’.  Around the year 612, Muhammed started preaching monotheism in Mecca – a rather polytheistic neighborhood.  In 622, his uncle, the chief, dies, and Muhammed, whose neighbors aren’t accepting his message, bugs out for a little town called Medina.  The neighbors had put a hit on him, so Mecca wasn’t safe anymore.  Less than a year after he made it out of Mecca, Mo started raiding Meccan caravans.  After graduating from caravan raids to outright war on his former neighbors, Muhammed eliminated the three Jewish tribes that lived in Medina.  By the time he died, in the middle of 632, he was running the southern part of Arabia, and had missionaries sent out to Persia, the Eastern Roman Empire, and Axum (Ethiopia).

By 642, Islamic forces had taken Christian Egypt.  By 710, the Muslim invasion of Spain began – it would be 1492, 782 years later, before the last Moor was driven from Spain.

I could go into the history in more detail – but the point I’m after is that fear of Islam in terms of warfare and invasion doesn’t qualify as persistent, abnormal and irrational. The argument that Muslims recall the Crusades only goes so far when you check the dates and see that the first Crusade started in 1096 – Abu Bakr took Jerusalem in 637, five years after Muhammed’s death and 550 years before the first crusade.  A few of the incidents over the past half-century push my thoughts toward the belief that there are enough of those to make fear of Islam look more normal and rational.

Simple research yields a simple argument – the term islamophobic, like the term homophobic, misuses the term phobia.