It’s not racist to criticise Islam

The University of Sussex was fined £585,000 last month by the Office for Students, the universities regulator, for failing to protect Kathleen Stock’s freedom of speech. In 2021, Professor Stock was hounded out of her job by a censorious mob that accused her of ‘transphobia’. Around the same time, the University of Bristol also refused to defend my own academic freedom, in the name of combatting ‘Islamophobia’.

In a social-media campaign, the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) denounced me as an Islamophobe and called for my dismissal. This was because I had referred students to literature on Islam and human rights that BRISOC members thought cast their faith in a negative light. Although I was unequivocally exonerated by an official inquiry, the university nevertheless announced that it ‘recognised’ BRISOC’s ‘concerns’ about me. Bristol also removed the ‘Islam, China and the Far East’ module from my Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society course, in order to protect the ‘sensitivities’ of those taking it.

There is a grave risk that the working group recently appointed by the UK government to define ‘Islamophobia’ may make the misfortune I endured more likely for others. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner announced the working group earlier this year, claiming that establishing an official Islamophobia definition would be a ‘crucial step’ in tackling anti-Muslim hate crime. The group is chaired by former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve KC, who wrote the foreword for the now notorious 2018 All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report on Islamophobia. This produced a definition that is unhelpfully broad. It classifies Islamophobia as a ‘type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. If the definition created by Rayner’s working group ends up anything like the APPG one, we are in serious trouble.

It is not at all obvious that a new definition is a good idea. As it stands, there are already plenty of existing definitions of Islamophobia. This, in itself, indicates an acute lack of consensus about what the term actually means. The hope of this working group is that producing yet another definition will assist the government and other bodies to ‘understand, quantify and define prejudice, discrimination and hate crime targeted against Muslims’. But inciting anti-Muslim hatred is already a crime in the UK. Religious discrimination is also unlawful.

Besides, defining anti-Muslim hatred is one thing, countering it is another. There is no evidence, for example, that the non-statutory official definition of anti-Semitism has had any impact upon anti-Semitism itself.

Fiyaz Mughal – founder of Tell MAMA, an organisation that records anti-Muslim hate crime and offers support to those who have experienced it – believes the entire exercise is ‘at best misguided, at worst counterproductive’. ‘Defining Islamophobia is not a solution’, he says, ‘it’s a distraction when existing laws have robustly brought perpetrators of anti-Muslim hate to justice’. Mughal sees far more value in addressing radicalisation and extremism, wherever it appears – a much more difficult and thorny task for the government than simply penning new definitions.

The danger is that the new official definition will end up being far too broad. This is the main problem with the APPG definition, which effectively classifies any and all criticism of Islam as Islamophobic. While the government’s working group has promised that its definition will preserve the ‘right to criticise, express dislike of, or insult religions and / or the beliefs and practices of adherents’, whether or not this will happen in practice remains to be seen. It’s also highly unlikely that the working group will address the issue of false accusations of Islamophobia or the censorship of those accused.

The big danger is that this new definition will treat Islam as a race, as the APPG definition does. Contrary to received wisdom, Islam is a religion, and therefore Islamophobia cannot be a type of ‘racism’. Its adherents come from every race under the Sun – it is a multiracial faith. To suggest otherwise betrays a narrow, monolithic and exclusionary conception of ‘Muslimness’.

What’s more, the attempt to demonise criticism of this particular religion could well chill criticism of religion across the board. Members of other faiths are unlikely to welcome a customised, official definition of unacceptable hostility towards Muslims without one that also applies to them.

According to The Economist, the working group is ‘likely to find itself wading into controversy’. Indeed, it will be a miracle if it manages to produce a definition that does not silence legitimate debate and conflate criticism with racism. The supposed cure for Islamophobia is likely to be more dangerous than the ‘disease’.

Steven Greer is emeritus professor at the University of Bristol Law School, research director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam and author of Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation (Academica Press, 2023). His upcoming book, Islamophobia and Free Speech, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.