Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

The terrifying reaction to a panel debate on Islamophobia | 28 October 2019

Have you ever wondered why so few moderate Muslim voices are heard in the public debate? I used to, until I started to defend my faith against its extremist defamers. I then found out that any Muslim who ventures into this arena to stand up against hardliners is subject to fierce and immediate character assassination.

The process is exposed in a Civitas pamphlet, out this month, entitled ‘The No True Muslim’ fallacy. It provides examples of the attempts to silence people like Sara Khan and Fiyaz Mughal by those who have appointed themselves as Islam’s spokesmen. But I can offer another example: the reaction to a recent event at the last Tory party conference.

The discussion, hosted by Policy Exchange, was about the debate on so-called ‘Islamophobia’ – which, as I have described in The Spectator, is a phrase intended as a weapon to silence, intimidate or even criminalise anyone who scrutinises what extremists have to say. Honed by the ayatollahs in Iran as a form of thought policing, it has been endorsed by various (non-Muslim) political figures in Britain who doubtlessly mean to protect Muslims from attack, but are unwittingly passing a tool into the hands of pro-Islamist hardliners. As a Muslim who has travelled extensively in the Muslim majority world, living in Saudi Arabia and visiting Pakistan for over four decades, I have seen how the device is used to introduce and enforce lethal modern-day blasphemy laws. The idea that Islamophobia could at some point be introduced into British law is terrifying, especially for British Muslims who disagree with what these self-appointed spokesmen think.

This is why I agreed, with 48-hours notice, to fly from New York to the event in Manchester. The debate was robust and sensible, and recorded on video.

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Qanta Ahmed
Written by
Qanta Ahmed
Dr Qanta Ahmed is a British American Muslim physician and journalist, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

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