Rajagopalan: Rise in Islamophobia

Kavitha Rajagopalan is the author of "Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West."

When terrible things happen, we ask ourselves why.

Two weeks ago, Anders Behring Breivik killed 76 Norwegian civilians -- shooting dead dozens of young people one at a time -- in what he described as an opening sortie in the war to stem Muslim domination of Europe. Within days, the international media had found citations from American bloggers in his 1,500-page manifesto. It's disturbing to think that American Islamophobia had any role, no matter how small, in this tragedy.

The thought is reminiscent of questions asked after the Jan. 8 Tucson shooting, or the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting at Fort Hood. Did Jared Lee Loughner target Rep. Gabrielle Giffords because of a political map with Giffords' electoral district in crosshairs? Was Nidal Hassan Malik driven to shoot and kill his fellow servicemen because of his correspondence with Yemen-based al-Qaida cleric?

No evidence has linked any of these gunmen to broader organizations or plots. In the public imagination, at least, all three have been rendered insane. Still, after each event, it seemed some were using intolerance for political gain and others were denouncing intolerance for corresponding political gain.

Intolerance is more insidious than just the stuff of political theater. It can be destabilizing to pluralistic, multicultural societies. And it shouldn't take a madman's manifesto to encourage us to consider its destructive potential.

Islamophobia is making fewer headlines than it was a year ago, when an American pastor threatened to publicly burn the Quran in Florida (he finally did it in March) and plans for an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan were being widely reviled as "building mosque at Ground Zero." At the time, the Pew Research Center reported that the percentage of Americans with a positive feeling toward Muslims declined from 41 percent in 2005 to 30 percent in 2010, even lower than it had been in the months after 9/11.

But this June, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, America's largest Islamic civil rights advocacy group, released a report documenting that Islamophobia is on the rise.

Nonetheless, American Muslims seem to be feeling more at home than before. In a Gallup poll released this year, 60 percent of American Muslims polled reported that they are "thriving," up 19 points from a similar study conducted in 2008.

Why? According to the poll, American Muslims have felt more politically enfranchised and economically stable in the past few years. And they have access to a similar set of rights and opportunities as other American religious groups to a far greater degree than their religious counterparts in the United Kingdom, France or Norway.

Giving equal access to rights and opportunities isn't just good for minority groups, it's good for the country. After all, people who are socially and economically thriving are simply more willing and able to invest in their society than those who aren't.

So it's bad news that this might be changing. The CAIR study makes a distinction between people who simply have a sense of unease or discomfort with Islam, and instead focused on people and organizations that openly seek to restrict the rights and freedoms of Muslims, for no other reason than prejudice. It is this latter group that is showing an increase.

Promoting the wholesale disenfranchisement of a segment of its population is a surefire recipe for trouble in a multicultural society, and Muslim-Americans aren't the only ones who will suffer. Our country as a whole would lose the economic energy and social contributions of a diverse, growing and engaged group of Americans.

Then Islamophobia's victim would be America as a whole. That would be a real tragedy.