Media and Minorities

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Yasemin Shooman
from within to destroy Western societies. The fiction of a threatening Muslim
domination resembles patterns of antisemitic thinking. Thus, the new anti-
Muslim discourses combine different threads of traditional racist thinking
by simultaneously ascribing inferiority and supremacy. The attitude of superiority
over the Orient, whose roots are in European colonialism’s construal
of it as an object to be civilized, merges with a traditional fear of Muslims that
goes further back in history. The menacing idea of the infiltration and subjugation
of the West modernizes the Christian European scenarios of fear of
the Middle Ages and early modern times. According to the historian Almut
Höfert, in historical discourse on the “Turk menace,” people assumed “that
all of Christianity was threatened to be overrun by the Anti-Christ as embodied
by the Ottomans.”23 This apocalyptic narrative echoes in the presentday
theme of a threatening “Islamization of Europe.”
“Taqiyya” and “Birth Jihad”:
The Accusations of Deception and Strategic Reproduction
In addition to the infiltration fantasy, the inventory of core anti-Muslim topoi
on the Internet includes fantasies of deception. According to what one finds
on Politically Incorrect under the heading “Taqiyya,” Muslims who do not express
extremist views are liars and “outed” by PI as frauds. The Arabic word
“taqiyya,” which can be translated as “dissimulation in the face of danger,” refers
to the denial of one’s faith when one’s life, or the lives of family members,
is threatened. Historically, taqiyya was primarily practiced by Shiites, who
were repeatedly persecuted as heretics by the Sunni Orthodoxy.24 The concept
comes from sura 16, verse 106 of the Qur’an, according to which God does
not punish someone who denies Him under duress. Taqiyya is by no means a
commandment to deceive; it merely provides protection from divine punishment
for denying one’s faith in the case of threatened violence. Islamophobes
deliberately misinterpret and distort the concept of taqiyya in order to insinuate
that Muslims have a special duty to deceive others.
In an article saying that “the Taqiyya Masters are most dangerous,” PI’s
author Michael Stürzenberger claimed that Mouhanad Khorchide, a professor
23 Almut Höfert, “Alteritätsdiskurse. Analyseparameter historischer Antagonismusnarrative
und ihre historiographischen Folgen,” in Repräsentationen der islamischen Welt im
Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Gabriele Haug-Moritz and Ludolf Pelizaeus (Münster:
Aschendorff, 2010), 28.
24 Der Islam. Zeitschrift
für Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients 57, no. 2 (1980): 249.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
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