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Of course, the picture need not be completely dreary. Last year, while filming a drama for Channel 4, producers of the film 'Yasmin', which follows a Muslim woman struggling to deal with the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments after 9/11, found something startling. At one point in the film Yasmin is walking home and is attacked by a group of youths. The filming of this scene was repeatedly disturbed on several occasions when members of the public, oblivious to the dramatisation of events, intervened to stop what they thought was an actual assault taking place. Significantly, the headscarf wearing Yasmin was repeatedly saved by non-Muslim passers by. Channel 4 eventually aired this scene unedited in their final piece although it remained unscripted - and inspiring.
By only examining incidents such as this, Malik failed to acknowledge the existence of an Islamophobic climate. The climate of fear and intimidation in which Muslims live has been contrived through the West's political culture, and is therefore an intellectual not social construct. In practise this means that although Muslims face no immediate threat, the fear of being branded a terrorist or suffering arbitrary detention without due legal process continues to haunt them.
Perhaps the most worrying development however is the appalling treatment meted out to Muslim prisoners in the West. Despite the filibustering of the Bush administration it is now widely acknowledged that American forces are routinely employing advanced torture techniques on their captives. Since 2002, over 34 Iraqis have died in US custody in addition to five Afghans. Of this, at least nine of the deaths have been highlighted as 'deliberate' by independent coroners who cite strangulation, smothering, asphyxiation, blunt force trauma and multiple gunshot wounds as the causes of death. A further eight were deemed to be 'justified homicides'.
When images of shackled, hooded and gagged Guantanamo inmates shocked the world, the Pentagon stated that such treatment was necessary for security reasons. No such excuse could be offered when the Abu Ghraib scandal finally emerged. In a recently published book, The Torture Papers, Karen Greenberg, Director of the Centre on Law and Security at NYU, carefully shows how the White House planned coercive interrogation and torture techniques for use in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. She shows how the administration was keen to establish legally viable arguments for the use of systematic torture, forbidden under international law, in order to evade judicial reprisals in the aftermath of these practises and policies becoming known.
Having preached lofty ideals about human rights, international protocol and the rule of law to Muslims for decades, the ease with which these principles have been discarded when pursuing the West's strategic aims in the Muslim world has been staggering.
The holding of prisoners without trial and charge, often coupled with a refusal to reveal the evidence against them, is almost exclusively confined to Muslims in the West. As prisoners continue to languish indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay, Muslims naturally feel their communities are under scrutiny and their actions inhibited. Malik and those who deny the existence of Islamophobia fail to appreciate this feeling by simply misreading the causes behind it.
One of the nineteenth centuries most celebrated authors, the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky, incarcerated himself for long periods, once argued that a civilisation should be judged by the way it treats its prisoners. Small wonder then that Muslims are worried.
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