National Security Adviser Michael Flynn at the National Prayer Breakfast, February, 2017, Washington, DC. Pool/ABACA ABACA/Press Association. All rights reserved.The line of demarcation has been drawn. Is fear of Islam rational? or a mental illness, a phobia? Against the soon-to-be National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn’s claim that fear of Islam is rational, we have the common and damning denunciation of Islamophobia.
My perspective is unusual; I am a historian of modern Europe and a human rights lawyer who works in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. My work defending human rights is born out of requests from Muslim Mauritanians who believe deeply in the promise of human rights – the right to freedom from enslavement, the right to equality before the law, the right to freedom of conscience, the right to freedom of expression, the right to property, and so forth. These are fundamental values that have guided the United States from its revolutionary era and that are enshrined in the major international human rights treaties.
The much celebrated book of Karima Bennoune, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, tells the story of numerous Muslim human rights defenders. All of them are fighting for the fundamental values that animate our American democracy. The polarization of politics – from rational to fear, or phobia – silences this human rights movement. The human rights defenders find themselves on a small isolated island, an ideological no man’s land.
