“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside-down world.“

Salman Rushdie

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Victims in their minds

For over 1,400 years, Islamic imperialists have been spreading their religion by the sword, executing non-Muslims who refuse to convert to Islam or live as second-class citizens (dhimmis). Wherever they are in the majority, Muslims engage in terrible oppression of non-Muslims. In Pakistan, the government deliberately seeks out Christians to clean the country’s sewers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians regularly have their churches attacked by jihadist thugs. In Saudi Arabia, Christians are forbidden from building churches or practicing their religion in public. In Nigeria, 3,462 Christians are estimated to have been killed in the first 200 days of 2021; this equates to roughly 17 murders per day. This is the brutal reality of Islamic supremacism.

And yet, Muslims claim to be the ones who are oppressed. While they persecute religious minorities and murder anyone suspected of blasphemy, Muslims claim to be persecuted. This severe persecution complex is rooted in the Qur’an, which characterises the Meccan polytheists’ resistance to Muhammad’s destruction of their culture as persecution, telling Muslims that they were driven out “because you believe in Allah” (60:1) and “because of religion” (60:9). Thus, Muslims are conditioned to see themselves as victims whenever they are unable to force Islam on others. Muslims are “oppressed” wherever they do not have dominion over non-Muslims. In a brilliant exposé of Muslim victimhood, Apostate Prophet makes this point:

In the West, Muslims enjoy benefits that they can only dream of in the Islamic world, from gainful employment to social welfare. Indeed, this is why they emigrate to Europe in such huge numbers, giving up everything for a chance at a better life. And yet, it is common to hear these same Muslims complaining of “Islamophobia” and “Western oppression”; this is the Muslim persecution complex in action. No amount of state subsidies can reverse this attitude. On the contrary, the better they are treated, the more resentful they become: for in the Qur’an, Muslims are warned that if non-Muslims treat them well, it is only to lure them away from Islam. In a blistering sermon, the British-Pakistani preacher Abu Waleed puts it succinctly:

Among themselves, Muslim grievance-mongers will vent their contempt for democracy and desire for shari’ah. To win the political support of non-Muslims, however, they are obliged to disguise their authoritarian agenda. Thus, they point to genuine cases of oppression – for example, those of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma or the Uyghur Muslims in China. It is difficult to overstate how cynical this is, for just like the Kurds, these groups are widely regarded with suspicion by Muslims for having an identity other than Islam. This mistrust can be plainly seen in how, on the detainment and torture of over a million Uyghurs in Chinese ‘re-education camps’, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has thus far been completely silent.

This cynicism extends to the war in Iraq. Under Ba’athist rule, jihadists had an ally in Saddam Hussein. Not only did Saddam handsomely reward the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, but as early as 1994, his regime was implementing elements of shari’ah, e.g. amputations of the hand and foot. With his removal by American forces in 2003, official Iraqi support for terrorism and shari’ah was ended. This is what informs claims of “Western oppression” by Muslim propagandists, not the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost. Indeed, if human life was their concern, then they would condemn Saddam’s chemical purges of the dissident Shi’a and Kurds with equal vigour. That they cannot bring themselves to do this speaks volumes.

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Wallowing in victimhood

The Muslim persecution complex leads the affected to see discrimination where there is none at all. For example, many Muslims have been quick to cite the recent inspection of Asim Qureshi – director of the hardline Salafist lobby CAGE – at Heathrow Airport as evidence of “Islamophobia”. In reality, Qureshi and his group have myriad ties to extremists and jihadist groups, from Al-Qaeda to the Taliban. Qureshi himself has described ISIS executioner Jihadi John as “kind and gentle”, and refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery. Thus, it is only right that he attracts the interest of airport security. Qureshi’s “oppression” at the hands of British security personnel is a pure fantasy, conjured up by a slave to Islamic victimhood.

Arguably, the Muslim persecution complex was most readily observable in Sayyid Qutb – a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 60s, who remains a cornerstone of the modern Islamist movement. In his self-pitying manifesto Milestones, which is required reading for many Muslim youth groups and student societies, Qutb alleges that the Jews are engaged in a conspiracy “to eliminate all limitations, especially the limitations imposed by faith and religion, so that the Jews may penetrate into the body politic of the whole world and then may be free to perpetuate their evil designs”. Qutb goes on to accuse the West of devising a careful scheme to erode belief in Islam and ultimately destroy Muslim society:

The Western ways of thought and all the sciences started on the foundation of these poisonous influences with an enmity towards all religions, and in particular with greater hostility towards Islam. This enmity towards Islam is especially pronounced and many times is the result of a well thought out scheme, the object of which is first to shake the foundations of Islamic beliefs and then gradually to demolish the structure of Muslim society.

This paranoid, baseless drivel appeals to resentful young Muslims, who, raised to believe that their religion is perfect, would sooner blame the infidel West for the decrepitude of the Islamic world. If the ummah flounders while the West pushes back the frontiers of technology, then there must be some wicked kuffar conspiracy designed to keep the Muslims down. They cannot allow themselves to think that by obsessing over which foot to enter the bathroom with, or whether or not their food contains gelatine, Muslims might be responsible for their own misery. This culture of victimhood is the fundamental reason that the Islamic world is in such a dire state today, as this brave Iraqi news anchor eloquently affirms:

In our follow-up article, we will address what is perhaps the defining myth of “global Muslim oppression” – namely, how Palestinians became refugees and why they continue to be without a state. Without endorsing the construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank or denying the war crimes committed by the Israeli Defence Forces, we will dismantle the propaganda of those who blame Israel for the preponderance of antisemitism among Muslims and the indiscriminate killing of Jews by jihadists. We will counter the vulgar anti-Israel narrative which has gained traction among many Irish parliamentarians, and show how the real persecution of Palestinians is happening under the Islamic imperialists of Hamas.