“Islamophobia” — UK’s Weaponisation of an Idea Pathogen

By Khaled Salih

[I]n the 1800s the dominant racial ideology in America really was white supremacy. As a result, the master-debaters of that age often used their reasoning to justify anti-black racism. An example would be the American physician Samuel Cartwright. A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn’t want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania[*], which could be remedied by “whipping the devil” out of them. Like the fictitious disorder that white people are diagnosed with today—white fragility—drapetomania is an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.

— GURWINDER, 20250213

If drapetomania was the pseudo-scientific lunacy of a slaveholding age, “Islamophobia” is the psychological conceit of a guilt-ridden one. Both spring from the same diseased impulse to medicalise moral discomfort — to turn dissent from a prevailing order into a diagnosable illness. In the nineteenth century, the physician Samuel Cartwright diagnosed the yearning for freedom in the enslaved as madness; today, Western intellectuals diagnose the desire to examine Islam with reason as a “phobia.” The plantation doctor’s whip has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s reprimand, but the logic remains unchanged: the heretic must be corrected, not heard. Drapetomania, in its time, absolved the slave master of cruelty; “Islamophobia” now absolves the cowardly of thought. Both are symptoms of what can only be called a moral neurosis — a civilisation so frightened of its own conscience that it pathologises those who still possess one.