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# The Suicidal Empathy: How “Islamophobia” Became the Racism That Protects a Religion
- URL: https://otherwise.ghost.io/the-suicidal-empathy-how-islamophobia/
- Published: 2025-11-16T08:39:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-17T13:42:54.000Z
- Author: Khaled Salih
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1792244264359, #Import 2026-10-17 14:38

*By Khaled Salih*

**A curious superstition**

There is a curious superstition doing the rounds in certain corners of Western academia and policy circles: the belief that if we redefine reality cleverly enough, it will stop being a problem. Terrorism, ideological fanaticism, theocratic politics – all of these can, we are assured, be alchemised into mere “constructions”, to be rearranged with the right vocabulary and enough wounded indignation.

The project I want to describe here is more sinister and more systematic than simple intellectual mental gymnastics. Let me present it as an assembly line – a production chain for manufacturing what is called suicidal empathy by Gad Saad: a moral posture so deranged that it compels liberal societies to dismantle their own defences in the name of compassion.

This assembly line has three main stations and four diagnostic tools. The stations are staffed, the case of Sweden, by:

Mathias Gardell, the architect of the “Islamophobia” concept.

Emin Poljarevic, the fortifier, who dresses that concept in academic armour.

Anna Ardin and Mattias Irving, the foot soldiers, who deploy the construct on the policy battlefield to shut down legitimate security scrutiny.

And the toolkit for examining this contraption comprises:

Thomas Sowell’s conflict of visions (constrained vs unconstrained).

David Deutsch’s hard-to-vary criterion for good explanations.

Iain McGilchrist’s model of left-hemisphere capture.

Gad Saad’s notion of idea pathogens and Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS).

Put together, they map a coherent pipeline of intellectual sabotage: from idea, to fortress, to political weapon.

**Stage One: Forging the Weapon – Gardell and the Birth of “Islamophobia”**

Our story begins with Mathias Gardell, not a dispassionate scholar but as a master smith of ideology. His task is straightforward: take a legitimate concern – prejudice against Muslims as people – and melt it down into a conceptual cudgel capable of terminating debate with extreme prejudice.

The term he works on is “Islamophobia”. At first glance, it seems unremarkable: a cousin of homophobia or xenophobia. But one fragment of that word threatens to blow up the entire edifice: *phobia* — a term that smuggles psychological pathology into what he wants to present as sober political critique.

“Phobia” implies irrational fear. That is a problem, because rational fears have the annoying habit of being supported by evidence. If one can point to statistical data on terrorism, doctrinal intolerance, patterns of attempted theocratic governance, or global survey results on support for illiberal laws, then concern ceases to be “irrational” and becomes, at minimum, debatable.

Gardell, to his credit, notices this. To his discredit, he explicitly decides that allowing the term to be tied to rational vs irrational fear leads to “endless and unproductive debate”. “Unproductive”, that is, for his purpose – which is not understanding reality but controlling the conversation.

So he performs the first catastrophic category error.

He jettisons the fear component entirely and redefines “Islamophobia” as a “system of exclusion and inclusion” that functions as a “racism without races.”

This move does several pieces of work at once: It shifts the focus from individual psychology to a vague, external system. It ensures that the phenomenon is always framed as a structural fault of the West, never as a rational response to internal ideological content. It borrows the entire moral arsenal of anti-racism and grafts it onto a belief system.

Religions, doctrines, and movements are, in any rational order of things, criticisable ideas. Race is an unchosen, immutable trait. Conflating the two is not a subtle slip; it is the essential trick.

Criticise an idea, and you participate in the lifeblood of a free society: conjecture and refutation. Criticise an essence, and you are a bigot. Gardell’s redefinition deliberately blurs this distinction.

Instead of asking, “Is this doctrine defensible?”, we are coerced into asking, “Are you a good person?” Once the conversation shifts from content to character, the debate is lost before it begins. This is how you turn a philosophical disagreement into a static tribal conflict.

**“Islamophobia” on the Deutsch Test: A Bad Explanation**

What would David Deutsch say about this new definition? A good explanation, he reminds us, is hard to vary: if you twiddle with its parts, it stops working. His classic example is the axial tilt of the earth explaining the seasons. Change the tilt, the distance, the orientation, and the explanation collapses. Every component carries weight.

Gardell’s “Islamophobia,” by contrast, is a classic bad explanation. As a “system for exclusion”, it is so nebulous it can effortlessly absorb anything. Present empirical evidence of doctrinal hostility? That does not modify the concept; your evidence becomes part of the system. The more you object, the more you prove the point.

Heads he wins, tails you lose.

This is what Deutsch calls an easy-to-vary explanation. It is unfalsifiable, infinitely patchable, and therefore explanatorily empty. It explains everything and therefore nothing. It survives not by accurately mapping reality but by being ideologically convenient.

**Racism Without Races: Borrowing Moral Capital on False Pretences**

The strategic payoff of Gardell’s manoeuvre lies in the phrase “racism without races.” By presenting criticism of a belief system as tantamount to racism, he performs a sort of moral embezzlement.

The West has (rightly) developed immense moral revulsion towards racism. Gardell’s trick is to siphon that revulsion and use it as a shield for a doctrine. The question “Is Islam, as a set of doctrines, compatible with liberal democracy?” is now treated as morally equivalent to “Are black people fully human?” One is a perfectly valid inquiry. The other is an obscenity. He labours to make them appear the same.

That is the intellectual veto at the core of Stage One. The subject is changed: from evidence and ideas to identity and sin. From “Is this true?” to “Are you wicked?”

**Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome and the Manufacture of Blindness**

This is where Gad Saad’s concept of idea pathogens and Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS) comes in. Rational memes survive criticism; they get stronger by being challenged. Anti-rational memes survive by forbidding criticism and punishing those who attempt it.

Gardell’s construct works as a weaponised meme. It induces OPS by demanding that audiences refuse to acknowledge obvious explanatory variables. Consider his favourite narrative: Sweden’s history of persecuting Catholics, Jews, Romani people – and his claim that “the Muslim” has now replaced the Jew, the Tatar, the communist as the main threat.

This is presented as moral caution: “We have persecuted minorities before; let us not repeat the pattern.” But to accept the equivalence, the audience must deliberately ignore robust explanatory factors: Differences in ideological content between those historical groups. Divergent political goals (e.g. universalist liberalism vs theocratic rule). Demographic shifts and their impact. Variations in human capital, governance culture and institutional behaviour.

All these are airbrushed away. Any negative societal tension must be attributed solely to the external “system of Islamophobia.” The doctrine, organisations, and openly declared ambitions of Islamist movements vanish behind the mist of victimhood.

OPS, in this analysis, is precisely this chosen blindness: the refusal to look at internal, measurable factors, and the insistence that all disparities arise from Western malice.

**The Psychology of Suicidal Empathy**

Why is this meme so successful in Western liberal audiences? I would like to identify two powerful emotional currents it exploits:

The homeostasis of victimology – the compulsive need for individuals and groups to maintain a victim identity, because victimhood confers moral authority. Every grievance, real or imagined, is fed back into the system to stabilise this identity.

Self-flagellation at the altar of progressivism – the urge of Western intellectuals to atone, publicly and permanently, for colonial and historical sins.

By adopting Gardell’s Islamophobia framework, non-Muslim academics and activists engage in ritualised ideological self-flagellation. They ostentatiously protect Islam the doctrine from all criticism, not because they have read it carefully and found it benign, but because doing so broadcasts their decency. It is a form of collective virtue signalling: “Behold, I am not one of the racists.”

The Thomas Sowell lens clarifies the politics of this move. Gardell’s project is a textbook product of the unconstrained vision: the belief that social evils are not tragic trade-offs but fixable, in principle, by the moral insight of a self-appointed elite. The focus is not on building robust processes – free debate, falsification, evidence-based policy – but on achieving morally correct results as defined by that elite.

Using James Carse’s distinction, Gardell does not seek to join an infinite game of open enquiry about Islam in Western society. He seeks to impose a finite game with a pre-determined end: silence the critics and claim moral authority as champion of the oppressed.

Stage One, then, forges the weapon: an anti-rational meme called “Islamophobia,” designed to terminate debate, pathologise scrutiny, and reward moral exhibitionism over intellectual honesty.

**Stage Two: Building the Fortress – Poljarevic and Academic Mysticism**

Gardell’s weapon is polemically useful but structurally fragile. A moderately sceptical undergraduate with access to an AI platform could poke holes in it. Enter Emin Poljarevic, whose role in this assembly line is to provide what the I call the fortress: a scholarly edifice of jargon and methodology to make the weapon appear untouchable.

The method is not subtle. It is a cascade of category errors, an inverted pyramid of conceptual mystification.

**Islam as Ontological Category: Turning Doctrine into Gravity**

Poljarevic’s most audacious claim is that Islam is an “ontological category.” Ontology concerns the fundamental nature of reality – things that exist whether you believe in them or not: matter, energy, mathematical truths. Islam, by any sane reckoning, is a contingent human construct: a system of beliefs, practices, institutions, and texts. It exists only insofar as people believe and act on it.

Yet Poljarevic insists that Islam exists even without Muslims. This is what I call academic mysticism. The intellectual consequence is devastating: if Islam is ontological, then to criticise it is not to examine a human idea but to question a basic feature of reality itself. You might as well be denouncing gravity.

Once you elevate an ideology to the level of an immutable reality, you have placed it beyond critique by definition. You no longer ask, “Is this set of doctrines compatible with liberal democracy?” You are told, “This is simply how the world is.”

**Islamism as People, Not Ideas**

The second major distortion binds Stage One and Stage Two together. Poljarevic conflates Islamism – a political-religious ideology – with a group identity. Islamists are treated as a people, an almost racialised block, rather than as adherents to particular doctrines.

This trick makes Gardell’s “racism without races” suddenly look academically plausible. If you collapse “Islamist ideas” into “Islamist people”, then criticising the ideas is framed as attacking the people. The label “Islamist” becomes less a description of ideological commitments and more a marker of a vulnerable minority in need of protection.

Once again, criticism of doctrine is transformed into bigotry against identity.

**“Islam as Method”: Tribalising Truth**

Poljarevic then recasts his entire project under the banner of “Islam as method”, which he describes as a form of liberation struggle: reclaiming intellectual autonomy from “Euro-American” constraints.

Whatever its rhetorical charm, this is not a search for truth. It is the tribalisation of epistemology. The problem is no longer “What is true?” but “Whose side are you on?” Falsification, cross-cultural evidence, and universal standards of reasoning are reframed as tools of colonial oppression. To dissent becomes to “participate in Euro-American dominance”.

Using Karl Popper’s terms, Poljarevic’s framework pathologises error correction. Disagreement is no longer the engine of knowledge; it is an act of aggression.

**McGilchrist’s Emissary Coup and Functional Stupidity**

From the perspective of Iain McGilchrist’s divided-brain model, this is a textbook case of Left Hemisphere Capture. The “emissary” – the hemisphere that loves tidy abstractions and schematic maps – usurps the “master” – the hemisphere that apprehends messy, contradictory, embodied reality.

Poljarevic constructs immaculate academic maps: “ontological Islam”, neat binaries of “moderate vs radical”, “Islam as method”, “activist consciousness.” These maps are then treated as more real than events on the ground – than bombings, sermons, manifestos, constitutional programmes, or the lived experience of those under Islamist rule.

Reality is not allowed to correct the map; the map is used to overwrite reality.

The result, borrowing Alvesson and Spicer’s term, is functional stupidity. This is not an insult to individual IQ but a description of a system that systematically suppresses critical reflection.

According to the analysis, Poljarevic’s methodology induces functional stupidity through two mechanisms:

Branding-induced stupidity – the fetish for impressive-sounding jargon (“ontological category”, “Islam as method”, “activist consciousness”) that functions mainly as a branding exercise. The label becomes more important than the clarity or testability of the underlying claim. People nod along because it sounds clever.

Culture-induced stupidity – the cultivation of an “activist consciousness” that functions as a psychic prison. The shared identity of resisting “Euro-American dominance” discourages internal dissent. Questioning the framework becomes a betrayal of the group. The academic environment degenerates into a mutual admiration club where everyone congratulates each other on their criticality while collectively avoiding the one critical question that matters: “Is any of this true?”

**The Mask of Moderation**

Poljarevic’s practical work includes the now-familiar division of Islamists into “moderate” and “radical”. On paper, this sounds useful: distinguish those who adopt liberal discourse from those who use violence.

However, this dichotomy is linguistically convenient and analytically absurd. It focuses on tactics while ignoring goals. What if groups adopt liberal human-rights language strategically, as a mask of moderation, to disarm sceptics, gain access to institutions, and secure funding – all while keeping their long-term theocratic aims intact?

A serious analyst would at least consider this possibility. Poljarevic appears blissfully incurious. When he sees the translation of Islamist demands into human-rights jargon, he takes it at face value as evidence of genuine moderation. The potential for strategic deception simply does not enter his model.

When he does attempt explanation, he attributes all differences between groups to vague institutional and sociocultural contexts. If a group is violent, the context repressed it. If a group is non-violent, the context socialised it properly. The content of the doctrine – what is actually believed – is almost entirely absent as an explanatory variable.

This is once again an easy-to-vary explanation. It can be patched *post hoc* to fit any outcome. It protects his framework at the expense of understanding.

All of this rests on an evasive, hyper-subjectivist method: an interpretive posture fixated on the phenomenological detritus of subjective experience while refusing to inquire into the deeper causal architecture—what ideological premises were embedded, in which historical soil they took root, and what political or cultural purposes they ultimately served.

**What Real Inquiry Would Require**

By contrast, what Gad Saad calls a nomological network of cumulative evidence (NNCE) — the actual standard of scientific inquiry — would demand hard, falsifiable data drawn from multiple, independent, and converging lines of evidence:

Quantitative content analysis. Frequency and prominence of themes like warfare, apostasy, minority rights, loyalty and disavowal, governance doctrine, etc., in canonical texts (*qur’ān*, *hadīth*, classical jurisprudence).

Epidemiological and historical data. Systematic patterns of conquest, conversion, legal practice, and treatment of dissenters through history, linked to doctrinal commitments, rather than treated as random cultural noise.

Global survey data. Large-scale attitude surveys in Muslim-majority societies on women’s rights, religious freedom, separation of religion and state, support for sharia penalties, and so forth.

Security and law-enforcement data. Funding streams, organisational structures, operational links, and doctrinal alignments of Islamist groups active in the present, assessed in a non-politicised, falsifiable way.

This is the sort of reality-checking machine that Poljarevic studiously avoids. His emphasis on “lived Islam” and the researcher’s “consciousness” privileges subjective interpretation over testable claims. Where NNCE aims at knowledge, his approach offers only description and mood.

Thus, Stage Two completes its work. The crude cudgel of “Islamophobia” is now housed in an impressive-looking fortress of academic mystification, designed to make what is essentially a noble lie look like rigorous scholarship.

**Stage Three: Deploying the Weapon – Ardin, Irving**

The final stage in this assembly line is deployment. A weapon and a fortress are of little use if they remain on paper. They must be marched into the real world.

This is the role of Anna Ardin and Mattias Irving, who, in their report, are acting less as scholars and more as field officers. Their main target is a report by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) – a feasibility study examining the ideological orientation and organisational links of various civil society organisations (CSOs) in Sweden.

The purpose of the MSB report was mundane but vital: to ensure that public funds were not being funnelled into organisations hostile to liberal-democratic principles. In other words, standard due diligence for a state not entirely committed to financing its own undermining.

**Skipping the Assess Phase: The Air France Analogy**

A critique would liken Ardin and Irving’s approach to the failure that brought down Air France Flight 447\. When the pilots were confronted with conflicting data, they skipped the assessment phase and reacted instinctively, putting a perfectly flyable aircraft into a fatal stall.

Ardin and Irving do something similar in the ACE Helix decision-making sequence: Assess – Choose – Execute. Presented with the MSB study, they essentially skip “Assess” and go straight to “Execute the foregone conclusion”.

The conclusion, needless to say, is “Islamophobia.”

Instead of asking: “Are these CSOs in fact linked to Islamist ideology?” “Do their public statements, funding sources, or organisational structures justify scrutiny?” they presuppose that the scrutiny itself is an act of “stigmatisation” and “labelling”. Their task is not to help Sweden navigate risk; it is to protect the organisations under scrutiny at all costs, using the full apparatus forged by Gardell and fortified by Poljarevic.

**The Sowell Script: Vision of the Anointed in Four Acts**

As Sowell has described so elegantly, this is an almost theatrical pattern, the script of the “vision of the anointed”. The Arden-Irving paper follows it with dreary precision:

The Crisis. They declare a moral emergency: the stigmatisation of Muslim civil society organisations. The fact that the “crisis” is simply the state doing its job is brushed aside.

The Villain. Blame is placed squarely on the MSB and the feasibility study authors, who are cast as malicious agents of prejudice.

The Solution. The “solution” is not “better data” or “refined criteria”, but the cessation of scrutiny. The right to determine which organisations are legitimate is to be transferred from state security professionals to the anointed – academics and the CSO leaders themselves.

Avoiding the Core Question. Crucially, they avoid the only question that matters: “Are these organisations actually Islamist in ideology and practice?” Instead they focus obsessively on the process of labelling – how terms are constructed, applied, and how they feel to the labelled. The debate is thus moved from reality to language, a familiar move in this assembly line.

**NLP Meta-model: Deletions, Distortions, and Nominalisations**

The paper’s linguistic tactics are an object lesson in manipulative discourse, and for that reason I shall use the NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) meta-model to shed light on them.

Deletions. The most telling feature of the paper is what it omits. There is no serious examination of: The CSOs’ public positions on doctrine and governance. Their funding sources and international links. Their historical record or internal structure.

By deleting this context, Ardin and Irving force the reader to accept that the MSB’s scrutiny is arbitrary and prejudicial. The mere existence of scrutiny is portrayed as an injury, since the possible justifying reasons have been meticulously removed from view.

Distortions – Complex Equivalence. They repeatedly employ what NLP calls complex equivalence: asserting that “anti-racism” is equivalent to defending these specific CSOs from scrutiny. Opposition to the MSB report is thus fused with the universally admired task of combating racism.

This is Gardell’s category error reborn: by merging a universally accepted good (anti-racism) with a specific political project (shielding certain Islamist-linked organisations), they ensure that any critique of the project looks like a critique of the good. It is linguistic blackmail: to disagree is to be racist.

Nominalisations. Perhaps most insidious is their reliance on nominalisations – turning processes into static, abstract nouns: “stigmatisation”, “labelling”, “othering”.

Instead of saying, “The MSB examined these organisations because they expressed X and did Y,” we are told, “These organisations suffer from stigmatisation.” The transformation of active processes into passive conditions hides agency. It conceals the possibility that the organisations’ own actions led to scrutiny.

Once “stigmatisation” is treated as an unexamined thing that simply exists, a moral imperative is invoked: “We must reduce stigmatization,” not “We must determine whether the scrutiny is justified.”

The net effect is the invalidation effect: the very idea of state risk assessment is delegitimised. The “Islamophobia” construct is now operational: any attempt to map ideological risk is recoded as racism.

**Homeostasis of Victimology and Final-Stage OPS**

In doing this, Ardin and Irving complete the homeostasis of victimology. The CSOs’ identity as victims must be maintained at all costs, because that victimhood confers moral authority and immunity from critique.

Similarly, Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome reaches its terminal stage here. The paper insists on a reality in which: All fault lies with the observer (the MSB and broader society). No fault can lie with the observed (the CSOs), who are granted presumptive innocence regardless of their own words, alliances, or doctrines.

Common sense – the idea that some groups might deserve scrutiny – is pathologised. To entertain such a thought is to risk being labelled an “Islamophobe” in Gardell’s sense: participant in a racist system.

Thus the weapon forged by Gardell and fortified by Poljarevic is wielded with full force. A necessary security study is reframed as a moral scandal, and the state is pushed towards wilful blindness.

**Suicidal Empathy: An Autoimmune Disease of Liberal Societies**

Standing back from the assembly line, we can now see the product it delivers with chilling consistency: suicidal empathy.

This is empathy divorced from reality, compassion enforced at knifepoint, in which a liberal society: Abandons hard-to-vary, evidence-based explanations. Embraces easy-to-vary dogmas that can never be falsified. Treats criticism of ideas as morally indistinguishable from hatred of people. Reverses its immune system, turning rational inquiry, security assessment, and error correction against itself.

The metaphor offered here is an autoimmune disease of the body politic. Those organs of society designed to identify and contain threats – open debate, security services, critical scholarship – are drugged with noble lies and induced to attack their own host.

The four tools we began with come together here:

Sowell shows us the unconstrained vision at work: the anointed elite believing that by enforcing the right attitudes, they can abolish risk and guilt alike.

Deutsch reveals a shift from explanations constrained by reality to endlessly malleable stories constrained only by political utility.

McGilchrist diagnoses the emissary’s coup: abstract maps and identity narratives override the brute facts of violence, doctrine, and history.

Gad Saad exposes a memetic infection that rewards blindness and punishes honest description.

What is lost in this process is not “intelligence” in the narrow sense but something more basic: the capacity for self-preservation. The ability to look at an ideology, read its texts, observe its global manifestations, listen to its spokesmen, and say, without trembling, “This is a problem, and we are entitled to defend ourselves.”

In place of that capacity we are offered intellectual opiates. They are seductive because they are easy. It is far more comfortable to signal virtue by adopting these frameworks than to endure the pain of confrontation – with texts, with history, with one’s own naïveté.

You get to sleep well, serenaded by your own moral magnificence, even as the structures that sustain your civilisation are gently unscrewed.

**The Choice Before a Free Society**

What emerges from this scrutiny is not a random collection of academic eccentricities but a coherent three-stage machine: Gardell forges an anti-rational meme called “Islamophobia,” designed to terminate debate by conflating ideas with race. Poljarevic constructs an academic fortress, turning Islam into an ontological category, collapsing ideology into identity, and wrapping it all in jargon to make it untouchable. Ardin and Irving act as political foot soldiers, using manipulative language to delegitimise legitimate scrutiny, promote victimology, and criminalise common sense.

The output of this machine is suicidal empathy – a debased moral stance in which to criticise doctrine is to persecute people, to assess risk is to stigmatise victims, and to defend yourself is to confess your guilt.

The question this poses to any genuinely liberal society is stark and, I’m afraid, unavoidable:

Will we be a civilisation that thinks – that tolerates the discomfort, pain, and conflict that come with truth-seeking, and that insists on distinguishing between a person and a proposition? Or will we settle for being a civilisation that merely knows what it is told, drugged by easy narratives and moral theatrics, content to call our own disarmament “progress” as we stroll, eyes half-closed, towards dissolution?

The assembly line described here cannot answer that question. It merely manufactures the anaesthetic. The decision whether to swallow it is still, for the moment, ours. Soon, it might be too late!

**References:**

**Analytical Frameworks**

Mats Alvesson & André Spicer, 2016, *The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work*. London: PROFILE BOOKS LTD.

James P. Carse, 1986, *Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility*. New York, NY: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc..

David Deutsch, 1997, *The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything.* London: Allen Lane.

—, 2011, *The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World*. New York, New York: VIKING (Published by the Penguin Group).

The Duke Report, 20250807, “A User’s Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Defense. Defending Yourself From Word Magic.”

[A User's Guide to Neuro-Linguistic DefenseMy motivation for writing this today is a note by esc who posted: “It’s good when people understand that they're being manipulated through having it pointed out to them - but it’s better when people notice it themselves. We need some sort of educational approach where people learn to pick up the patterns on their own.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/10c4b591-fbcb-42be-92f2-d7390562fa24_150x150-3.png)The Duke Report](https://thedukereport.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-neuro-linguistic)

Vera Hart, 20250907, “The Illusion of Humanity: Why We Struggle to See Predators for What They Are.” Toxicity in The Culture (Substack). [https://substack.com/home/post/p-171773396](https://substack.com/home/post/p-171773396?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

Daniel Kahneman, 2011, *Thinking, fast and slow*. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hasard Lee, 2023, *The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot’s Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions*. New York: St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Iain McGilchrist, 2019, *The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.* New Expanded Edition. New Haven and London: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

—, 2021, *The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World*. London: Perspectiva Press.

Gad Saad, 2021, *The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense*. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, A Division of Salem Media Group.

Thomas Sowell, 1995, *The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.* New York: BasicBooks.

—, 1999, *The Quest for Cosmic Justice*. New York, NY: THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc..

—, 2007, *A conflict of visions: ideological origins of political struggles*. New York, NY: Basic Books.

—, 2023, *Social Justice Fallacies*. New York, NY: Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc..

**Case Studies**

Anna Ardin and Mattias Irving, 2025, “The Islamist Labeling of Muslim CSOs: A Critical Examination of Stereotypes about Muslims and Islam in a Public Agency in Sweden”. Islamophobia *Studies Journal*, 9(1), 97–128\. Berkeley: Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, University of California.

Mattias Gardell, 2011, *Islamofobi*. Stockholm: Leopard Förlag (2nd edition)

Emin Poljarević, 2014, “Islamism.” In *The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics*, edited by Abderrahmane S. Moussaoui, 2 vols., 434–442\. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Emin Poljarevic, 2023, “A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Lived Islam and Muslimness.” *New Methodological Perspectives in Islamic Studies*, Edited by Abbas Aghdassi & Aaron W. Hughes. Leiden: Brill, pp. 264-290.

Emin Poljarević, 2024, “Islam as Method-“ *Philosophy and Society*, Vol 35, no. 3, pp. 459–730\. [https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2403465P](https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2403465P?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)