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PROFESSOR JUNAID AHMAD analyses the politics of Islamophobia, Muslim political agency and the silence of influential intellectuals in light of the continued imprisonment of Imran Khan.
There is a peculiar genius among certain Muslim intellectuals in the West: they can detect Islamophobia everywhere except where naming it might cost them something. In Paris, they are forensic. In Delhi, incandescent. In Gaza, thunderous. In Washington, fluent in the grammar of empire. But when Muslim political agency is crushed in Pakistan, when Imran Khan is imprisoned and millions of his supporters are treated as civic contamination, the vocabulary collapses. The seminar goes quiet. The footnotes flee the scene. The prophetic tradition, so frequently invoked in safer venues, is quietly folded into hand luggage until the next fundable outrage.
Khan need not be romanticised to recognise the betrayal. One can criticise him, reject parts of his politics, even dislike his movement, and still understand the obvious: here was a Muslim leader who internationalised the language of Islamophobia, pushed anti-Muslim hatred onto the global diplomatic agenda, spoke of Muslim dignity as agency rather than grievance-management, and gave millions the sense that Muslim sovereignty need not remain permanently supervised by generals, Gulf monarchs, Western embassies, and local comprador elites.
Now that he has been caged by precisely the kind of order these intellectuals claim to oppose, many have discovered their most refined political doctrine: silence.
How convenient. How mature. How career-safe.
The problem is not that every Muslim scholar or activist must support Khan. The problem is that so many built careers on the very vocabulary his persecution now tests: Islamophobia, empire, authoritarianism, Muslim agency, decoloniality, political subjectivity, resistance. These words were not meant to become decorative furniture in the academic-industrial complex. They were meant to clarify reality.
Instead, they are sharpened against safe enemies and sheathed before dangerous patrons. They work beautifully against France, India, Israel, China, and America. They malfunction, apparently, when the offender speaks Urdu, wears a uniform, issues travel permissions, controls family access, or determines whether one’s next visit home will be pleasant or poisoned.
For this class, Islamophobia is apparently a French headscarf ban, a Hindutva lynch mob, a Western police raid, a Chinese camp, an Israeli bomb. It is all of these. But in Pakistan, when Muslim political agency is criminalised; when Khan supporters are branded extremists, traitors, terrorists, cultists, or useful idiots; when Palestine solidarity itself must be spoken only in the approved dialect of the security state; when the country’s most popular Muslim political figure is isolated as a warning to others – suddenly Islamophobia becomes conceptually unavailable. It vanishes behind the fog machine of ‘complexity’.
This is not sophistication. It is cowardice with institutional polish.
The cowardice is especially obscene because some fashionable theorists of Islamism – understood not as clerical caricature but as Muslim political agency in pursuit of Muslim autonomy – spent years treating Khan’s political tendency as intellectually thrilling. It was, for them, post-Western Muslim politics in motion: anti-elite, anti-imperial, morally charged, civilisationally confident, impatient with humiliation. It seemed to embody the very thing they had theorised in conference rooms: a mass Muslim politics refusing both Western tutelage and local servility. It was excellent material for lectures, essays, symposia, podcasts, and perhaps a very stimulating edited volume.
But when the movement became less useful as theory and more dangerous as solidarity, the romance ended. The concept remained. The people disappeared.
The scandal is almost too perfect. Some of these towering academics live less than half an hour from Bradford, arguably the largest concentration of Khan supporters outside Pakistan. Here was a working-class Pakistani Muslim community – politicised, wounded, mobilised, alive – sitting on the doorstep of scholars who have spent careers insisting that Islamophobia cannot be defeated by liberal education alone, but through mass political mobilisation. Did they become organic intellectuals to this community? Did they offer strategy, education, amplification, media literacy, legal support, public companionship, or even the courtesy of taking these people seriously?
Apparently the revolution could not find parking in Bradford.
The intellectual erasure of Bradford reveals the class structure of the whole operation. Working-class Pakistanis are useful as abstractions: ‘the Muslim street’, ‘diaspora communities’, ‘racialised subjects’, ‘postcolonial formations’. But when they become actual political agents with actual loyalties – especially loyalties embarrassing to liberal-left respectability – they become too populist, too emotional, too religious, too attached to one man, too insufficiently curated for the decolonial salon. Their grief is not peer-reviewed. Their rage lacks theoretical hygiene. Their politics arrives without the proper bibliography.
And so the defenders of Muslim autonomy abandon the Muslims actually practising it.
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This silence is not universal, which makes the broader silence more damning. There have been brave voices: Naledi Pandor, Allan Boesak, Ronnie Kasrils, Rashied Omar, Steven Friedman, Patrick Bond, Fatima Bhutto, Yasir Qadhi, Tariq Ali, Roger Waters, Norman Finkelstein, Vijay Prashad, Jeremy Corbyn, Ilan Pappé, Sami Hamdi, Riffat Hassan, John Esposito, Tamara Sonn, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui, Medea Benjamin, Rania Masri, Katie Halper, Noura Erakat, Omid Safi, Susan Abulhawa, Yanis Varoufakis, Charles Amjad-Ali, Taimur Rahman, Maria Kari, Sana Saeed, Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, Ammar Ali Jan, Hassaan Bokhari, Hamza Ahmad Khan, and others. Their courage lies not in having no criticisms of Khan, but in refusing to make criticism an alibi for abandonment. Courage needs names. Young Muslims require examples, not abstractions. They need to know that moral seriousness is not a posture adopted after tenure, applause, and risk assessment.
CAGE International deserves particular mention because it grasps what many Muslim organisations still avoid: Islamophobia is not only imposed by white states upon Muslim bodies. It is also operationalised by Muslim regimes when they abduct, torture, censor, extradite, disappear, and discipline their own people in the name of ‘security’. The War on Terror was never merely a Western project. It was a marketplace of Muslim regime collaboration. A Muslim general can serve imperial Islamophobia while quoting scripture. A Muslim state can persecute Muslim agency while claiming to defend the ummah. A Muslim regime can speak Palestine while crushing the domestic forces that take Palestine seriously. The accent changes. The architecture remains.
That is why Khan’s imprisonment matters beyond Pakistan. He is today’s Morsi not because his politics are identical to Mohamed Morsi’s, but because the structure is familiar: a popular Muslim political figure is removed, demonised, isolated, and normalised as a prisoner while respectable intellectuals explain why the matter is regrettable but complicated. We have seen this film before. Its ending is never complicated. It is written first in cowardice, then in blood, and finally in regret.
The final refuge of the cowardly Muslim intellectual is to recite the flaws of the persecuted. Khan did this. PTI did that. His supporters said this. Yes, and water is wet, politicians are flawed, and movements are messy. This is not analysis; it is evasion. The question is not whether Khan is beyond criticism. He is not. The question is whether criticism becomes an alibi for abandoning him to a coercive order making an example of him and the millions who see their dignity through him.
Politics is not a purity seminar. Solidarity is not canonisation. One can oppose authoritarian repression without joining a party, defend a prisoner without endorsing every policy, and recognise mass political agency without surrendering judgement. These are not difficult distinctions. They become difficult only when courage is absent.
History will not remember the careful disclaimers. It will not preserve elegant evasions, tactical silences, privately sympathetic messages, or the ‘we are monitoring the situation’ cowardice of the professional class. It will remember who spoke when speech carried cost, and who converted prophetic politics into a conference theme.
The Islamophobia industry wanted Muslim suffering without Muslim power, Muslim injury without Muslim agency, Muslim grief without Muslim sovereignty. Imran Khan’s imprisonment has exposed that bargain with merciless clarity. It has revealed who treated Islamophobia as a wound in need of justice, and who treated it as a career in need of management.
The question is no longer whether these intellectuals understand Islamophobia.
The question is whether they were ever serious about liberation at all.
Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
