Anti-Iran and Anti-Shia Discourses as a Major Pillar in the Islamophobia Industry

From the Iranian Revolution to the War on Iran: Orientalism, Empire, and the Architecture of Islamophobic Discourse

Islamophobia Studies Journal

Islamophobia Studies Center

Abstract

This article argues that anti-Iran and anti-Shia discourses constitute one of the most historically persistent and politically consequential pillars of the modern Islamophobia industry. Beginning with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the United States’ “Twin Pillars” regional security architecture, the article traces the systematic construction of Iran as an existential civilizational threat through overlapping vectors; Western imperial media, the instrumentalization of Sunni Arab regimes, Cold War mobilization of political Islam against the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War Clash of Civilizations paradigm, and the Israeli Hasbara network’s structuring role in shaping Western foreign policy discourse. Drawing on the analytical framework developed in the Islamophobia Studies Center, particularly the concept of structural Islamophobia and the thesis that Islamophobia is constitutive of, not merely associated with, the Clash of Civilizations paradigm, the article demonstrates that the current US-Israeli military campaign against Iran represents not a departure from but the culmination of four decades of Islamophobic discourse production. The Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary is shown to have operated as a specifically Islamophobic instrument from its colonial and Cold War inception, while the convergence of the Israeli Hasbara apparatus with the domestic Islamophobia industry has produced durable policy outcomes at the highest levels of Western statecraft.

Keywords: Islamophobia; anti-Shia discourse; Iranian Revolution; Clash of Civilizations; Israeli Hasbara; structural Islamophobia; Good Muslim/Bad Muslim; Orientalism; US foreign policy; empire

I. The Structural Embeddedness of Anti-Iran Discourse in the Islamophobia Industry

The field of Islamophobia studies, as developed in the Islamophobia Studies Journal, Islamophobia Studies Center, and the broader critical scholarly literature that has emerged from the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley, has consistently argued that Islamophobia must be understood not as a collection of individual prejudices, ignorant opinions, or episodic bigotry, but as a structural, systemic, and institutionalized phenomenon embedded in the political economies of Western imperial power.^[1]

This article advances the argument that anti-Iran and anti-Shia discourses constitute one of the most historically durable and politically consequential pillars of this Islamophobia industry, a pillar that has been systematically constructed, maintained, and amplified across more than four decades, from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to the current US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic. The argument proceeds through six interrelated analytical claims that together constitute a genealogy of anti-Iran Islamophobia with its genesis in the collapse of the American Twin Pillars regional security architecture; its consolidation through visual and media regimes of representation; its Cold War instrumentalization through the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary; its absorption into the post-Cold War Clash of Civilizations paradigm; its structural articulation with the Palestinian question and Israeli Hasbara; and its culmination in the current war on Iran.

This genealogical approach is grounded in Edward Said’s foundational insight that Orientalism is not merely a body of scholarship but a will to power, a system of knowledge production that simultaneously describes and produces its object, and that is inseparable from the material conditions of colonial and imperial domination.^[2]

Anti-Iran Islamophobia is Orientalism in one of its most consequential contemporary manifestations. To analyze it as such is to insist that the current war against Iran cannot be understood as a security policy response to a nuclear threat, a rational calculation of interests, or an inevitable clash between opposed “civilizational” values. It must be understood as the political-military culmination of a decades-long Islamophobic knowledge production project, one that the Islamophobia Studies Journal and Center has the analytical and ethical responsibility to name and to trace.

II. The Iranian Revolution and the Collapse of the Twin Pillars: Islamophobic Discourse as Imperial Damage Control

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one of the most consequential political events of the twentieth century, not because it introduced Islamic politics into a secular world, since Islam had been central to anti-colonial and nationalist movements throughout the post-war period, but because it destroyed, in a single popular uprising, the primary instrument of US hegemony in the Persian Gulf.^[3]

The Nixon Doctrine of the early 1970s had designated Iran and Saudi Arabia as the two pillars of American regional security architecture, the so-called Twin Pillars policy. The Shah’s Iran was, in this framework, not merely an ally but an indispensable enforcer of US interests, purchasing billions of dollars in American weaponry, suppressing leftist and nationalist movements from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, and serving as a critical node in the global anti-Soviet containment strategy. The Revolution did not merely change a government; it demolished an entire architecture of imperial control.^[4]

The loss of Iran was not experienced in Washington as the expression of the legitimate political will of the Iranian people, but as a catastrophic security failure that demanded explanation — and the explanation that was reached for, almost immediately, was Islam itself.

This is the founding moment of modern anti-Iran Islamophobia: the transformation of a popular revolution against tyranny and foreign domination into evidence of Islamic irrationality, fanaticism, and civilizational incompatibility with modernity. The Revolution was read not through the category of anti-imperialism, which would have required acknowledging the role of the United States in supporting the Shah’s brutal SAVAK apparatus, in orchestrating the 1953 CIA coup that destroyed Iranian democracy, but through the category of religious pathology.

This interpretive move was not innocent. It was the product of a specific set of institutional actors, think tanks, media organizations, government analysts, and academic area studies programs, operating within an Orientalist epistemological framework that had already pre-constituted Islam as the explanatory variable for all political behavior in Muslim-majority societies. The Revolution was Islam; the hostage crisis was Islam; the chants of “Death to America” were Islam. That these events were intelligible as responses to decades of American-backed repression was systematically excluded from the dominant interpretive frame.

What was produced through this interpretive exclusion was not merely a distorted representation of the Iranian Revolution but the foundational template of the modern Islamophobic social imaginary; the Muslim as fundamentally and irreducibly religious, as incapable of secular political rationality, as driven by theological affect rather than material interest, as threatening to the liberal order not because of anything done to Muslim societies by Western powers but because of something essential and unchangeable in the nature of Islam itself.

III. The Visual Regime: Constructing the Islamophobic Social Imaginary through Images of the Revolution

The consolidation of anti-Iran Islamophobia was not only a discursive or policy phenomenon; it was, critically and perhaps primarily, a visual one. The Iranian Revolution produced an iconographic archive that would become the foundational stock imagery of Western Islamophobic representation for decades: the black-clad women in full-face covering, the long-bearded clerics, the crowds of fist-raised protesters, the burning American flags. These images were selected, framed, and transmitted through a Western media apparatus that was already structured by Orientalist assumptions about Muslim bodies and Muslim emotion.^[5]

The operation of selection is crucial here. The Iranian Revolution was a mass movement of extraordinary social breadth and political complexity. It included Marxists and liberals, nationalists and feminists, workers and merchants, secular students and devout clerics. The women who participated were not uniformly veiled; many were not. The movement’s discourse and rhetoric were not reducible to religious fanaticism; it drew on a sophisticated tradition of Third World anti-imperialism that was both legible and celebrated in liberation movements from Cuba to Vietnam.

What the Western camera saw, or, more precisely, what the editorial apparatus permitted to be seen, was the black chador, the raised fist, the ayatollah. The full-face covering became the synecdoche for the revolution as a whole, and through the revolution, for Islam as a whole. This visual reduction, the condensation of an entire civilization’s political complexity into a single, threatening icon, is precisely what Stuart Hall called stereotyping: the fixing of difference into essence, the naturalization of contingent social facts into immutable characteristics.^[6]

The Islamophobic social imaginary that crystallized around these images was not simply a set of beliefs held by prejudiced individuals. It was a structured field of representation that shaped how Muslims, all Muslims, Shia and Sunni, Iranian and Indonesian, devout and secular, would be perceived, treated, and governed in Western societies for the next four decades. Every subsequent crisis, the Rushdie Affair, the Gulf War, 9/11, the London bombings, the Gaza genocide, and the bombing of Lebanon would be received and interpreted through this pre-formed visual framework.

The power of the media-imperial image complex lay not in any single photograph or broadcast but in its cumulative, iterative effect: the slow sedimentation of an Islamophobic epistemology that became the default cognitive framework through which Muslims and Muslim politics were rendered legible to Western publics.

The gendered dimension of this visual regime deserves particular attention. The veiled Iranian woman became, in Western representation, the figure of Islamic oppression par excellence, a figure that simultaneously justified hostility toward Iran, provided a humanitarian alibi for Western interventionism, and positioned Western liberalism as the only emancipatory alternative for Muslim women.^[7]

This representational move was achieved by systematically suppressing the agency, voice, and political complexity of Iranian and Muslim women themselves, including the many Iranian women who had actively chosen religious dress as a marker of anti-imperial solidarity, and who would subsequently resist the consolidation of the Islamic Republic’s own patriarchal policies on terms that Western feminism was structurally ill-equipped to recognize.

IV. The Good Muslim/Bad Muslim Binary and the Cold War Instrumentalization of Anti-Shia Islamophobia

If the Iranian Revolution produced the primary visual and affective content of anti-Iran Islamophobia, the Cold War geopolitics of the 1980s provided the institutional architecture through which that Islamophobia was systematized into durable policy. Two interrelated processes were central to this systematization: on the one hand, the mobilization of Sunni Arab regimes against revolutionary Iran, and on the other hand, the mobilization of transnational Sunni political Islam against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Both processes were animated by the same fundamental logic, which Mahmood Mamdani has named with analytical precision as the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary and the instrumentalization of Islamic identity categories by US imperial power to distinguish between those Muslims who served American interests, the “moderates,” the “allies,” the “reformers”, and those who resisted them, the “extremists,” the “fundamentalists,” the “jihadists.” What is critical to recognize is that this binary is not simply a descriptive framework but a productive one; it actively constitutes the identities it purports to merely describe.^[8]

In the Persian Gulf context, the United States, working in close coordination with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and the smaller Gulf monarchies, actively cultivated and promoted a discourse of Shia/Sunni sectarian conflict that positioned Iran as an existential threat not merely to American interests but to “Sunni Islam” itself. The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), initiated by Saddam Hussein with explicit US encouragement and support, was framed in this discourse not as a border conflict or a struggle for regional hegemony, but as a defensive war of Sunni civilization against Persian-Shia expansionism.^[9]

This framing accomplished several ideological objectives simultaneously. It aligned Sunni Arab populations behind their authoritarian governments against a revolution that had, in its early phases, represented a genuine challenge to all forms of political tyranny. It reconstructed anti-imperialism, which the Revolution genuinely was, as sectarian aggression. And it positioned the United States and its Gulf allies as the protectors of Sunni Islam against a Shia threat, thereby obscuring the fundamentally imperial character of US policy in the region.

The instrumental deployment of Sunni/Shia sectarianism by the United States and its Gulf allies was not a reflection of pre-existing civilizational divisions but the active production of those divisions as instruments of imperial management.

The simultaneous mobilization of Sunni political Islam against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan completed this ideological architecture. By funding, arming, and ideologically empowering mujahideen networks drawn from the Sunni world, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and beyond, the United States and Saudi Arabia created what Mamdani calls “political Islam” as a specifically Cold War phenomenon; an Islam disciplined, weaponized, and deployed as a geopolitical instrument by the very power that would, a decade later, declare a “War on Terror” against that same creation.^[10]

The Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary operated, in this Cold War context, as a distinctly Islamophobic mechanism. It did not transcend or escape Islamophobia by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” Muslims; it instantiated Islamophobia more deeply by making Islamic identity itself the governing variable for political evaluation — treating all Muslims as primarily and essentially Muslims, as creatures of their religion rather than agents of their political circumstances, and then sorting them along a political axis that had nothing to do with the ethical or moral content of their Islamic commitments and everything to do with their alignment with American imperial interests.

The Shia, in this framework, were the paradigmatic Bad Muslims defined by their opposition to the Twin Pillars architecture, by their revolutionary challenge to the regional order, by their structural alignment, however mediated and contested, with the interests of the Islamic Republic. Anti-Shia Islamophobia was not, in other words, a theological prejudice dressed up in political clothing; it was a political instrument wearing theological clothing.

V. From Cold War to Clash of Civilizations: Iran as the Post-Soviet Civilizational Enemy

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 produced a profound ideological crisis for Western imperial policy; the loss of the primary adversary that had organized and justified four decades of military buildup, political intervention, and strategic alliance. The search for a new organizing principle of global politics, for a new enemy adequate to sustain the institutional apparatus of the security state and the moral economy of Western civilizational superiority, produced Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis.^[11]

The thesis has been extensively criticized by scholars working in the Islamophobia studies tradition and in postcolonial theory more broadly. What is analytically significant for the present argument is the thesis’s relationship to the pre-existing architecture of anti-Iran Islamophobia. The Clash of Civilizations did not generate the antagonism between “Western” and “Islamic” civilizations ex nihilo; it provided a theoretical framework that organized, legitimated, and elevated to the level of grand theory a set of Islamophobic representations, policy orientations, and media practices that had been under construction since 1979.

Iran and Shia Islam occupied a peculiar and particularly consequential position within the Huntingtonian civilizational map. As the only Islamic state explicitly organized as a theological challenge to the Western liberal order, as an “Islamic Republic” rather than a secular republic or a traditional monarchy, Iran provided the paradigmatic instance of the Islamic civilization’s inherent antagonism to Western modernity. The hostage crisis, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the support for Hezbollah and Hamas; each of these episodes was received and amplified through the Huntingtonian framework as further evidence of an irreducible civilizational incompatibility.

The critical insight developed in the Islamophobia Studies Journal is that this relationship is not one of simple application, the Clash of Civilizations thesis applied to a pre-existing Iranian threat, but of mutual constitution. The Clash of Civilizations thesis needed Iran, needed a theocratic Islamic state that could serve as the embodied instance of civilizational opposition, as urgently as the US foreign policy establishment needed the Clash of Civilizations framework to organize its post-Cold War strategic posture. Anti-Iran Islamophobia and the Clash of Civilizations paradigm co-produced each other.^[12]

Islamophobia is not merely correlated with the Clash of Civilizations framework — it is constitutive of it. The Clash of Civilizations IS Islamophobia elevated to the level of grand theory, and anti-Iran discourse is its organizing substance. — Hatem Bazian, Islamophobia Studies Journal

The consequence of this constitutive relationship is that the Iran-as-existential-threat discourse became, in the post-Cold War period, self-sustaining and self-reinforcing. It generated its own institutional infrastructure — Iran-focused think tanks, Iran hawks in the policy community, Iran-focused academic programs, Iran-focused media coverage — that produced a continuous stream of content affirming and elaborating the thesis of Iranian civilizational menace. This infrastructure operated not as a rational assessment of Iranian capabilities or intentions but as an Islamophobic knowledge production system that was organized around the pre-given conclusion of Iranian threat and worked backward from that conclusion to select, interpret, and amplify whatever evidence appeared to support it.

VI. Palestine, Israeli Hasbara, and the Islamophobia Industry: Convergent Architectures

The emergence of Islamophobia studies as a field of critical and decolonial scholarly inquiry was driven, in significant part, by the recognition that the domestic Islamophobia industry in the United States and Europe, the network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets, political figures, and academic actors that produces and disseminates anti-Muslim discourse, is structurally connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, specifically, to the Israeli state’s Hasbara apparatus.^[13]

This connection is not merely one of shared personnel or funding, though both are well-documented. It is, more fundamentally, a connection of strategic logic. The Israeli state confronted, after the collapse of the Oslo process and the Second Intifada, a growing international movement for Palestinian rights that threatened to shift the terms of Western public and political opinion against Israeli occupation policies. The Hasbara response to this challenge was to reframe the Palestinian struggle not as a question of colonial dispossession, quest for freedom and human rights, but as a manifestation of “Islamist terrorism” and civilizational conflict.^[14]

Hamas, Hezbollah, and their connections to Iran became, in this reframing, the central organizing figures. The Palestinian question was absorbed into the anti-Iran Islamophobic framework; Palestinian resistance was not the resistance of a colonized people but the forward deployment of Iranian-backed “Islamist” expansionism. This reframing accomplished the strategic double objective of delegitimizing Palestinian claims and amplifying the Iran-as-existential-threat discourse simultaneously.^[15]

The sophistication and ambition of this Hasbara strategy have been dramatically illuminated by leaked documents from the Stagwell Group, a major global public relations firm with close ties to Israeli government entities. Research conducted by Stagwell and its constituent firm, the polling and strategic communications company founded by Mark Penn, tested a wide range of messaging frameworks with American audiences and found that framing Israeli military operations in terms of the “radical Islam” threat by emphasizing Iranian backing, Islamist ideology, and civilizational menace produced the largest shifts in favorable opinion, rebounding support by more than twenty percentage points among respondents who had initially expressed critical views of Israeli military conduct.^[16]

The leaked Stagwell research represents documentary evidence of what Islamophobia scholarship has long argued analytically: that anti-Iran Islamophobia and pro-Israel advocacy are not parallel discourses that happen to share rhetorical territory, but integrated components of a single strategic communications architecture.

The Islamophobia Studies Center has argued, in this context, that the relationship between Israeli Hasbara and the Islamophobia industry is best understood not through the lens of conspiracy, as a single coordinated operation run from a central headquarters, but through the lens of structural convergence: two institutional systems that share organizational networks, funding streams, political alliances, and ideological frameworks, and that have developed, over decades of parallel development, a deep functional integration.^[17]

This is precisely the dynamic that we have been describing for years: Islamophobia is instrumentalized to make Israel appear as a bulwark of “Western civilization” against a supposedly monolithic, threatening Islam. The more Muslims are framed as dangerous, the more Israel appears necessary and virtuous, as a frontline fortress whose violence is rebranded as “self-defense.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s interview on French TV around May 24, 2024 is illustrative in framing the genocide on Gaza as a defense of Western civilization:

French: “Notre victoire, c’est votre victoire ! C’est la victoire de la civilisation judéo-chrétienne contre la barbarie. C’est la victoire de la France !”

English translation): “Our victory is your victory! It’s the victory of Judeo-Christian civilization over barbarism. It’s the victory of France!”

On May 26, 2025, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz echoed Netanyahu’s framing of the war in Gaza as “protecting Western Civilization,” which fits perfectly into fear-mongering and the Islamophobic imaginary.

The anti-Iran dimension of this convergence is structurally necessary rather than incidental. Israel’s ability to present itself as a beleaguered outpost of Western civilization in a sea of Islamic hostility depends critically on the credibility of the Iranian threat narrative. An Israel that could not point to “Iranian-backed” Hezbollah in Lebanon, “Iranian-backed” Hamas in Gaza, and “Iranian nuclear ambitions” as existential threats would face a very different international political environment. The maintenance of anti-Iran Islamophobic discourse is, in this sense, a strategic imperative of Israeli foreign policy advocacy, and the Hasbara apparatus invests accordingly.^[18]

VII. The Orientalist Colonial Inheritance and the Activation of Structural Islamophobia in Western Foreign Policy

The processes described in the preceding sections did not operate upon a blank slate. They activated, elaborated, and institutionalized an Orientalist and colonial inheritance that was already deeply embedded in Western knowledge production, cultural representation, and political culture.^[19]

Said’s Orientalism documented the longstanding Western scholarly and cultural tradition of representing the Islamic Orient as the negation of Western rationality, liberty, and progress, as a world of sensuality, irrationality, fanaticism, and despotism. This representational tradition was not merely academic; it was the epistemological infrastructure of colonial administration, providing the cognitive and moral frameworks through which European powers justified their domination of Muslim-majority societies from India to North Africa to the Levant.

The post-1979 construction of anti-Iran Islamophobia drew on this inheritance and updated it for the conditions of late-twentieth-century imperial politics. The Ayatollah replaced the Oriental despot; the Islamic Republic replaced the Ottoman Empire; the nuclear program replaced the Arab threat to imperial trade routes with the swards in hand. The surface content changed while the deep structure of Orientalist representation, the essential irrationality of Islamic governance, the impossibility of Muslim self-determination, the need for Western intervention as both moral obligation and civilizational necessity, remained intact and operative.

What the post-1979 period added to this colonial inheritance was the institutional infrastructure of what can be properly called structural Islamophobia; a system not of individual prejudice but of organized, well-funded, politically connected discourse production that operates at the intersection of foreign policy advocacy, domestic politics, media production, and academic legitimation. The Islamophobia industry, in this sense, is the contemporary organizational form of Orientalism — Orientalism’s industrial manifestation in the era of mass media, think-tank politics, and twenty-four-hour news cycles.^[20]

The structural character of this Islamophobia means that it is not amenable to the remedies that a prejudice-focused analysis would suggest: education, exposure, dialogue, and individual attitudinal change. It is organized around material interests, political, military, economic, and ideological, and is sustained by institutional actors who benefit from its maintenance. The Iran-threat discourse benefits the defense industry (which profits from the military buildup it necessitates), the Israel advocacy network (which uses it to insulate Israeli policies and genocide ^[21]from criticism), the domestic Islamophobia industry (which uses it to fundraise and build political constituencies), and the segments of the political establishment in both parties that have organized their careers around the security-state framework it sustains.

It is worth underscoring that this structural analysis does not collapse the distinction between different agents and their varying degrees of intentionality, cynicism, or genuine ideological commitment. Some participants in the Islamophobia industry are cynically exploiting a profitable discourse; others are true believers; still others occupy a middle ground of motivated reasoning in which their material interests and their sincere convictions have been rendered mutually reinforcing by the structures within which they operate. What structural analysis insists upon is that the persistence and power of anti-Iran Islamophobia cannot be explained by reference to individual psychology alone — whether the sincere fanaticism of ideologues or the bad faith of cynical operators — but requires attention to the institutional conditions that make anti-Iran Islamophobia continuously and profitably reproducible.

VIII. The War on Iran as the Culmination of Islamophobic Discourse: Empire, Hasbara, and the Authorization of Destruction

The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran is, in the analytical framework developed throughout this article, not a departure from the patterns of the preceding four decades but their culmination. It is the moment at which the Islamophobic discourse architecture constructed over those decades, the visual regime of threatening Muslim bodies, the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary, the Clash of Civilizations framework, and the Hasbara integration, achieves its operational endpoint: the authorization of military destruction as civilizational self-defense.^[22]

This observation should not be misread as a claim that discourse determines military outcomes in any simple or mechanical sense. Material interests, strategic calculations, alliance dynamics, and domestic politics are all relevant to understanding the specific trajectories of US-Israeli policy and war toward Iran. But the observation does point to something analytically essential: the space of political possibility within which those interests, calculations, and dynamics operate has been shaped and constrained by four decades of Islamophobic discourse production. The war against Iran is thinkable, presentable, and sustainable as a policy option because the Islamophobic architecture has made it so.

The Gaza genocide of 2023–2026 is analytically inseparable from this trajectory. The genocide was enabled, in its international dimension, in the provision of weapons, diplomatic cover, and legitimating discourse by Western governments, by precisely the Hasbara-Islamophobia convergence described in the preceding section. The systematic invocation of “Iran-backed Hamas,” the “October 7 as civilizational attack” framing, the deployment of “radical Islam” messaging identified by the Stagwell research as maximally effective in shifting American opinion: all of these are direct applications of the anti-Iran Islamophobic discourse architecture to the specific political and rhetorical needs of the genocide.

The genocide, in turn, generates new content for that architecture and new urgency for the war against Iran. Hamas’s survival, Hezbollah’s resilience, the Houthis’ blockade of Red Sea shipping, each of these is presented, through the Islamophobic framework, as evidence of Iranian imperial overreach, of the “Shia crescent’s” expansionist threat, of the existential danger that requires military response. The discourse and the military campaign co-produce each other in a feedback loop that Islamophobia studies must analyze with clarity and without equivocation.

The war on Iran is not merely a security policy decision; it is the political-military culmination of a forty-five-year Islamophobic knowledge production project. To understand it only through the lens of strategic calculation is to reproduce the amnesia that the Islamophobia industry depends upon for its legitimacy.

The analysis developed here also demands attention to the domestic dimension of anti-Iran Islamophobia. The political class of the United States that authorizes and funds military action against Iran is the same political class that has, over the past decade, tolerated and in many cases actively promoted the Islamophobic legislative, rhetorical, and policy agenda documented in the Islamophobia Studies Journal’s articles, annual reports, and in the US National Counter-Islamophobia Strategy. The congressional figures who have spoken of “Muslim problems,” who have sought to designate Muslim community organizations as terrorist entities, who have promoted surveillance and profiling of Muslim communities, these are not a distinct political category from the Iran hawks. They are, in many cases, the same people, acting from the same structural position within the Islamophobic architecture.

IX. Toward a Critical Genealogy of Anti-Iran Islamophobia and the Imperatives of Solidarity

The argument of this article has been genealogical in its method and structural in its analytical framework. By tracing the construction of anti-Iran and anti-Shia discourse through six interrelated historical and institutional processes, imperial damage control after 1979, visual regime construction, Cold War instrumentalization, Clash of Civilizations theorization, Hasbara-Islamophobia industry convergence, and colonial-Orientalist inheritance, it has sought to demonstrate that anti-Iran Islamophobia is not an incidental or peripheral feature of the Islamophobia industry but one of its foundational pillars.

The analytical and political implications of this argument are significant. They suggest, first, that the struggle against Islamophobia cannot be conducted adequately within a purely domestic framework, as a struggle against individual prejudice, against discriminatory laws, against hate speech, without simultaneously engaging the foreign policy dimensions of the Islamophobic architecture. The domestic and foreign dimensions of Islamophobia are not parallel tracks but a single integrated system, and responses that address one while ignoring the other will fail to dismantle the structural conditions that sustain both.

They suggest, second, that solidarity between Muslim communities across the Sunni-Shia divide is not merely a theological or communal aspiration but a political necessity. The Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary has operated, throughout the period examined in this article, by exploiting and amplifying intra-Muslim divisions, and most notably, by deploying Sunni Arab regimes and Sunni political Islam as instruments against the Iranian Revolution and the Shia communities aligned with it. A critical Islamophobia politics must recognize this divide-and-rule logic for what it is and build the cross-communal solidarities that can resist it.

They suggest, third, that the Palestinian question and the Iranian question are not two separate issues that happen to be discussed in the same regional context, but structurally interconnected nodes in a single Islamophobic architecture. The liberation of Palestine and the resistance to the war on Iran are, in this analysis, not competing claims on solidarity but mutually reinforcing imperatives. The Hasbara-Islamophobia convergence that has linked them in the service of empire must be met by a critical-scholarly and political convergence that links them in the service of justice.

Finally, the argument of this article underscores the field of Islamophobia studies’ particular and urgent responsibility at this historical moment. The war on Iran is being conducted under conditions of intense ideological management, in which the Islamophobic discourse architecture is being deployed at maximum intensity to suppress critical analysis, to manufacture consent, and to insulate the decision-making apparatus from democratic accountability. The critical scholarly tools developed in the Islamophobia Studies Center, structural analysis, genealogical method, attention to the production conditions of knowledge about Islam and Muslims, and insistence on the connections between domestic and foreign Islamophobia, as well as connected colonial histories, are not merely academic resources but political necessities.

The task of Islamophobia studies in this moment is not to describe the Islamophobic architecture from a safe scholarly distance but to contribute, through rigorous critical analysis, to the political work of dismantling it.

Anti-Iran and anti-Shia Islamophobia has been one of the most consequential and durable pillars of that architecture. To name it clearly, to trace its genealogy honestly, and to insist on its connection to every dimension of Western policy toward Muslims and Muslim-majority societies — this is the analytical and political work that the present moment demands.

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^[1]Hatem Bazian, “Islamophobia Studies Journal: Framing the Field,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2012): 7–8. The Journal, founded at UC Berkeley, established the critical scholarly infrastructure for analyzing Islamophobia as a structural and systemic phenomenon rather than a collection of individual prejudices.

^[2]Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

^[3]Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 229–245. See also Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

^[4]Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 354–398. Brzezinski explicitly described Iran and Saudi Arabia as the “Twin Pillars” of US regional strategy and documented the Carter administration’s response to the Revolution.

^[5]See Edward Said’s book, Covering Islam, for a detailed examination of the subject.

^[6]Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 223–290. Also, important to read Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Revised and updated ed.). New York: Olive Branch Press, Interlink Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-62371-006-4. OCLC 928572276. – originally published in 2001.

^[7]Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

^[8]Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 17–62.

^[9]Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2006), 21–44.

^[10]Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 50–90.

^[11]Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49. For the critical postcolonial response, see Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation, October 22, 2001.

^[12]Hatem Bazian, “Islamophobia, the Clash of Civilizations, and Manufacturing the Muslim Threat,” MDPI Religions 9, no. 9 (2018): 282. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9090282

^[13]Hatem Bazian, “The Islamophobia Industry and the Demonization of Palestine,” American Quarterly, vol. 67 no. 4, 2015, p. 1057-1066. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0073.

^[14]Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012). See also Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (Washington, DC: CAP, 2011).

^[15]Ali Abunimah, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 118–154. See also Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 241–288 on the “existential threat” framing of Iran in Israeli foreign policy advocacy.

^[16]Dropsite News, “Leaked: Israel Reputation Survey Research by Mark Penn/Stagwell” (2024).

LEAKED: Israel Is Considered a "Genocidal, Apartheid Country" Abroad, According to Israel’s Own Research

^[17]Hatem Bazian, “Islamophobia, Israeli Hasbara, and the Architecture of Structural Anti-Muslim Racism,” Substack (2025). https://substack.com/@hbazian/p-181197210

^[18]Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (London: Verso, 2023), 89–124.

19. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

^[20]Hatem Bazian, “War on Islam: State Violence, Structural Islamophobia, and the Architecture of Empire.” Medium Article, March 2, 2022. https://medium.com/@Prof.hatembazian/islamophobia-and-structuring-post-cold-war-new-world-order-3b2df09f04e5

^[22]See Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 241–288.