Regular readers will know that I am interested in words and language and how sometimes a shortage of words limits the boundaries of thought.

My case is that there is no excuse for a shortage of words, in any language, as they are easy to make up.

The study of lexical semantics is concerned with this issue. It includes and in a manner requires the creation of new words in language through ‘common use’ rather than academic or inspired thought by an individual. Languages not only define themselves but give birth!

Perhaps the process of the movement of a word into common usage is a product of both conception by an individual and adoption by society because society has a use for it.

So here is my attempt as an individual, at introducing a new word into the English speaking world. My intent is that common understanding and adoption of it’s the word would correct a ‘vagueness’ and introduce a ‘precision’ in thought.

The word I propose to challenge, correct and replace is ‘Islamaphobia’.

This is why. A ‘phobia’ is generally understood as an extreme and irrational fear of something. In common use phobias relate to fear of spiders, rats and more abstract concepts like enclosed spaces.

I question here whether a phobia regarding a religion, and those who are members of that religion, really induce an ‘extreme and irrational fear’ in others. I mean, really?

Are there those who are extremely and irrationally fearful of Christianity? Are there those who are fearful a religion that has love as its founding ideal? People might have been fearful of it’s armies such as in the Crusades, but those armies were never the product of the ethics of the teachings of the Prophet Jesus of Nazareth.

So should modern societies be ‘extremely and irrationally fearful’ of the ethics of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammed?

I would argue no. Societies in the West are aware of being irrationally fearful when it manifests as a prejudice and this is more closely what is expressed in the word ‘Islamaphobia’. But is this prejudice rightly placed in the list of spiders, rats and enclosed spaces?

Perhaps a new word is needed to describe this prejudice against people of this faith.

There is one in common use for the prejudice against members of the Hebrew Faith and this is of course, anti-Semitism. It is not Semitic-phobia because there is no such word. It’s a bit weak.

So the word I suggest is used to describe prejudice against people of the Islamic faith is;

‘anti-Islamic‘. I have saved it to my ‘Word document’ dictionary, as it is not there.

Perhaps one day, it will be.