My teacher, the late Professor Mahmoud Ayoub, used to say ignorance is the original sin of interfaith relations. Not malice, but ignorance. Malice, he believed, was simply ignorance that had found a megaphone.
I have thought of him often these past two weeks, as the United States and Israel wage war on Iran, and American Muslims brace for what always follows when bombs fall on Muslim-majority countries: the turning of a foreign conflict into a domestic referendum on whether Muslim neighbors belong here at all.
We are now 17 days into a war that began on February 28 with joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. The geopolitical complexity of this conflict is real—the nuclear anxieties, the regional power dynamics, the long shadow of the Islamic Republic’s internal repression. Those deserve serious, careful analysis.
What does not deserve a moment’s tolerance is what has erupted alongside the military campaign: a surge of Islamophobia so severe that researchers at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented over 25,000 Islamophobic posts on a single social media platform in the first six days of the war alone. These have been amplified through reposts, bringing that number to nearly 280,000 mentions.
The language filling those posts describes Muslim Americans as “vermin,” “parasites,” and an “infestation”—the precise vocabulary that has historically preceded mass violence against targeted peoples. This is not incidental. It is being seeded from the top.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has described Iran as driven by “prophetic Islamic delusions.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has called Iran’s faith a “misguided religion.” A sitting member of Congress from Tennessee has declared, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”
This is not wartime rhetoric that merely “misses the mark.” It is a theological and civic claim—the assertion that 1.8 billion people and the three to four million who are our fellow citizens are constitutionally incompatible with the American project.
I have spent years working at the intersection of Muslim-Christian dialogue, editing The Muslim World journal at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and studying at the feet of scholars who dedicated their lives to the Abrahamic conversation. As such, I find this claim not only morally abhorrent but intellectually illiterate.
Iran is not Islam. The Islamic Republic is not the ummah (the whole community of Muslims).
This distinction is not a technicality. It is foundational.
The Shia Muslims with whom I have shared meals, theological conversation, prayer and grief are not responsible for the decisions of a government they themselves have protested at enormous personal cost. The men and women in Tehran’s bombed residential neighborhoods, the families whose homes have been destroyed, the prisoners in Evin receiving only bread and water—these are not abstractions. They are human beings made in the image of God, which is what my tradition teaches, and what Professor Ayoub’s tradition teaches as well, in its own luminous language.
I am a Baptist pastor in Waco, Texas. My congregation is progressive and affirming. We are not a political organization, but we are a moral one and the gospel has never permitted the luxury of silence when neighbors are scapegoated.
When we worked on our immigrant support ministry last year, naming it Refugia, we were practicing what the Bible demands—that the stranger among us be treated as native-born, that the alien not be oppressed. That calling does not evaporate simply because the government has decided to wage war. If anything, it intensifies.
The pattern is painfully familiar. After October 7, 2023, Muslim and Arab students were harassed on campuses across the country. After 9/11, Sikhs were murdered because they wore turbans.
Fear, weaponized by power, always seeks the nearest available face. And the rhetoric being deployed right now—framing this war in terms of “prophetic Islamic delusions” and “misguided religion”—is not merely careless. It is a Christian nationalist narrative that dresses imperialism in the vestments of crusade.
Professor Ayoub taught me that the Quran and the gospel share a profound commitment to the dignity of the human person—al-karama al-insaniyya—a dignity that no state, no war, and no demagogue has the authority to revoke.
The work of interfaith reconciliation is never merely academic. In moments like this, it is survival work. It is the insistence, sometimes costly, that our neighbor’s humanity is not conditional on the behavior of their government, their ethnic heritage, or the religion they practice.
The bombs are falling on Iran. We must not let hatred fall on the people next door.
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