Faith & Religious Identity
Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Muslim — how source guides handle the language of faith, religious identity, and the prejudices that target it. The corpus's strongest coverage here is of the two structural prejudices (antisemitism, anti-Muslim bias), defined the same way as racism and ageism; the identity terms turn on a single rule — be specific, and don't let a faith stand in for an ethnicity. Pages for Jewish identity and Islam itself are in progress as more sources are gathered.
What this chapter covers
This chapter gathers the language of religious identity and the prejudices that target it. Its strongest, most fully sourced material is the two structural prejudice-concepts — antisemitism (anti-Jewish prejudice) and Islamophobia (anti-Muslim prejudice) — which the source guides define and prescribe the same way they define racism or ageism. Alongside them sits Muslim, the identity term whose guidance turns on specificity: capitalize it, use it as a noun, and don’t let it stand in for the ethnicity “Arab.”
The chapter is about naming bias precisely. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are words the guides want used plainly and spelled correctly (the closed “antisemitism,” and “anti-Muslim” when the structural reading matters). The identity rules are about not conflating a religion with an ethnicity, a nationality, or a politics. The commons’ coverage of faith is still filling in: dedicated pages for Jewish identity (“Jew” / “Jewish person,” including the rule against the adjectival and verb forms) and for Islam itself (with the cautions around “Islamist” and “Islamic fundamentalist”) are drafted but held back pending a third strong source for each — the current corpus carries solid guidance from only two guides on each, below the commons’ three-source threshold for a full page. A Jewish-press or interfaith-focused style guide would unlock both.
How sources position themselves
- American Psychological Association (APA, 2023) — defines both antisemitism (with the no-hyphen spelling rule, following the ADL) and Islamophobia (citing Berntzen & Rambøl); the chapter’s most institutional anchor.
- Racial Equity Tools (2023) — the structural definitions: antisemitism via Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, Islamophobia via Political Research Associates, plus the “anti-Muslim is generally preferred” caveat and the observation that the two prejudices are entangled.
- Diversity Style Guide (2023) — glossary entries for antisemitism (documenting the spelling shift), Islamophobia, and Muslim (the noun/adjective distinction).
- Sierra Club Equity Language Guide (2021) — the “be specific” caution that “Muslim is not synonymous with Arab.”
- NABJ Style Guide (2022) — that plain “Muslim” is sufficient, against the archaic “Black Muslim” compound.
Chronology
The clearest movement in this chapter is a spelling change that consolidated in the early 2020s: the shift from “anti-Semitism” to the closed “antisemitism,” adopted by the AP, the New York Times, the ADL, and the major Jewish institutions, and documented in both APA’s and the Diversity Style Guide’s 2023 entries. Otherwise the guidance is stable and additive. The structural definitions of both prejudices have held steady across the 2021–2023 sources, and the “-phobia”-versus-”anti-Muslim” refinement is added precision rather than a reversal. Read the chapter as a settled core (the two prejudices, the Muslim identity rules) with the Jewish-identity and Islam pages still being sourced.
Cross-cutting principles
- The prejudices are structural concepts, named like racism. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are treated by every source that defines them as systems, not sensitivities — the same register the commons uses for ageism, ableism, and classism. Racial Equity Tools frames antisemitism as an adapting ideology whose myth 'says that Jews are to blame for society's problems,' and defines Islamophobia as 'religious bigotry, with strong racial components.' It also notes the two are 'entangled… rooted in the same systems of white supremacy and Christian hegemony.' These are words to use plainly, not euphemize.
- Spelling and form carry meaning. Two precise usage rules recur. APA and the Diversity Style Guide both prescribe the closed spelling 'antisemitism' (no hyphen), because 'anti-Semitism' implies a real category called 'Semitism' — a 19th-century racial pseudo-science the closed spelling refuses; the ADL, World Jewish Congress, and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum all adopted it. And Racial Equity Tools flags that the '-phobia' suffix in 'Islamophobia' can suggest individual bigotry rather than systemic forces, so 'the form anti-Muslim is generally preferred' when naming structures.
- Don't let a faith stand in for an ethnicity. The identity terms' central caution is against conflation. Sierra Club states it directly — 'Muslim is not synonymous with Arab,' and African American Muslims are the largest Muslim population in the United States. The same logic runs the other way: not all Arabs are Muslim, and the Diversity Style Guide keeps 'Muslim' (a noun, a person) distinct from 'Islamic' (the adjective for the faith) and from 'Islamist' (a political movement, not a synonym for ordinary believers).
- Self-identification and specificity govern. As across the commons, how a person or community names its own faith takes priority, and the recurring instruction is to be specific rather than to reach for a broad religious or geographic label. NABJ's guidance that plain 'Muslim' is 'sufficient' — no need for archaic compounds — is of a piece with the chapter's preference for the precise current term over the dated or the conflated one.