A spiritual Ishmaelite

Internalized Nice Islamophobia in Pakistani Academia: Moral Performance, Epistemic Dependency, and the Politics of Respectability

A particularly insidious manifestation of nice Islamophobia appears not in Western institutions alone, but as an internalized disposition within Pakistani academia itself. Here, the dynamics DiAngelo identifies—niceness, innocence, and moral self-exemption—are reproduced by local elites who have learned to mediate between global liberal norms and indigenous intellectual traditions. This is not simply mimicry or intellectual colonialism; it is a structurally incentivized adaptation that converts epistemic dependency into moral capital.

Internalized nice Islamophobia in Pakistani academia operates through respectability performance. Scholars, administrators, and public intellectuals learn—often implicitly—that professional legitimacy, funding access, and international recognition depend on signaling distance from Islamic normativity. This signaling is rarely hostile. It is couched in the language of moderation, reform, enlightenment, and scientific rationality. Statements such as “I’m a Muslim, but I believe religion should remain private,” or “Islam needs serious reform to be compatible with modernity,” function less as philosophical positions and more as rituals of reassurance to liberal audiences. They announce: I am safe, I am reasonable, I am not like the others.

This is precisely the logic of nice racism transposed inward. The actor experiences themselves as progressive, courageous, and ethical, while the structure rewards their compliance with symbolic inclusion. The harm lies not in critique of Islam per se—internal critique is both legitimate and necessary—but in the asymmetry of scrutiny. Islamic traditions are treated as objects of reform, suspicion, or embarrassment, while liberal secular norms remain the unmarked standard against which maturity is measured. The result is not intellectual freedom, but a narrowed corridor of acceptable dissent.

A second mechanism is epistemic ventriloquism. Pakistani academics often internalize the categories, anxieties, and moral priorities of Western liberal discourse and then re-articulate them as if they were indigenous concerns. Islam is framed primarily through lenses of extremism, gender anxiety, or irrationality because these are the questions that travel well internationally. Alternative Islamic problematics—spiritual epistemology, moral psychology, time ethics, metaphysics of knowledge—are sidelined as parochial or unscientific. This produces a peculiar double alienation: local publics experience academia as contemptuous, while global audiences encounter a flattened, pathology-centered Islam.

Niceness plays a crucial affective role here. Critique is delivered gently, humorously, or with self-deprecating irony, allowing the speaker to maintain an image of balance and sophistication. When challenged by students or colleagues who resist this framing, the response is rarely authoritarian. Instead, dissenters are labeled emotional, ideological, or insufficiently rigorous. Calls for civility, evidence, and “keeping religion out of the classroom” function as tone-policing devices that protect the dominant epistemic orientation without appearing coercive. As in DiAngelo’s analysis, the conflict is reframed as a failure of manners rather than a substantive disagreement about power and knowledge.

This internalized nice Islamophobia is reinforced by accelerationist incentives. Pakistani academia is under constant pressure to modernize rapidly, to align with global metrics, rankings, and funding cycles. Ethical and intellectual change is expected to be swift, legible, and exportable. Islam, with its emphasis on continuity, slow moral cultivation, and embedded normativity, becomes an obstacle to be managed rather than a resource to be thought with. Niceness smooths this process by presenting acceleration as care: “We are only trying to help Pakistan catch up,” “We must be realistic about the global world.” The costs of dislocation—student alienation, epistemic despair, cultural fragmentation—are externalized and rarely counted.

Over time, this produces a form of moral self-surveillance. Academics pre-emptively censor lines of inquiry that might be perceived as too Islamic, too metaphysical, or too critical of liberal universalism. Grant proposals, syllabi, and public commentary are shaped by anticipatory compliance. The result is not open inquiry but a quiet narrowing of the imaginable. Ironically, this often coexists with rhetorical commitments to critical thinking and academic freedom, revealing once again the gap between intent and impact that DiAngelo insists we examine.

Addressing internalized nice Islamophobia therefore requires more than defending Islam against critique. It requires naming the structure of incentive and affect that makes certain critiques profitable and others unthinkable. It also requires moral courage of a specific kind: the willingness to risk being perceived as “difficult,” “ungrateful,” or “insufficiently modern” in order to reopen epistemic space. This is slow, relational work, not ideological confrontation.

A Muslim-world analogue of DiAngelo within Pakistani academia would thus function less as a polemicist and more as a diagnostician of niceness. The task is to show how politeness, moderation, and reformist rhetoric can reproduce epistemic hierarchy even when spoken in local accents. By insisting on the distinction between niceness and justice, and by coupling that insistence with an anti-accelerationist ethic of moral time, such a project can begin to re-legitimate Islamic intellectual agency without retreating into reaction or romanticism.

Ultimately, the aim is neither to sanctify Islam nor to demonize liberalism, but to mature both. Pakistani academia will only overcome its epistemic despair when it can critique Islam without performing for liberal approval and engage liberal knowledge without internalizing its civilizational narcissism. That maturation cannot be rushed. It must be cultivated deliberately, patiently, and with a willingness to endure the discomfort that genuine ethical learning always entails.