Islamophobia in Australia is a fear of Islam in Australian society; it has been associated with hostile and discriminatory practices toward Muslim individuals or communities and the exclusion of Muslims from social, cultural and political affairs.

Islamophobia and intolerance towards Muslims has existed well prior to the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Islamophobia in the United Kingdom refers to a set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in the United Kingdom. Islamophobia can manifest itself through discrimination in the workforce, negative coverage in the media, and violence against Muslims.

As of 2017, acid attacks, arson attacks against mosques and vehicle ramming have statistically risen against Muslims, predominately in England and Scotland.

Islamophobia in Australia is understood as a set of negative beliefs concerning the Ideology of Islam, as well as a contemporary outlet for general public anger and resentment towards migration and multiculturalism.

Islamophobia in the media refers to the occurrence or perception that media outlets tend to cover Muslims or Islam-related topics in a negative light. Islamophobia is defined as "Intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims".

Islamophobia in Sweden refers to the set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in Sweden. Historically, attitudes towards Muslims in Sweden have been mixed with relations being largely negative in the early 16th century, improving in the 18th century, and declining once again with the rise of Swedish nationalism in the early 20th century. According to Jonas Otterbeck, a Swedish historian of religion, attitudes towards Islam and Muslims today have improved but "the level of prejudice was and is still high." Islamophobia can manifest itself through discrimination in the workforce, prejudiced coverage in the media, and violence against Muslims.

Islamophobia in Canada refers to set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in Canada.

Particularly since the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, a variety of surveys and polls as well as reported incidents have consistently given credence to the existence of Islamophobia in Canada.

Islamophobia has manifested itself as vandalism of mosques, and physical assaults on Muslims, including violence against Muslim women wearing the hijab or niqab. In January 2017, six Muslims were killed in a shooting at a Quebec city mosque. The number of Islamophobic incidents have significantly increased in the last two years. Islamophobia has been condemned by Canadian governments on the federal, provincial and municipal level.

The Canadian media have played a mixed role in their coverage of Islamophobia, and have been described as having perpetuated it and/or countered it for Canadian audiences. Canada’s public education system has also been scrutinized for its role as the site of Islamophobic incidents and of the development of Islamophobic attitudes in youth.

Islamophobia in Norway refers to the set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in Norway. Islamophobia can manifest itself through discrimination in the workforce, negative coverage in the media, and violence against Muslims.

The following is a list of a number of recent incidents characterized as inspired by Islamophobia by commentators.

Note that "Islamophobia" became a popular term in ideological debate in the 2000s, and it may have been applied retrospectively to earlier incidents.

Islamophobia in the United States can be described as the unvalidated, highly speculative, affective distrust and hostility towards Muslims, Islam, and those perceived as following the religion and or appear as members of the religion and its associative groups. This social aversion and bias is facilitated and perpetuated by violent and uncivilized stereotypes portrayed in various forms of American media networks and political platforms that result in the marginalization, discrimination, and exclusion of the Muslims and Muslim perceived individuals. Media and politicians capitalize on public fear and distrust of Muslims through laws that specifically target Muslims, while the media emphasizes Muslim religious extremism in association with violent activity.

Advocacy groups like Center for American Progress explain that this social phenomenon is not new, but rather, has increased it’s presence in American social and political discourse over the past ten to fifteen years. They cite that several organizations donate large amounts of money to create the “Islamophobia megaphone”. CAP defines the megaphone analogy as “a tight network of anti- Muslim, anti- Islam foundations, misinformation experts, validators, grass root organizations, religious rights groups and their allies in the media and in politics” who work together to misrepresent Islam and Muslims in the United States. As a result of this network, Islam is now one of the most stigmatized religions, with only 37 percent of Americans having a favorable opinion of Islam, according to a 2010 ABC News/ Washington Post poll. This biased perception of Islam and Muslims manifests itself into the discrimination of racially perceived Muslims in the law and media, and is conceptually reinforced by the Islamophobia Network.

Islamophobia is an intense fear or hatred of, or prejudice against, the Islamic religion or Muslims, especially when seen as a geopolitical force or the source of terrorism.

The term was first used in the early 20th century and it emerged as a neologism in the 1970s, then it became increasingly salient during the 1980s and 1990s, and it reached public policy prominence with the report by the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (CBMI) entitled "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All" (1997). The introduction of the term was justified by the report's assessment that "anti-Muslim prejudice has grown so considerably and so rapidly in recent years that a new item in the vocabulary is needed".

The causes and characteristics of Islamophobia are still debated. Some commentators have posited an increase in Islamophobia resulting from the September 11 attacks, some from multiple terror attacks in Europe and the United States, while others have associated it with the increased presence of Muslims in the United States and in the European Union. Some people also question the validity of the term. The academics S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim Vakil maintain that Islamophobia is a response to the emergence of a distinct Muslim public identity globally, the presence of Muslims is in itself not an indicator of the degree of Islamophobia in a society. Sayyid and Vakil maintain that there are societies where virtually no Muslims live but many institutionalized forms of Islamophobia still exist in them.

Anti-Chinese sentiment, Sinophobia (from Late Latin "Sinae" "China" and Greek φόβος, "phobos", "fear"), or Chinophobia is a sentiment against China, its people, overseas Chinese, or Chinese culture. It often targets Chinese minorities living outside of China and is complicated by the dilemma of immigration, development of national identity in neighbouring countries, disparity of wealth, the fall of the past central tribute system and majority-minority relations. Its opposite is Sinophilia. Factors contributing to sinophobia include disapproval of the Chinese government, historical grievances, fear of economic competition, and racism. Sinophobia also stems from older ethnic tensions, such as those related to Japanese nationalism, Korean nationalism, Indian nationalism and Vietnamese nationalism.

Anti-Arabism, Anti-Arab sentiment or Arabophobia is opposition to, or dislike, fear, hatred, and advocacy of genocide of Arab people.

Historically, anti-Arab prejudice has been suggested by such events as the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the condemnation of Arabs in Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, and the 2005 Cronulla riots in Australia. In the current era, racial prejudice against Arabs is apparent in many countries including Iran, Poland, France, Australia, Israel, and the United States (including Hollywood). Various advocacy organizations have been formed to protect the civil rights of Arab citizens in the United States, such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Below is a list of incidents in Albania that could be considered Islamophobic:

Islamophobia in Germany refers to the set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in Germany. Islamophobia can manifest itself through discrimination in the workforce, negative coverage in the media, and violence against Muslims. Various German Islamic groups have expressed concerns over the attacks targetting mosques.

Anti-Catholicism (also referred to as Catholicophobia or Catholico- phobia) is hostility towards Catholics or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy and its adherents.

After the Protestant Reformation and until at least the late 20th Century, the majority of Protestant states (especially the United Kingdom and the United States) made anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Pope and Catholic rituals major political themes, with anti-Catholic sentiment at times leading to violence and religious discrimination against Catholic individuals (often derogatorily referred to in Anglophone Protestant countries as "papists" or "Romanists"). Historically, Catholics in Protestant countries were frequently suspected of conspiring against the state in furtherance of papal interests or to establish a political hegemony under the "Papacy", with Protestants sometimes questioning Catholic individuals' loyalty to the state and suspecting Catholics of ultimately maintaining loyalty to the Vatican rather than maintaining loyalty to their domiciled countries. In majority Protestant countries with large scale immigration, such as the United States and Australia, suspicion or discrimination of Catholic immigrants often overlapped or conflated with nativism, xenophobia, and ethnocentric or racist sentiments (i.e. anti-Italianism, anti-Irish sentiment, Hispanophobia, anti-Quebec sentiment, anti-Polish sentiment).

In the Early modern period, in the face of rising secular powers in Europe, the Catholic Church struggled to maintain its traditional religious and political role in primarily Catholic nations. As a result of these struggles, there arose in some majority Catholic countries a hostile attitude towards the considerable political, social, spiritual and religious power of the Pope and the clergy in the form of anti-clericalism.

Islamophobia is a neologism formed by combining "Islam" and the suffix "-phobia", implying the basic meaning of "Islamophobia" to be "fear of Islam" or "aversion to Islam". The definition of the term can vary. The Ontario Human Rights Commission gives an example definition of Islamophobia: "stereotypes, bias or acts of hostility towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general." The Oxford English Dictionary defines Islamophobia as "intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims". The Oxford dictionary pinpoints the term's first known usage in English to 1923, although the historical origin of the term is contested. This definition reflects the view that hostility toward Islam as a religion can potentially overlap with the more xenophobic and racialized forms of hostility toward Muslims as a community or people.

In 1996, the Runnymede Trust in the United Kingdom established the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. In "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All", a 1997 report of the Commission's findings, Islamophobia was defined as "an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination." "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All" outlined the following eight recurring views of Islam that constitute Islamophobia:

After analyzing the nuances in many definitions of Islamophobia, Robin Richardson, a former director of the Runnymede Trust and the editor of "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All", concludes that the term can be acceptably defined as "a shorthand term referring to a multifaceted mix of discourse, behaviour and structures which express and perpetuate feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Muslims, particularly but not only in countries where people of Muslim heritage live as minorities."

Specialists may prefer to avoid the suffix "-phobia" and use more descriptive terms such as personality disorders, anxiety disorders, and avoidant personality disorder.

The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος "phobos", "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g. agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g. hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g. acidophobia), and in medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory (e.g. photophobia). In common usage, they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject (e.g. homophobia). The suffix is antonymic to -phil-.

For more information on the psychiatric side, including how psychiatry groups phobias such as agoraphobia, social phobia, or simple phobia, see phobia. The following lists include words ending in "-phobia", and include fears that have acquired names. In some cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game, of notable example being a 1998 humorous article published by "BBC News". In some cases, a word ending in "-phobia" may have an antonym with the suffix "-phil-", e.g. Germanophobe / Germanophile.

A large number of "-phobia" lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other. Also, a number of psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. Sometimes it leads to bizarre results, such as suggestions to cure "prostitute phobia". Such practice is known as content spamming and is used to attract search engines.

An article published in 1897 in "American Journal of Psychology" noted "the absurd tendency to give Greek names to objects feared (which, as Arndt says, would give us such terms as klopsophobia – fear of thieves, triakaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13...".

Some researchers point to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as a starting point for Islamophobia in the United States. It may be due to the growing influence of political Islam around the same period. In his book, "The Modern Middle East", author Mehran Kamrava notes that the "rise in the popularity and spread of political Islam can be traced to the 1980s and even earlier, when a general trend in the politicization of Islam began sweeping across the Middle East following the Arab 'victory' in the 1973 War and the success of the Iranian revolution." Others find Islamophobia present in the United States far earlier and argue that Americans were using the fear of Islam as a unifying concept in defining America. Some also believe that the phenomenon of Islamophobia is a psychological defense mechanism, which is spreading through mass media like a virus. Regardless, negative media images of Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s were compounded by reporting on Islam and Muslims that relied on Samuel Huntington's 1993 idea of a "clash of civilizations" for their framework; one that "the American media were all too ready to embrace after the fall of Communism in the late 1990s."

Spending copious amounts of time with members of the same sex in a confined or limited atmosphere was cited by Kempf as a possible reason for the onset of the disease. Environments where this might occur included but were not limited to army camps, ships, monasteries, schools, asylums, and prisons. Kempf asserted that individuals in these environments who had recently or were currently undergoing stress (due to fatigue, sickness, loss of a love interest, etc.) were more likely to have weak egos. According to the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, the ego is the part of an individual's mind that mediates between the primitive unconscious and reality. When in such a position, sufferers would become "eccentric and irritable", tending to feel inferior and weak amongst his or her companions.

It is important to note that the onset of this condition was not attributed to unwanted homosexual advances. Rather, Kempf stated that it was caused by the individual's own "aroused homosexual cravings". The individual's homosexual feelings as a cause of his or her symptoms was what differentiated this diagnosis from any other stress-related disorder.

In October 2015, a Muslim convert named Malika Bayan was turned away from a hair salon in Bryne by a hairdresser named Merete Hodne who said the Bayan's headscarf was "a totalitarian symbol." Hodne also said that Islam was not a religion, but rather a political ideology. Hodne was subsequently charged 10,000 kroner for religious discrimination. Former MP Peter N. Myhre sided with Hodne, arguing a hijab was similar to a Nazi uniform and denounced the court system for convicting her of discrimination. It was revealed by Norwegian media prior to the court ruling that Merete Hodne was once a member of the anti-Islam group PEGIDA.

There are a number of other possible terms which are also used in order to refer to negative feelings and attitudes towards Islam and Muslims, such as anti-Muslimism, intolerance against Muslims, anti-Muslim prejudice, anti-Muslim bigotry, hatred of Muslims, anti-Islamism, Muslimophobia, demonisation of Islam, or demonisation of Muslims. In German, "Islamophobie" (fear) and "Islamfeindlichkeit" (hostility) are used. The Scandinavian term "Muslimhat" literally means "hatred of Muslims".

When discrimination towards Muslims has placed an emphasis on their religious affiliation and adherence, it has been termed Muslimphobia, the alternative form of Muslimophobia, Islamophobism, antimuslimness and antimuslimism. Individuals who discriminate against Muslims in general have been termed "Islamophobes", "Islamophobists", "anti-Muslimists", "antimuslimists", "islamophobiacs", "anti-Muhammadan", "Muslimphobes" or its alternative spelling of "Muslimophobes", while individuals motivated by a specific anti-Muslim agenda or bigotry have been described as being "anti-mosque", "anti-Shiites". (or "Shiaphobes"), "anti-Sufism" (or "Sufi-phobia") and "anti-Sunni" (or "Sunniphobes").

Homosexual panic is a term coined by psychiatrist Edward J. Kempf in 1920 for a condition of "panic due to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings". Kempf classified this condition as an acute pernicious dissociative disorder, meaning that it involved a disruption in typical perception and memory functions of an individual. In the psychiatrist's honour, the condition has come to also be known as "Kempf's disease". It is no longer recognized by the DSM.

Promoters of this suicide method recommend it to terminally ill patients. However, across the world, most people who use suicide bags are physically healthy. Instead of having incurable cancer or other life-threatening physical diseases, most of the users have psychiatric disorders or substance abuse problems that might possibly be addressed through medical and psychological treatment. The demographics of its users varies; in one survey, the method had been used mostly by middle-aged adults in failing health, who were attracted to the relative nonviolence of the method.

This suicide method is also typically used by younger or middle-aged adults, rather than by older adults. In the US, it is more commonly chosen by non-Hispanic white males than by women or people of other races.

In the early 16th century, popular ontological discourse in Sweden regarding Islam was largely negative, portraying the religion as fatalistic, fanatic, violent, cruel, and aggressive. A popular painting from the same century depicts Saint Christopher carrying Jesus as a child on his shoulder, saving him from water in which the Pope and Muhammad drown. The painting was aimed at Catholicism, and portrayed the Pope and Muhammad as false prophets. Turks were often used synonymously with Muslims, as a prayer book of Caspar Melissander from 1609 reads, "Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, keep us from the Turk, the Tattar, the Pope and all sects." Decrees during the 17th century eventually made practicing Islam illegal, as well as any other religion outside of the Church of Sweden. In 1734, membership in the Church of Sweden was established as a precondition for citizenship, and any non-Lutheran could be banned from entry into the country.

During the 18th century, public opinion towards the Muslim world improved with continuous contact to the Ottoman Empire. King Karl XII made exceptions to the aforementioned citizenship laws in 1718, allowing Muslim and Jewish migrants from the Ottoman Empire the right to perform their religion. Opinion towards Islam and Muslims deteriorated once again in the early 20th century with the rise of nationalism and Orientalism in Sweden. Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, teacher and mentor of several of the leading Swedish Orientalist scholars, was highly critical of the faith. Söderblom's attitudes were very impactful to academic discourse, seeing as few Swedish scholars at the time had connection with the Muslim.

After the Second World War, the concept of multiculturalism gained support in among the Swedish public and the Swedish government. By the 1980s, the presence of Islam became visible in the Swedish society for the first time and was met with mixed responses. Jonas Otterbeck, a Swedish historian of religion, claims that most Anti-Muslim sentiment in the country were derived from an opposition to traditional Islamic clothing such as the hijab and a belief that Saudi Wahhabism (a extremely conservative movement within Islam) was representative of the entire religion. At the end of the 1980s, extremist xenophobic groups began targeting Muslims as a severe societal problem and causing the recession in Sweden’s economy.

Håkan Hvitfelt conducted surveys in the 1990s to research the Swedish public's attitudes towards Islam. He found that the majority of Swedes had "a rather or very negative attitude to Islam" and considered Islam "incompatible with democracy, oppressive against women, and expansive" in nature. Hvitfelt claimed that media was largely responsible for negative attitudes. Attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in the late 90's and early 21st century have improved but according to Otterbeck, "the level of prejudice was and is still high."