Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step feels like fidelity to the dead. At the last step the argument stops being one.
I was asked to find the name for this. The literature offers four, and the distance between them matters more than the fact that they exist.
The clinical vocabulary names a mechanism. Fear-conditioning researchers measure the generalisation gradient, which is how sharply a learnt fear falls away as a new thing stops resembling the original threat. Shmuel Lissek and colleagues reported in Biological Psychiatry in 2014 that patients with generalised anxiety disorder have abnormally shallow gradients: the fear does not decay as the resemblance thins. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found the same flattening in combat veterans with post-traumatic stress, with correlates in the insula and the hippocampus. The name is overgeneralisation of conditioned fear. It was established with rings of graded size and electric shocks, not with political opinions, so anyone carrying it across into politics is borrowing an authority the experiments did not grant. I am borrowing it as an analogy and saying so.
The sociological vocabulary names a formation. Andreas Zick, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and their colleagues, in the Journal of Social Issues in 2008, tested German survey data across three samples of 2,700 and found that hostilities move together. Racism, antisemitism, hostility to Muslims and contempt for the homeless cluster into what they called a syndrome of group-focused enmity, held together by a general ideology of inequality. On that account the objection does not spread outward from a grievance. It was never that specific to begin with.
For the Iranian case there are two closer names. Reza Gholami’s Secularism and Identity (2015) calls it non-Islamiosity, a way of building a diasporic self by subtracting Islam from it. Shirin Khayambashi, writing in the Canadian Review of Sociology in 2025 from six months of fieldwork among Iranians in Toronto and York Region, named the sharper form ingroup Islamophobia, where the hostility lands on other Iranians, the ones who still pray.
The political vocabulary names a dynamic. Roger Eatwell’s cumulative extremism, from the Political Quarterly in 2006, is the way one form of extremism feeds off and magnifies another. The theocrat and the Islamophobe are not opposites. They are collaborators who have never met, each supplying the other with proof.
In an earlier essay I called part of this the emergency mind, the state in which a crisis feels so total that any act promising resolution looks justified. I would put it differently now. The emergency mind explains why judgement suspends. It does not explain why the suspension takes this shape, always outward, always towards the nearest available category. The shape is the thing to name.
Here is the concession, and it is not a cheap one. The inference is not groundless. The Islamic Republic invokes Islam in its constitution, its courts and its claim to authority. Someone who concludes, after forty-seven years of being flogged in the name of God, that the name of God is the problem has made an inference rather than suffered a hallucination. Gholami’s own material shows people using distance from Islam in order to live, not only in order to hate. And the move from ‘this is an error’ to ‘this is a condition’ takes a dissenting person and files them under psychiatry, which is the oldest instrument the Islamic Republic uses on its own critics. I want the error named and the person left standing.
The error is a failure of resolution.
A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; the judiciary of a particular state does, under a particular reading, upheld by particular men whose names are known and published. Replace the category with the men and the objection gets sharper. Generalisation blurs the target, and a blurred target is what a regime prefers its opponents to aim at.
It also costs the person who makes it. On 6 September 2026 the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) took nearly 44 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, against about 17 per cent for the Christian Democrats, and now sits three seats short of a majority in a German state parliament. Six days later about 150,000 people marched in some 20 cities to demand the party’s ban. The programme that won carries no clause exempting Iranians who dislike Islam. Immigration enforcement sorts by passport, name and face. It does not read your theology, and it will not ask.
So there is no single word for the condition, and the absence is instructive. What can be watched for is smaller than a diagnosis: the moment of relief a person feels when the circle widens and one more thing may be hated without further thought. That relief is the anaesthetic. It is what the widening is for.
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