In July 64, a fire burned much of Rome. Rumour said the emperor had wanted it. The historian Tacitus recorded what Nero did next: "to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace" [1]. The fire was real. The failure to stop it, and the suspicion against the ruler, were real. The people punished for it were a small minority who had nothing to do with it.
That passage is nearly two thousand years old. Fikr Institute reads it as the first clear entry in a record that has never closed. When those who govern fail, and the public begins to ask why, a group is found to carry the blame. The group changes. The method does not.
Rome also gave the method its name, although the Latin maxim divide et impera, divide and rule, is a later formulation of what Roman commanders practised. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul between 58 and 50 BCE in large part by playing its tribes against one another [2]. Dividing the governed keeps them from uniting against those who govern them. Blaming one part of them for the failures of the rulers is the domestic form of the same strategy.
Strasbourg, 1349. The Black Death was moving across Europe, and no ruler could stop it. The Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. On February 14, about two thousand were burned on a wooden platform in their own cemetery [3]. The chronicler of the city, Jacob von Konigshofen, wrote down the real motive in a single sentence: "The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews." Had they been poor, he wrote, and had the lords not owed them debts, they would not have been burned [3]. The accusation was poison. The reason was debt.
Virginia, 1676. In Bacon Rebellion, frontier settlers angry over tobacco prices and taxes rose against the colonial government, and enslaved and indentured people joined them on the promise of freedom [4]. The rebellion was put down. What followed was a new era in which the limited rights of people of African descent and of Virginia Indians were written into law, leading to the slave code of 1705 [4]. The poor of different origins had fought side by side. The law then divided them by race.
California, 1882. When wages fell and the economy faltered, many on the West Coast blamed Chinese workers. Congress suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship, a ban later made permanent and lifted only in 1943 [5]. The workers had not set wages. They were blamed for them.
Germany, 1919. On November 18, the field marshal who had led the army, Paul von Hindenburg, told a parliamentary inquiry that the military had been sabotaged at home. The myth that the army had been stabbed in the back by disloyal citizens, among them socialists, communists and Jews, was later used by the Nazi Party to attack the republic and to mark its targets [6]. The generals had lost the war. Others were made to answer for it.
The United States, 1942. More than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes and held in camps. Four decades later, a commission appointed by Congress concluded that the decision was not justified by military necessity, and named its causes: "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership" [7]. A government that had failed to anticipate an attack punished a community that had not carried it out.
India, 2020. When the coronavirus spread, the health ministry traced about 30 percent of cases to a gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, and many blamed Muslims as a whole. A hashtag accusing Muslims of a coronavirus jihad trended, old and misleading videos circulated, and some reports about Jamaat members were later found to be untrue. Statements by politicians of the ruling party fuelled the anger, and Muslim vendors were blocked and beaten [8]. India, 2024. Days into a national election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked a rally in Rajasthan whether their earnings should go to infiltrators, and said the opposition would distribute the wealth of the country among those who have more children, an apparent reference to Muslims [9]. The leader of the opposition Congress party called it "a deliberate ploy to divert attention" [9].
The United States, 2026. In March, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee wrote that Muslims do not belong in American society. Representative Randy Fine of Florida wrote: "We need more Islamophobia, not less." Representative Brandon Gill of Texas wrote: "No more Muslims immigrating to America." Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama placed an image of the September 11 attacks beside a photograph of the Muslim mayor of New York, under the words "The enemy is inside the gates." The House leadership stayed largely silent [10]. A Sharia Free America Caucus, founded in December 2025, reached 68 members from 25 states by June [11]. Republicans spent more than 10 million dollars on television advertising that mentioned Sharia or Islam negatively, about ten times the total of the previous four election cycles [10].
Set that beside the record of what Muslims have done. A RAND Corporation study found that of about three million Muslims in the United States, only a hundred or so had embraced armed jihad in the eight years after September 11 [12]. Then set it beside the record of what the government has done. In 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the infrastructure of the country an overall grade of C, with transit and stormwater at D and roads at D plus, and put the investment gap at 3.7 trillion dollars, up from 2.59 trillion four years earlier [13]. The war in Afghanistan alone cost about 2.3 trillion dollars [14]. The roads were not neglected by Muslims. The wars were not chosen by Muslims. The money spent on ads warning against Sharia was not spent on a single bridge.
That is the pattern across nineteen centuries. In Rome, the failure was a fire. In Strasbourg, a plague and a debt. In Virginia, a revolt of the poor. In California, falling wages. In Germany, a lost war. In 1942, a failure of foresight. In India, a pandemic and an election. In the United States today, a war, a cost of living crisis and a crumbling infrastructure. Each time, the failure was real. Each time, the minority was innocent of it. And each time, the blame served those who governed, because it turned the anger of the governed away from them and toward their neighbours.
They claim to govern by consent, and to answer to the voters for their record. Even then, when the record fails, they do not answer for it. They point.
Coordination across these cases is not the claim; nineteen centuries share no single author. Convergence is clear: the same move appears wherever a ruler fails and a minority is near at hand. Exploitation is documented: Konigshofen named the debt behind the burnings in Strasbourg [3], a commission named the failure of political leadership behind the camps [7], and in 2026 the campaign against Sharia was financed with more than 10 million dollars in advertising [10]. The precedent is the first one, Rome in the year 64.
The signs to watch are whether the new Congress in January keeps the Sharia caucus and its rhetoric at the centre of its agenda while the infrastructure gap goes unfunded, whether anti Sharia bills spread further in the states, whether the language of blame begins to turn toward the next convenient group, and whether the costs of the war on Iran are debated as openly as the threat of Sharia.
Fikr Institute judges that the rise of hostility toward Muslims in the West, and in India, is not a response to anything Muslims have done. It is the oldest alibi of failed government. A ruler who cannot fix the roads, end a war or lower the price of bread has one tool that costs nothing: a name to blame. Nero used it on the Christians, Strasbourg on the Jews, California on the Chinese, Washington on the Japanese, and Delhi on its Muslims. Today it is used on Muslims again. Tomorrow it will be used on whoever is nearest, because the failure it hides has not been fixed.