The "Shut Up!" Tool Of "Islamophobia"
At Quillette, Jeffrey Tayler lays out how the left betrays the most vulnerable with the notion that if we criticize Islam, we are ugly and horrible bigots:

Those who deploy the "stupid term" ... "Islamophobia" to silence critics of the faith hold, in essence, that Muslims deserve to be approached as a race apart, and not as equals, not as individual adults capable of rational choice, but as lifelong members of an immutable, sacrosanct community, whose (often highly illiberal) views must not be questioned, whose traditions (including the veiling of women) must not be challenged, whose scripturally inspired violence must be explained away as the inevitable outcome of Western interventionism in the Middle East or racism and "marginalization" in Western countries.

Fail to exhibit due respect for Islam -- not Muslims as people, Islam -- and you risk being excoriated, by certain progressives, as an "Islamophobe," as a fomenter of hatred for an underprivileged minority, as an abettor of Donald Trump and his bigoted policy proposals, and, most illogically, as a racist.

Islam, however, is not a race, but a religion -- that is, a man-made ideological construct of assertions (deriving authority not from evidence, but from "revelation," just as Christianity and Judaism do) about the origins and future of the cosmos and mankind, accompanied by instructions to mankind about how to behave. Those who believe in Islam today may -- and some do -- reject it tomorrow. (Atheism has, in fact, been spreading in the Muslim world.)

Calling the noun Islamophobia "sinister," Ali A. Rizvi, a Canadian Pakistani-born physician and prominent figure among former Muslims in North America, told me via Skype recently that the word "actually takes the pain of genuine victims of anti-Muslim bigotry and uses that pain, it exploits it for the political purpose of stifling criticism of Islam." In fact, denying Islam's role in, for instance, misogynist violence in the Muslim world, said Rizvi, is itself racist and "incredibly bigoted, because you're saying that it's not these ideas and beliefs and this indoctrination [in Islam] that cause" the "disproportionately high numbers of violent, misogynistic people in Muslim majority countries, it's just in their DNA."

Also, remember that Islam claims jurisdiction not just over its followers, but over us all, with a message directed to humanity as a whole. Which means Islam should be susceptible to critique by all.