this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Bigotry is intersectional. You know damn well what people are trying to say, and what hateful bullshit they're responding to.
When some redcap uses "Muslim" as a synecdoche for spitting out middle-eastern stereotypes, they're not engaging in comparative religious criticism, or making some grand philosophical argument. They're being a racist asshole. Even if the label they use is not a race. If you haven't noticed - racist assholes love tiny excuses to say 'what's so racist about--?!' whatever dehumanizing caricature they just attributed to some associated label. Like "thugs." Or "bankers."
Bankers aren't an ethnicity... but people screaming about "bankers controlling the media" are definitely talking about an ethnicity.
This is true, but when I'm having a discussion about religion and I feel like I'm done criticizing christianity and move on to islam for a bit, people shouldn't say "woah, that sounds a bit racist", and some people still do. I'm very left leaning but I have to say it's mostly people who consider themselves progressive or left leaning, who have trouble separating these things.
In your discussions about Islam, do you confine your criticism to Islam as a religion, or do you branch off into the political and social roles that Islam plays and their negative contributions towards human development (sorry if I am making assumptions)?
If it is the latter, it is an incomplete picture unless you talk about how what we now consider the Muslim world was pushed into being such through the systemic disassembly of moderate Islam and secular third world movements because they were seen as less disruptive to the international order than the potentially Soviet-aligned movements? The Islamic Republic in Iran didn’t come out of nowhere, after all. You’re not talking about Islam per se at that point, but a forced move of political radicalization that was looking for any carrier it could use.
This depends on who I'm talking to. I don't usually steer the debate towards politics my self because I don't feel like I'm well enough informed about foreign politics to start that particular debate. However one of my friends with whom I often have deep discussions is from Iran, and he loves debating the political side of what is going on there lately, so when I'm talking to him, the political and social roles of Islam is regularly touched upon. If I'm talking to someone who doesn't have a greater knowledge of the political side than I do, I try to keep it about the religion. If I'm going to debate something I know little or nothing about, I prefer if the other person does know something about it, so they can correct me if I make dumb assumptions because of my ignorance, and so I can learn a bit more and hopefully become less ignorant with time.
Edit: a word