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[Merged] General Criticism of Islam/Islamophobia Topics

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mijopaalmc said:
So it is the killing that annoys you? Or the number that are killed?
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... not annoyed by the killing, not annoyed by the numbers killed. How can a killing miles from me be annoying? I suffer no inconvenience.

The fact remains that they are killing in the name of their faith.
 
Axiom_Blade said:
Cool glib reply, bro.

How is that a straw man? Why don't you outline for me which criticisms of Islam are okay and which ones are "Islamophobic"?
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How is saying "[j]ust keep silent on Islamic issues unless you have direct experience with Islam" is a straw man?

Gee, I don't know...

Possibly because no-one has actually made that argument.
 
hgus said:
First some background. I live in Sweden, a secular Christian country. I lean towards atheism. I can well understand why one becomes an Islamaphobe. I know intellectually that Islam as all religions contains mostly good parts and some bad parts. Just as humanity itself. BUT I almost entirely see the bad parts of Islam. On television I see Bin Laden, suicide bombings, religious wars, intolerance and hate. If I do not actively search for it, I would never read or see anything of the good parts of Islam. So emotionally it is very easy to become afraid of and therefore hostile to Islam. Information bias see to that. That it is foreign and hard to understand do not help. Neither is our tendency to generalize the bad things THEY do, and particularize the bad things WE do.

The point of this rambling is that I believe that Islamaphobia is mainly an emotional thing. And if one is not aware of that, it is probably hard to get a constructive discussion.

And lastly. It is of course fully possible, to dislike and even hate Islam based on rational arguments. But I believe it is less often the case.

(It is late and english is not my first language. Any incoherent blabbing and errors is blamed on one of those factors. :covereyes)
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Emphasizing the bad news makes for more viewers because we pay closer attention. This has survival advantages, but it also encourages paranoia.

I agree with A'isha, that in the US we are in more immediate political danger from our own fundie nut-jobs.
 
MontagK505 said:
Were they killed specificity because they were Muslims? Is the US planning genocide on Islam? Or is it just bad political decision making?
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It depends on your point of view. Bush called the wars a "Crusade" and they were largely supported by the religious right in this country, as well as everyone who wanted revenge for 9/11. One could pick and choose those details to paint a picture of Christian aggression against Islam, and say that Christianity is actually the most dangerous of the organized religions. However, this oversimplified view ignores the rest of the facts. This is why it's important to separate the politics and the culture from the religion and the people who practice it.
 
mijopaalmc said:
How is saying "[j]ust keep silent on Islamic issues unless you have direct experience with Islam" is a straw man?

Gee, I don't know...

Possibly because no-one has actually made that argument.
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Maybe nobody in this thread has made that argument...
Okay, let me ask again: Which criticisms of Islam are okay, which ones are "Islamophobic", and how can you tell the difference? Who are the Islamophobes and what makes them different from "legitimate" critics of Islam?
 
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Axiom_Blade said:
Maybe nobody in this thread has made that argument...
Okay, let me ask again: Which criticisms of Islam are okay, which ones are "Islamophobic", and how can you tell the difference? Who are the Islamophobes and what makes them different from "legitimate" critics of Islam?
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I've named a couple Islamophobes in this these now-merged threads and given at least one criterion that distinguishes criticism of Islam from Islamophobia.

You could—gasp!—read the thread and—horror of horrors—respond to the arguments that posters here have explicitly put forward.
 
mijopaalmc said:
I've named a couple Islamophobes in this these now-merged threads and given at least one criterion that distinguishes criticism of Islam from Islamophobia.
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...And you can't be bothered to repeat yourself, but you have no problem having me dig through several pages of your past posts.

You could—gasp!—read the thread and—horror of horrors—respond to the arguments that posters here have explicitly put forward.
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As soon as I find evidence of an argument, I'll be happy to respond to it.
 
A'isha said:
I don't think there's as much difference among the immigrants to the US and to Europe as you think.

Bin Laden's statements are hardly the barometer of Islamic thinking on the matter.

Not full, no, but the door is there and unlocked. The traditional history of the codification of the Qur'an, along with supporting archaeological evidence like the Sana'a manuscript, certainly allow for the beginnings of textual criticism within an Islamic context, and it's already happening where Islamic religious scholarship and Western academia (which, really, is the only place things like "textual criticism" actually are done) intersect.

As I said, that's not needed for textual criticism to start. And Saudi salafist Wahhabism and Iranian Islamist velāyat-e faqīh are not what I would call "mainstream Islam". I would expect such open questioning to arise last in those two places, not first.
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Thank you, A'isha, for your kind response. I'll be mulling things over.

Meanwhile, I like to post and then spend quite some time re-reading my own and others' responses to check for bias. For example, I am concerned I am overly influenced by factors such as this. I am sincere in not wishing to "bash" out of ignorance, and wish to retain balance.

It's a bit of a tough nut to crack, and decidedly very much a work in progress.
 
Are there rational reasons to fear some of the ideas that tend to cluster around Islam? I can think of a few, most of them having to do with illiberal attitudes towards women and free expression.

To take one obvious example, there is the tradition that women should keep some portion of their heads covered, which I discussed a little bit in this post. This tradition also exists within Christianity, of course, but it is limited in the West to a few marginal sects. Legally or culturally enforced modesty is generally harmful in my view, and contributes to the idea that human sexuality is a dangerous thing to be controlled rather than wonderful thing to be celebrated, not to mention the terrible idea that women bear a special responsibility for keeping men's irrepressible sexual urges in check.

To take another obvious example, on today of all days, there were the protests that broke out as a result of publication of certain cartoons.
 
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I sent this as PM to Humes fork (I forgot that I was using the "Quote the Post in a PM" feature to capture the quoted tweet):

Humes fork said:
A great tweet:

Why do mainstream Muslims slam Ahmadis? Its like unicorn-believers slamming fairy-believers. Youre ALL Muslims, w/the same myths. Get along.
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You have a strange perception of "great" when it involves an atheist broadcasting their ignorance.
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Some of the nicest people I hve ever met in my life come from muslim countries. I could easily love a Pakistani woman.

If you read the holy books Islam as it is in the Qu'ran is no worse than what you read in the bible.

Heres my problem with Islam. Most jews and Christians ignore the violent parts of their faith these das whereas muslims still practise it.
 
Originally Posted by Frozenwolf150
Not all Muslims see it that way. Consider the scholarly movement in places like Turkey to reinterpret the Quran for modernity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal...s_within_Islam

The fact that you've got Muslims all around the world who live their lives and practice their faith very differently is proof that the Quran is not immutable. As it has been stated in this thread already, do you think the average Muslim family living in Ohio is identical to the average Muslim family living in Iran?
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I do not want to underestimate this reform initiative but the idea of reopening the 'gates of the ijtihad' has a respectable age now (ever since the 19th century). Unfortunately very few things happened in the meantime, the medieval Islamic jurisprudence is still largely there, barely touched. Even this Turkish initiative hasn't moved too far ahead so far and let me doubt that many muslims would accept it if it departs too far from the status-quo.

The problem is much deeper than the apologists of islam are prepared to accept and it has to do with the basics of islam of course. The familily in the USA is more 'progressive' indeed but the problem is that when you apply the western standards of what means to be moderate even that family appears as quasi-literalist, still fundamentalist indeed. I am often puzzled of how these Islamic apologists require from Christians to renounce the view that the Bible is perfect (fully in agreement) but think somehow that is 'bigotry' to ask the same from muslims regarding the Quran.

Assuming that muslims are like the other people on Earth the only honest explanation for the fact that in the muslim world religion still strongly shapes culture* (and not the other way around as in other parts of the globe) is that the basic tenets of islam (those regarding the value of Human Reason are crucial) put way stronger brakes to attempts at modernization than those of other (Abrahamic) religions. This is not 'bigotry', it is realism, one needs a totally different type of education if one wants to make possible that 'quantum jump' necessary to accept that the conclusions of the unaided Human Reason are more important sometimes than what is written in the holy book...

Christianity and Judaism, of course, have their fundamentalists but it would be a delusion to think that these religions are on the same level with Islam. The crucial difference is that they have a much stronger internal logic inside the basic tenets leading to symbolic interpretations of the holy texts and limiting its 'dark' parts to remote historical contexts. Christianity for example is way less the religion of Jesus than the religion ABOUT Jesus and ever since Paul the symbolic interpretation of the Old Testament and the Jewish Law was stressed making the path way easier to today's view that what counts to still be a Christian is to believe in the Ressurection of Jesus and that he died for Humanity's sins plus a few other basic tenets. Accepting that the holy book is far from being 'perfect' whilst still being a Christian is not that difficult to justify rationally.

Also both Christianity and Judaism give a much more importance to unaided Human Reason (after all Job argues with God when he thinks is treated unjustly whilst in islam only 'submission' is acceptable) and at least since the 13th century Reason became more and more prominent (Judaism may be closer to islam given the importance accorded to the Jewish Law but its rabbis were able centuries ago to renounce the barbaric practices of the torah and this paved the way to today's Reform Judaism).

In short islam has much more educational, theological and organizational 'defects' than other Abrahamic religions and only a frank recognition of these can bring about a lasting Islamic Enlightenment. Only people capable to see the 'dark parts' of their religion can really 'direct' it where they want. As the situation presents today I'm afraid many muslims are fundamnetalists (in the Western understanding of the term), even among those living in the West, Islam is still in the Middle Ages (no surprise that a Quranic criticism on a par with Biblical criticism, one of the 'engines' of modernity, is inexistent in the Islamic world).

That's why I think we should help real muslim reformers (instead of the current plethora od pseudo-reformers who advocate negligible reforms), like Tawfiq Hamid**, although of course the ideal path were the apparition of the Islamic counterpart of moderate Christianity and Reform Judaism (by accepting that the Quran is not 'perfect'). That seems to me a much better approach than blocking all legitimate directions of research via branding 'bigots' all those who think that islam needs a non trivial reform.


*in spite of centuries now of exposure to Modernity

**he does not really challenge the 'perfection' of the quran but one can 'read between the lines' that he is aware of its limitations too
 
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Yeah, Muslims are resistant to Modernity just like African slaves were reisistent to work. :rolleyes:

Perhaps if the West didn't have a habit of establishing cruel, Imperialist puppet states in the Muslim world, when the West can't directly subjugate it, Muslims would be more receptive to Western Modernity.
 
Dream on. Only a non trivial reform of islam can do the job, be it a mere relegation of islam at the personal level + a level of secularism in society comparable with that in the West (not the case at the moment in the muslim world, those who believe that there are such muslim countries now are deluded). Unfortunately at the moment there is not even capacity to change in important ways the Islamic jurisprudence (which is not considered immutable, this in theory)...
 
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metacristi said:
Dream on. Only a non trivial reform of islam can do the job, be it a mere relegation of islam at the personal level + a level of secularism in society comparable with that in the West (not the case at the moment in the muslim world, those who believe that there are such muslim countries now are deluded). Unfortunately at the moment there is not even capacity to change in important ways the Islamic jurisprudence (which is not considered immutable, this in theory)...
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Yeah, that does not show that Islam in toto is fundamentally opposed to modernity any more than a sea change in the demographics of Christianity in the US show that Christianity in toto is fundamentally opposed to modernity. At best, your Islamophobia can be couched in terms of the politically influential, extremist strains of Islam being fundamentally opposed to modernity–which you then expand without justification to Islam in toto.
 
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