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Self-proclaimed "atheist Muslim" Ali Rizvi says "The left is wrong on Islam. The right is wrong on Muslims."

UltimaOnline

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
The 'atheist muslim" asks "Is it better to criticize Islam without criticizing muslims? Or to criticize muslims without criticizing Islam?"

Like most issues, in the United States especially, the conversation around this issue — about Islam, Muslims, and terrorism — eventually diverged into the left and the right. You had the liberals with their view, and the conservatives with their view, and I felt both of them were really missing the mark. They were both conflating “Islam” the ideology and “Muslim” the identity. Islam is a religion; it’s a set of beliefs, a bunch of ideas in a book. It's not human. Muslims are real, living, breathing people, and to me, there's a big difference between criticizing ideas and demonizing human beings.

Neither side was making that distinction. On the left, people were saying that if you have any criticism against Islam, then you were a bigot against all Muslims. On the right, it was like, there are a lot of problematic things in Islamic scripture, so everyone who is Muslim must be banned, or profiled, or demonized. Both sides weren't making that distinction between challenging ideas, which has historically moved societies forward, and demonizing human beings, which only rips societies apart.

I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims. When Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson say something that's homophobic or misogynistic, people on the left descend on them like a ton of bricks. They’re very comfortable with criticizing and satirizing fundamentalist Christianity. But when it comes to Islam, which has many of the same homophobic and misogynistic teachings, they throw their hands up, back off, and say, whoa, hold on, we must respect their religion and culture.

This is very frustrating to our liberal counterparts in Muslim-majority countries, who are fighting fundamentalist Islam the same way that liberals here fight fundamentalist Christianity, and they’re even risking their lives for it. Many have died for it. Yet they hear their liberal counterparts in the West calling their ideas “Islamophobic.” This is a devastating double standard for them.

Those on the right paint all Muslims with the same brush. The title of my book speaks to millions of people in the Muslim world who are atheist or agnostic but must publicly identify as Muslim or they’d be disowned, ostracized, or even killed by their families and governments. They’re atheist in thought but Muslim by presentation. They’re living a contradictory existence. Hence the title of the book.

They retain the Muslim label because the governments and Islamist groups in their countries won’t let them shake it off. Well, now, with Trump’s Muslim ban, especially the first one he proposed as a candidate in 2015, Trump won’t let them shake it off either. Blanket bans like that include many people like me, because we have Muslim names and come from Muslim-majority countries.

Look at it this way. Do you know Jewish people who eat bacon? Almost all of my Jewish friends eat bacon. Now, does that mean that Judaism is suddenly okay with bacon?

This is the difference between religion and people. You can’t say, hey, I have a lot of Jewish friends who eat bacon, so Judaism must be okay with pork. It doesn't make sense. So when I say that most Muslims I know are very peaceful and law-abiding, that they wouldn't dream of violence, that doesn't erase all of the violence and the calls for martyrdom and jihad and holy war against disbelievers in Islamic scripture. Most of my Muslim friends, both in Pakistan and here, had premarital sex and drank alcohol too. That doesn’t mean Islam allows either of those things.

The hard truth is there is a lot of violence endorsed in the Quran, and there are other terrible things, as there are in the Old Testament. But there are more people in the world — even if it’s a minority of Muslims — who take their scripture seriously. It’s dishonest to say that violent Muslim groups like ISIS are being un-Islamic.

If you're a young Iraqi man and your family was bombed by the US, your reaction may be that you may become anti-American. You might say, okay, I'm going to fight these guys. But would your reaction to US foreign policy be to start enslaving and raping 9-year-old Yazidi girls? Or forcing local non-Muslim minorities to pay a tax or convert to Islam, or be crucified publicly, as commanded in the Quranic verses 9:29-30 and 5:33? Or beheading Shias or apostates who have left Islam? Or throwing gays off rooftops?


That isn’t just the reaction of someone simply to US foreign policy. These are things they're doing to their own people. Killing apostates and taking sex slaves. So the question about weighting and how much it matters, it's a good question. But these people tell us why they do what they do. There are terrorists who after a terrorist attack will say, “This is our revenge for what you're doing to our lands and our people.” And then there are other times that they’ll put out statements saying, “This is what the Quran says.” ISIS often puts out very accurate statements quoting the Quran that completely fit their actions.

The thing is, we have had a lot of discussion about the US foreign policy and how that has caused problems in the Muslim world, but we somehow shy away from talking about the equally important religious, doctrinal basis for these terrorist acts. We shouldn’t deny either. I’m convinced that one of the main reasons we haven’t resolved this problem is that we are afraid to make the complete diagnosis.

I agree that in many cases we’re talking about existentially adrift people, people pining for something grand or noble or meaningful in their lives. And in a lot of ways, ISIS or Islamic extremism is the biggest game in town on that front. These movements or groups offer a singularly purposeful struggle, and it’s hard to overstate the appeal of that.

I think that's actually very legitimate. A lot of these people are just wandering souls. They're just trying to find a place for themselves. But the more interesting question for me is why is Islam, why is this particular religion, so appealing to them? Why do people prone to violence find Islam so appealing for their purpose?


The way we think about this is strange. We try really, really hard to dance around it. When someone tells us they did something for political reasons, we accept it easily. “Sure, they did it for politics." When someone says, "I did this for money," we believe them. Even when people say, "I played Doom, the video game, and I listened to Marilyn Manson," we take it at face value and have all these cultural conversations about the role of video games and music in violence.

But when people say, “I'm doing this in the name of Allah,” and quote verse 8:12, which says, “Strike the disbelievers upon the neck and strike from them every finger tip," and we see them doing exactly what those words say, we look at that and go, "No, no, it's got to be politics. It’s got to be for money. Let's see what video games they were playing."

That's the only thing I have a problem with. I acknowledge the other causes. I have explored them in my book. Yes, there are political grievances, and there are foreign policy grievances. We never deny those. So why do we deny that religion itself, the scripture itself, can drive these atrocities?

Think of the [National Rifle Association] slogan, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” The typical liberal response to that, and rightly so, is no, don’t downplay the deadliness of guns. You can’t take them out of the equation. Even if they’re just a tool or prop, they’re central to it.

Now replace “guns” in that statement with “religion” or “beliefs.” Religion is a much worse prop in this case, because it’s got ideological roots. There are words in the scripture that command, verbatim, exactly the kinds of violent acts we see Islamic militant groups do. They’re not quoting Islamic Studies professors at Al-Azhar University. They’re quoting the Quran and Hadith.

And yes, in some cases Islam is used by nonreligious people for other motives. A good example of this is when the Pakistani government banned YouTube in the country after a film mocking Islam and Muhammad went viral. This helped the government because it deprived political dissenters of a huge platform. Now, if they’d said, “We’re banning YouTube because we want to quash political dissent,” the entire country would’ve risen up against them. But when they said they wanted to do it to stop blasphemy against our beloved prophet, the masses supported them. So they used religious reasons for nonreligious purposes.

But this still doesn’t take away from the point. It still stands that religion — and I say religion in general this time because while Islam is especially dangerous today, the other Abrahamic religions have served the same purpose when they were — lends itself extremely well to the goals and whims of authoritarians, tyrants, and the violent everywhere, whether it’s being used as a prop or driving them by belief.


https://www.vox.com/conversations/2...-isis-terrorism-ali-rizvi-religion-sam-harris
 

syed putra

Alfrescian
Loyal
They can say what they want. Eventually they will import millions of Muslims prefering them over chinese.
 
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