A great guest post on Hemant’s blog by Muhammad Syed and Sarah Haider on how and why Reza Aslan is wrong about Islam.
A video clip of Aslan responding to Bill Maher’s comments on Islam went viral last week.
Maher stated (among other things) that “if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea or drawing a cartoon or writing a book or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS.” Maher implied a connection between FGM and violence against women with the Islamic faith, to which the charming Aslan seems to be providing a nuanced counterbalance, calling Maher “unsophisticated” and his arguments “facile.” His comments were lauded by many media outlets, including Salon and the Huffington Post.
Although we have become accustomed to the agenda-driven narrative from Aslan, we were blown away by how his undeniably appealing but patently misleading arguments were cheered on by many, with the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple going so far as to advise show producers not to put a show-host against Aslan “unless your people are schooled in religion, politics and geopolitics of the Muslim world.”
Only those who themselves aren’t very “schooled” in Islam and Muslim affairs would imply that Aslan does anything but misinform by cherry-picking and distorting facts.
Muhammad and Sarah correct Aslan point by point.
Aslan contends that while some Muslim countries have problems with violence and women’s rights, in others like “Indonesia, women are absolutely 100 percent equal to men” and it is therefore incorrect to imply that such issues are a problem with Islam and “facile” to imply that women are “somehow mistreated in the Muslim world.”
Let us be clear here: No one in their right mind would claim that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh are a “free and open society for women.” Happily, a few of them have enshrined laws that have done much to bring about some progress in equality between the sexes. But this progress is hindered or even eroded by the creeping strength of the notoriously anti-woman Sharia courts.
For example:
- Indonesia has increasingly become more conservative. (Notoriously anti-women) Sharia courts that were “optional” have risen to equal status with regular courts in family matters. The conservative Aceh province even legislates criminal matters via Sharia courts, which has been said to violate fundamental human rights.
There’s much more, all informative. I gotta go. More later.
Someone who thinks that Bangladesh is a “free and open society for women” needs to start reading Taslima Nasreen’s No Country for Women blog.
No amount of sophistry and dissembling from Muslim apologists can conceal the reality of day to day existence in majority Muslim countries. We don’t need a ‘nuanced’ understanding of Islam (WTF does that mean?) or sophisticated interpretations of the Quoran or the hadiths. The question is “Why are Muslim societies such as the are?”
Also, why are so many members of the Left so wilfully blinkered in regard to the realities of the ideology, is it because so much of the condemnation originates from the Right?
Incredibly, despite the facts, Turkey and Indonesia are still promoted as examplars of ‘secular and moderate Islamic’ countries.
Turkey and Indonesia are both on the fringes of the Islamic world and both have long experiences with secular, military dictatorship. Whatever progress they have achieved has come from abandoning Islamic tenets not adhering to them. The moment the Islamists are given an opening, the march backwards towards the 7th century begins
The blinkeredness is required because to be otherwise would dilute the purity of one’s commitment to the Leftist cause. There can be no room for nuance. Obviously there’s a degree of cognitive dissonance involved when one’s politics require the belief that all peoples and cultures are equal and worthy of respect in the teeth of the evidence of the real world where certain cultures (and therefore by definition the people who perpetuate them) are self-evidently worse than others in practically all important respects. To admit that would require one to admit one type of culture – Western culture other than the USA – is superior to others. One might as well ask why Creationists are wilfully blinkered.
Fixed that for you. People are not cultures. All people deserve some basic respect regardless of what culture they come from or what cultural values they hold. Not all cultures are equal.
The type of culture I would deem “superior” (that is, to cultures that encourage bigotry and inequality) is not necessarily found in Western/USA countries, though its features manifest there more commonly than in other places, at this particular moment in time. I see it as a culture that crosses cultural and political boundaries, though, and exists as a subversive, usually at least partially repressed counterculture within all nations existing at the present moment.
The original question:
There is probably some cognitive dissonance going on, yes. It’s hard to accept when someone who’s your avowed enemy, with a track record of being wrong about everything, is right about something, and for mostly the wrong reasons to boot. Some lefty types are hesitant to be really brash in criticizing Islam, precisely because they want to distinguish themselves from the racist intolerance masquerading as critiques from the right. On the other hand, Muslims do face racialized bigotry in my country, so to me the trade-off (between slightly less brash criticism of Islam vs. protecting Muslims in my country from bigotry) is worth it to me. YMMV. My commentary is America-specific.
It’s true that sometime lefties (maybe moreso in Europe than America) interpret political correctness to mean “thou shalt not ever criticize anyone’s culture for any reasons.” One wonders if they would have rationalized suttee in India and tossing children into wells with the Aztecs.
I would interpret political correctness as, “Every culture possesses at least one aspect that other cultures can learn from.” It’s true that, in terms of modern, mainstream Islam, it’s hard to find many admirable qualities. If we look back over the last centuries, though, it’s much easier, with their many contributions to mathematics and science.
@Sally 5.
I agree, obviously there are differences in cultures. Victorian society was better than cannibalism. Which is an awfully low bar but the one which the apologists for Imperialism used as justification.
We should be better than ISIS. But the reason that ISIS have designed their propaganda the way they have is precisely to illustrate what they see as Western perfidy. When people complain about the beheadings they move straight to Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration torture program.
@Brucegee 5
You are comparing a religion here to a culture. So the appropriate comparison would be to ask what the Catholic church has contributed to society in the past 50/100 years versus Islam. I think both lists would be rather short.
@4 sonofrojblake,
“The blinkeredness is required because to be otherwise would dilute the purity of one’s commitment to the Leftist cause.”
Or the “Leftist cause”, such as it is, in the early 21st century.
I’m old enough to remember the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s and 70s. Although its members were opponents of racism and imperialism, I couldn’t imagine that they would have ignored, for example, Islamic and Hindu misogyny with the rationalisation that criticism would be another case of “white men telling brown men how to treat brown women”. Of course, why not consult the ‘brown women”? Cultural relativism and ‘anti-racism’ sentiments have been extended to the point of absurdity, particularly when religion is used to confuse the issue.
@#3
“The moment the Islamists are given an opening, the march backwards towards the 7th century begins”
Yes, in most majority Muslim nations “free and fair” elections would result in an Islamist majority, so much for moderate islam.
@5 Sally Strange,
“On the other hand, Muslims do face racialized bigotry in my country,”
In mine as well, however, it seems that the ‘trade-off’ can, and has, been pushed too far. In principle, Westerners should be able to distinguish condemnation on human rights principles from “racialized” religion, that’s not so easy, as both the extreme Left and Right can gain propaganda advantages in conflating the two.
@7 Phillip Hallam-Baker,
“Victorian society was better than cannibalism.”
Victorian society was very much superior to cannibalism, most of the West’s liberal democratic institutions were consolidated in the late 19th century and the Victorians didn’t invent imperialism, they inherited it. As with slavery, they were the first to question its moral and ethical justification. They were certainly far less hypocritical in regard to their foreign policy objectives than the contemporary USA.
“As with slavery, they were the first to question its moral and ethical justification.”
Oops, I extended the definition of “Victorian” a bit too far, although it doesn’t make any material difference.
@RJW, you are missing the point that ‘we are better than cannibals’ was in fact the justification used for much of the British Imperial adventure, especially so in Africa where the cannibal cooking pot is a common trope in Victorian literature despite the obvious fact that they were articles of western manufacture.
The folk who like to use women’s status in the case against Islam are the same folk who stand in the way of women’s rights in the West
@11 Phillip Hallam-Baker,
No, I’m not, the justification for the British Imperial adventure was essentially commercial, the initial colonisation of many areas was undertaken by the British East India Company and its private armies, not the British government. The ‘civilising mission’ was simply a propaganda camouflage for imperialism’s underlying mercantilism and never taken seriously by most of Britain’s political elite.
” The folk who like to use women’s status in the case against Islam are the same folk who stand in the way of women’s rights in the West”
Oh yes, the sweeping generalisation, where’s the evidence for this penetrating insight?