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Islam is not a Race! …Or an Apple, or a Hacksaw. It’s Not Even a Loud or a Sour.

24 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Distinction, Donald Trump, Islam, Islamophobia, prejudice, Race, Racism, Richard Dawkins, Terrorism

Trump's Friend

One of Donald Trump’s fans

Prejudice Paints in broad strokes, but its defense is typically written in fine print. So very often the same person who begins with broad generalizations will find all manner of fine-tuned distinctions to make in support of them. Hatred of Muslims gives us not just one but two of these games. In the first, people worry over whether or not Islamophobia is a word. In the second they reassure us that Islam is not a race.

By people, I suppose I mean Richard Dawkins.

I also mean a lot of other people too, but we’ll start with Dawkins. He just happens to have given us a couple of good examples of the sort of games people play on this subject. The first occurred in a discussion of Ahmed Mohamed (the Muslim boy who’s clock earned him national attention awhile back. Accused of Islamophobia in his comments on the subject, Dawkins dismissed this as a non-word. The second appears on his Twitter stream on December 8th:

DawkinsCropped

What both of these examples have in common is a flippant response to concerns about hatred and fear of Islam and/or Muslims. The issue is far from limited to Dawkins or his critics. Trump and his fans have provided countless examples of these games over the last few months. Let’s take each of these issues in turn.

***

Is Islamophobia a word? Yes, it is. Whether or not that word can be used to communicate something useful is a more serious question. We’ll pursue that one here.

I’ve spoken with some folks who oppose the use of the word to describe attacks on Muslims.They interpret the word as applying only to attacks on Islam itself which ought in their view to be fair game for reasonable criticism (as opposed to attacks on actual Muslims). It’s an interesting distinction to make, but there are at least 2 problems with it, no 3.

1) While it may be true (and I certainly think it is) that there are perfectly reasonable criticisms of Islam itself, it is also true that there are unreasonable and highly biased criticisms of Islam. So, restricting our concerns about unfair criticism to actual people doesn’t do much to ensure responsible dialogue.

2) Actual prejudice simply isn’t limited to such neat distinctions. Unreasonable and biased criticism of Islam itself is indeed one of the many ways that someone seeking to spread hatred of Muslims may communicate his or her prejudice.

3) There are serious questions about the social footing in which even a sound rational criticism of Islam will take place today. Sure, we can put a reasonable Muslim in a room with a reasonable critic and ask them to hold a reasonable debate, but in the present political climate, the comments flying back and forth across various media bleed far too much into other topics such as terrorism, war, and national policy. Whn issues such as misogyny and homophobia are used, as they often are to explain what is wrong with Islam, it becomes that much easier to justify military action against Islamic countries. But bombs fall on women and those of homosexual orientation, just as they do straight men. And the poetic injustice reaches its final flourish when women and children in flight from ISIS are denied refuge because so many in the west can imagine Islam only in context of its horrors. In this context, it’s at least a little difficult to take the notion of reasonable criticism at face value.

As another way of putting this last point, I would say that a reasonable criticism is not simply one rooted in sound reasoning; it is one made in a context wherein constructive dialogue may actually take place.  When that context is not present, many arguments that mihght at face value seem quite reasonable can often do more to spread hatred than to address real problems in a rational way.

This doesn’t resolve every question about Islamophobia, to be sure. The term may be directed at those with legitimate concerns about Islam or its adherents. Then again, words don’t come with guarantees about their own usage. Excessive and irresponsible criticisms of Islam and its adherents do happen, and concerns about such issues ought not to be dismissed with a quip about voicabulary.

***

For my own part, I shall continue to use the word, Islamophobia. I shall use it to describe what I take to be irrational prejudice against Islam, Muslims, or Muslim entities (Mosques, charitable organizations, states, etc.). I will distinguish it from criticisms that I do regard to be rational. I’m open to debate as to which is which, but I shall regard preemptive dismissal (such as that of Dawkins) as a sign of bad faith.

***

The notion that Islamophobia is a form of racism is itself interesting on a number of levels. To be sure, there are times when I am tempted to say that some other term might be more appropriate than ‘racism’, but when someone points out a prejudice, a discussion of whether or not that prejudice is about race, religion, nationality, or some other category can be pretty damned underwhelming. It’s well enough to dot your Is and cross your Ts, but that sort of quest shouldn’t be used to obscure the larger point that some form of prejudice is at stake in the issue.

As to the specific notion that critics of Islamophobia think Islam is a race, well it’s tough to decide whether or not that ‘s a straw man or a red herring. Perhaps it’s a straw herring.

I imagine someone out there may well think that Islam is a race, though I have yet to encounter the fellow. The vast majority of those asserting that Islamophobia is a form of racism are not, however, asserting any such thing. The notion that Islamophobia is a form of racism can be argued in a variety of ways:

1) In some cases the argument is essentially analogical reasoning. Islamophobia shares enough of the traits of racism that some feel justified in using the term on that basis alone. Some may not find this particularly convincing, but even so the denial just leaves us in search of a different word for the prejudice, and in no case does it involve mythical ideas of a Muslim race.

Trump&Friends

Trump’s milkshake brings all the White Supremacists to the yard!

2) Others emphasize the role of racial motivation in support for attacks against Islam. White Supremacists can and do criticize Islam as a way of attacking other ethnic groups. Because Islam is associated with specific demographic populations, criticism of Islam is an effective way of criticizing those groups. You can see this for example in the white racist memes often posted as replies in support of Trump these days. You can also see this in the number of crimes and attacks on others such as Sikhs commonly mistaken for Muslim, or in criticisms that oddly take practices from one Islamic region as arguments against people from another one (see my last post). When folks describe Syrian refugees in mass as terrorists, then no, this is not a criticism of any religion, and no, specific security concerns about the possibility that terrorists COULD come into the country as refugees do nothing to justify the sweeping generalizations often made against these refugees. In these and countless other ways, the religious nature of Islam is confounded with issues of ethnic identity and nationality.

…which is incidentally just what one would normally expect from racists.

Simply put, the question here is not whether those serving as the object of purportedly racist attacks really constitute a race (as if ‘race’ were real to begin with); it’s whether or not racism plays a role in the motivations of those launching the attacks.

3) Perhaps the most substantial argument in favor of the notion that Islamophobia is a form of aracism lies in the notion that attacks on Islam actually serve to re-enforce some of the same institutional inequalities once promoted through racism. Where previous generations may have justified colonialism and discrimination in the name of the ‘white man’s burden’, we now bomb Islamic nations with disturbing regularity and debate whether or not to take in their refugees through reference to Islam and Islamism. In effect, one might suggest that Islam is just the latest label used to perpetuate regional aggression as well as individual acts of discrimination. The vocabulary of racism may have changed, but it’s not terribly precise to begin with, and its effects remain largely the same.

***

Whatever the basis for describing Islamophobia as a form of racism, the notion that Islam is literally a race simply isn’t among them. That is little more than a flippant excuse for dismissing serious concerns. That’s definitely not helpful.

 

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Reza Aslan and New Atheists Who Really are Atheists After All

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, History

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

atheism, Communism, History, New Atheism, religion, Reza Aslan, Rhetoric, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris

r.-aslanThe ongoing feud between Reza Aslan and the so-called “New Atheists” continues to shed more heat than light. The latest round of this race to the bottom of the intellectual barrel comes to us in the form of a Salon piece written by Aslan. It presently carries the provocative title, “Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and “New Atheists” aren’t new, aren’t even atheists.” This is certainly a provocative enough title. I expect I wasn’t the only person to open the page wondering just how he was going to make the case that Dawkins and company aren’t atheists.

Score one for the god of misleading headlines. This article gets its provocative angle compliments of a rather weak bit of semantics:

In fact, not only is the New Atheism not representative of atheism. It isn’t even mere atheism (and it certainly is not “new”). What Harris, Dawkins and their ilk are preaching is a polemic that has been around since the 18th century – one properly termed, anti-theism.

Apparently, the New Atheists aren’t really Atheists because they aren’t merely Atheists. So, if you aren’t ‘merely’ a thing you aren’t that thing at all, at least in the mind of whoever wrote the title of that Salon piece. And if you’re also a thing+ or possess an extra helping of thingatude, then well, no, you’re not even a thing at all.

Out of generosity, I’ll assume it wasn’t Aslan that chose that title.

The larger point of Aslan’s piece is actually to differentiate the ‘New Atheism’ from its predecessors, and apparently to embed that differentiation in a narrative that does as much as possible to discredit new atheism. The resulting sleight of hand is definitely Aslan’s doing. It is admittedly more clever than the title fiasco.

Aslan’s essay includes a rather sweeping narrative about the history of non-belief, touching on a number of things well worth thinking about. Aslan comes to the main point with a fairly specific passage in which he ties the New Atheism with the atrocities of state communism. To get to that point, he first introduces the notion that anti-theism is an intellectual tradition in its own right, one of many twists an turns in the history of unbelief. As strident opposition to religion is what folks like Dawkins, Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens do, Aslan assures us they are themselves clearly part of the intellectual movement of anti-theism rather than simply part of the traditions of atheism.

I’m not entirely sold on the historicism here, but as far as this goes, it’s probably fair enough to describe these folks as anti-theists. The problem here is what Aslan does with this point. While he works hard to distinguish anti-theism from mere unbelief, Aslan works equally hard to ensure that we do not distinguish intellectual opposition to religion from the slaughter of innocents.

It wasn’t atheism that motivated Stalin and Mao to demolish or expropriate houses of worship, to slaughter tens of thousands of priests, nuns and monks, and to prohibit the publication and dissemination of religious material. It was anti-theism that motivated them to do so. After all, if you truly believe that religion is “one of the world’s great evils” – as bad as smallpox and worse than rape; if you believe religion is a form of child abuse; that it is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children” – if you honestly believed this about religion, then what lengths would you not go through to rid society of it?

For an historian of religion this is an inexcusable bit of misdirection. Aslan moves seamlessly from a narrative about the work of Marx and the rise of state communism to a series of direct references to his present intellectual opponents in the New Atheism movement. In fact, he uses the views of today’s New Atheists as a direct explanation for the motivations of Stalin and Mao. It doesn’t get much more anachronistic than that.

…actually, I should say he uses some of their more outrageous quotes. This isn’t really a consideration of their views so much as a bit of quote-mining masquerading as an intellectual criticism, but still the main point is, the man is explaining the actions of communist dictators with random comments from people who weren’t yet a gleam in their fathers’ eyes when Stalin was starving his peasants and Mao was waging his war on sparrows.

In effect, Aslan turns Harris and company into the present-day spokesmen for some of history’s most horrific genocides. This is anachronism at its worst, and Aslan uses it to advance the notion that anti-theism is responsible for the tragic abuses of state communism.

So, there it is. According to Aslan, the Stalinist purges and those of Mao can be understood as a direct reflection of an anti-theistic world view. We needn’t consider the politics of either nation, it’s economic complexities, or any alternative explanations behind these histories. We need only look at what New Atheists have to say today in order to know that this is what the New Atheists is capable of.

…and perhaps to shudder at the prospect.

Ironically, Aslan’s critique of New Atheism smacks of the very inattention to social complexities that many (including Aslan) see in the approach Dawkins and Harris have taken to Islam. It’s an approach that treats doctrines as if they themselves were the driving engines of history, and in doing so it reduces historical knowledge to the needs of present-day polemics. This view of history sees little in human conflict that one can’t fit into a well-written tweet (or perhaps a pithy and misleading title). Aslan has often advocated a nuanced view of the relationship between religion and violence, but with this piece, that nuance might as well be a nine-pound hammer.

Frankly, I’m a bit tired of the battle between Aslan and Harris, et. al. The dialog is increasingly more personal points, and that just isn’t the best role that a public intellectual could play. This a duel between two simplistic views of history, each of them equally myopic. If the rest of us are supposed to choose a side, then I for one will be choosing ‘none of the above’.

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The Prayer of an Atheist

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 91 Comments

Tags

atheism, Existentialism, Pastafarianism, PZ Meyers, Richard Dawkins, Sacasm, Sam Harris, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn

IPU

Okay, believers, you got us!

Atheism really is a religion after all. Yes, I know, some of us have been denying it for years, but I personally just can’t keep up the pretense. I am tired of living a lie, and I must confess to the true nature of my beliefs. I have to open up about my faith and let my spirit-flag fly!

I pray every night. Yes, I do! It goes something like this; “Oh Father who art not in Heaven…” On special days, I ask my non-God to give me a nothing, or maybe a pony. I ask it to confer its non-blessings on those whom I love, or at least I would do that if we atheists were capable of loving others. When I am really mad I say imprecatory prayers in those hopes that the nothingness will embrace my enemies in its nonitude.

Does that surprise you?

Well, we let me tell you about the scriptures! I read a passage from Dawkins every night. And then I meditate on it. (It used to be old Berti Russell, but I have come to see him as a false prophet.) The important thing to know here is that I do not merely think about Dawkins text, I meditate on it. I have to get in just the right frame of mind, and let the spirit of the nothing come upon me, and then it all comes clear.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

Those of you who do not carry the spirit of the nothing in your heart will never quite understand the writings of atheists, for it will close your eyes and lead you astray. Seriously, the nothing will take one of your socks (or maybe a pen) every time you approach it in a false spirit. You may think this is unfair. How could an unjust nothing be so cruel? But you have only yourselves to blame for rejecting the nullitude.

We atheists always keep our socks!

So, what do I do when I have to make a decision? Well, I used to address every moral dilemma by deducing he proper action from the non-existence of God, but in time I came to see this is a pointless theological exercise. Nowadays I simply ask myself “What would Chuck do?”

I can also go to one of several living authorities on the subject. American Atheists are always happy to provide spiritual guidance and direction. One does not simply speak to Dawkins or Harris on these matters, and the scientifically impure burst into flames when meeting PZ Myers in person. You have to go through intermediaries. I am always a little fearful when speaking with these ministers of the Non-God, because I do not wish to anger them and face ex-communication.

Her Hornyness!

I dabbled briefly in the cults of Pastafarianism and Her Hornyness, The Invisible Pink Unicorn, but through careful reading of scripture and some intense personal questioning (to say nothing of guidance by properly constituted non-believing authorities), I have come to realize that these are but cults leading those new in the faith (the “Baby-Atheists”) astray from the one true path.

To help me stay on course, I consult either the Positivist’s Creed or the Essential Doctrines of Existentialism.

Sometimes I go door to door with The Origin of Species. When people answer, I say; “Do you have a personal relationship with Charles?” If they will talk to me about it, I always ask if I can come into their environment and adapt with them.

Yes, all these things are true and more. We heathen don’t share these things with believers, because atheism is a gnostic faith after all. You have to go through at least 3 levels of initiation before you get your secret decoder ring. Only then will the prophesies of Nietzsche become clear to you.

It’s all true.

Atheism really is a religion.

***

I should also say that my favorite hobby really is not collecting stamps.

71.271549 -156.751450

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