What the Left and Right get wrong about Islam

[kmoney]

"The left is wrong on Islam. The right is wrong on Muslims." — author Ali Rizvi
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2...-isis-terrorism-ali-rizvi-religion-sam-harris

Ali Rizvi ... 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. Sean Illing And your sense was that both the left and the right were failing to capture this distinction? Ali Rizvi 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. Sean Illing How does your book split this difference? Ali Rizvi I think all of us have the right to believe what we want, and we must respect that right, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have to respect the beliefs themselves. That's what this book is about. It’s about making that distinction between Islamic ideology and Muslim identity, and explores how we can have an honest conversation about ideas and beliefs without descending into bigotry against those who might challenge or hold them. What the left and right get wrong about Islam Sean Illing There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I want to refocus us on the political questions. I’ll be honest: I came to this conversation with some trepidation. I’m of the left, but I do believe there is an element of the left that struggles to talk honestly about the problems in the Muslim world, in part because so many feel obliged (rightly, I think) to beat back the bigotry on the right and also because religion is rarely the only variable driving behavior. But when I saw your tweet the other day claiming that the left was wrong about Islam and the right was wrong about Muslims, that felt like a good way into this difficult debate. Can you tell me what you meant by that? Ali Rizvi 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. Sean Illing You seem to applaud the intent here but still think it’s ultimately counterproductive. Ali Rizvi I get that it comes from a good place. I’m a liberal myself, and I vote liberal. It’s part of our liberal conscience to protect the rights of minorities, as they should be protected. But that doesn’t mean we must protect and defend all of their beliefs as well, many of which are just as illiberal as the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists. 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. Sean Illing And what of the right? Ali Rizvi 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. Islam isn’t a religion of war or peace Sean Illing I don’t believe Islam is inherently or necessarily violent, and I think a broad view of history justifies that claim. But there is, at this moment, an inordinate amount of chaos springing out of the Muslim world. Much of that is due to political and economic and social and historical factors, and I’m sure some of it has to do with specific religious doctrines. I don’t feel equipped to assign weights to these causes, and I’m about as far from an authority on Islam as one can get, so I struggle to say anything definitive or useful about these problems. Ali Rizvi I'm going to paraphrase my friend Maajid Nawaz on this. He says Islam is neither a religion of war nor a religion of peace. It's just a religion, like any other religion. Sure, the scriptures of these religions have inspired a lot of people to do good things, but they have also inspired a lot of people to do bad things as well. 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. Sean Illing And how do you account for all the other external factors that conspired to create the conditions of unrest in these countries? Ali Rizvi Foreign policy is a factor. It wasn’t long ago that the United States was hailing the Afghan mujahedeen as heroes for fighting against the Soviets. The word “mujahedeen” literally means people who wage jihad. That was a good thing for America in the 1980s. Bin Laden was among these fighters, and himself was a recipient of US funding and training. We’ve seen how that turned out. But there’s also this — 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. Sean Illing Right, but again, it becomes awfully tempting to analyze this disorder in a vacuum. When states fail and societies collapse, you often see tribal and ethnic and religious violence depending on how the fault lines are drawn, and so it’s never as easy as isolating a text or some doctrines as the chief cause. Ali Rizvi Fair enough. 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.

Interesting article. He criticizes the double standard for Islam that many on the right decry on TOL but then also stands against demonizing all.