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Why should a white feminist remain Muslim?

Jill

Muslim Hedonist has thoughts.

The North American Muslim version of an identity crisis has been raging online for some time now, especially after 9/11. Being a Muslim is regarded by many, probably most immigrant Muslims here, as primarily the result of being born into a Muslim family. A Muslim child is (usually) assumed to become a Muslim adult, unless he/she either publicly converts to another religion.

I take the main concern underlying Sana’s comments to be something like this: ‘You’re white; you weren’t born in a so-called terrorist-producing country, or to a Muslim family. As a woman, you’re not even circumcised (unlike born Muslim men). In other words, you can hide, unlike us. In today’s political climate, we are stuck with being Muslim whatever we personally happen to believe, but you aren’t.

Not only that, but you, who exercised a privilege which we never had—the freedom to choose to be Muslim, as opposed to having it forced on you—have the gall to turn around and complain about how oppressive Islam is to women. What, didn’t you do any research before deciding to convert? And since you now see the light, why do you persist in hanging around?’

Read it all.

6 thoughts on Why should a white feminist remain Muslim?

  1. Interesting. It’s so hard for me to analyse these things because to me all religion is made up and thus flexible. I cannot take the point of view that any kind of deity or spirituality is a reality because it’s more alien to me than the idea of being the opposite sex or for a closer simile being from a different culture.

    Hence I support strongly people’s right to believe whatever the hell they want, but equally strongly detest using your belief in any controlling manner.

    My point being that I was considering a response to the concept of defining Islam and what it is to be Islamic and realised I wouldn’t know where to start or how to be objective. So I’ll just ramble instead 😀

  2. Unlike Catholocism, which is not going to change anytime soon, if ever, Islam has no hiearchy, and is thus in many ways more flexable. Of course, that can work to the benefit of the fundies as well as the more liberal Muslims.

    It seems to me, as an outsider to all religion, that one of the key problems in Islam, as well as Christianity, is that to a very large extent the non-fundies tend to percieve their fundamentalist coreligionists as holding a more pure, or true, or devout, version of the faith. Which results in a reluctance to criticize too loudly. After all, a fundie is just a liberal believer with the faith knob turned up to eleven. Since faith is central to religion, how can you reasonably criticize someone for having strong faith?

    I tend to view Islam as the last remaining real religion. Christianity, 500 years ago (heck, 200 years ago) was real. Christians killed one another over religious schisms, burned witches, and killed heritics. They didn’t just have faith, they had FAITH. Real religion, the pure, undiluted, nondomesticated, stuff is bloody dangerous. Modern Christianity is watered down; it isn’t a way of life, its a hobby. And I’m delighted with that, hobby religions are safe, no one kills other people for their hobby religion. Of course, the fundamentalist Christians are constantly trying to make Christianity a real religion again, and I worry greatly that they might succeed. Ideally religion goes from hobby, to cultural artifact, to discarded like bell bottoms and disco.

    Islam needs to be watered down as well. Right now Muslims are pretty much the only religious group where FAITH is more common than faith, and as a consiquence they kill each other over religious schisms, kill heritics, etc.

    I hope that converts to Islam can work with born Islamic liberals to help bring liberal Islam into greater acceptability and prominance, and thus water down Islam and make it safe to be around. Because undiluted religion, whatever the religion, is too dangerous to let exist in the world.

  3. The “hobby religions” still might kill people of other religions over their FAITH. To assume otherwise is to ignore a rather palpable reality of world politics. Furthermore, capital “I” Islam is no less safe than capital “C” Christianity, you just have to look outside of the hegemony created by the news media, and with an open mind. Perhaps by living among those scary Muslims for a while. To me, its your rather broad generalizations that are scary – if people were to indulge complexity a little more than they currently do, there would be fewer “misunderstandings” in this world of ours.

  4. Either I was unclear, or you’ve misunderstood what I said. I am not at all attempting to claim that Christianity is safe, merely that due to its (largely) hobby status it engages in violence vastly less frequently than Islam does due to Islam’s (largely) non-hobby status.

    That Protestants and Catholics still assault and murder one another over obsure points of dogma in Northern Irelant stands out, for example, because it is so uncommon. In most of the rest of the Christian dominated parts of the world Protestants and Catholics don’t often even taunt one another, much less engage in sectarian violence. Why? Because mostly (just mostly, not wholly) Christianity is a hobby, not a real religion. Compare to the much more frequent violence between Shia and Sunni due to the fact that Islam is mostly (just mostly, not wholly) a real religion as opposed to a hobby.

    Objectively, Islam is more scary than Christianity. How many homosexuals have been sentenced to death and executed in Vatican City in the past year? Zero, right? But the best figures available [1] tend to indicate that at least 100 homosexuals, likely many more, were executed in Saudi Arabia in the past year.

    How many women in Vatican City were sentenced to brutal torture as punishment for being a rape victim in the past year? We know of one in Saudi Arabia.

    I’m not any more anti-Muslim than I am anti-any-other-religion. But it is undeniable that Islam is (mostly) a real religion, while Christianity is (mostly) a hobby. The result is that Christians don’t kill people for religious reasons anywhere near as often as Muslims kill people for religious reasons.

    Christianity is dangerous, absolutely. But it is less dangerous than Islam becuse it is so much more watered down.

    Take Shintoism as an example. Prior to WWII great efforts were made in Japan to produce fundamentalist Shintoists, and those efforts succeeded to a terrifying degree. By the time WWII arrived about one and a half generations had grown up being indoctornated in fundamentalist Shinto, and the result was that large numbers of otherwise sane and rational Japanese were not only willing, but eager, to die for the Emperor. The term “suicide bombing” hadn’t been invented yet, but it accurately describes Japanese tactics during the later part of WWII. In Okinawa, for example, there are dozens of recorded instances of apparently unarmed women and children concealing explosives about their persons, “surrendering” to US forces, and then detonating the explosives when they were near a large group of US soldiers. And that’s ignoring Kamikaze attacks, the “mass charge” tactics used by the Japanese infantry, and the fact that the Japanese Imperial Army tended to fight to the last man rather than surrender.

    Today Shinto is something of the ultimate in hobby religions, it has been watered down so successfully that aside from a thin scattering of genuine believers its not even really a hobby anymore, its a cultural artifact.

    Christianity hasn’t been watered down as successfully as Shinto was, and in the USA I note a disturbing increase in the number of people practicing Christianity as a real religion.

    I strongly suspect that, numerically, the number of Real Muslims is fairly low, but it appears to be greater than the number of Real Christians, even in the USA, as evidenced by the significantly higher amount of Islamic inspired violence when compared to the amount of Christian inspired violence.

    Again, I’m *NOT* claiming that Christianity is nice and wonderful and fantastic, and that Muslims are evil terrorists. I’m simply saying that Islam is taken more seriously by a larger number of its believers than Christianity is, and that does make it more of a threat. That does *NOT* mean that I’m claiming Christianity isn’t a threat, just that its *less* of a threat.

    I also realize that conservative thugs will use any and all excuses to claim that Islam is evil to its core, destructive to the world, and must be crushed. But the fact that they’re crazy can’t let liberals of good will ignore the fact that Islam isn’t as watered down as Christianity yet. Conservative gasbags also use the illegal immegration problem as a front for their racist agenda; that doesn’t mean that illegal immegration isn’t a problem [2]. I can’t let the fear that conservative thugs are being their usual thuggish selves about Islam prevent me from observing that, objectively, Islam kills a lot more people than Christianity.

    [1] Which aren’t that good because the dictators of Saudi Arabia won’t release real figures.

    [2] I don’t like it largely because illegal workers have no bargaining power and consiquently get massively abused by the villians who use them as pseudo-slaves. I say make it easier to get in legally and put stiff penalties on the people who hire illegals, but leave the poor illegals alone. They wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a demand for their labor, so either cut that demand by punishing the employers, or let that demand be satisfied by letting in orders of magnitude more legal immegrents.

  5. That Protestants and Catholics still assault and murder one another over obsure points of dogma in Northern Irelant stands out, for example, because it is so uncommon.

    Well, they don’t, for starters. The Troubles are officially over. There have been a very small number of recent murders by terrorist groups but they basically were “punishment” /”law enforcement” gang stuff, and not cross-sectarian IIRC. It’s way past time that the petty criminal gangs of Belfast stopped being dignified with the terrorist/political struggle label.

    The other, much more important thing is that “obscure points of dogma” do not and did not ever have anything to do with it. It was an ethnic conflict, a civil rights struggle that turned violent and nasty. Christianity is a total red herring here. You’re actually looking at colonialism as the root of the problem, and while I am basically ignorant of history I suspect the same is true of any alleged “religious” struggle. The reason Northern Ireland stands out is that Ireland is weird in being a white European country that was a victim rather than a perpetrator of violent colonialism. (I’m painting with a really broad brush here; like I said, I don’t really know history.)

  6. Also, I should point out that by “very small number” in the (currently moderated) comment above, I mean, literally, two or three. This is a tangent, but always kind of weirds me out that people know *anything* about the Troubles, like, that they even existed. It’s almost impossible to overstate what an obscure, tiny little conflict it is on the global scale. To put it in perspective, I just went and looked up homicide rates and it seems like there were four years in the 1970s when Northern Ireland had a higher homicide rate per head than the United States, and one year when it was three times as high. So: the Troubles went on for thirty years, and most of that time they didn’t even pull the murder statistics up high enough to get over the normal baseline in the USA. And Northern Ireland is really, really small– about a million people now, less then. A not-very-violent conflict on a tiny scale. So how come it got so much global media attention? How can people say stuff like “well, Iraq will be OK in the end– look at Northern Ireland?” The scale of Iraq and the problems there, it’s insane to compare it. My creepy feeling about this is that because Northern Ireland was a conflict involving white people, it just got way more attention and loomed much larger in people’s heads than it should have.

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