Mainstream Muslims Finally Take on Extremists

[ingemann]

Islam also shouldn't be judged on what Muslim countries do. Well, not entirely.

There's not some platonic ideal which embody Islam, Islam are what Muslims do today.

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Muslims in USA are not representive, not even for Muslim minority population around the world, and BTW until they was singled out after 2001, they was happily part of the RR coalition in GOP with all which followed that; hostility to atheism, gay rights etc. It was only the moment they discovered that they was a minority they began to behave like civilised people or at least began to pay lip service to it.

[ingemann]

Islam also shouldn't be judged on what Muslim countries do. Well, not entirely.

There's not some platonic ideal which embody Islam, Islam are what Muslims do today.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Muslims in USA are not representative, not even for Muslim minority population around the world, and BTW until they was singled out after 2001, they was happily part of the RR coalition in GOP with all which followed that; hostility to atheism, gay rights etc. It was only the moment they discovered that they was a minority they began to behave like civilised people or at least began to pay lip service to it.

The point is that there are moderate Muslims. I don't know what percent of Muslims are moderate. Although I am not a fan of Islam in any way, I do think that it is important to give credit to any of them who oppose the dogmatic ones.

The term moderate Muslims are meaningless on it own, moderate compared to what? Do there exist liberal Muslim; yes I have meet many of the, I have also meet MINOs, I have meet conservative Muslims who didn't wish to force their religions on anybody. In fact I work with a conservative Muslims, he's a general nice guy all around, while another guy I studied with was a "moderate" Muslim, and I despised him. These terms are meaningless, and in fact I do not blame a lot of Muslims that they fail to "take on" the extremists, the risk for them if they did that is much bigger than for everybody else. But make no mistake this unwillingness, which I don't blame them for, have a price in that the rest of society see Muslims as a unpleasant faceless mass and their leaders as double tongued liars.

[ingemann]

I just think it's ridiculous that we can be having the conversation on this website about how the exaggerated rhetoric, political extremism, and fundamentalist religious beliefs of Christians in America could conceivably lead to crazy white guys shooting up Planned Parenthood, but once you introduce Islam into the conversation, some of the same people who strongly caution about the former believe that coming to a similar conclusion about the latter is racist or Islamophobic. That there must be other reasons for why they do what they do. It's just such a strange inconsistency. (And to be fair, there are many many people who are hypocrites in the reverse, as well.)

"Well, if this was fifty years ago it would've just been something different, so blibbityblimblam" is one of the weirder defenses. It's hard for me to see this refusal to acknowledge that there is a core issue with the religion, with that worldview, and how widespread those beliefs truly are, as anything other than hyper sensitive social justice politics.

Lefties in America (and other places in the West) are perfectly capable of looking at the Planned Parenthood shooting and realizing what led to it, and are justifiably outraged. But imagine a broad swath of the world where those kinds of extremist beliefs are not only common, but state-sanctioned. Where those people control genuine patriarchal theocratic regimes and subjugate their populace on the regular. Beliefs that have been inculcated in these people all their lives spiral out of control when outside factors are introduced (be it poverty, political instability, war, some combination of all three) and those are important to consider, but it's ridiculous to pretend like extreme religious beliefs (many of which are widely believed in huge regions of the world, whether that's convenient to admit or not) aren't the largest issues here from which much of this springs.

And like I said, lefties have demonstrated they are perfectly capable of understanding these thought processes, and responding with targeting the appropriate ideologies. Provided the people involved are white.

You know, the problem in the 1930s could have been Islamism, but it was fascism.  And, we couldn't hope it went away on its own.  We couldn't send the Nazis to self-esteem classes.  Thankfully, the Islamists don't control a country as scary as Germany.  But, let's acknowledge that parts of Islam are a problem and it needs to change.

This is basically the point I was getting at, more succinctly put. Crabcake specifically understands this, if you're talking about the Nazis. She's reasonable enough to admit that whether you wanted to or not, you needed to target the ideology as harmful, regardless of how it sprung up. Yes, there were plenty of reasons why the Nazis came to power, and why their belief system spread, but at the end of the day the ideology was influential regardless and did grievous harm. So you target the ideology. But in this case, suddenly targeting the various extremist Islamic belief systems becomes problematic.

Bravo

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Also the last question, I think it's quite interesting, it could be worth its own debate, because it's not just a blind spot for CrabCake (a poster I respect) but a blind spot a lot of people share. Of course some of it is pure team sport, there's some quite obnoxious people who don't like Muslims, and often they're connected to Kulturkampfs of the past, which automatic place some people on the other side. But it's also in my opinion part of greater intellectual wave of cultural self blaming of western culture.

[ingemann]

One aspect we ignore when we talk about Islam and the Middle East and compare their modernisation process with other part of the worlds, is the different history and what modernisation is.

As example what we see as extreme or conservative Islam is not really traditional Islam, traditional Islam while it had it own bad side was much more based on regional culture. What we see is a Saudification of Sunni Islam, which in it own disgusting way is part of modernisation and internationalisation process.

But let's go back to the different modernisation. Modernisation is in many way a westernisation or Europeanisation. In this context Europe and Europeans is not the continent or the people living on it, but the areas populated by European descended people; Europe, the Americas and Australia. European culture is the first culture which conquered the world (yes there is the 6 exception, but even they was Europeanised), which is why we see European values as the values of modernisation. But the meeting between Europeans was different and traumatic in different ways.

For China (and Japan to lesser extent) , the meeting with Europeans, could just as well have been a invasion of space aliens; yes they knew Europe existed, but they knew next to nothing about Europe, even after centuries of trade. As such the meeting was traumatising, to see their armies crush by barbarians who didn't want to be Chinese. They was used to when the barbarians defeated them, they assimilated as a new Chinese upper class, but the Europeans clearly saw China as barbarians, which was traumatising for China. But it allowed China and Japan to look critical on their own values and belief, and begin to modernise their society.

south and south east Asia discovered the Europeans dominance earlier, and while they was unable to modernise fast enough to survive as states, it allowed them to keep the structures and institution the Europeans set up.

For the Africans it was worse, Europe was host of locusts which fell on the continent, but disappeared to fast to set up anymore than the shallowest of structures and institutions. They got the worst of colonisation, a brutal break down of traditional structures and very weak new ones.

But here's the Middle East are unique. The Middle East and Europe was historical one, but as the Arabs and Islam spread, they conquered the best and most rich parts, leaving the fringe to Europeans. So from early on, Europeans was war like barbarians, leaving in the wastelands and practicing the an old obsolete Abrahamic faith. That was the world Islam was born into. This meant they had little interest in Europe and thought nothing of interest could come from it, except slaves and plunder. The problem was already a few centuries later Europe was on the rise, but the Arabs didn't discover this as the "Europe" they was in contact with was in decay. The Crusades was a shock, but their ultimate failure confirmed the view of Europe, and the perceived success of the Ottomans only confirmed it further. Only in Morocco there was a early awareness of the way it was going, but they was a poor state at the end of the Islamic world. But we can already see the weakness under the Ottoman greatness. Their richest provinces was the Balkans, the Balkans which in 1000 had been barbarian wasteland, even after centuries of mismanagement, the Balkans was more important than Syria, which had been among the richest of Roman provinces. The Ottomans could even truly beat Austria, even while Austria suffered under religious wars with their own vassals, fought the mightiest European kingdom (France) which was allied with the Ottomans, they was unable to crush them. So the Ottomans, the mightiest of Muslim states, a state in which half of all Muslims lived in or swore fealty to, was no more than a equal to the individual kingdoms of Europe at its highest.

But this was not obvious, and the political situations in Europe, meant that Austria could not focus on the Ottomans, which meant the weakness was hidden, and they was only slowly beaten back. So the Arabs and Turks had a illusion of superiority, which suddenly disappeared with the French invasion of Egypt, but even there the inability of the European powers to agree how to carve the Ottomans up, gave them after the first illusion had disappeared a illusion of being equals with the Great Powers of Europe, which again ended with WW1. After this the Arabic world has desperate sought a way to rise again to what they was in their own views; superior to the European barbarians, but here marxism, fascism and pan-Arabism have failed them; most obvious shown in their failure to beat Israel.

[ingemann]

I think it's quite telling about some people's views of Muslims, that they think treating Salafi hate mongers as the scum, they are, will alienate the Muslim community. The truth are that bedstuy suggest that Muslims are treated as human beings, while some of your other seem to think that Muslims are so fundamental irrational and by their nature savage, that treating them that way will only make them more likely to commit violence.