Slain policeman’s family warns against confusing extremists with Muslims

[Igel]

35. The error is in the expression "a true Muslim."

It allows those who are Muslims to ignore what others who say they're Muslims and to protect themselves and their religion.

The terrorists are true Muslims.

Those who do bad things aren't true Muslims.

IS has no true Muslims.

Those who hate education aren't true Muslims.

Muhammed, by that definition, might not be a true Muslim.

There is no group called Muslims. And Islam is then a platonic, ethereal norm that may well have no adherents or believers and therefore be ineffable. It becomes a ludicrous exercise in nihilism for the purpose of protecting one's self, one's group, one's totem, all because there can be only one such entity. Now everybody who upholds the five pillars and has recited the shahada is a Muslim; now there's no diversity because Islam is so strictly and narrowly construed that there is possibly only a handful of "true Muslims." But there's only one Islam because fitna is still disallowed. We just change the boundaries as necessary, minute by minute, to maintain one pretense or the other.

Water fleas are smarter than to fall for this.

At some point the religion and the culture it's intertwined with have to be related to behavior. Otherwise we have a culture and a religion--both of which are defined in terms of behaviors and ideals--sort of hanging divorced from the population that purports to bear that culture and behavior. Is the population devoid of behavior? Or is the religion and culture diverse and not quite homogeneous, but still to be regarded in some sense as single entities.

It matters when we look at things like "culture" and whether there can be such a thing as genocide by way of cultural elimination and assimilation. If there is not culture or religion held by a population, such genocide is impossible. Instead, either it's genocide whenever a person's unique, unparallelled culture and religion is altered or taken over; or there's no genocide. This is more atomistic than reasonable.