Religion
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(9,356 posts)Over at the Friendly Atheist:
Criticism of Islam Is Not Islamophobia - April 4, 2013 By Hemant Mehta
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/04/criticism-of-islam-is-not-islamophobia/
The article links to an equally good piece by Jackson Doughart and Faisal Saeed al-Mutar, who hit the nail right on the head:
the creeping influence of terms like blasphemy and Islamophobia is undignifying to both Muslims and non-Muslims for two reasons. First, it colludes with Islams attempt to infantalize its adherents convincing them that critical thought, especially about the matters of faith, is immoral. Second, it presumes that Muslims, particularly in the West, are not mature enough to handle criticism of their chosen beliefs, and that their subcultures are reducible to archaic texts and practices. This is the real injustice, involving the basest abandoning of scruple and succumbing to cowardice, and can only be rectified by ditching this thoroughly nonsensical expression.
That paragraph clarifies something that's always bothered me about the "Islamophobia" argument - it seems condescending if not downright insulting to Muslims.
And of course, to the delight of real extremists, it tries to insulate Islam from criticism by providing a handy double standard.
Christine Stansell picked up on that in her review of Leila Ahmed's 2009 book, "A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America." (Ahmed is also the author of "Women and Gender In Islam" (1993), which I read while living in Ahmed's native country, Egypt.)
Writing in New Republic, Stansell notes:
American feminists have no problem seeing fundamentalist Christianity as a broad-based movement that harbors lethal views at the edges, but they will bend over backwards to avoid criticisms of radical Islam, even at its most hateful and murderous.
The only violence that matters in the book is American violence. The (Muslim) Brotherhoods slaughter of Sadat and eleven other high-ranking officials, an attack which wounded twenty-eight, comes off here as an unfortunate but righteous act...
Certainly the emphasis on male politics is right. It is to the books credit that it insists on understanding veiling in a broad context, and not simply as a womans issue. But feminism sometimes disappears altogether. This is because Ahmed wishes to trap her theme between the poles of Western oppression on the one hand and, on the other, those anti-imperial resistance movements that made veiling into an emblem.
But the historical reality is not so simple. Colonialists certainly made anti-veiling a pawn, but so did their opponents, foisting off the task of maintaining tradition onto women and sneering at their objections as the result of Western feminist ideas.
http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/hidden-in-plain-sight#