Extremism, Islamophobia, and taking New Atheists seriously: How liberals can critique fundamentalism

[rug]

There's a difference between Donald Trumpian bigotry and critiquing extremism. It's time liberals admit it

Wednesday, Sep 23, 2015 01:15 PM EDT
Sean Illing

Thanks to Ben Carson’s objectively stupid remarks about Islam and the U.S. Constitution, a conversation about religion, violence and xenophobia has been reignited. Noted atheist Sam Harris also weighed in on the topic last week (albeit from a completely different angle). Harris and his collaborator, Maajid Nawaz, argued in a piece for The Daily Beast that liberals have to talk honestly about “Islam’s Jihad problem,” without veering into Islamophobic territory.

Carson has been criticized mercilessly in recent days, and for good reasons. The presidential hopeful, like many of his fellow travelers in the GOP, is a religious bigot. As a fundamentalist Christian, he can’t be dispassionately critical of other faiths. Virtually everything he says on the topic of religion is tinged with zealotry. Not so with Harris and Nawaz. Although Harris has been especially critical of Islam, he has spent as much (if not more) time condemning Christianity and faith in general. So Harris at least offers a less tribalistic perspective.

Now seems as good a time as any to draw a clear distinction between xenophobia (i.e. what you hear at a Donald Trump rally) and legitimate critiques of Islamic extremism. I don’t always agree with Harris, and I’ve been critical of the so-called “New Atheists,” but he’s absolutely right that we have to be able to criticize specific religious ideas without being accused of bigotry. A religion, after all, is not a race, and so criticizing a faith tradition is not the same thing as criticizing, say, an ethnic group.

A religion is a bundle of ideas, some better than others. I happen to think that all religions are equally mistaken about the nature of the universe. But all religions are not the same. Harris’s point is that Islam, at this particular moment and for a variety of reasons, has a unique problem, and that we (particularly liberals) need to have an “honest conversation” about that. Harris writes:

"What most discussions of Muslim extremism miss, and what is obfuscated at every turn by commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, Karen Armstrong – and even Nicholas Kristof and Ben Affleck – is the power of specific religious ideas such as martyrdom, apostasy, blasphemy, prophecy, and honor. These ideas do not represent the totality of Islam, but neither are they foreign to it. Nor do they exist in precisely the same way in other faiths. There is a reason why no one is losing sleep over the threat posed by Jain and Quaker extremists. Specific doctrines matter.

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/23/extremism_islamophobia_and_taking_new_atheists_seriously_how_liberals_can_critique_fundamentalism_while_avoiding_xenophobia/

"It's time liberals admit it."

That must be it, it's the "liberals"' fault.

[Fumesucker]

1. Welcome to DU...

Where everything is always the "liberals" fault.

[Promethean]

3. Don't knee jerk against it just because rug posted.

Remember every once in a while his anti-atheist filters malfunction and something smart actually breaks through. In this case many of the most vocal liberals do throw a fit every time someone criticizes islam or turn a blind eye when it is muslims doing horrible things and try to paint it as a more general problem. My least favorite recent example is the dramatic increase in rape in Norway and Sweden. Statistics show the increase is entirely perpetrated by muslim men against non-muslim women but the media and politicians there deride those who try to bring attention to it.

[MisterP]

2. well maybe "liberals" like the guys who shot Romero