You can see this idea that giving offense causes harm everywhere in the new critical social justice culture. Anything that gives offense to marginalized people must be repressed for the good of society. And anyone criticizing people of color too strenuously or offending them must be deplaformed and canceled. And just as in Islam, there is a jockeying for who is the accurate representation of the faith, Sunnis or Shia, in the social justice camp, believers decide who the true representatives of each oppressed group are.
Fall afoul of the right political view and you will be denounced; people throw around terms such as "political blackness" or "multi-racial whiteness. In Muslim countries, biology textbooks will censor evolution.
Now, due to gender theory, biology is similarly coming into conflict with an ideology—and losing. A mixture of post-colonial theory and critical race theory is behind a push to disrupt texts, a call to decolonize the Western Canon and school curricula.
Critical social justice ideologies are in direct conflict with Enlightenment values and the rigors of the scientific method, like Islam, and are thus a huge threat to liberalism—like Islam. I have had the good fortune to meet and speak with many brave people in the fights against fundamental Islam and critical social justice. That silent majority needs to become vocal very quickly.
We need more people to be brave enough to speak up and push back. The long march through the institutions is sprinting into the final lap, and it cannot be allowed to win. Why should Islam get special dispensation? Ali and fellow activist Asra Q. Reformers like Ali and Nawaz do, and they continually exhort those Muslims who disagree with such diktats — and those outside the religion — to speak up.
In her Op-Ed, Ali noted the false argument so often made, that to criticize Islam is bigotry. Her critics would point to the success of Muslims in America, a deeply assimilated population that, according to multiple studies — including one published by the Cato Institute in October — is among the most educated and affluent. Nor do we grapple with dress codes, burqa bans and other such debates that have consumed Europe for years.
AZ: The whole gamut. I think what he wrote is valid. This is a conversation we have in the Muslim world, so why is it a problem? As soon as I was the target of those kinds of attacks to try to silence me, I realized this is a strategy. This is a strategy to try to intimidate people into silence.
It is a betrayal of liberalism and liberal values that the liberal left is complicit with this silencing of Muslim voices that argue for self-criticism, liberal values, progressive ideals, this is a betrayal of liberalism and of liberal values. To me, time will reveal that liberals were on the wrong side of history on this point.
This is a moment to wake up and offer honest conversation as a remedy to so many of the social ills that challenge liberal values. That could all well be true. Like the United States for example. It was before women could vote in this country constitutionally. I like what Ani said, that in one place they want to cover a woman up, the other they want to display them to sell stuff. Both I think are exploitive. And I can tell you, in the context of my district, and the people who I serve, we get cases of sexual harassment, abuse, all the time.
No Muslims are within miles of the conversation. But I think it needs to be confronted like I would anywhere else, and not fetishized within the Muslim community as a special problem. But I have serious issues with his framing. Muslims have been a punching bag for quite awhile, in a modern sense. Part of that is based on ignorance, part of that is based on the lens that we use.
Because you start framing and pushing a culture in a negative sense, add religion to it, add culture to it, add tribalism to it, and in the end it seems that demeaning a whole society becomes such a convenient thing. I disagree. Framing it like that, in a U. AZ: Can I add something? This is a new phenomenon. It has to do with this new interpretation of Islam that has taken over the Muslim world and redefined what Islam is.
They were not violent—they were poor and they were oppressed. I think everybody knows that there are global problems in all of this. AG: I was wondering what your sense is of what I think is a failing of the liberal, lower-case-d democratic political system that we have a situation where one of our two major parties is ending up with two candidates who are extraordinary bigots against American Muslims.
Another question is whether there is a special responsibility for liberal Muslims to speak on behalf of their conservative coreligionists. KE: How did we end up with a situation where the Republican Party has basically decided that Muslim-bashing is going to help them win elections?
Let me just say, Herman Cain was doing it four years ago. They put it in their platform. I know of no Muslims trying to establish a caliphate or Sharia law in the United States. How did this come to be?
One, these people hate a lot of people, not just Muslims. There it is. The regular, good old American xenophobia and bigotry has pulled up to include some new people: Muslims. Those two things have worked together. So Ted Cruz has Frank Gaffney as a top aide. And I think the answer is clear. You see Muslims all over this country, even today, last night, people coming on the Hill, talking about issues, talking about problems that they want policymakers to address, this is how this problem is going to be solved: activism and inclusion.
Let me wrap up with one quick story. After Ferguson, you heard some Muslims be in solidarity with African Americans, while some were silent. Anyway, I go to Ferguson to raise voter turnout, because when Mike Brown was killed, the election before that only 12 percent of people voted at all. Twelve percent. So we go in there to try to raise voter turnout, and I go into a black Christian church.
Almost all of whom were African American, a few of them were Latino, a few of them were white. None of whom were Muslim, that I saw. What that report and this entire industry of arguing that Muslims are under attack has done is given cover to the dynamic in our community that does not own up to the problems of extremism and ideology.
Ultimately, I believe we have a responsibility to own up to the problem. What we had instead was years of denial and deflection. The denial and deflection is what led to the demonization. I have an anecdote, which happened in Springfield, Virginia.
I sat in a Comfort Inn where Hizb ut-Tahrir members—an organization of extremists who call themselves nonviolent—stood with the flag of their Islamic state vision behind them arguing that the United States is the American Raj, like the British Raj.
They are young men living here in Northern Virginia who do want to see the caliphate. I do not believe that the Democratic leadership, including the Obama Administration, has helped the cause in not acknowledging the Islam in Islamic State. And the responsibility that we have to conservative Muslims is to move them along, I believe, on a progressive path. In that same way, liberals in America challenge American conservatives. This entire conversation has been anchored to this idea of conservative hatred and the liberal response to it.
There should be no compromise there. They are opposing conservative values every single day in the op-ed pages, on votes, and that to me is my duty, my farz as a Muslim, to do that, and to fight for progressive values. And there are such people. However, the situation among Muslims in the United States is very different from what is the case in the European context. These are two different streams of people, hooked to different ideas.
I have an example from when I started in Boston, where I was a student at that time. As a police officer, I had taken a leave to come here. I got the best opportunities after that, from Fletcher to Harvard to Columbia as a professor to the National Defense University to teach the American military. I got maybe a benefit , in some ways, and I received a lot of respect and opportunities as an American Muslim. And I see my identity as that. I have lived in England also.
I cannot see that same experience in many of the countries, even though I have great respect for those countries. The perception of Muslims as synonymous with Islamism - criticism of Islamism is characterised as criticism of Muslims - is precisely the view taken by groups such as the EDL. The mystery is why the left has welcomed into its ranks individuals who by any definition sit on the ultra-right.
The answer, I suspect, lies in the fact that many Islamists exhibit a pathological anti-Americanism that is quite attractive to a certain type of degenerated progressive. As for all the other bad things the pro-Islamist left are seemingly to ignore in embracing Islamism - did I mention confirmation bias? Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
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