I'll leave you with this though, the course offerings for Islamic Studies at Georgetown University:

- ISLAMIC STUDIES

ARAB-351-352 Introduction to Arabic Culture (3, 3)
ARAB-373 Women in the Qur’an (3)
ARAB-444 Introduction to Islamic Civilization
ARAB-525 Qur’anic Exegesis (3)
ARAB-535-536 The Qur’an (3,3)
ARAB-555 Introduction to Arabic and Islamic Studies
ARAB-609 The Qur’an in History (3)
ARAB-610 Science in the Islamic World
ARAB-611 Islamic Thought on the Eve of Modernity
ARAB-627 Intro to the Hadith (3)
ARAB-760 Arab Historiography (3)
THEO-350 Readings in Sufism (3)

Alright, thanks for the anecdote.

For sure. We, a society and culture previously prejudiced against gay people, changed to one that was not (or at least so much).

A question of our behaviour, not anything necessarily unique to our heritage. Islamic culture could alter in a similar way. It would take a lot of change, perhaps even within the major tenets of the religion itself (the notion of God as an authority above challenge is a bit of a barrier here, but then culture of our history thought much the same at some point).

OK, but I just don't believe this. Being from somewhere else on the planet doesn't give you free reign to do whatever you want to gay people. And they matter more than the feelings of Muslims whose religion gets criticized. — The Great Whatever

Neither do I. I don't know anyone who agrees with the argument: "Yes, killing gay people is good. They ought to be doing it." The point is our reaction ( "Islam is savagery which has no place in civilised society" ) isn't about that sort of issue. It's just us lashing out at a present problem which we can't fix more or less immediately-- well, unless you're into genocide.

I think a start would be not to insist that Islam cannot be criticized.

Well anecdote (which means here an actual course listing at an actual top tier college) beats bare assertion which is all you've offered but I assume your take is based on a broad survey you've undertaken of the nation's islamic studies programs?

Clearly not. Let's give you an example. If I say: "Radical Islam is the greatest philosophy ever. All other beliefs are nonsense and we ought to abandon them." is this statement harmless? Would you accept me saying it all over the place and it garnering respect from all corners of society?

Words, understanding, lives and belief systems are all bound up together. What we say and think about others matters.

Criticising someone's beliefs, actions and values is to attack their place in society. It is to say they are too heinous or savage to belong. And that's the problem with the West's discourse surrounding the problems of Islam. They don't attack the belief and actions in terms of Islam (e.g. it's wrong, under Islam, to think gay people ought to die or for tradition to be beyond criticism, etc., etc.), but in terms of people with a history within Islamic culture of being unable to participate in civilised society. We scapegoat people to feel like we are making an impact on problems we recognise.

Criticising someone's beliefs, actions and values is to attack their place in society. It is to say they are too heinous or savage to belong. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Nah. This is crazy sauce. Yikes.

I voted for Trump because in the debate when asked what he was looking for in a Supreme Court Justice, he, unlike Clinton, mentioned the word "Constitution." Yes, their job is Constitutional interpretation, not contemporary morality enforcement.

Both candidates "mentioned the word." (Probably because the question they were responding to was literally something like: What's your stance on the interpretation of the constitution?") Do you mean that that the job of justices is to take an originalist stance toward interpretation and to have no truck with 'living document' talk? Because I could maybe see where you're coming from with that - it's just not what you said at all.

Yikes indeed-- but it's true.

I mean there are different levels. If follow you about repeating what you are saying back to you, you'll find me annoying and criticise me. You'll think me annoying and unsuitable company until I stop-- until I behave differently, I will not belong around you. But that's about as far as it will go. You won't think of me as an living embodiment of a culture and history which cannot fit with a civilised society.

The point about Islam is our reaction is frequently the latter. And we mistake this prejudice for being serious about injustices within Islamic cultures.

is this statement harmless? — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep.

Would you accept me saying it all over the place and it garnering respect from all corners of society? — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep.

Yikes indeed-- but it's true. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Nope.

@TheWillowOfDarkness

Criticising someone's beliefs, actions and values is to attack their place in society. It is to say they are too heinous or savage to belong.

You do realize that to be consistent, you have to also extend your radical moral largesse to the KKK and neo-nazis, right?

Unless, I'm utterly misreading you and you're arguing for these kinds of attacks?

Why, have you? If not, then as I suggested earlier, let's cease this.

Listen, you made the claim that leftists make no attempt to understand the Qu'aran, Mohammad's place in history etc. and that it's entirely Queer theory & that kind of thing. The handy thing about a statement structured like this a single example falsifies it. (and it would be easy to multiply examples.)

But, yeah, we can drop it. Your statement was a throwaway one from the beginning ( the same kind of thing as "all men hate women", or "all white people are racist ") so I'm not sure why I'm getting so involved. It just bugged me, I guess?

In the sense that a neo-nazi or KKK member might change their culture, sure. Like a muslims (or anyone else), they are no less capable of devloping an ethical position on particular people or issues.

The problem is, at that point, what is left of neo-nazi or KKK identity? Neither of those groups a historical tradition bound-up with the everyday life and functioning of a society that extends beyond racial (and other unjust forms of discrimination). It make senses to speak, for example, a pro-gay muslim. A neo-nazi or KKK member in favour of multicultural society? Not at all.

It's interesting how Trump's election has ended up with a discussion on being gay in a Muslim country. Kind of funny.

You must have a low estimation of my intelligence if you think I would make such a statement while thinking it admitted of no exceptions. The fact that I have gone out of my way to qualify it for you also ought to deflate your concern.

It make sense to speak, for example, a pro-gay muslim. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It also makes sense, I think, to speak of a pro-bacon Muslim, or an atheist Muslim. To want Muslims to be this that and the other, antithetical to the standard Islamic position on all of these issues, seems to me to be just a way of saying that you just want Muslims to be Westerners, except they wear hijab or something. Which is just a roundabout way of saying that Islam is incompatible with whatever you imagine polite society to be. It gets tricky, for example, if you ask people what they think about the relative authority of Sharia versus a Western constitution.

Fair enough. I'll revise my understanding of your statement to be something like "I have had some personal experiences of leftists talking about Islamic in pomo terms and have also seen that on the internet and I don't like that." I can't argue with that and I'm sure it's true.

Yes, it's that and it's that Islamic scholarship is smaller and less critical than Christian scholarship. Again, I don't see how anyone can deny that.

Absolutely. Muslims being "westerners" is effectively where the argument ends up: we are demanding changes to Islam which make it, in practice, more or less indistinguishable from the culture in Western democracies. It's saying practices of Islamic culture are unethical and they ought to change.

The point is that it is done with Islamic identity, as our society changed with history of Christian tradition, rather than viewing Islam and its people as an identity that needs to be wiped off the Earth (no doubt traditional Islam being abandoned, but that was the point all along).

To demand that Islam be reformed to foreign influence until it is unrecognizable, in order to fit in with polite society, strikes me as no different from denying that Islam is incompatible with polite society. I mean, to even be coherent, you'd at least have to give everyone a 'hey, don't take the Qu'ran too seriously, mannnn' primer.

(And yeah, Christianity was destroyed form the inside and is in the process of dying off).

The requirements for being recognized as a Muslim scholar are pretty extensive. That's a position within the global Muslim community.

Critical scholarship? I'm curious.. what sorts of writings are you thinking of there? Just religion studies?

Parts of Islam as it's currently practiced? For sure.

Islamic identity and history? No. Muslims can disavow those parts (even if they are big) of Islam without saying that everything about how the lived, their past and where they think of themselves as belonging, is savage.

You're thinking of a theologian. I mean a secular scholar (who may or may not be religious personally) who studies the religion.

I see your point, but it doesn't strike me as an interesting distinction. It seems like a polite way of saying euthanasia is preferable to murder, but either way Islam as it is has to go. What would remain would be unrecognizable as present Islam.

Sure. Such scholarship abounds. A lot of it is by topic, not religion. So for instance, Bernard McGinn edits a collection of essays on apocalypticism. Islam is definitely in there. If you're looking for history, Richard Foltz, but again.. the overall topic is the history of Central Asia with a particular focus on religion.

If it's something more current you're looking for, we're too close to it for a full-bodies analysis. I think that's true going back at least 100 years. Too much has happened to Islam for scholars to do much digestion. But there's plenty of info out there.

All that said, my opinion is that Christianity is the most ideologically complex of the global religions. That's kind of like saying cheetahs are the fastest cats, though. So what?

I have a hunch that you've read more Foucault than I have, but I'm familiar with the general contours of his thought. I think it's fair to say that many of his early works are characterized by a deep sense of.... maybe not oppression, but of an inescapable, often invisible, entanglement that undercuts the possibility of real agency. Dispotifs run deep, so deep that they control how you think about them, even when you're trying to think critically. There's an undeniable paranoiac element to 'early' Foucault - both the man in the tower, unseen and seeing & and the fear of something in me that isn't me (though, to be more precise, it's more like 'me' is a kind of 'fold' in-and-of greater forcefields of power...and the man in the tower is himself in me)

The (perhaps cartoonish) understanding I have of Foucault is that it's only in his later work that individual agency, and all the positive stuff takes off (the technologies of the self etc.) Is that fair?

If there is a rupture between early and late Foucault - and the rupture is something like how I've characterized it (and I'm open to criticism here, I may have totally botched it) - isn't his whole Iranian flirtation contemporaneous with the shift?

In terms of how it usually manifests within the West, yes. Islam is the "The Other," a people with a history and culture considered outside anything worthwhile, something understood to be so savage that it ought to be wiped off the face of the Earth. I would go as far to say a lot of us think of Muslims as "savages" who we must enlighten. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes!



Cultural relativism is cancer. These people ARE savages.

Clinton did not mention the Constitution and did not indicate that constitutional interpretation was the role of Court. Trump did. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/19/the-final-trump-clinton-debate-transcript-annotated/?0p19G=c.

Clinton's only reference to the Constitution was in her complaint that the Senate had failed to vote on Obama's appointment.

People rejoicing over a Trump presidency should stop and think about the fact he was elected on a platform of anger and hate. Our country cannot move forward on anger and hate; it can only move backwards.