It’s so utterly gross and never fails to make my stomach churn. Discussions of Women’s rights and patriarchy within Muslim communities are happening all the time, in mosques, youth groups, hoyseholds (I speak with my mother consistently on these issues), bot as much as they really need to in my opinion but they occur nonetheless. Yet it is divorced from the invented reality which white liberals (and even leftists) live in, and if they were to peer into our conversation, which I’d prefer they didn’t as they can’t help to insert their chauvinistic views onto us often, they’d find it unrecognizable to what they expect, and that makes sense. They aren’t a part of the community nor do they have insight on how it operates very well, I don’t expect them to understand, but I’d personally like them to stop this overt fetishism for Muslim women if they genuinely wish to improve the situation at all. It only feeds into conservative narratives of patriarchal norms and the “necessity” (status quo) of maintaining “tradition” since all of us see the intervention of liberals in our spaces as dangers to our community.
Liberals, in my experience, think that US evangelicalism is the paradigm for all religions (despite the fact that evangelicalism as Americans understand it developed quite recently within global Christianity). Hence they assume that every religion is in itself basically static, because fundamentally incoherent; it consists in a few principles, badly understood and adopted originally for political ends, which must be defended at all costs and never approached with any kind of nuance. Thus we get religion as brand or identity, rather than a way of life. If the average American Protestant, by and large, believes nothing and bows mostly to secularism in his day-to-day actions, but proclaims loudly (and as a kind of remnant of earlier faith) that you must “read the BI-BUHL and accept Jesus or you won’t be SAVED” – well, then, the average Muslim must similarly see the truth of western liberalism, and for reasons merely eccentric or perverse insist on “oppressing women,” etc., and this can never change. Or so thinks the liberal.
But the thing is, most religions are not like that. Catholicism is not like that; most Protestants are not like that; nor is Islam like that. They are living systems of life and belief, which one can accept or reject on their own merits. They are not dead signifiers, like US evangelicalism is: for the latter is nothing but bourgeois “secularism” with a tacked-on Christian “theme.” But liberals find the American view of religion easy to accept, because their own politics and philosophy are also inconsistent, virtue-signaling, and confused.
It’s so utterly gross and never fails to make my stomach churn. Discussions of Women’s rights and patriarchy within Muslim communities are happening all the time, in mosques, youth groups, hoyseholds (I speak with my mother consistently on these issues), bot as much as they really need to in my opinion but they occur nonetheless. Yet it is divorced from the invented reality which white liberals (and even leftists) live in, and if they were to peer into our conversation, which I’d prefer they didn’t as they can’t help to insert their chauvinistic views onto us often, they’d find it unrecognizable to what they expect, and that makes sense. They aren’t a part of the community nor do they have insight on how it operates very well, I don’t expect them to understand, but I’d personally like them to stop this overt fetishism for Muslim women if they genuinely wish to improve the situation at all. It only feeds into conservative narratives of patriarchal norms and the “necessity” (status quo) of maintaining “tradition” since all of us see the intervention of liberals in our spaces as dangers to our community.
Liberals, in my experience, think that US evangelicalism is the paradigm for all religions (despite the fact that evangelicalism as Americans understand it developed quite recently within global Christianity). Hence they assume that every religion is in itself basically static, because fundamentally incoherent; it consists in a few principles, badly understood and adopted originally for political ends, which must be defended at all costs and never approached with any kind of nuance. Thus we get religion as brand or identity, rather than a way of life. If the average American Protestant, by and large, believes nothing and bows mostly to secularism in his day-to-day actions, but proclaims loudly (and as a kind of remnant of earlier faith) that you must “read the BI-BUHL and accept Jesus or you won’t be SAVED” – well, then, the average Muslim must similarly see the truth of western liberalism, and for reasons merely eccentric or perverse insist on “oppressing women,” etc., and this can never change. Or so thinks the liberal.
But the thing is, most religions are not like that. Catholicism is not like that; most Protestants are not like that; nor is Islam like that. They are living systems of life and belief, which one can accept or reject on their own merits. They are not dead signifiers, like US evangelicalism is: for the latter is nothing but bourgeois “secularism” with a tacked-on Christian “theme.” But liberals find the American view of religion easy to accept, because their own politics and philosophy are also inconsistent, virtue-signaling, and confused.