http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201381112549657227.html
A litmus test for anti-Muslim bigotry
Anti-Muslim bigotry so often goes unnoticed, and we should make it our duty to
recognise and ostracise it.
Last Modified: 12 Aug 2013 08:47
Murtaza Hussain
Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related
to Middle Eastern politics.
If there's nothing bigoted about saying it about Muslims, Dawkins and his
defenders should come out and make the same unqualified and context-free
statements about other groups in society...Murtaza argues [Getty Images]
There's an interesting and rather illuminating thought experiment you can
perform when listening to media figures and politicians discuss Muslims. Take
the recent interview on Fox News of the author Reza Aslan, where the host
interrogated him at length about his religious background, at one point
accusing him of having "gone on several programmes while never disclosing [he
is] a Muslim".
Or take New Atheist ideologue Sam Harris, who has said "We should profile
Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim", as
well as his counterpart Richard Dawkins who has become famous for asking
incisive questions like "Who the hell do these Muslims think they are"?
This is all above-board language in today's popular discourse. But as a simple
test try replacing the word "Muslim" with "Jew"; or "Muslim" with "Black" in
each of these quotes and see how it sounds in your head. Most likely, it sounds
significantly less comfortable, normal, and acceptable than it did just a
moment ago.
Indeed, it's difficult to imagine how Harris, Dawkins, or the Fox News host who
questioned Aslan about his faith could continue as public figures were they to
make the same types comments about any minority group other than Muslims. They
would've in all likelihood won broad, well-justified, condemnation and even
been drummed out of the public sphere for their frank bigotry.
Perhaps they'd have been taken up as martyrs by the fringe-right where such
xenophobic language about Jews and Blacks is still commonplace. Instead they've
so far been permitted to continue spreading hatred against one of the few
minority communities it is still acceptable to negatively generalise, degrade
and menace.
Selective individuality
It's worth remembering why making sweeping statements about "the Jews" and "the
Blacks" became considered unconscionable behaviour in the first place. Both
groups were once spoken of by racists and anti-Semites as though they were a
homogenous mass of people, undifferentiated in any meaningful way and all
sharing the same (largely negative) characteristics.
This view obliterated the reality of lived human experience; that such
constructed communities are not a featureless horde but are actual individuals
with names, families, and an essential personhood which invariably defies the
simple and easy logic of mass generalisation. Such generalisations were used to
great effect to whip up hatred and to deny the essential humanity of selected
minority groups - that is until sufficient horror was generated to make society
pause and reflect on what makes such rhetoric so unsavoury.
Believe it or not, like other groups in society, Muslim people are also
individuals. There are over a billion Muslims in the world and correspondingly
there are over a billion different, individual interpretations of Islam. As the
author Mohsin Hamid put it , stark generalisations of Muslims " represent a
refusal to acknowledge variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a
desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush " .
Critics of this seemingly reasonable position argue that in fact Muslims are
different, that there is something unique about them and their religion which
negates their essential humanity and homogenises them all into one convenient
mass. There's actually nothing new about this argument. In fact, it's the same
type of bigoted and falsifiable claim which was at one time regularly made
about Jewish communities in the West.
Immanuel Kant claimed that "Jewish law
[made Jews] hostile to all other
peoples." while Voltaire described Jews as "ignorant", "barbarous" and said all
of them "were born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts". Contemporary
anti-Muslim rhetoric from politicians, media figures and New Atheist
philosophers sounds almost identical to this repulsive hatemongering. Rather
than being the standard bearers for enlightened liberalism as they claim, such
individuals are little more than modern purveyors of the same type of bigotry,
albeit with a new target in mind. Blinded by arrogance, self-assuredness and
hatred, they've become exactly what they claim to stand against.
Dawkins ruminations
Richard Dawkins recently ignited a minor furor by pointing out that "All the
world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge". His
defenders rushed to point out that his statement was merely a fact and as such
there was nothing bigoted about it whatsoever.
Dawkins declaration also happens to be true when you substitute the word
"Hindus", "Blacks" or "Chinese" for Muslims here, but his admirers would have
had a harder time defending the same statement made about any of these groups
without being tarred as xenophobes.
This situation is often decried by New Atheist advocates and their fellow
travellers as a 'refusal to acknowledge reality' - the ostensible 'reality'
being their own inherent superiority over others. Nonetheless, they are
hesitant about whom they relate this to and toe the line when it comes to which
minority groups it is safe to attack and which must be avoided. Dan Murphy of
the Christian Science Monitor explained the fallacies behind this crude
chauvinism:
Dawkins, as an educated man, should be well aware of the legacy of colonialism
and of simple poverty
. When the Nobel Prize was founded in 1901, the vast
majority of the world's Muslims lived in countries ruled by foreign powers, and
for much of the 20th century Muslims did not have much access to great centres
of learning like Cambridge. The ranks of Nobel Prize winners have traditionally
been dominated by white, Western men - a reflection of both the economic might
of the West in the past century, preferential access to education for that
class of people as well as a wonderful intellectual tradition .
The same reasons why Muslims are underrepresented in the halls of Western
scientific achievement are also applicable to essentially every other group in
the world besides white males living in Western countries. If there's nothing
bigoted about saying it about Muslims, Dawkins and his defenders should come
out and make the same unqualified and context-free statements about other
groups in society whom they see as not stacking up. The fact that they refuse
to do so signals that this has little to do with courageously speaking the
truth and more about picking out which minorities it is still safe to bash.
A simple test
If you're ever unsure whether a statement about Muslims is bigoted, simply
substitute the name of another minority community into the same sentence. If it
sounds uncomfortable or even heinous to you upon doing so, rest assured that
the original statement is probably just as malign. For the same reason we no
longer talk in broad terms about "the Jews" or "the Blacks" we should no longer
talk about "the Muslims", especially when making negative generalisations which
are today beginning to mimic the darkest xenophobic rhetoric of the 20th
century.
Contrary to what today's popular discourse may suggest, Muslims are also
individuals with essential humanity and are deserving of the same level of
respect and decency as any other group in society. It's almost certain that the
language of today's anti-Muslim crusaders will one day also be looked back on
with as shame and embarrassment as anti-Semitic and racist statements are now.
Such rhetoric and its purveyors belong in the dustbin of history and in any
progressive view of society that is where they will inevitably reside. Our duty
today is to recognise and ostracise such bigotry wherever it exists, and to
ensure that this kind of hatemongering against minority communities becomes a
thing of the past.
Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related
to Middle Eastern politics.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:
Al Jazeera
Hide Comments
Komentar saya..
Jusfiq Hadjar 35 minutes ago
I disagree with this article.
Muslims should take Dawkin's statement as a wake-up call to enter the modern
world, scientific world.- and to build universitites, research centers, and
translate scientific books (and not only the book of Bucaille), in lieu of
building talllest buildings in the world and big mosques in many corners of the
World......
Jusfiq Hadjar
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