Thread: Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the United States

Originally Posted by gwahir

Syme, I think your claim that religion is not a fundamental part of the violence is dubious and naive.

That's not really what I said. I said that Islam's teachings aren't the root cause or motivation for the violence. That they have become wrapped up in it very closely is obvious and I don't deny it. But there wouldn't have been anything for them to get wrapped up in if non-religious factors hadn't disposed people in Muslim societies towards violence in the first place.

Originally Posted by gwahir

In certain parts of the world, Islam has become weaponised -- it is used, mostly by political leaders, to motivate its constituents to terrorism and hatred.

This is very true and integral to what I'm talking about! It certainly doesn't mean that Islam causes violence. It means that it's used to provide a framework or guide for the expression of violent 'potential' that exists already. No amount of fiery jihad-preaching is going to stir up terrorism and hatred in people who don't have anything to be deeply angry about to begin with. Extremist Islam is used to harness, direct, and control the anger of people who are already deeply disgruntled. So again, the violence doesn't actually come from Islam. It comes from people's anger over the Israelis kicking them out of their homes and treating them like sub-humans, or the Americans propping up a dictator that throws them in jail and kills them for demanding less corrupt government, or the British robbing their country blind of it's oil wealth for fifty years, or whatever else. The religion just forms provides the mold into which that anger and inclination towards violence are poured, and if the religion wasn't there, a different mold would be used.


Oh yeah, atmosfear: Qur'an (sometimes minus the apostrophe) is the common spelling and the one most often identified as correct. I don't know whether you are suggesting that "Koran" is the proper spelling for anyone who isn't a cunt, but "Koran" is outmoded in the same way as "Moslem".

I'll respond to the rest tomorrow or maybe Sunday.

Originally Posted by coqauvin

Aside from pointing out a history of racist bigotry that used religious beliefs and quotations to justify and absolve bigots from their crimes in the southern United States several decades ago, there is still the issue of Protestant vs. Catholic Christians in Ireland, and the violence that's done to them. Hell, I remember reading a newspaper story about a Catholic school being built in a Protestant neighbourhood, and kids were getting rocks thrown at them on their way to school.

This is all perfectly valid and a good example which I was anticipating being brought up at some point, I agree religion can be and often is used as a vehicle for violence, Christianity is no exception. However I would disagree with this..

Originally Posted by coqauvin

..oppressed people pour their anger, frustration and confusion at their surroundings into, and if it wasn't religion to do it, another vehicle would be found

You seem to be arguing that violence is inevitable and religion is simply a channel through which people vent. I would say that more often the violence is a direct cause of the individuals strong belief or emotional attachment to the religion, and yes if it wasn't religion it would be something else.. a political view, a country, a family. Not because it provides a convenient excuse for their actions but because it is important to them and will cause them to be driven to the extremes of human behaviour it its name.

Also, I'm not too sure about this..

Originally Posted by coqauvin

regardless of what's contained in their holy books.

..used in the context of the argument about whether the Quran is a book which encourages or justifies violence. As it does, and the Bible doesnt.

Originally Posted by Woofness

You seem to be arguing that violence is inevitable and religion is simply a channel through which people vent. I would say that more often the violence is a direct cause of the individuals strong belief or emotional attachment to the religion, and yes if it wasn't religion it would be something else.. a political view, a country, a family. Not because it provides a convenient excuse for their actions but because it is important to them and will cause them to be driven to the extremes of human behaviour it its name.

It's true that religion can be used to encourage violence, but the heart of the issue is that if people didn't have the propensity to commit this violence in the first place, or found such violence abhorrent through any means (religious included), they wouldn't accept the religious justification for violence. The people who commit violence in these situations are ones who are willing to commit violence in the first place. It's the same effect of normally law-abiding citizens in a riot situation who turn to looting because it is suddenly considered socially acceptable, if only for a short time. When the contraints preventing the use of violence are loosed, it will be used by those who wish to use it, and it won't be used by those who don't normally turn to violence, or see it as an easy escape.

Originally Posted by Woofness

...used in the context of the argument about whether the Quran is a book which encourages or justifies violence. As it does, and the Bible doesnt.

But the Bible does justify violence. There are numerous examples that I can think of that display extreme violence, for example, the battle of Jericho.

Originally Posted by Joshua 6:

21And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
24And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
27So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout all the country.

Admittedly this is just an example of violence, but when we're speaking of religious texts, little more is needed. Any preacher wishing to whip his congregation into a fury could use this quotation to justify violence, for in spite of Joshua's egregious violence, "The LORD was with [him]; and his fame was noised throughout all the country." There are no negative consequences here for treating your enemies as though they were subhuman. Deuterotomy 20 gives instructions from God on how to make war on your enemy. Matthew 18 reinforces the concept that if there is an offending part of the whole, it's better to excise the part considered diseased than keep the body whole, which is an admittedly tenuous link that still supports the idea of complete removal of things that offend you. There is no concept of tolerance or acceptance in that, and this is easily subverted as a metaphor to use when preaching to your congregation. To top this off, Proverbs 20:30 says: "Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being." How in all of this does the Bible not encourage violence, or is very easily subverted into doing so, which has the same effect as though the quotations directly incited violence? In terms of effect, there is no difference, and saying semantically there is is a poor argument, because that distinction has no measurable effect in reality.

Look, I'm not Christian, nor have I ever read the Bible in its entirety, but it is not hard to find this stuff at all. I think most of this sentiment comes from some unwritten cultural belief that Christianity is anti-violence, which has about as much validity as the belief that the Bible never contradicts itself.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Oh absolutely -- I wasn't singling out Islam as The Violent Religion at all. All I was doing was pointing out the contrast between a religion like Islam is in certain places in the Mid East, and how it's able to be so effectively weaponised by political and religious leaders, and a religion like Church of England, which is mostly ineffectual and, in general, not able to stir up anything except tea.

Well, yes, but this is a comparison of the best of one field to the worst of another. An accurate comparison would be one made between violent extremist groups in Islam and violent extremist groups in Christianity. Comparing a moderate, easy-going sect of Christianity with a violent extremist group is going to give an obvious result. I realize that you're making a comparison between groups in power, but the heart of the organizations in power is the real differentiator here. If the moderates of Islam were in power and the extremists of Christianity were in power, the same comparison between the two is still faulty.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Protestantism is, as far as I'm aware, not the same thing as the Church of England, which is the Anglican Church. But I could be wrong. In any case, I don't think the example of the Irish Christians' war is the same thing as the religious warfare in the Middle East -- I only know so much about that particular conflict, but it doesn't seem like either Catholicism or Protestantism has been "weaponised" in anything like the same way; rather, there is a divide between the people and it's being fought over.

It's still, at its heart, the same issue - religions being used to encourage violence. The particulars of justifications are more means to an end in this situations. In this case, this is how Christianity is used to encourage violence, although other examples exist in history, such as, most famously, the Spanish Inquisition. The assumption made before was that Christianity is a religion solely of peace and does not encourage violence, but there are plenty of historical and modern examples of it being used in these ways, the same as Islam. As Christ himself said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." Condemning another religion as violent without first looking at your own religion, and this still goes for anyone who lives in the Western world, because they all have close ties with Judeo-Christian ideology on a cultural level, is a foolish thing to do.

Originally Posted by gwahir

I think you're misunderstanding me... I don't know of a religion that doesn't qualify as "violent", I just don't think they're all violent the same way. I'm not even saying Islam is the worst one -- I'm only saying it's uniquely used as a weapon.

I'm not clear on the meaning of this "weapon" metaphor. When you say that Islam has been "weaponized", what exactly do you mean? That's not a very descriptive way of putting whatever you're trying to say about the differences between Islam's role in violence and the role of other religions in violence.

Originally Posted by gwahir

But you already know that I disagree with you about your first point, that religion only justifies violence that people were already going to commit. I find that absolutely naive. It may be true in some cases, but not in the majority. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Jihadism. The Holocaust (maybe). The Irish conflicts (maybe). We have no reason to think that those horrendous things would have happened anyway -- they are FOUNDED in religion.

THIS is what's naive. These incidences of violence aren't really founded in religion. The Crusades are a particularly obvious cause of conflicts with definite geopolitical causes underlying the surface-level coat of religious symbolism with which they were justified. The Crusades were initiated because the Byzantines requested military aid from Western Europe against the invading Seljuks, eagerly endorsed by the Popes for political reasons, and perpetuated by a combination of social and economic factors in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition is another easy one, it's political/social root causes are connected with the desire of Spanish Christian monarchs to weed out and remove elements within their kingdom that were perceived as politically/socially threatening or potentially undermining. They wanted a religiously homogeneous kingdom for political reasons, not because they were oh-so-devout and thought that it was what God wanted them to do.

With all due respect, you are calling other people naive, but you are making arguments based on notions that anyone who has seriously studied this issue would have been disabused of very early on.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Honestly, with no religious motivation, do you think the conflics in the Mid East would be anything like they are now? I doubt there'd be one, let alone one this complex and violent.

Yes, without religious motivation, the Middle East would still be as messed up as it is today. Practically every conflict in the Middle East stems from root causes associated with things like land, mineral resources, water rights, mistreatment of one ethnic group by another, severe economic inequality, resentment of a population towards a corrupt political elite or non-democratic/repressive regime, and so on and so forth. The Iranian revolution and ensuing theocratic regime, plus the Iran-Iraq war? Check. Palestinian militancy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Definitely a check. The Arab-Israeli wars? Check. The Lebanese civil and subsequent violence? Double-check. Everything that's happened in Afghanistan since the Soviets invaded? Check. The violence that has afflicted Iraq since we invaded? Yes, you better believe it. These are only a handful of examples but like I said earlier, I practically guarantee you that you will not be able to come up with apparently religious conflicts that haven't had underlying non-religious causes.

I appreciate that these conflicts have become so wrapped up in religion and religious justification that it's hard to see past those things, and it's very easy for an uninformed observer to say that religion "obviously" causes them. That doesn't make it true.

Originally Posted by ephekt

Of course there are cultural aspects as well, but the primary source of "kill the apostates" is definitely the Koran. The Koran also outlines the ability/imperative to kill infidels as well as the reward for doing so.

You're not understanding me. I realize that the Qur'an is the source of Islamic law mandating death for apostates, and in some places, justifying warfare against 'unbelievers'. Pointing that out isn't the same thing as proving that the actions of violent Islamic groups/sects are caused by those passages. Those passages are the justifications they use for violence that is, at it's root, motivated by other factors. So you're not really making an argument at all, just saying "nuh-uh" in response to those of use who are arguing that Qur'anic content isn't the cause of Islamic violence.



Okay, sycld:

Originally Posted by sycld

However, as you say, the common conduct of members of a religion is just as much a part of the religion as strictly what is canonical or doctrinal.

Yeah, I don't disagree that there are more violently-inclined Muslims (or at least more violent Muslim groups/organizations) in the world today than there are violently-inclined Christians or Christian groups. What I disagree with is attributing this to something that's intrinsic to the character of Islam itself, and saying that Islam is violent by it's nature.

Originally Posted by sycld

Regardless of what is stipulated in the Qu'ran or whether Jihad is defined as a more metaphysical struggle rather than a truly military one, there is something fundamentally wrong with modern Islamic culture.

This is a blanket statement and while I understand what you're trying to say, I don't agree with the way you've put it. There is no such thing as a unitary "Islamic culture". Islam accounts for about one quarter of the world's population, ~1.5 billion people. They have a shared religion but not a shared culture. The cultural diversity and diversity of thought within the Islamic world is immense, as it would be within any other group of that size, geographical distribution, and varied historical and ethnic background.

I'd be comfortable saying that there are severe cultural problems in many parts of the Islamic world; or that many Islamic societies/states/populations have such problems. I would avoid blanket statements, though, because they are practically guaranteed to be inaccurate in a case like this.

Originally Posted by scyld

Unfortunately, the reality is that Muslims with moderate attitudes regarding their faith, tolerance of other religions, and who believe in non-violent resolutions to conflicts are in the minority.

This is a statistical claim; what's your source? Most of the info I've seen on this topic (and I've seen a lot, since it’s a huge part of my field) seems to support the opposite conclusion, at least with regard to actual terrorism/violence. I can't recall ever having seen that much data about tolerance for other religions or similar issues, but at the very least I feel confident arguing that a majority of Muslims don't support terrorism/violence. Do your own research and see how many reputable studies you can actually find saying that a majority of Muslims believe the things you say they do.

And even insofar as Muslims do support violence, I’d be careful attributing that entirely or even largely to Islam. I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you put non-Muslims into the same historical/social/economic/political conditions that we see Muslim violence/terrorism emerging from today, plenty of them would similarly support or sympathize with the use of violence against their perceived oppressors. They wouldn’t dress their struggle up in Islamic religious trappings as Hamas and Hizballah and al-Qaeda do, but the basic effect upon them would be the same (they’d find another ‘vehicle’ for their violence instead of radicalized Islam).

Originally Posted by sycld

That's not to say that there aren't perverse practices justified through religion amongst adherents to other faiths. But none are so widespread as they are in Islam.

I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m just disagreeing that many of these practices come from the teachings of Islam, rather than some other source.

Originally Posted by sycld

Just take a look at countries ran by Muslims. Most of them cannot separate church and state. As my father said who taught English in Saudi Arabia for a year, there the Christian Bible is (or at least was) treated the same way as pornography. Turkey is secular through a rather brutal enforcement of social secularism.

This I don’t disagree with; the biggest single problem I do see with Islam is that basic Islamic scripture—Qur’anic scripture—makes zero distinction between church and state. This IS a problem with Islam (and Turkey’s solution, while I agree with it in principle, really just exacerbates the problem they’re trying to fight in some ways—they need to wise up and realize that banning political parties doesn’t do away with the social attitudes that caused those parties to emerge, it just strengthens them and the banned parties always reform within a few years, e.g. AKP and Felicity came out of Virtue Party, which itself came out of Welfare Party and the MNP/MSP before). Anyhow: Yeah, failure to separate church and state is a problem that most Islamic countries have to some extent—in cases like Saudi Arabia and Iran, it’s near-total.

At the same time, though, I think it’s rather unfair to entirely blame Islam itself for the failure of Islamic societies to adopt and internalize the Western invention of church/state separation. It’s definitely a problem within the Islamic world but its roots lie not only in Qur’anic scripture, but—like religious violence—in other factors. In other words, just as we have to ask why religious sects and groups form around violent ideas in the first place, we have to ask why Islamic societies haven’t embraced church/state separation nearly as readily as Western societies (or alternately, why Islamist political groups have been able to seize power in Muslim societies and create governments like that of Iran). The ayatollahs never would have been able to come to power in Iran, for instance, if a history of Western political/economic interference and the tyranny and ineptitude of the Western-backed Shah hadn’t created the social and political climate of 1979. The basic mechanism is the same one that I’ve been talking about this whole thread with regard to violence. Again, I don’t disagree that Qur’anic content shoulders some of the blame for Islamic societies’ failure to separate church and state, but it’s far from the only cause. A number of Muslim states would probably have much more secular governments and cultures today if not for various foreign policy decisions on the part of the US and Britain especially.

It’s also important, when discussing Muslim societies where there is no church/state separation, not to confuse the abuses of particular rulers with what Islam mandates politically. The fact that the Qur’an recognizes no church/state separation doesn’t mean it supports or advocates many of the things that go on in Islamic states—the repression, the terrible treatment of non-Muslims, the draconian legal codes, and so forth. Most of the Wahhabi dickery we see in Saudi Arabia, for instance, was invented by the Wahhabis themselves and not taken from the Qur’an. The same goes for most of the repression practiced by the Iranian government.

Originally Posted by sycld

Even Malaysia, the largest Muslim state with a rather religiously diverse population, forces all ethnic Malayas to submit to Shrariah law, and the Shariah courts rulings can countermand any ruling from a secular court.

This isn’t at all accurate—who told you this? The Malaysian legal system is based on English common law with a parallel sharia system which is only applied to Muslims, usually only in non-criminal matters. There have been proposals that it be expanded to apply to all Malaysians regardless of religion, but currently it does not; the only set of laws that apply to all Malaysians is the country’s secular common law-based system. I don’t like Malaysia’s system and it does violate the principle of separating church and state, but not nearly as egregiously as you claim it does.

Originally Posted by sycld

The latest "Islamic state" is Chechnya, where a Muslim was elected as president of this constituent state of Russia. At first the Kremlin was quite supportive of him, as they looked upon him as someone who could bring peace to the region and solidify Russian control of the region. Now, he's forcing all women to wear Hijab, supports honor killings, and is otherwise stripping Chechnyans of their human rights in the name of Islam.

He might be doing it in the name of Islam but that doesn’t mean he’s actually adhering to anything in Islamic teachings. Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule has about the same relationship to Islam that Tomas de Torquemada’s activities had to Christianity. I appreciate that it’s example of the repression that exists in some Islamic societies but I don’t think there is much of good argument that this repression occurs because Islam says it should.

Honor killings especially are not advocated or called for in the Qur’an and have nothing to do with Islam even if the people committing them try to pretend otherwise. The fact that so many Westerners have come under the contrary impression is especially sad.

Originally Posted by sycld

Sure, in India, there are Hindu extremists. There are Hindu terrorists. There was even some legitimate cause for concern when a party with Hindu fundamentalists leanings had controlled the central government for a time. But India is still at its heart a secular democracy, with free religious expression and an open society. The current prime minister is, in fact, a Sikh and not a Hindu (and by and large a very good leader). Pakistan, on the other hand, is a hotbed of Islamic extremism with an small educated population under siege by a larger population of poor uneducated people leaning towards extremism and a military that often supports militant fundamentalism against the wishes of its civilian government. There is little tolerance for practice of any religion other than Islam. Pakistan is poorer than India, yes, but before the partition of these two states Lahore was a cosmopolitan and diverse city.

I think Pakistan’s situation is a lot more complicated than you are implying, though. It isn’t a convincing argument to suggest that just because Lahore was a cosmopolitan city before partition, Pakistan as a whole had same conditions and ‘potential’ as India at the time of partition and therefore should have developed in the same way, and Islam is to blame for the fact that it hasn’t. Pakistan was not in the same condition as India at the time of partition, and it did not go into the post-partition era with the same circumstances, prospects, and internal issues, and its history has been shaped by some very different external factors too.

If we want to get into a discussion about the specifics of why India and Pakistan have gone in different directions since partition, I think it should have its own thread. I’d be quite happy to participate in it. Here, let it suffice to say that I don’t agree that the blame for Pakistan’s problems can be laid at the feet of Islam, and that your argument to that effect is uncompelling. Lahore’s pre-partition character doesn’t mean much in regard to this question.

I'll address other points of yours, Syme, if I get to them. However,

Originally Posted by Syme

This isn’t at all accurate—who told you this? The Malaysian legal system is based on English common law with a parallel sharia system which is only applied to Muslims, usually only in non-criminal matters. There have been proposals that it be expanded to apply to all Malaysians regardless of religion, but currently it does not; the only set of laws that apply to all Malaysians is the country’s secular common law-based system. I don’t like Malaysia’s system and it does violate the principle of separating church and state, but not nearly as egregiously as you claim it does.

All ethnic Malays are considered to be Muslim by the government. Thus, it is true at least that all native Malays are forced to submit to Sharia courts.

Perhaps the matters they rule on are relatively trivial compared to the secular courts; that I do not know.