[lbo-talk] Islam and Muslims (was Doug and Islam)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 20:35:06 PDT 2007


On 3/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 14, 2007, at 8:44 PM, Ansar al-Zindiqi wrote:
>
> > DH: I don't really welcome people going on here about the "evil of
> > Islam."
> >
> > A. al-Z: I really don't give two hoots what you think at this stage
> > in regards to that.
>
> Of course what I think doesn't matter in the scheme of things, but I
> could boot you out of here if I felt like it, and it's not hard to
> imagine how I could come to feel that way.
>
> I've known Yoshie for 10 years. I don't like her Islamophilic turn,
> but you don't give up on someone because of a weird obsession. You
> just hope it passes, like a taste for emo.

Ten years ago, I was just off the boat, from a country where religion is not a big thing and Muslims are hard to find.

Ten years ago, America wasn't running a prison full of Muslim detainees held indefinitely in Guatanamo, occupying two predominantly Muslim nations, intervening militarily in more (Somalia, the Philippines, etc.) on the pretext of fighting Muslim terrorists, and threatening to bomb -- even nuke! -- another.

A lot of things have changed in the last ten years! If you haven't changed when things have changed, you are behind the times.

Some of "Ansar al-Zindiqi"'s views are still confined to the margins, but others -- like the ideas that Islam cannot be modernized, Islam is more violent, sexist, homophobic, etc. than other religions, Islam glorifies the cult of martyrdom, Islam has little regard for human lives, their own and others', Islam is fascism, etc. -- are widely held, even by the political mainstream, and expressed directly or indirectly. Those Islamophobic views have to be explicitly combated, if we are to change politics today.

Beyond that, I think leftists should try to find out more about Islam in all its varieties, Muslims of all kinds, predominantly Muslim nations (with a wide variety of customs, class structures, economic situations, balances of political forces, intellectual trends, etc.) and see if they can't find things they like about them. People, including leftists, do not fight for the lives and rights of people, cultures, countries they do not love and cherish. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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