Lefties and liberals must criticise conservative Islam
Islam is an idea, Muslims are people. Muslims have rights, Islam as an idea does not. Conservative, fundamentalist Islam is anti left wing and being normalised on British streets so we must be able to criticise it without fear for everybody’s benefit. Left wing silence on this has hurt our side.
The writer of this article is a British Asian atheist. I shouldn’t have to, but I feel I need to say that.
Terrorist attacks across Europe carried about by Islamic fundamentalists, extreme homophobia and a teacher in Batley in hiding due to death threats. Imagine now all these things were linked to an ideology and instead of criticising this idea, left wingers ignored it and called anyone opposing it a racist? That is exactly what has happened with the British left and Islam.
People in the UK right now are seeing this problem and the only people talking about this legitimate issue is the far right due to left wingers and liberals being silent in a misplaced form of social justice or cowardice.
Islam must be criticised and we cannot be called Islamophobic or worse ‘racist’ for saying this because if this current way of thinking maintains, people will be driven towards the far right.
It will also help Muslims; being a religious fundamentalist is not a happy place to be and if the far right rises, they will be the worst hit.
Ex-Muslims have been warning white left wingers and liberals for years that they are wrong about Islam. Taken in its conservative form, Islam punishes apostasy with death. So it is a bit rich for privileged westerners to sit on a moral high horse and tell the people who suffer from conservative Islam they are being racist or inflammatory.
Sweden for years has been a broadly liberal centre left country; in this writer’s opinion a good thing too. Even in this setting there has been a swing towards the far right and this came after they took in refugees from the Middle East who were uneducated and from a highly Islamic region of the planet; this was an accident waiting to happen. We don’t have to wait in fact, the Netherlands have seen this already where they elected Geert Wilders.
A vicious cycle occurs; the far right rises, racism rises, Muslims aren’t accepted into the country they live in, Muslims become more conservative so the far right rises and round it goes.
9/11 was the most obvious example of Islam in its worst form. However, many terror attacks have happened by many different ethnic and religious groups and the percentage of Muslims who are terrorists is astonishingly low.
What we can look at however is issues wherein most Muslims have an issue. The majority of British Muslims do not accept same sex marriage. What is most shocking is there is no difference across the generations 18 year old Muslims are no more liberal than their grandparents (Savanta Comres BBC Asian Network study). In this same study, a majority of Hindus and Sikhs did accept so this is a British Muslim problem although again attitudes were more or less the same across ages.
This goes back to what is known as the paradox of tolerance. If we tolerate intolerant ideas, then those intolerant ideas will end up engulfing all of us. If we tolerate the fact that Muslims are homophobic, we will end up with a society where homophobia is just accepted.
We have ethnic segregation in the UK like it or not. London, Birmingham, Leicester, Luton, Manchester all have blatant segregation wherein there exists areas where Muslims live in enclaves and other areas without many at all. Faith schools entrench this and must be banned. Segregation inflames community tensions and if people aren’t talking to each other, suspicion creeps in.
Where does this come from? Social/religious conservatism is a natural reaction to brutal racism wherein people are not accepted into the dominant culture so revert to a caricature of their heritage as alluded to.
Geopolitics is also to blame. The USA laid the foundations for the Taliban by propping the Mujahedeen up to stop the Soviet Union. Our good friends the Saudis have brought in Wahhabism to British mosques.
Whataboutism isn’t good enough. Just because someone else did something wrong does not excuse you doing something wrong. If you ever talk about this, people will only ever say, well what about the West? What about what the West did to Iraq, Syria, Palestine? However, this does not change the argument and it is whataboutism.
Other Asian groups have rejected the Asian identity as a result of not wanting to align themselves with such a religiously conservative group. Although I do not agree with this, I completely understand.
A group of British Sikhs claimed that Muslim grooming gangs were targeting Sikh girls well before the grooming gang scandal came out. Clearly, divisions exist.
If the left do not talk about this real and genuine problem, they will lose support and get ready for more Islamophobia and segregation and Tommy Robinson’s gang of merry men to infiltrate the mainstream.
