I really don't think the West has the faintest idea of the scale of the crisis that Arab Islam is going through, a deep crisis of culture and politics and religion. The region is still violently homogenizing, still justifying its oppression with phantom conspiracies and imagined nemeses, still tormenting girls and women at a vast scale in the name of religion. Does this crisis encapsulate the Arab world? No, of course not. Does it describe Islam as a whole? No, of course not. Yet there is nevertheless an immense crisis underway that can't be brushed aside as some figment of the Islamophobic imagination. In places like Lebanon or Egypt, the trend is slow-moving but relentlessly negative. In places like Syria or Yemen, the implosions were quick and cataclysmic and still ongoing. A great war is now underway for the character of the Arab world and the soul of Arab Islam. And everywhere you look, the Islamists have shown up for the fight. The modernizers, reformers, secularists and minorities, meanwhile, have not. How could they? Their numbers are shrinking almost everywhere. And what of the West, with its vaunted "values" it never stops congratulating itself for? The West is sitting out the struggle entirely. It has almost nothing to say about the over 80% of Egyptian girls who experience female genital mutilation. Western elites have been too busy these past 20 years- forgive me - debating how many genders they can fit into an acronym to notice actual and profound gender oppression. Muslim apologists in the West often accuse critics of these trends of being Islamophobes. There are, of course, Islamophobes out there. But these critics are not them. I submit that it is the silent ones, the Westerners too uncomfortable with the idea that something might be going wrong in the "global south" that isn't the fault of white Europeans to utter a word about the terrible status of women in many Arab societies, who are the Islamophobes. It is they who believe that to critique these phenomena is bigotry because they suspect that this oppression is somehow innate and authentic to Islamic and Arab societies and cultures - and not, as history teaches us, a fairly recent collapse driven by populist ideologues and fanatics bent on a cultural and religious re-engineering of their own societies. The past 30 years have taught us that what happens in the Muslim world does not stay in the Muslim world. Silence and ignorance are bad responses to this crisis. Any change for the better must begin with seeing the problem clearly and talking about it honestly.
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