Haviv Rettig Gur
I seem to have triggered some folks. But this isn’t a racist point. It’s serious and substantive and legitimate. And I’m doubling down. The Australian nurses themselves are not the story here. The story is the Muslim communal leaders and organizations who went to bat for them. That’s what made me think these sad thoughts. And yes, I do think there’s a problem we have to face honestly, and that it flows from Muslim religious politics. Not all Muslims and not in every place — I’ve seen up close the Islam of Kazakhstan and the Islam of southern Thailand where these politics are far less present — and not in every one of Islam’s many distinct religious iterations. But it’s still there more or less throughout the religion, including its most important leadership cadres and most popular articulators across so very many of its diverse and distinct cultural spaces and in so many of its vast lands that it isn’t intellectually honest to pretend there isn’t a coherent phenomenon here. There’s hard data about antisemitic sentiment in the Muslim world. There’s hard data about gender equality. About democracy. About conspiracy theories. If you try to tell me this is a Middle East-centric view, Islam is bigger, etc., then I’m willing to listen. If you try to tell me I’m crazy and racist and there’s nothing wrong with Muslim religious politics writ large, you’re gaslighting and lying. That there are exceptions doesn’t mean we can’t discern a general rule. That Christianity was in many eras worse (as some Muslims tweeted at me) is entirely true but also irrelevant. It isn’t now. That there are bad Jews is similarly true but irrelevant to the point. There’s a real crisis. And it is a crisis deeply intertwined with questions of modernity and identity. And it is a crisis — again, specifically related to religious politics — that’s resulting in terrible harm to vast numbers of people. Islam also contains the solutions. Only Muslims can fix this. But my point here is simply to say there’s a problem out there that won’t disappear just because somebody decides it’s racist to point it out. Refusing to see it won’t put us on the path to solving it. If you can’t engage with that, you’re not an honest person.
Haviv Rettig Gur
What if there really is a problem in the Muslim world, a crisis of modernity, of equality and democracy, minorities hounded into nonexistence, systematic oppression of women, rampant antisemitism? And what if this deep crisis is being carried into the West by Muslim diasporas?