• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

You are here: Home / Culture / Islam and the Political Left

Islam and the Political Left

June 5, 2017 by Geoff Leave a Comment

I remember last year when the HuffPo article Muslims are the True Feminists came out and I thought it was a joke. In the past, I had considered creating a feminist character who wrote articles for them claiming that the only way to be a true woman was to have an abortion in order to prove that they would publish anything. But alas, they did publish it. And the author does point out some true things, such as the liberating power of modesty. But what is interesting is that this article was seen as explicitly empowering by left leaning types who sympathize with social justice, despite having selections like this:

So I urge my Free the Nipple gal pals to take a look at your Muslim sisters and collaborate with them to create a feminism that treats the female body as a temple and not as a toy. Let us see feminism in a different light—through modesty and the courage to savor our sugar. Let us call on the Muslim feminists of the world.

In other words, don’t fall for stupid ideas, such as the idea that displaying your body nudely on the Internet is a rebellion against the male gaze. To overcome such stupidity, she argues, feminists should look to the traditions of Islam.

Now, I’m no Muslim and I don’t think that hijab chic is the answer to issues of self-esteem and women’s rights. But the argument isn’t utterly insane. But what is weird is that the argument was accepted and applauded by people who write endless articles connecting modesty with rape culture, body shaming, and eating disorders when Christians care about it. One article even goes so far as to say that Jesus doesn’t care how people dress, despite the Biblical call in several places for men and women to be modest with their dress. Why is modesty enforced by Muslim men (by legal penalties) a sign of feminist liberation, but modesty recommended in Christian circles a deadening force of patriarchal oppression? I mean, even in very secular cities, the main restriction on women’s dress is that they can’t walk about topless…but most women don’t want to anyhow as people naturally tend to cover erogenous zones in circumstances in which they aren’t soliciting a mate.

As bizarre as the example above is, Edward Feser made a few more observations:

All of this is, of course, well known.  My point in rehearsing it here is neither to compare Islam unfavorably to other religions, nor, for the moment, to suggest that any of the facts rehearsed reflects inherent (as opposed to historically contingent) features of Islam, though I will address that question below.  The point is rather this.  Western Christianity has largely accommodated itself to liberalism.  Give or take a few standout episodes (such as the French Revolution), it has less political power now than at any time since before Constantine.  And the more any of its tenets are out of sync with liberalism, the less likely even prominent churchmen are to talk about those tenets in public or to put much emphasis on them in private.  Christianity, in short, has effectively been “tamed” by liberalism.  And yet liberal Christophobia has only increased.  You might think, then, thatIslamophobia would be an even greater tendency within liberalism, given how very much farther out of sync contemporary Islam is with contemporary liberal mores and policy.  And a few prominent left-of-center voices — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Bill Maher — have indeed been highly critical of Islam.

But in fact most liberals exhibit exactly the opposite tendency.  Probably many liberal readers of this article, including those happy to rehearse the purported sins of Christianity, will have been made uncomfortable by the list of facts about Islam rehearsed above.  To say anything which might seem in any way to put Islam in a bad light is to risk having flung at one the now-routine accusation of “anti-Muslim bigotry.”  The tendency is to downplay every aspect of historical and contemporary Islam which is irreconcilable with liberalism, to search out and call attention to aspects which are (or can be interpreted as) favorable to or at least compatible with liberalism, and to insist that the latter alone are representative of “genuine” Islam.  In his New Criterion article, Minogue noted how Christophobia has been conjoined with an “extraordinary solicitude for Islamic sensibilities in Western states since 9/11” — since 9/11, take note.  Despite 9/11, and indeed, one is tempted to say evenbecause of 9/11.  Every new jihadist attack seems, as if by a kind of reverse inductive reasoning, to make some liberals even moreconfident in their judgment that there is no essential connection between Islam and terrorism, and that Islam and liberal values are ultimately reconcilable.

The concomitant of Christophobia, then, seems to be not Islamophobia but rather a kind of Islamophilia, and the condemnationof Islamophobia as itself a manifestation of the purported evils of traditional Christianity.  Nor is it only in liberal perception of current events that Christophobia and Islamophilia are conjoined.  As Minogue also observed, one of the ritualistic liberal expressions of Islamophilia is an incessant “apologizing for the Crusades” — this despite the fact that the Crusades, while far from morally spotless in their execution, were essentially defensive responses to medieval Islamic aggression, as actual historians of the Crusades like Jonathan Riley-Smith andThomas Madden never tire of demonstrating.   Modern Westerners apologizing for the Crusades is like Eliot Ness’s descendents apologizing to Al Capone’s descendents for some of Ness’s men having gotten a bit rough with some of Capone’s men.

Feser has some reasons as to the apparent compatibility between Western Liberalism and Islam. My thought is that for both sides it’s strategic and naive. Leftists find in Islam a useful rhetorical tool to use against Christians and Christianity. But because they don’t believe that anybody sincerely believes their religion, they think that once Islam is on the rise, it can be modified (it won’t work). Similarly, Muslims who genuinely believe that dar al Islam should encompass the world see liberalism as a tool against Christianity without realizing that the deep hatred that leftists typically have for tradition and hierarchy could eventually be used against them.

Anyway, any layer of this commentary might be wrong, it’s impressionistic at best.

 

Related Posts:

  • Is the political personal? Is the personal political? by Geoff
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy and Intertextuality:… by Geoff
  • Of Saints and Serpents or the Christian and Inner Darkness by Geoff

Share:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket

Filed Under: Culture, Philosophy

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • 2020 Has Been a Big Year or I Finally Quit
  • Steps to Open a Bible College
  • You Have No Power Here, This is a Library
  • What is true wealth?
  • What’s Wrong with Conservatives?

Recent Comments

  • Sharon on Whether we live or die, Aslan will be our good lord.
  • Alishba lodhi on Effort Habit: Keep the Faculty of Effort Alive in You
  • Geoff on Why is Covetousness Idolatry?
  • Geoff on 2020 Has Been a Big Year or I Finally Quit
  • Kelly Jensen on Why is Covetousness Idolatry?

Archives

  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • May 2013
  • March 2013

Cateories

WordPress · Log in