Islamophilia: A Metropolitan Malady (3/5)
This book was released in 2013, but recently was republished. It got it for about $5, and at around 60 pages, it's a brief read. And reading it, the book manages to feel both dated, yet eeriily pertinent.
I think a lot of us are aware of this, that there is, or at least was, a tendency to treat Islam with kid's gloves. The constant assertions of "Islam is a religion of peace" every time there was violence done in its name. The way that South Park could get away with mocking every religion except Islam. The way that few people objected to Dawkins criticizing Christianity, but how the gears changed when he criticized Islam. The way Islamophobia was weaponized in such a way that criticism of Islam itself could be deemed Islamophobic. I fell into this trap as well back in the day, and was just as guilty of it. Something to say is that the book doesn't dispute the existence of Islamophobia, at least in as much that bigotry towards individual Muslims exists and should be called out, but it does examine what Murray calls Islamophilia. That there was, and to an extent is, this bizzare fawning over Islam within society (mainly on the left, but even on the right to an extent), subjecting it to different standards from other Abrahamic religions.
Something I should note is that part of the reason I haven't ranked this book higher is that Murray's style of writing is eloquent, but sometimes too eloquent for its own good. It's flowery, but can come across as a pean, and there's no actual statistics cited. It's more a collection of individual events to present the thesis. Now, it's a thesis I agree with, but someone could easily ask for harder data. That being said, it does present a pattern that I do recall. Like I said, the book partly feels antiquated, because the stuff Murray describes feels a bit like old news. On the other, the same patterns he describes are repeated today via outrage culture. As in, people being offended on behalf of other people, and insisting that they be offended, and if they aren't, they don't understand why the supposedly offensive thing is actually offensive. The book has no shortage of these examples.
The counter-argument is, of course, that Murray is playing a game of what-aboutism? Murray, by his own admission, is "culturally Christian" (despite being atheist), so you could argue that he's going to sway a certain way on the issue. However, I have two points in contrast to this. One, examples highlighted in the book don't just include double standards, they include absolutely ahistorical statements. I forget the details, but one is a statement that "Europe is as historically Muslim as it is Christian." Okay, how? You could make that argument for Spain and Portugal, and maybe areas of eastern Europe, but the continent as a whole? No. Or when some scholars claim that people like Copernicus were actually Muslim, and the existence of science itself owes itself to Islam. It reminds me of nutters who insist that the pyramids were built by aliens, because there's no way the Egyptians could build such structures themselves. The difference is that such claims about the pyramids aren't treated seriously, while the above claims are, or at least were, being treated seriously.
The second point is that there's clear cases of double standards that I can't attribute to whataboutism. For instance, I still remember when Richard Dawkins tweeted out that he found the sound of church bells to be more pleasant than the Adan. Before long, he was being yelled at for being "Islamophobic," and not just on Twitter, by people within Al Jazeera. Hami Morsi (sp?) listed Dawkins as a "notorious Islamophobe." Okay, how? Dawkins has spent most of his time criticizing Christianity. But daring to say he dislikes the sound of the Adan, or extending his anti-theism to Islam? Suddenly the conversation changes. If "Islamophobic" extends to criticizing Islam (which at least one group listed in the work is/was attempting to do), then we're in big trouble. And this doesn't extend to Islam, it's the same way that anti-semitism can be weaponized against stuff like BDS, but keeping this on topic, then yes, it does become a problem. To borrow a quote from Majid Nawaz, "no person is below dignity, and no idea is above scrutiny."
So, have things changed? Well, like I said, the same behaviours described in the book haven't gone away, they've just morphed into new fields. But focusing on the book itself, it's mixed. It's preaching to the choir, it's a bit too anecdotal, but at the same time, it remains pertinent to the idiosyncracies we see in discourse today.
