Mainstream Muslims Finally Take on Extremists

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

I don't approve of this title. You think mainstream Muslims haven't been fighting against extremists?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

First, let's define these "Western Values" and "Islamic Values" that are supposed to be inherently opposed

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Define these "Western Values" and "Islamic Values" that you suppose are inherently exclusive

"Free speech vs. "Blasphemy laws and using violence to stop free speech"
"Feminism vs. Treating women as inferior and mutilating their genitals"
"Democracy, separation of church and state vs. Islamic theocracy"
"Cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism vs. ignorance and hatred of minorities"
"Minority rights vs. Tyranny of the majority"
"An acceptance of basic classical liberal values vs. trying to exploit freedom while speaking against it"
"Gay Rights vs. Death penalty for gay sex"
"Proper law and justice vs. sharia law"
I could go on.

Those are not "Islamic" values, those are "Islamist" values. Two letters, big difference.


You say

We can't really fight the ideological battle with ISIS unless it becomes Islamic values vs. Western values.

which I disagree with, but I'm assuming you meant to type "Islamist values", which I would then agree with.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Muslims decide what is and is not in their religion.

And, you have to understand my point in the context of my argument.  I think we need to create a break between Muslims and Islamism/Wahhabism/Salafism/Any kind Islam that conflicts with basic human rights and Democratic values. 

Crabcake said we should try to accommodate moderate Islamists and Saudi type Islam which has all the evil of ISIS, just without the extreme brutality and outward violence.  I couldn't disagree more.

As far as Islamist vs. Islamic, it's a fair distinction.  Not eating pork is neither here nor there for me, although I find it annoying.  But, Islamist values are also Islamic values.  I sometimes feel like people want to create this separate category for "bad Islam."  Islamist, Wahhabi, extreme, radical, Islamofascist, political Islam, they all just mean "bad Islam."  Well, there's a danger because some "bad Islamists" call themselves moderate and peaceful while they preach hatred and awful nonsense that goes against American values.  We need to be a bit more specific about what we will and will not accept from our religious groups.

Advocating Sharia law, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, anti-democracy/pro-theocracy, violence against cartoonists, chopping hands off for stealing, nah, that's unacceptable, period.

Alright, well most of this is good to know, because from reading your posts in this thread and many others both here and on AAD I was getting the impression you thought Islam in and of itself is the problem, which is why I was so concerned with the sentence I asked about before.


However, I would like to point out that those "Western Values" that you listed before are not at all exclusive or original to the West as we understand it today, and that vast amounts of what are considered "Western values" (additionally, what constitutes Western values is a whole debate itself) actually originated in the Islamic world.

Maybe I'm reading too much into what you're saying and your views, but you seem to have a very black-and-white view of the Islamic world, particularly how you bring up Sharia law a lot and your laser-like focus on just the Middle East.

The application of Islamic Sharia law to democracy is a huge topic with a very broad range of views in the debate on how it should be applied to governance and law, not unlike how America is a secular democracy yet we still trace our legal foundation to Judeo-Christian values, or how there are Christian Democratic parties across the world that are inspired by Christian values and push those values within a democratic framework with respect to human rights. I strongly suggest you read this first link, especially the "Obstacles" subsection, and while you're doing it, keep in mind the effect that the Middle East will have on Islam in the rest of the world and the counterforces to Islamist forces within Muslims communities around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_democracy


I would also suggest that you read these articles, and maybe do a bit more digging yourself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_ethics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiqh#The_current_schools_of_jurisprudence

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Many of our media organizations treat Salafi hate preachers as moderate Muslims and treat groups like CAIR as the voice of mainstream Muslims.

[Citation needed]


I have never seen The Media treat "groups like CAIR" as the voice of mainstream Islam, let alone try to make a distinction between Salafism and other branches.

Political correctness, like Libertarianism, is not actually a thing outside of the internet and college campuses. Our news is nothing but covering Islamic extremism and the wars in the Middle East for 15 years. The reason people on the political left talk about Islamophobia more than Islamic extremism is because Islamic extremism is not an existentional threat to our liberal society (at least, not until it ) the way Islamophobia is.

Honestly, if we could get back to the Islam of 1975, that would be a huge step forward.  

What does this even mean? How has Islam as a whole changed for the worse since 1975?

The Islamic world as a whole (not just MENA), by the virtues of globalization and the ideological conflicts of the War on Terror, is arguably on a path to a better future now in 2015 than it was in 1975. Widespread denunciation of terrorism by leaders and peoples, the washing away of bloodthirsty warmongering dictators that enabled Islamism, would start wars with Israel to unite their population against a foreign enemy to maintain support, and suppress democratic movements; feminist movements, the penetration of societies to the ideals of democracy and equal rights being made possible in a world connected by mass media and the internet, etc.


Yes, the Muslim world is in turmoil. It has been for most of the past 100 years, and centuries before that. But the Western world as we know it and our systems of government were born out of turmoil as well. It took the United States 400 years to arrive at our current form of government. Our history was nothing but mass violence from the 1760s - 1890s. The Iraq War shows that you can't just impose it on them from the top down; there has to be a ground-up building of governments. That's exactly what's happening now with movements like the Arab Spring. Our meddling in Muslim countries is part of the reason it's taken so long for these movements to develop, and then you get mad because there's a predictable backlash?


Progress is not linear; there will be steps forwards and backwards. Many times, our interventions in places like MENA actually set things back. Yes, let's support those fighting ISIS and other extremists by all means. We may have to ally with non-violent conservative Muslims to achieve this goal in the short term, and work on supporting movements for liberal governments in the long-run. "Us versus Them" mentalities like "Western culture is superior" is exactly the wrong way to go about this. You need to stop viewing a complex world in such black-and-white terms.
 

Or did you mean the situation of the Islamic world back in 1975? Because if so, that's exactly what enabled the rise of Islamism.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Also, to continue a debate from earlier about "Western" versus "Islamic" values/culture, I pointed out that universal human values are not exclusive nor original to the West, and you agreed and said that Western values are essentially universal values.


Which negates the "universal" part of it.


You can't just attribute everything good in the world to the West, and then claim because of the West the world was blessed by these good things. That's just Eurocentric arrogance and feeds the flames of culture wars, and then you get a backlash when people find out the not-so-nice things about the West and Western culture who then group it in with the good stuff (see: anti-liberalism, utopian extremists, religious conservatives, etc. reacting to the negative aspects of a consumerist, capitalist, permissive society and/or imperialist legacies by trashing universal rights and political secularism as well).

Islamic culture is inferior to Western culture.

Which also makes this sentence hilariously wrong and just weaponizing the concept of human rights into a intercultural conflict, which it is not.

Multiple Muslim scholars (and other religions as well, by the way) have issued declarations of rights by tracing them back to Islamic teachings based on the Quran and the Sunna of Mohammed, and the rights they give are the universal values. You have many Islamic scholars arguing that Shariah law needs to be freed from its medeival legal basis, the same thing that happened with Christian teachings today having abandoned the ancient tribal laws of texts like Leviticus.  Tradition is not incompatible with the modern world or universal rights.


If you keep going on in a divisive fashion about how this is about Western values/culture versus Islamic values/culture, then you're only going to perpetuate this conflict.