Can One Really Be a Woke Islamist?
Zohran Mamdani and the need for better arguments if we care about defending liberalism
(Audio version here)
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I know very little about Zohran Mamdani personally but it seems implausible that anybody can be both woke and an Islamist. Nevertheless, I am seeing many claims to this effect on social media. It’s not that people seem divided on whether Mamdani is going to defund the police and “queer” everything or expand it into a morality police and persecute sexual minorities, but that some seem convinced he’s going to do both at the same time. Unless Mamdani has multiple personalities and one is an extreme progressive on the woke axis and the other an extreme conservative on the Muslim axis, this seems likely to be a case of people conflating the two movements they see as the biggest threats, even though they are fundamentally incompatible.
This kind of muddled thinking reflects a pattern I’ve observed often: a failure to distinguish between different forms of illiberalism. Woke activists and Islamists both conflict with traditional Western liberalism and with traditional Western conservatism, certainly, but they also conflict with each other. They are not simply a different expression of the same anti-liberal and/or anti-conservative force.
When conservatives are guilty of this kind of conflation, it is typically because they have failed to see other kinds of conservatives as conservative because the traditions they want to conserve are antithetical to the ones they themselves want to conserve. It is, by no means, a criticism of conservatives that they wish to conserve traditions they see as good and resist acceptance of those they see as bad. This is perfectly reasonable! But it can lead some to see ideas that threaten their conservative values as necessarily progressive even when they are not. E.g., both queer theory and Sharia Law are antithetical to Christian conservatism so, even though they are also antithetical to each other, they get conceived of as the same kind of thing which can co-exist.
They cannot co-exist, though. Critical Social Justice (wokeism), rejects evidence-based epistemology and liberalism in favour of identity-based moral hierarchies. It prioritises lived experience over evidence and reason, and reads everything through a shadowy system of power and privilege while policing minds and language and penalising dissent. It seeks to dismantle established social structures, believing them to be permeated by oppressive power structures like white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy and cis/heteronormativity.
Islamism seeks the enforcement of religious law and traditional moral order. It regards homosexuality as sinful, women’s autonomy as immoral, and secular liberalism as a threat to divine authority. It reads everything through a lens of religious dogma and seeks to establish a social structure based on these views, also while policing minds and language and penalising dissent. These two moral orthodoxies are both deeply illiberal, yes, but they are also directly antithetical to each other.
The closest wokeness and Islamism can get to coexisting is when the former enables the latter due to profoundly anti-Western beliefs and a lack of consistent principle. The woke are inclined to downplay the problem of Islamism and accuse people concerned about it of Islamophobia. Islamists, of course, do not return the favour by accusing people concerned about radical queer activism of homophobia or transphobia. The woke frequently like to pretend that Islamism does not exist or that it does but is rooted in resistance to Western colonialism while Islamists know it does exist and that it is rooted in Islam.
Consequently, when a Muslim is accused of being both woke and an Islamist, he or she is usually woke and would likely die if Islamists got into power. There is a form of Muslim identity that interprets Islam in a progressive way using ideas from it that genuinely are compatible with socialist views and inclusivity and then stretch massively to make it also compatible with women’s rights and LGBT rights. Islamists tend to reserve a special ire for progressive Muslims, as the zealous always do for heretics.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is this kind of progressive Muslim and he is also often accused of being both woke and an Islamist. Khan is not an extremist despite claims that he is, but he can legitimately be criticised from a liberal and/or conservative perspective on the grounds of a bias towards ‘woke’ rhetoric and ideas and underplaying the problem of Islamism as well as on matters of policy and public expenditure.
Is Zohran Mamdani a more radical version of this progressive synthesis? I think people who are critical of him would do best to ask this question and provide evidence of their concerns that he is, rather than trying to claim he is both ultra-progressive in a woke way and ultra conservative in a Muslim way. A widely circulated screenshot from 2020 shows him asserting that “queer liberation” requires defunding the police. That is a radical ideological position, and voters are right to ask whether he still holds it and what it would mean for public safety and freedom of belief and speech in a city where diverse views exist and have a right to exist.
Does Mamdani uphold the free expression of a wide range of views including gender critical feminists and religious or social conservatives? Does he stand against Islamism and all forms of religious or ideological authoritarianism? Will he oppose antisemitism unambiguously? Will he reject identity politics that demonise certain demographics and unjustly advantage others? Will he engage with people across the political spectrum respectfully and productively? If he cannot commit to these and other liberal principles, there are very strong grounds to criticise him that will be convincing to people who aren’t illiberal extremists but don’t already see the problem. Accusing him of being a woke Islamist cannot be convincing, because it is incoherent nonsense.
One of the biggest problems we are facing right now is a lack of the accuracy, clarity, precision and principled consistency that are needed to genuinely convince others that there is a problem they should care about. Hyperbolic narratives may well convey a sense of seriousness and urgency but, if their claims are incoherent inventions born of a convenient conflation of two antithetical enemies, they fall apart under the most basic scrutiny. This cannot persuade honest and well-intentioned people who need to be convinced that there is a problem to be addressed. Instead, it gives the ideologues who are responsible for the problem the ammunition they need to dismiss all critique as unserious or bigoted.
We, liberals on the left, right and currently homeless, who see the problem with various forms of illiberalism must not abandon truth, clarity, fairness and principled consistency if we wish to convey this effectively to others who are confused, unconvinced or conflicted about them. Only by sticking to them can we do that.
Note: While thinking of an image for this piece and floating the idea of a crescent and star in “Progress” flag colours, I received this warning, which I think supports my point about the incompatibility of wokeness and Islamism.
People immersed in cultic binary thinking often simply conflate anything and everything that's at odds with their cult doctrine. Thus, you often see Christian conservatives speaking as if secular humanism and the New Age are the same, when in reality these have contempt for each other.
A woke Islamist is not self contradictory. If woke means viewing the world and all relationships through an oppressor/oppressed - anti-western lens it makes sense IF you define western governments and cultures as oppressors.