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.
But Islam and wokeness don't have the same root system? Wokeness is definitely a Western phenomenon made up of a distinctly Christian sense of original sin, Marxist focus on power structures, postmodern epistemology & language obsession and a distorted liberal sense of progress.
Different origin, yes. But I meant “root system” more in the sense of how these things function, not where they come from. Both Islam and wokeness have sacred beliefs, punishable heresies, and strict codes of speech and behavior. The starting points differ, but the structure is similar.
The radical nature of them? Yes, I think so too. Then people make the mistake of seeing a Muslim who is radically woke and call him a radical Muslim which is not actually wrong and therefore an Islamist which is.
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.
That's actually the basis for Iran's take on Twelver Shia Islam. The state propaganda is dotted with rhetoric about Western Imperialism. It's like they've fused Islam with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
I agree with you. Woke ideology and Islamism are two entirely different things, so one cannot believe in both. This is also why I am skeptical of the concept of the “Woke Right.” It seems as nonsensical as the term “Woke Islamist.”
But they aren’t **entirely** different, just different enough in the way Helen said, and thats an important distinction. Both do have totalistic impulses that clash with varying degrees of intensity with liberalism. Both tend to the dogmatic and the collectivist. That’s what the right wing picks up on when they misdiagnose “woke Islamism” as one thing (however much motivated reasoning is driving this misdiagnosis, and it’s far above zero.)
Agreed. It's also telling that Islamists and wokeists mean almost opposite things when they talk about 'Islamophobia'. (An attack on the most important thing in the world vs an attack on something that should be irrelevant.)
I also wrestled with an image for this piece, but I didn't get the terrifying handy warning. Is that AI?
Yes, but I was asking it to help me think of an image and throwing ideas at it and asking specifically for pros and cons rather than just describing what I wanted. I have aphantasia and cannot picture things in my head or even think in terms of symbolic images very well. I didn't just ask it to generate the image and receive a warning without asking for an opinion. I said "What about this" and then it said that.
I'm reminded of a rather funny clip of Alex Jones raving about the "communist socialist system of Islam." Such constructions seem to be employed more as tribal totems than as anything resembling a coherent concept; the audience is not meant to imagine any concrete noun at all, but only to feel the pangs of instinctive unease: "Oh no! Three things I dislike!"
Most political content works this way, in my view, even if it's generally less on-the-nose. One responds to an imagined enemy rather than real ideas. It's why I rarely bother with it.
You are correct in concluding that what logically connects these contradictory beliefs is anti-Westernism. That is the final singularity I eventually arrived at when examining pretty much every single variety of progressive belief. It is a destructive movement not a reformist one - and they explicitly say so when you read the "queer" polemics. Liberalism is meant to improve lives individually and collectively.
Are you familiar with the term "Omnicause"? - I've encountered it used by Mary Harrington, Helen Dale and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A word that is getting increasing airplay, a description of the way the Palestine issue has become totemic for the prog/left.
Exactly this. I’m so glad to read this piece from you, Helen. There is so much misunderstanding here- thanks for your clarity and insight: “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.”
I’m usually a big fan of yours, but the tiny flaw in this essay is the fact that we are facing a tsunami of people who are both Woke & pro-Islamist simultaneously. That’s _their_ failure, not ours.
I’m perfectly clear about the logical impossibility of those two ideologies coexisting consistently. But look at Iran 1979: the Islamist takeover was ushered in by ‘woke’ communist radicals.
You are correct but I think as is common even the woke who seem to be favoring Islamist Hamas nowadays are ignoring all reality while progressive Muslims are realizing their performative areas of religion can stretch really well into trappings of wokeness. What better way to avoid sexualizing than a hijab? How much does no alcohol play very well into wellness cults nowadays? Meditation or praying five times a day?
Good thoughts. Speaking from the US it does appear that he tried to focus on bread and butter class oriented issues more than on cultural ones. I'm for this. That said, he seems to not really have reached voters outside of Manhattan, and there could be reasons for this that really don't have to do with him. Also, he did come from a woke place at one time, and this needs to be watched, but many people seem to be growing past this. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I do think he is going to have a hard time becoming mayor.
Excellent, a balanced reasonable person looking at policy decisions and weighing up pros and cons based on what he has actually said and done in a balanced and nuanced way. Kindly clone yourself, sir.
Hi I’m new to your Substack. Do you have an essay where you explain what evidence based epistemology is? From what I understand, what you describe as wokeism and what I understand as “identity politics” are based in the evidence of lived experience, so defined by a common communal experience—the way a population demographic navigates the stereotypes that color their existence in a society.. joining this convo without previous context, I’m interpreting the moral hierarchy you describe as wokeism’s unviable “one-size-fits-all” kind of remedy to a problem in society (e.g. homeless people can’t get jobs because they dress poorly because they don’t have jobs to buy clothes); intended to be internalized by an individual in order to avoid the perpetuation of an oppressive or micro aggressive act.
In my view the intention is good but the solution is, in a way, dehumanizing due to the way it fails to allow the afflicted group to state what they actually want. It also has a way of dictating how other human beings, who also want to help, should respond.
Hi! Welcome. Evidence-based epistemology is simply determining what is true based on evidence but what you're describing is 'standpoint epistemology' and that works politically, unfortunately. You absolutely could get evidence of the experiences and perceptions of a certain demographic by surveying a large representative sample of them and this is valuable data on experiences and perceptions. You have to be aware of two things:
1) They may not match reality. e.g., A big survey in the UK found that Britons believed 21% of the population to be Muslim when the actual percentage was 5%. This is evidence of a mismatch between perception and reality and it is useful to know it because then we can investigate why it exists and the answer is probably to be found in anxiety about cultural incompatibilities. Then this can be addressed at its source whereas accepting the lived experience of people who had this perception as true would just cause a mess.
2) The 'woke' don't do representative surveys. They explicitly regard the members of every group who agree with them as the 'authentic' voice of that group and everybody else as still trapped within their socialisation into oppressive power structures and blind to social reality (not woke). This means that we really only hear from political subsets who are likely to be middle-class and university educated. e.g., The woke will tell us that BLM represents black views. Surveys tell us the majority of black people feel BLM has not been at all helpful to reducing racism. The woke will tell us that black people want to defund the police. Surveys tell us that positive or negative opinions of the police among black people vary mostly by whether they have been to university or not with those who have feeling more negatively while those who have not are more likely to feel positively.
So, yes. Your view that this is an unviable 'one-size-fits-all' kind of remedy that does not really hear what certain groups are saying is spot on, in my view!
Well, he has called Gaza a "genocide", defended slogans like "globalise the intifada", is pro-BDS and refused to affirm Israel's right to exist as a majority Jewish state, but that could just be an attempt to court the Muslim vote, 96-99% of whom have unfavourable views of Jews (although this is figure is sourced from data relating to those originating from North Africa and the Middle East- with the percentages ranging from 60-75% in other parts of the world). Muslims comprise 12% of New York City's voting population, after all.
Besides a key consideration is that Mamdani has specifically stated that he follows the Twelver Shia version of Islam. This doesn't mean that he shares sympathy with the Persian variant of Twelver Shia, but there is an extent to which Twelver Shia has become entangled with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. He's been careful to avoid the rhetoric of decolonisation outside of the subject of Israel, but his father is a noted professor of postcolonial studies of the critical theory variety.
I largely agree with you, Helen. Religious fundamentalist Islam is completely incompatible with Woke. However, you ignore the two Islams. Islam is both a religion and a political doctrine because it imposes a specific legal framework to govern society through Sharia Law. The religious Islam may not be compatible with woke, but the political doctrine is entirely compatible with woke- complimentary even- because both can have the aim of reifying the catastrophically failed ideology of revolutionary or radical socialism.
In practice the radically progressive revolutionary socialist version of Islam cannot co-exist with religious Islam once power is achieved and liberal democracy has been overthrown, but the two are entirely compatible during the pre-revolutionary phase, even though, to those with any common sense, the relationship is tantamount to goats becoming temporary bedfellows with wolves.
Generally Mamdani occupies the extreme end of cultural progressivism as you correctly state. He wants to completely abolish prisons, after all! However, my point would be there is such a thing as political Islamism which isn't characterised by fundamentalist ultraconservative religiosity.
As an interesting aside, I asked Grok to break the 249,941 deaths caused by Islamic Terror Attacks between 1979-2024 into three separate categories.
20-30% were purely religiously inspired.
50-60% were to create an Islamic state, and replace secular regimes with sharia-based governance.
15-25% were Radically Progressive/Socialist/Communist with the aim of producing a Revolutionary State and claimed to be anti-Imperialist targeting Western or 'colonial' (Israel) influence. The may have been revolutionaries, but they were also Islamists.
Well, within the Twelver Islam doctrine there is the Karba narrative of the martyrdom of Islam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed. It tends to fit perfectly with themes of resistance, occupation, the oppressor/oppressed narrative, as well anti-Western (particularly capitalist or neo-colonialist) tropes.
The thing is Helen, I see the marriage of convenience between Islam and the Left as somewhat akin to dialectic schizophrenia. The two can co-exist within the same ideological framework, but only in an internally inconsistent, contradictory and fragmented manner- but since when has that ever bothered the woke!
"When conservatives are guilty of this kind of conflation"
Helen - There you go again. You provide the specific example for left liberalism, but you do not to back this, again, moral equivalency claim with conservatism. I don't see it at all with conservatism. There are debates within the conservative domain as to what are traditional values worthy of protection, but there is consistency in the overall framework of conservative ideology.
The left-liberal woke framework is rife with hypocrisy and contradictions like this example of antisemitic support of Islam even in its radical form and practice while Islam in its radical form and practice kills gays and trans and women that step out of line set by men. Another is the woke left support for trans biological males competing in female athletics and allowed in female locker rooms and bathrooms and thus harming women's rights and safety. Climate crisis beliefs and related policies result in higher costs of food that result in more hunger while the left virtue signals care to end hunger. Woke defund the cops demands that harm low-income minority people that the woke left claims to advocate for.
The list goes on.
Provide me one example of conservative hypocrisy and contradiction. And no, eliminating critical theory and woke content, curriculum and instruction from the schools and libraries is not any free speech contradiction. Conservative principles include preventing children from accessing things that are bad for them.
Yes. I asked it to help me think of an image that depicted the conflation of Islamism and wokeism and floated some ideas for its opionion! I have aphantasia and really struggle with even the ideas for imagery. It suggested the current one which I like.
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.
The apparent conflation might be less about cultic thinking, and more about seeing the root system, not just the leaves.
But Islam and wokeness don't have the same root system? Wokeness is definitely a Western phenomenon made up of a distinctly Christian sense of original sin, Marxist focus on power structures, postmodern epistemology & language obsession and a distorted liberal sense of progress.
Different origin, yes. But I meant “root system” more in the sense of how these things function, not where they come from. Both Islam and wokeness have sacred beliefs, punishable heresies, and strict codes of speech and behavior. The starting points differ, but the structure is similar.
The radical nature of them? Yes, I think so too. Then people make the mistake of seeing a Muslim who is radically woke and call him a radical Muslim which is not actually wrong and therefore an Islamist which is.
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.
That's actually the basis for Iran's take on Twelver Shia Islam. The state propaganda is dotted with rhetoric about Western Imperialism. It's like they've fused Islam with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
I agree with you. Woke ideology and Islamism are two entirely different things, so one cannot believe in both. This is also why I am skeptical of the concept of the “Woke Right.” It seems as nonsensical as the term “Woke Islamist.”
But they aren’t **entirely** different, just different enough in the way Helen said, and thats an important distinction. Both do have totalistic impulses that clash with varying degrees of intensity with liberalism. Both tend to the dogmatic and the collectivist. That’s what the right wing picks up on when they misdiagnose “woke Islamism” as one thing (however much motivated reasoning is driving this misdiagnosis, and it’s far above zero.)
As usual, you've brought nagging concerns to the foreground. Now I have more questions to find answers for.
Agreed. It's also telling that Islamists and wokeists mean almost opposite things when they talk about 'Islamophobia'. (An attack on the most important thing in the world vs an attack on something that should be irrelevant.)
I also wrestled with an image for this piece, but I didn't get the terrifying handy warning. Is that AI?
https://dolancummings.substack.com/p/islamophobia-homophobia-and-the-moral
Yes, but I was asking it to help me think of an image and throwing ideas at it and asking specifically for pros and cons rather than just describing what I wanted. I have aphantasia and cannot picture things in my head or even think in terms of symbolic images very well. I didn't just ask it to generate the image and receive a warning without asking for an opinion. I said "What about this" and then it said that.
I'm reminded of a rather funny clip of Alex Jones raving about the "communist socialist system of Islam." Such constructions seem to be employed more as tribal totems than as anything resembling a coherent concept; the audience is not meant to imagine any concrete noun at all, but only to feel the pangs of instinctive unease: "Oh no! Three things I dislike!"
Most political content works this way, in my view, even if it's generally less on-the-nose. One responds to an imagined enemy rather than real ideas. It's why I rarely bother with it.
You are correct in concluding that what logically connects these contradictory beliefs is anti-Westernism. That is the final singularity I eventually arrived at when examining pretty much every single variety of progressive belief. It is a destructive movement not a reformist one - and they explicitly say so when you read the "queer" polemics. Liberalism is meant to improve lives individually and collectively.
Are you familiar with the term "Omnicause"? - I've encountered it used by Mary Harrington, Helen Dale and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A word that is getting increasing airplay, a description of the way the Palestine issue has become totemic for the prog/left.
Exactly this. I’m so glad to read this piece from you, Helen. There is so much misunderstanding here- thanks for your clarity and insight: “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.”
I’m usually a big fan of yours, but the tiny flaw in this essay is the fact that we are facing a tsunami of people who are both Woke & pro-Islamist simultaneously. That’s _their_ failure, not ours.
I’m perfectly clear about the logical impossibility of those two ideologies coexisting consistently. But look at Iran 1979: the Islamist takeover was ushered in by ‘woke’ communist radicals.
You are correct but I think as is common even the woke who seem to be favoring Islamist Hamas nowadays are ignoring all reality while progressive Muslims are realizing their performative areas of religion can stretch really well into trappings of wokeness. What better way to avoid sexualizing than a hijab? How much does no alcohol play very well into wellness cults nowadays? Meditation or praying five times a day?
Good thoughts. Speaking from the US it does appear that he tried to focus on bread and butter class oriented issues more than on cultural ones. I'm for this. That said, he seems to not really have reached voters outside of Manhattan, and there could be reasons for this that really don't have to do with him. Also, he did come from a woke place at one time, and this needs to be watched, but many people seem to be growing past this. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I do think he is going to have a hard time becoming mayor.
Excellent, a balanced reasonable person looking at policy decisions and weighing up pros and cons based on what he has actually said and done in a balanced and nuanced way. Kindly clone yourself, sir.
Well, I have my flaws too, but thanks for the compliment.
Hi I’m new to your Substack. Do you have an essay where you explain what evidence based epistemology is? From what I understand, what you describe as wokeism and what I understand as “identity politics” are based in the evidence of lived experience, so defined by a common communal experience—the way a population demographic navigates the stereotypes that color their existence in a society.. joining this convo without previous context, I’m interpreting the moral hierarchy you describe as wokeism’s unviable “one-size-fits-all” kind of remedy to a problem in society (e.g. homeless people can’t get jobs because they dress poorly because they don’t have jobs to buy clothes); intended to be internalized by an individual in order to avoid the perpetuation of an oppressive or micro aggressive act.
In my view the intention is good but the solution is, in a way, dehumanizing due to the way it fails to allow the afflicted group to state what they actually want. It also has a way of dictating how other human beings, who also want to help, should respond.
Hi! Welcome. Evidence-based epistemology is simply determining what is true based on evidence but what you're describing is 'standpoint epistemology' and that works politically, unfortunately. You absolutely could get evidence of the experiences and perceptions of a certain demographic by surveying a large representative sample of them and this is valuable data on experiences and perceptions. You have to be aware of two things:
1) They may not match reality. e.g., A big survey in the UK found that Britons believed 21% of the population to be Muslim when the actual percentage was 5%. This is evidence of a mismatch between perception and reality and it is useful to know it because then we can investigate why it exists and the answer is probably to be found in anxiety about cultural incompatibilities. Then this can be addressed at its source whereas accepting the lived experience of people who had this perception as true would just cause a mess.
2) The 'woke' don't do representative surveys. They explicitly regard the members of every group who agree with them as the 'authentic' voice of that group and everybody else as still trapped within their socialisation into oppressive power structures and blind to social reality (not woke). This means that we really only hear from political subsets who are likely to be middle-class and university educated. e.g., The woke will tell us that BLM represents black views. Surveys tell us the majority of black people feel BLM has not been at all helpful to reducing racism. The woke will tell us that black people want to defund the police. Surveys tell us that positive or negative opinions of the police among black people vary mostly by whether they have been to university or not with those who have feeling more negatively while those who have not are more likely to feel positively.
So, yes. Your view that this is an unviable 'one-size-fits-all' kind of remedy that does not really hear what certain groups are saying is spot on, in my view!
Concept creep is an important consideration.
Well, he has called Gaza a "genocide", defended slogans like "globalise the intifada", is pro-BDS and refused to affirm Israel's right to exist as a majority Jewish state, but that could just be an attempt to court the Muslim vote, 96-99% of whom have unfavourable views of Jews (although this is figure is sourced from data relating to those originating from North Africa and the Middle East- with the percentages ranging from 60-75% in other parts of the world). Muslims comprise 12% of New York City's voting population, after all.
Besides a key consideration is that Mamdani has specifically stated that he follows the Twelver Shia version of Islam. This doesn't mean that he shares sympathy with the Persian variant of Twelver Shia, but there is an extent to which Twelver Shia has become entangled with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. He's been careful to avoid the rhetoric of decolonisation outside of the subject of Israel, but his father is a noted professor of postcolonial studies of the critical theory variety.
I largely agree with you, Helen. Religious fundamentalist Islam is completely incompatible with Woke. However, you ignore the two Islams. Islam is both a religion and a political doctrine because it imposes a specific legal framework to govern society through Sharia Law. The religious Islam may not be compatible with woke, but the political doctrine is entirely compatible with woke- complimentary even- because both can have the aim of reifying the catastrophically failed ideology of revolutionary or radical socialism.
In practice the radically progressive revolutionary socialist version of Islam cannot co-exist with religious Islam once power is achieved and liberal democracy has been overthrown, but the two are entirely compatible during the pre-revolutionary phase, even though, to those with any common sense, the relationship is tantamount to goats becoming temporary bedfellows with wolves.
Generally Mamdani occupies the extreme end of cultural progressivism as you correctly state. He wants to completely abolish prisons, after all! However, my point would be there is such a thing as political Islamism which isn't characterised by fundamentalist ultraconservative religiosity.
As an interesting aside, I asked Grok to break the 249,941 deaths caused by Islamic Terror Attacks between 1979-2024 into three separate categories.
20-30% were purely religiously inspired.
50-60% were to create an Islamic state, and replace secular regimes with sharia-based governance.
15-25% were Radically Progressive/Socialist/Communist with the aim of producing a Revolutionary State and claimed to be anti-Imperialist targeting Western or 'colonial' (Israel) influence. The may have been revolutionaries, but they were also Islamists.
Yes, I can see that radical progressive Muslim mix.
Well, within the Twelver Islam doctrine there is the Karba narrative of the martyrdom of Islam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed. It tends to fit perfectly with themes of resistance, occupation, the oppressor/oppressed narrative, as well anti-Western (particularly capitalist or neo-colonialist) tropes.
The thing is Helen, I see the marriage of convenience between Islam and the Left as somewhat akin to dialectic schizophrenia. The two can co-exist within the same ideological framework, but only in an internally inconsistent, contradictory and fragmented manner- but since when has that ever bothered the woke!
"When conservatives are guilty of this kind of conflation"
Helen - There you go again. You provide the specific example for left liberalism, but you do not to back this, again, moral equivalency claim with conservatism. I don't see it at all with conservatism. There are debates within the conservative domain as to what are traditional values worthy of protection, but there is consistency in the overall framework of conservative ideology.
The left-liberal woke framework is rife with hypocrisy and contradictions like this example of antisemitic support of Islam even in its radical form and practice while Islam in its radical form and practice kills gays and trans and women that step out of line set by men. Another is the woke left support for trans biological males competing in female athletics and allowed in female locker rooms and bathrooms and thus harming women's rights and safety. Climate crisis beliefs and related policies result in higher costs of food that result in more hunger while the left virtue signals care to end hunger. Woke defund the cops demands that harm low-income minority people that the woke left claims to advocate for.
The list goes on.
Provide me one example of conservative hypocrisy and contradiction. And no, eliminating critical theory and woke content, curriculum and instruction from the schools and libraries is not any free speech contradiction. Conservative principles include preventing children from accessing things that are bad for them.
Wow, the last sentance of the post script, the bit in italics, is really quite chilling. Was it AI?
Yes. I asked it to help me think of an image that depicted the conflation of Islamism and wokeism and floated some ideas for its opionion! I have aphantasia and really struggle with even the ideas for imagery. It suggested the current one which I like.