Islam, Muslims, and the Refusal to Think Clearly

Why denying the problem of bad ideas fuels both terrorism and backlash

(Audio version here)

Two things can be true at once:

1. Murderous terrorist attacks, “honour” violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, child marriages, oppression of women, persecution of homosexuals, antisemitism, denials of freedom of belief and speech and explosive violent reactions to perceived blasphemy can all be inspired or justified by Islam.

2. Muslim people can be good, kind, brave, generous, peaceful, tolerant, open-minded, egalitarian, hardworking, conscientious assets to a society and good friends and neighbours.

In fact, they are true and this truth seems to give very many people considerable difficulty. This has never been clearer than in the state of political discourse following the horrific shootings at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia in which, at time of writing, 15 innocent people have lost their lives. Police have revealed the murderers to be Sajid and Naveed Akram and the massacre to be an Islamist terrorist attack. One brave man, who tackled one of the two shooters and disarmed him before being shot non-fatally himself was reported to be an Ahmed al Ahmed - a name which indicated a Muslim background. Further information seems to indicate that he is a believer. Consequently, it seems that both the perpetrators of this atrocity and the hero of the day are Muslim. Confused and conflicting partisan narratives about this abound on social media.

The key issue here is not that the behaviour of Muslims varies hugely with some committing acts of terror and others acts of heroism and the vast majority committing neither. It is that Islam contains ideas which plausibly justify violence, persecution, oppression and censorship and that these ideas can only be neutralised by being confronted honestly by Muslims rather than denied or apologised for. The refusal to acknowledge this fuels both Islamist violence and anti-Muslim backlash.

For many discussing the terrorist attack online from a political standpoint, this is inconvenient and the desire to make only one of these facts true or representative of Muslims is consequently strong. There is, of course, already an antisemitic conspiracy theory doing the rounds claiming that “the Jews” or “Israel” are behind the attack which is a ‘false flag’ intended to raise sympathy for Jews while demonising Islam. This should be treated with the contempt it deserves and dismissed with disgust.

Far more common are attempts to argue that the terrorists represent the real face of Islam and mentality of all Muslims and Mr. Ahmed is an anomaly, was confused about what was happening or even that he was sympathetic to the terrorist because he did not use the gun to shoot him once he had seized it. This is met with claims that it is al Ahmed who represents the true face of Islam and mentality of all Muslims and any claims that the murderous terrorists were inspired by Islam is rooted in racism and Islamophobia. The only thing these two factions agree on is that people need to pick a side. Islam and Muslims are either defined by murderous acts of terrorism or heroic acts of self-sacrifice.

Some people attempt to find some kind of balance between these two poles by drawing a line between “Islamists” and “Muslims” with the former being those who hold the beliefs of Islam in a literalist, fundamentalist and authoritarian way and seek to impose them on others violently and the latter those who hold to much more moderate, peaceful and positive interpretations of Islam and play nicely with others. This is a sectarian distinction.

Other people take a more psychological approach to drawing distinctions and argue that the religion itself is not to blame for violent, intolerant, oppressive and anti-social behaviour, but the differing personality traits of individuals. This argument holds that people who behave violently or intolerantly in the name of Islam would do so with whatever ideology they held to while those who are peaceful and tolerant would likewise always make that interpretation of any cultural or religious framework.

There is a kernel of truth in both these positions. There really is a difference between literalist, fundamentalist interpretations of ideologies and more moderate, benign, vague and fluffy ones. And human psychology really does vary widely and individually with regards to which direction any individual is likely to go in. This is unsatisfactory, however. The fact remains that if the contents of an ideology are such that, when its foundational principles are taken literally by someone with a zealous, authoritarian personality, bloodshed, persecution, oppression and censorship ensue, that ideology is a problem.

What is the worst a highly dedicated liberal humanist committed to first principles and intent on spreading them assertively could do? Aggressively insist on your right to be treated as an individual and recognised as sharing in common humanity and then leave you alone?

Nor is it a valid defence of any ideology to point out that the majority of its adherents don’t take it very literally or seriously or apply it to their lives and interactions with others. If people understood to be defined by a set of ideas and values behave most pro-socially and ethically when they are largely ignoring those ideas and values, those ideas and values are bad.

At this point, I am typically asked if I am also critical of Christianity which contains some fairly illiberal and oppressive ideas and is only currently not widely regarded as a problem due to a majority of Christians having a non-literal, liberal, benign and vague concept of it? Well, yes, actually, I am. Very much so. I do not want to see a revival of literal belief in Christianity, precisely because this is typically accompanied by violence, bloodshed, intolerance and persecution.

However, while there is some cause to worry that literalistic and authoritarian interpretations of Christianity may be ramping up again, there is more reason to believe that it is already highly prevalent among Muslims. One thing that makes people more likely to take fundamentalist stances on religion and behave in radical authoritarian ways is the normality of this in culture. Many Muslims come from cultures where this stance is normal and form subcultural communities where it remains normal. Muslims regularly poll as having much higher views in opposition to the rights of women and same-sex attracted people and as being particularly hostile to freedom of belief and speech when it comes to criticising Islam. They are overrepresented in terrorist attacks which is surely related to a belief that being ‘martyred’ in such a way enables one to access Heaven. Honour violence, forced marriage, the covering up of sexual offences and female genital mutilation remain a significant problem in Muslim communities.

It can be very difficult for liberals to acknowledge these problems. By ‘liberals’ I am, as always, referring to people with a freedom-centred philosophical stance who value individual liberty and universal human rights and can be found on the left, right and centre. Our commitment to the rights and freedoms of the individual mean that we really do not like to think about people collectively and statistically. As long as there are Muslims who are good, kind, peace-loving, tolerant of different worldviews and supportive of the rights of women and homosexuals, we will always be opposed to negative generalisations and collective blame of the whole demographic.

Yet there is a difference between groups of people defined by immutable characteristics and groups of people defined by commitment to an ideology. It has always been nonsense to blame “white people” as a whole for the existence of racist white people and to deem them all complicit in white supremacy due to the colour of their skin. It has equally been ridiculous to blame ‘men’ for the existence of rapists and violent criminals and deem them all complicit in patriarchy due to possession of a penis. Nobody can change the colour of their skin or their biological sex and nor do these cause abhorrent beliefs or harmful behaviours.

It is, however, much more reasonable to expect people to take some responsibility for the sets of ideas they willingly subscribe to. We can criticise ideas quite legitimately. We can criticise conservatism, libertarianism, liberalism or socialism. We can also criticise religion. This does not mean we should blame people for the worst manifestations of their own ideology which they themselves do not subscribe to, but we do really need them to be acknowledging and addressing the problem.

The politics I subscribe to are left-wing and consequently it has been important that I address the rise of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement on the left. I am not complicit in that movement because I do not believe it represents legitimate left-wing stances and I have opposed it since it arose. It did, however, arise on the left and can only realistically be marginalised from the left by the left. The same is true of conservatives currently opposing the rise of illiberal populism on the right and the far-right ‘groypers.’ One cannot hold them complicit in what they see as a betrayal of conservative values, but one can expect them to lead the charge in fixing it. A charge of complicity in a damaging ideology can only be made when people who can be considered to have some responsibility to address a problem instead condone, minimise, whatabout or justify it.

This is how the two truths at the start of this piece relate to each other. Rather than trying to resolve the problem of Islam including very many terrible ideas that justify violence, persecution, oppression and censorship while many Muslims are wonderful people who endorse none of that by making divisions between Islamists and Muslims or talking about individuals’ psychological traits, we need the Muslims who are wonderful people addressing the ideas that are terrible openly. It is no good to hold up good and brave individuals like Ahmed al Ahmed and claim that he represents real Islam while condemning any mention of the fact that the Akram father and son were very explicitly inspired by Islam as Islamophobic. In order not to be complicit in the problems, we need Muslims to be addressing the perfectly plausible interpretation of Islam held by the Islamic State and radical Islamist groups directly. This man has been doing this and urging other Muslims to do the same.

We need Muslims who support women’s equal status and autonomy to address widely held Islamic beliefs which deny these and those who support the rights and freedom of same-sex attracted people to tackle beliefs attributed to Islam which oppose them. We need Muslims who oppose antisemitism to be vocal about this and take issue with antisemitic rhetoric in their own communities. We need those who respect values of freedom of belief and speech and the right to criticise anything to intervene on those of their coreligionists who would make it a crime to criticise or mock Islam or who justify violence as a response to such criticisms or mockery. Islamic feminists and gay rights activists have been working on this but, by far, the most persistent voices on these issues, especially the right to criticise Islam, have been ex-Muslims.

As an atheist who is consistently critical of religion, I would naturally very much prefer it if Muslims addressed the problem of terrible ideas and values within Islam by ceasing to be Muslim. Believing one knows the divine will of God and what he wants for humans and that it is for everyone in the world to believe in and act according to one’s own religion does tend to lend itself to authoritarianism and intolerance. This is not inevitable, but it is one hugely significant barrier to respecting the rights and freedoms of other people, and there is simply no reason to believe any of it is true.

I accept, however, that this idea is not likely to have a widescale uptake and so I beseech Muslims to whom their faith is important and who also value peaceful, tolerant co-existence and the rights and freedoms of women, homosexuals and non-Muslims to acknowledge that their faith does not naturally lend itself to this and nor does it commonly manifest in that way. I have long been arguing that we need to support Muslim reformers - those individuals who openly address bad ideas within Islam and tackle them head on, arguing that the faith needs, not apologetics, but explicit, honest reform. Like ex-Muslims, they are a minority within a minority who are very vulnerable and face significant hostile backlash from illiberal Muslims while also frequently being regarded with suspicion and skepticism by critics of Islam. They are, however, the best bet for addressing the ideology as it really is and those of us who are genuinely concerned about bad ideas should respect and support them.

There is currently considerable anti-Muslim sentiment across the Western world and it is messy and escalating. It is unlikely to subside because so many of the concerns about Islam are valid. It is not valid to blame all Muslims for the worst manifestations of Islam but those who seek to shut down any criticism of Islam and insist we recognise only the positive writings and manifestations as legitimate can reasonably be accused of complicity. It can be psychologically difficult for people who interpret their faith in benign, meaningful and fulfilling ways and consider it to define their identity to concede ethical issues with it, but the only way productive way forward is for decent Muslims to tackle the problems in Islam head on.

In our current climate of existential anxiety, people are increasingly unwilling to think in complex, granular and individualistic ways. They are primed to think in blanket and totalising ways and it is foolish and counterproductive for Muslims to encourage this by entering into a battle of narratives about the true nature of Islam. When faced with such a dichotomy while in a state of self-protective anxiety, people are unlikely to conclude that Ahmed al Ahmed represents the true face of Islam and much more likely to decide that Sajid and Naveed Akram do.

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