Islamophobia

Sectionfive

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
Isn't automatically equating atheism with Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins et al a bit like automatically equating Islam with Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini?
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Of course, so perhaps necessary to separate atheism from Atheism for the discussion.

Here's the thing. It seems to me that when we hear criticism of islam, nine out of ten times it's Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan. That one in ten might maybe, occasionally be Indonesia (which is actually worlds largest muslim population) or Malaysia. Islam has been racialized to mean a fairly consistently defined area and peoples. Atheism in my experience is one of the main sources of this thinking, or at the least offers little resistance to it. So much of what I have encountered has no concept of race, whiteness and bizarrely less of power, politics and history. It's a complete blindspot. As if their ideas don't exist in an atmosphere of hostility to the middle east and and white dudes having a go at the very notion of islam carries the same consequences as targeting the local christian bishop. Unfathomably shallow
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
zhao said:
but perhaps we SHOULD start examining strains of xenophobia, eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, and modern-centrism in mainstream Atheism.
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OK, fine, but a few points:

zhao said:
eurocentrism
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is possibly unavoidable (which is not to say that tackling it isn't desirable) since modern atheism, as a Thing, more or less began in Europe. But moreover, all cultures and cultural phenomena start out in one part of the world or another and come out of earlier cultures pre-existing in that region. Capital-a Atheism is hostile to Christianity too, remember, which may have begun in the Middle East but matured and spread elsewhere in the world as a primarily European meme, if you'll forgive the term.

And isn't Islam (quite literally) Middle-East-centric? Any ideology will bear at least some cultural hallmarks of the time and place where it originated (even if in a negative sense, e.g. Marxism as a response to and reaction against specifically British/European capitalism in the 19th century).

zhao said:
modern-centrism
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Dunno what to say to this, really. We do, for better and worse, all live in the modern world. That's not to say there aren't some ideas and values from the past that could help make things better in the future but fetishizing the imagined purity of long ago is a trait common both to religious fundamentalism and secular fascism.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
There are atheists in the Middle East. Sometimes they also happen to be liberals, socialists, conservatives, Communists, or nationalists. Sometimes they are none of these things. The confluence of political power and Islam in the Middle East and South Asia is the problem, mainly because those in power align with or support or are militarised or revolutionary Islamic sects or creeds.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
Sectionfive said:
Of course, so perhaps necessary to separate atheism from Atheism for the discussion.

Here's the thing. It seems to me that when we hear criticism of islam, nine out of ten times it's Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan. That one in ten might maybe, occasionally be Indonesia (which is actually worlds largest muslim population) or Malaysia. Islam has been racialized to mean a fairly consistently defined area and peoples. Atheism in my experience is one of the main sources of this thinking, or at the least offers little resistance to it. So much of what I have encountered has no concept of race, whiteness and bizarrely less of power, politics and history. It's a complete blindspot. As if their ideas don't exist in an atmosphere of hostility to the middle east and and white dudes having a go at the very notion of islam carries the same consequences as targeting the local christian bishop. Unfathomably shallow
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OTM. Its astonishing how myopic Dawkins and his supporters are. They're an embarrassment to the rationality they claim to embody.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
such a stupid word, why was it this specific piece of terminology that emerged rather than a better one? it's an 00s coinage it think. the kids now would come up with a much more catchy term. 'islamophobia' makes it sound like you're pathologically scared of muslims, like you freeze in fear when you see one
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
such a stupid word, why was it this specific piece of terminology that emerged rather than a better one? it's an 00s coinage it think. the kids now would come up with a much more catchy term. 'islamophobia' makes it sound like you're pathologically scared of muslims, like you freeze in fear when you see one
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I think there's often a genuine component of fear behind things but you're right it often feels like an awkward term when applied to more straight up hateful and ignorant stuff
 
version

version

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
such a stupid word, why was it this specific piece of terminology that emerged rather than a better one? it's an 00s coinage it think. the kids now would come up with a much more catchy term. 'islamophobia' makes it sound like you're pathologically scared of muslims, like you freeze in fear when you see one
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Some people are. I remember a mate's dad going on about how anxious he was when he noticed a bloke he thought was a Muslim getting on the same plane as him.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
Some people are. I remember a mate's dad going on about how anxious he was when he noticed a bloke he thought was a Muslim getting on the same plane as him.
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I guess, but I imagine this was a while ago? I think that kind of thinking has probably faded away to a large extent now that the era of large-scale Islamist terror attacks in Western countries seems (for now) to be over.

At any rate, a bunch of big white lads pushing around a small Bengali woman because she's wearing a niqab are obviously not scared of her - they're just being cunts.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Yeah, it was a while ago. I think nowadays people refer to this sort of thing as hate or bigotry rather than a phobia.
 
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