Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
It's not about trying to be a "saviour" - well maybe it is for some people, it certainly isn't for me**. I dunno, I'm just extremely opposed to relativism and the attitude among a lot of people that considerations to do with culture and belief trump all other considerations, such as gender violence, homophobia or indeed antagonism to other ethnic or religious groups. When I see a woman walking down the street completely covered from head to foot in black cloth with only her eyes showing*, I'm sorry but that does look very weird and not particularly OK to me. It's an explicit statement of men's ownership of women, and it distresses me that some people are able to blind themselves to this with a shrug and a "Well it's just their culture, innit". Or even to imply that people who are concerned about it, from a very basic humanitarian or feminist position, must necessarily be "racist". Whereas I think it's far more racist to adopt the relativist position that concepts like gender equality are appropriate for white people but not for Muslims.
[Before anyone jumps in with the OH SO WHITE PEOPLE HAVE SOLVED SEXISM, HAVE WE?!? - no, of course not. But that doesn't make issues like the niqab or female genital mutilation go away.]
I agree that there is nothing inherently unique about Islam - in particular, that there's far more in common between Islam and Christianity, and Judaism too of course, than many followers of those religions would be prepared to admit. Nevertheless, Islam does seem to be very widely politicised in a way that other religions aren't (these days) to anything like the same extent. (Then again, I get the impression the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox sects in Israel have such a disproportionate degree of influence in the Knesset that you could make the case for the country being a quasi-theorcracy.) Obviously there are many people in America who would quite happily turn their country into a Christian version of Iran, and that's extremely worrying - but they haven't got there, yet.
*I lived for a five years in a part of east London with a Bengali plurality, with its own directly elected (Bengali) mayor who got into power by playing the basest sort of tribalist ghetto politics and, not far away, streets where there are regular demonstrations by Islamists and it's becoming increasingly unpleasant and even unsafe for white people to walk. This isn't "right-wing propaganda", it's actually just how things are.
**Which is why I think France's veil ban is worse than the problem it purports to solve, and in a broader sense why I think Dawkins is not helping the secularist cause. People in Europe didn't stop being fundamentalist Calvinists and Puritans and Catholics because of an obstreperous campaign to convince them that religion is a terrible thing - it happened over the course of centuries as democratic institutions challenged the power of the church, people became wealthier and gained wider access to education and as progress in science, technology and medicine overturned the mediaeval worldview. People retreat into the old certainties when they feel under threat, and I can appreciate that for many Muslims Dawkins is one part of a many-headed Thing made up of Israel, US foreign policy, Hindu nationalism, domestic Islamophobia in Western countries and so on.
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