The Dangerous Intertwining of the American Culture War and Islam
I recently came across a discussion between conservative thinker and activist Candace Owens and self-proclaimed Islamic reformer Imam Mohammad Tawhidi that really alarmed me on an issue I’ve suspected to be long-brewing and unaddressed. I was already familiar with the broken nature of popular discussion on Islam in the West but this interview from last year really set off some major red flags. As if Sam Harris’s claims about Islam being a “mother lode of bad ideas” and Jordan Peterson’s characterization of the faith as “a totalizing system” weren’t enough, this particular interview really hit the nail on the head with the highly problematic nature of how we talk about Islam.
Ever since a culture war between the left and the right has begun raging in America and the West in general, it seems like every subject that is intersecting political lines is getting polarized, distorted and politicized. One of the subjects that has been affected by this tension is the subject of Islam and its relationship with the West. For years I’ve been seeing signs of the development of a public consensus that there definitely is something radically wrong with either Islam or Muslims that is at odds with modernity in general, and the West in particular. There have been some instances in the media that caught the public eye but so far I’m yet to see someone raising the alarm on how broken our dialogue has become on Islam.
The following are the top five takeaways from this interview which I hope will be call to action or at least serious consideration of how distorted, polarizing, lacking nuanced and unsophisticated the public discourse on Islam is. I’m leaving out the evaluation of how true or false these claims are with the hope that readers will see how far the public consensus has gone forth.
- Prophet Mohammad being viewed as a violent, immoral patriarch
From an idea of modeling yourselves after a religious figure, Candace asked whether the Prophet Mohammad was a “good man” and drew a comparison with Jesus how “he never slaughtered anybody”. At one point she even says about Prophet Mohammad that “he was violent, he killed people, he raped people…”. In response the Imam describes how there’s a majority view that believes that he did go out and loot, “went out for jihad and had no mercy whatsoever” while a minority does believe in a peaceful reading of the history. Therefore Muslims should promote this peaceful reading and disregard the majority one. He later notes that even this minority reading had some massacres that he doesn’t deny. - High Muslim birth rates and demographic takeover
The topic of the European migrant crisis comes up and Candace asks whether it is at all problematic to the discuss the high birthrates among migrant Muslims and who have “diametrically opposed values” to countries their immigrating to. She goes on to say how it is claimed (by the left purportedly) and considered to be “Islamophobic” to talk about high Muslim birthrates in Europe. The Imam goes on to state that it is a problem for both native Europeans as well as migrants who already live there as they view these incoming migrants with disdain. Candace narrates anecdote of her college friend claiming she wasn’t like “those Muslims” in connection to the differences between new migrants and settled immigrants. - The alliance between the left and violent extremists
In response to the much-debated idea of whether Islam is a religion of peace and how quickly the left sides with Islam whenever any violence or terrorism occurs, the Imam says, “Their [the left] agenda is power. They don’t care about any human being, any life”. He goes on to claim the left funded ISIS and this global leftist elite is complicit in arming rebels to bring down governments, and install socialist dictators instead. “Whenever something happens, the left and the extremists unite to bring down characters”. - Islam’s compared to other monotheistic faiths
Candace brings up the subject of comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam and asks about the differences between the Bible and Quran, the reason for hostility between Jews and Muslims despite Quran heavily drawing from the Torah and why most Americans, despite knowing little about Islam, still call it the religion of peace.
The Imam responds that these claims are yet another strategy of the left “because it sounds nice to say”. On the question of Jews and Muslims, he claims that Islam tells Muslims to be at war with the Jews (a claim that he seems to contradict when he says before 1979 Shia Muslims had no problems with Israel). - Impossibility of Islamic reform
“Islam can never, ever, ever be reformed.”
The Imam claims that the first ever Muslim reformer (Hussein the grandson of Mohammad) was brutally murdered by the ruling Muslim caliph of the time and questions how he, an Australian Muslim, can ever hope to accomplish this. He claims that only Muslims may be reformed, but not Islam.
No matter how you view Islam, how much you know about the faith, history, development, struggles and successes of the Muslims across time it is incredibly dangerous to develop consensus around such a discourse that is struggling to make sense of itself amidst a culture war between the left and the right. There’s a cast of people who are actively engaging in such discussions and promoting the ideas about Islam coming out of them. I’ll refrain from the charge of bigotry or racism and would like to give serious thought to their concerns but I suspect this might not be enough. I fear that these ideas are slowly leading to a consensus in the West about Islam and should be a grave warning to everyone involved either as a participant or a viewer of this debate on Islam.
