The MINO problem seems to exist with every single minority group in America. You have progressive Asian activists spending all their time talking about "not your model minority" and "antiblackness in the Asian community", while never caring about working-class Asians, just spouting buzzwords to collect on their NGO sinecures. Same with Jews as well. I wrote about it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/double-crossed
And as for the collaboration between Christians and Muslims, it was a long time coming. If it hadn't been for 9/11, Muslims would be a solidly Republican bloc.
You see something similar within Mormonism. Progressive Mormons, at least, have more of a leg to stand on: Mormonism was founded on the idea of continuing revelation and it’s slowly shifted over time, lending some credence to the idea that it may land in tidier accordance with progressivism in the future.
But it is unambiguous in the central importance of aligning your own approach with mandates from “living prophets” and the church as a whole, and people who object to what the faith’s prophets claim while still calling themselves believers are mostly fooling themselves. The faith is very deliberately near-immune to bottom-up influence.
In a lot of ways, I find fundamentalist believers more understandable than progressive ones. I get the impulse to reconcile heritage and culture with personal morality absorbed within a broader society opposed to one’s faith, but that combination leaves people a mess of unexamined contradictions, torn between fundamentally and irrevocably incompatible ideas.
Yup. When I left Islam the most common response was along the lines of "It's ok if you don't believe XYZ, you can still be a Muslim!" which honestly left me quite angry at how unserious they were about the whole affair. Of course people adopt religions for all sorts of reasons, but I thought of the scholars who dedicated their entire lives towards ensuring that a not a single error ever made it into their copies, and damn what a fucking insult to those people and their work.
From what I can tell, in traditional societies, what matters is the outward practice more than what one actually believes. I've known Arabs who didn't believe a word of their respective religions, but had to continue to go through the motions, lest people start talking.
If you consider the sum of the work of Islamic scholars to be "a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence," what do you care if it's insulted?
I value intellectual rigor (or rather, effort?), even if it leads to distasteful places sometimes. A lot of beneficial advances such as in law and literacy came from religious scholars grinding away.
Same. There's something so off about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young saying that God wanted polygamy, but then the LDS church backing off on that because it was too unpalatable to other groups. Also, the LDS church did not allow Black people to join until the 1970s, which seems more to do with politics than any divine revelation.
I see fundamentalist Mormons that are Whites-only and polygamous as "more Mormon" than the official LDS church.
After further meditation on the topic (sign of a good Substack post right there) - one other thing that makes Islam different from Christianity as practiced in the West is that, for better or worse, every Muslim society that I am aware of continues to be very much governed by tradition and social pressure.
WIERD societies, again, for better or worse, aren't. You can do anything you want to, you can set up your own religion, you can change genders, call yourself a member of a different species, tell people that you are the new Pope, and unless there is a specific statute forbidding you to do something, you are free to do whatever you want.
Take the hijab - MINOs correctly point out that it not specifically mentioned in the Koran or Hadiths, but the folks in Pakistan could give a shit. If a girl from a proper family were to go out without a headcovering, the results would be pretty predictable, and no amount of "show me the exact Sura!" would change that. Nor would it matter what that girl thought, what "her Islam" meant or even whether she or anyone in her family believed a word of it.
Everybody in a traditional society knows what their rights and obligations are, there is no making it up as you go along, and if you do otherwise, you will be brought back to earth in no uncertain terms, and I don't even necessarily mean violence.
This is an excellent point. It's an impossible question to answer but I would be curious to know how much of this hewing towards tradition is borne out of the implicit assumption that tradition should not be questioned because it has always been right, for the same reasons the Quran should never be questioned. I'm thankful to Eugine Nier for linking to David Friedman's work on Islamic legal systems: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Different_13/Book_Draft/Systems/Islamic_Law_Chapter.htm
I would modify that closed loop description to some degree: "it is old because it is seen as right, and societies following it have not collapsed in the meanwhile".
That is, to survive for a long period implies going through some degree of (imperfect) filtering for fitness. Like the results or not, we need to acknowledge the implications of longevity.
Of course, such traditionalism can make a society slow to adapt to changing circumstances of many kinds, so it can become maladaptive. That's why a wise mixture of traditionalism and innovation may be needed in a changing world like today.
The Critical Social Justice ideology which has captured modern progressive movement does not strike me as likely to be sustainable. It seems to me to want to toss out almost all tradition in favor of new dogma, while offering so many self contradictions and unproductive framings that it cannot help but collapse itself once it gains power. I don't think it seeks a wise balance.
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 28, 2023Liked by Yassine Meskhout
You seem very proud of the efforts taken to ensure the literal text of the Quran doesn't change. However, this is not enough to ensure that interpretations don't change. And in fact they have.
This is why there are currently four different Sunni mainstream schools of Islamic law, that disagree with each other on various issues. For example, three of them ban all alcohol, but the Hanafi school bans only wine. Or how most Muslim scholars have found ways against the Quranic punishments for Hadd offences, basically by imposing various evidentary and other requirements that are impossible to meet in practice. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Different_13/Book_Draft/Systems/Islamic_Law_Chapter.htm
The reason Islam appears so unchangeable today is due to the recent widespread influence of the literalist Salafi school of Islam, largely due to Saudi oil money financing mosques. By way of analogy, imaging a 17th century observer looking at the strictness of the New England Puritans and concluding that Christianity, or at least Puritan Christianity, was unchangeable.
You are correct on this point, and I intentionally avoided addressing the many schisms within Islam to keep this post (overly?) simplified. My argument posits that interpretations in Islam are much harder to come by, not that they're imposible. I also would not posit that efforts devoted towards scriptural consistency are the only explanation for the rigidity in Islam; I think your theory about the Salafi's influence is worth considering.
The link to David Friedman's work is perfectly on point, and I regret I hadn't thought to consult that source before writing this post. The impossible evidentiary standards for Hadd offenses reminds me of a similar judicial revolt in 19th century British law where judges responded to the multitude of mandatory death penalties by resorting to sentencing "death recorded" on paper only.
The glorification of the man who wrote down what God told him to, over those who put those texts together into their final inerrant form after his death, has always represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the relative importance of authors and editors
You and Sarah are right about what the MINOs and their woke buddies will say. But who will listen? Who is actually conned? Only the wokesters themselves, and even then only the stupid ones.
It mostly serves as a glossing over facade by maintaining an outer appearance of "nothing to see here". Put simply, the "real" Muslims were too busy with their lives and too disconnected from mainstream discourse to correct the record, and the MINOs were able to formulate this narrative without any pushback. That can only last so long of course.
To those who are fervent in their faith, there will be rewards in heaven.
To those who are inconstant and defame their faith, there will hell to pay.
There is one thing that I, a conservative Christian, admire about a faithful Muslim, and that is that he knows his Quran up, down, back, and forwards, and can find answers to any question therein.
When newsies and Marxists say, "Islam condones this or that," I always answer, "Really? If they are so supportive of this, why are they cutting off fingers, hands, and/or pushing the person off of a roof?"
It disturbs me to see churches that supposedly follow the faith allowing the evil inside the door.
More and more, I want to visit the offending place and knock the dust off of my sandals (So to speak.)
"If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely."
As far as I can tell, they don't have to be the slightest bit religious to actually get the benefit. I don't think social justice progressives have the slightest bit of respect for any religion whatsoever. There are three reasons why progressives are pro-(American)Muslim:
1. They are brown.
2. They are immigrants.
3. Conservative white people fear/mistrust them, and progressives are dedicated to uplifting everybody conservatives whites don't like.
None of those reasons have anything to do with the religious beliefs of Muslims. Jews are also a favorite protected class of socjus progs and most American Jews are incredibly secular.
So all you have to say is that you identify as somebody of Muslim heritage and you get the Oppression Olympics points no matter what you believe.
As a gay Catholic my guiding star on theology tends to be this (supposed) quote from Galileo: "I am not inclined to believe that a God which endowed us with strength, reason and intellect is inclined for us to forgo their use"
The MINO problem seems to exist with every single minority group in America. You have progressive Asian activists spending all their time talking about "not your model minority" and "antiblackness in the Asian community", while never caring about working-class Asians, just spouting buzzwords to collect on their NGO sinecures. Same with Jews as well. I wrote about it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/double-crossed
And as for the collaboration between Christians and Muslims, it was a long time coming. If it hadn't been for 9/11, Muslims would be a solidly Republican bloc.
Very well said. This phenomena is such an insidious form of selling out precisely because it pretends to be doing the opposite. It's so gross.
You see something similar within Mormonism. Progressive Mormons, at least, have more of a leg to stand on: Mormonism was founded on the idea of continuing revelation and it’s slowly shifted over time, lending some credence to the idea that it may land in tidier accordance with progressivism in the future.
But it is unambiguous in the central importance of aligning your own approach with mandates from “living prophets” and the church as a whole, and people who object to what the faith’s prophets claim while still calling themselves believers are mostly fooling themselves. The faith is very deliberately near-immune to bottom-up influence.
In a lot of ways, I find fundamentalist believers more understandable than progressive ones. I get the impulse to reconcile heritage and culture with personal morality absorbed within a broader society opposed to one’s faith, but that combination leaves people a mess of unexamined contradictions, torn between fundamentally and irrevocably incompatible ideas.
Yup. When I left Islam the most common response was along the lines of "It's ok if you don't believe XYZ, you can still be a Muslim!" which honestly left me quite angry at how unserious they were about the whole affair. Of course people adopt religions for all sorts of reasons, but I thought of the scholars who dedicated their entire lives towards ensuring that a not a single error ever made it into their copies, and damn what a fucking insult to those people and their work.
From what I can tell, in traditional societies, what matters is the outward practice more than what one actually believes. I've known Arabs who didn't believe a word of their respective religions, but had to continue to go through the motions, lest people start talking.
This matters in every society. Traditional ones just reward people for... following traditions.
If you consider the sum of the work of Islamic scholars to be "a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence," what do you care if it's insulted?
I value intellectual rigor (or rather, effort?), even if it leads to distasteful places sometimes. A lot of beneficial advances such as in law and literacy came from religious scholars grinding away.
Same. There's something so off about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young saying that God wanted polygamy, but then the LDS church backing off on that because it was too unpalatable to other groups. Also, the LDS church did not allow Black people to join until the 1970s, which seems more to do with politics than any divine revelation.
I see fundamentalist Mormons that are Whites-only and polygamous as "more Mormon" than the official LDS church.
Continuing revelation...
I suspect that, as often as not, the progressives just want societal approval.
It occurs to me that an autist/Islam overlap might come in the fact that they both appreciate consistency.
After further meditation on the topic (sign of a good Substack post right there) - one other thing that makes Islam different from Christianity as practiced in the West is that, for better or worse, every Muslim society that I am aware of continues to be very much governed by tradition and social pressure.
WIERD societies, again, for better or worse, aren't. You can do anything you want to, you can set up your own religion, you can change genders, call yourself a member of a different species, tell people that you are the new Pope, and unless there is a specific statute forbidding you to do something, you are free to do whatever you want.
Take the hijab - MINOs correctly point out that it not specifically mentioned in the Koran or Hadiths, but the folks in Pakistan could give a shit. If a girl from a proper family were to go out without a headcovering, the results would be pretty predictable, and no amount of "show me the exact Sura!" would change that. Nor would it matter what that girl thought, what "her Islam" meant or even whether she or anyone in her family believed a word of it.
Everybody in a traditional society knows what their rights and obligations are, there is no making it up as you go along, and if you do otherwise, you will be brought back to earth in no uncertain terms, and I don't even necessarily mean violence.
This is an excellent point. It's an impossible question to answer but I would be curious to know how much of this hewing towards tradition is borne out of the implicit assumption that tradition should not be questioned because it has always been right, for the same reasons the Quran should never be questioned. I'm thankful to Eugine Nier for linking to David Friedman's work on Islamic legal systems: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Different_13/Book_Draft/Systems/Islamic_Law_Chapter.htm
There is an element of a chicken and egg problem here. "Tradition is seen as right because it is old and it is old because it is seen as right."
I would modify that closed loop description to some degree: "it is old because it is seen as right, and societies following it have not collapsed in the meanwhile".
That is, to survive for a long period implies going through some degree of (imperfect) filtering for fitness. Like the results or not, we need to acknowledge the implications of longevity.
Of course, such traditionalism can make a society slow to adapt to changing circumstances of many kinds, so it can become maladaptive. That's why a wise mixture of traditionalism and innovation may be needed in a changing world like today.
The Critical Social Justice ideology which has captured modern progressive movement does not strike me as likely to be sustainable. It seems to me to want to toss out almost all tradition in favor of new dogma, while offering so many self contradictions and unproductive framings that it cannot help but collapse itself once it gains power. I don't think it seeks a wise balance.
You seem very proud of the efforts taken to ensure the literal text of the Quran doesn't change. However, this is not enough to ensure that interpretations don't change. And in fact they have.
This is why there are currently four different Sunni mainstream schools of Islamic law, that disagree with each other on various issues. For example, three of them ban all alcohol, but the Hanafi school bans only wine. Or how most Muslim scholars have found ways against the Quranic punishments for Hadd offences, basically by imposing various evidentary and other requirements that are impossible to meet in practice. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Different_13/Book_Draft/Systems/Islamic_Law_Chapter.htm
The reason Islam appears so unchangeable today is due to the recent widespread influence of the literalist Salafi school of Islam, largely due to Saudi oil money financing mosques. By way of analogy, imaging a 17th century observer looking at the strictness of the New England Puritans and concluding that Christianity, or at least Puritan Christianity, was unchangeable.
You are correct on this point, and I intentionally avoided addressing the many schisms within Islam to keep this post (overly?) simplified. My argument posits that interpretations in Islam are much harder to come by, not that they're imposible. I also would not posit that efforts devoted towards scriptural consistency are the only explanation for the rigidity in Islam; I think your theory about the Salafi's influence is worth considering.
The link to David Friedman's work is perfectly on point, and I regret I hadn't thought to consult that source before writing this post. The impossible evidentiary standards for Hadd offenses reminds me of a similar judicial revolt in 19th century British law where judges responded to the multitude of mandatory death penalties by resorting to sentencing "death recorded" on paper only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_recorded
Except the "death recorded" sentence required an act of Parliament to explicitly allow it.
All laws are made up, but some laws are less made up than others.
Excellent!
The glorification of the man who wrote down what God told him to, over those who put those texts together into their final inerrant form after his death, has always represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the relative importance of authors and editors
I'm gonna repeat my tweet.
You and Sarah are right about what the MINOs and their woke buddies will say. But who will listen? Who is actually conned? Only the wokesters themselves, and even then only the stupid ones.
It mostly serves as a glossing over facade by maintaining an outer appearance of "nothing to see here". Put simply, the "real" Muslims were too busy with their lives and too disconnected from mainstream discourse to correct the record, and the MINOs were able to formulate this narrative without any pushback. That can only last so long of course.
To those who are fervent in their faith, there will be rewards in heaven.
To those who are inconstant and defame their faith, there will hell to pay.
There is one thing that I, a conservative Christian, admire about a faithful Muslim, and that is that he knows his Quran up, down, back, and forwards, and can find answers to any question therein.
When newsies and Marxists say, "Islam condones this or that," I always answer, "Really? If they are so supportive of this, why are they cutting off fingers, hands, and/or pushing the person off of a roof?"
It disturbs me to see churches that supposedly follow the faith allowing the evil inside the door.
More and more, I want to visit the offending place and knock the dust off of my sandals (So to speak.)
Yes, even as a heathen unbeliever I find a great deal to admire about those who devote themselves to a code and apply it in a consistent manner.
"If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely."
As far as I can tell, they don't have to be the slightest bit religious to actually get the benefit. I don't think social justice progressives have the slightest bit of respect for any religion whatsoever. There are three reasons why progressives are pro-(American)Muslim:
1. They are brown.
2. They are immigrants.
3. Conservative white people fear/mistrust them, and progressives are dedicated to uplifting everybody conservatives whites don't like.
None of those reasons have anything to do with the religious beliefs of Muslims. Jews are also a favorite protected class of socjus progs and most American Jews are incredibly secular.
So all you have to say is that you identify as somebody of Muslim heritage and you get the Oppression Olympics points no matter what you believe.
> There are three reasons why progressives are pro-(American)Muslim
You missed the main one. Progressives hate America, Muslims hate America.
As a gay Catholic my guiding star on theology tends to be this (supposed) quote from Galileo: "I am not inclined to believe that a God which endowed us with strength, reason and intellect is inclined for us to forgo their use"
That however doesn't justify their misuse.
I agree that people pretending Islam is supportive of gay rights are either lying or self deluding themselves
The same is true of Christianity.
Depends on the sect.
“Amendments” are Unnecessary when Allah Most High’s Speech itself is the primary source of Law. Simple and Straightforward.