by Bruce Bawer
Apropos of my concerns about Islam in the West, a reader writes that: “America is NOT Europe, and there is a huge difference when it comes to the question of Muslim immigrants.” American Muslims, he notes, are more educated than European Muslims, and are encouraged to work and assimilate, not to live on welfare in ghettos. Yes, I made a major point of these differences in my 2006 book While Europe Slept. When I wrote that book, I believed that, thanks to these differences, America would escape Europe’s fate. Having observed the course of events in the years since that book came out, I’m no longer as optimistic as I was then.
The same reader makes the familiar argument that defining sharia is "a difficult task considering there are no less than 4 major schools of Sharia, differing greatly from one another.” Yes, they differ in many details, but they’re all oppressive.
Apropos of the Toronto imam whose kill-the-gays rhetoric got this thread started, another reader notes that in Canada “the right to freedom of speech is not as absolute as it is in the United States” and that “had the authorities known what the Imam was going to say, they wouldn't have let him in the country.” True. For my part I prefer the First Amendment, though I see nothing wrong with denying entry to foreigners who are coming to a country to preach murder.
Yet another reader wonders about this statement of mine: "The current immigration policies of most Western governments favor, in practice, people who have contempt for, and represent a threat to, Western values." The reader asks: “What does this mean? Does being a religious fanatic move you to the front of the line for immigration?” Here’s what I was talking about: in most Western countries, the largest number of immigrants migrate thanks to a policy called “family reunification,” the intention of which is to enable people to live with their spouses, parents, and children. What this policy has led to, alas, is a pattern of forced marriages within patriarchal Muslim clans, whereby young Muslims in Europe or North America are wed to their cousins in South Asia or North Africa so that the latter can move to the West. Instead of favoring individuals from the Muslim world who seek to escape the stifling authority of their extended families and live in freedom, then, “family reunification” favors, in practice, the expansion of traditional Islamic patriarchies and the importation of their guiding values.
A fourth reader asks:
…where do you draw the line? No, literally. What is the sorting mechanism you intend to put in place whereby the vast majority of Muslims in the West who have nothing to do with the Imam you cited (even if many of them might find homosexuality morally abhorrent, a proposition no different from most Evangelicals in this country) are meaningfully distinguished from others of his ilk? I don’t believe it is Islamophobic to point out the existence of this problem, but it is Islamophobia per se if the intent is to hang on all Muslims the words and deeds of their most extreme elements and then make generalized demands that the community AT LARGE needs to change something about its behavior. I say this as a Gay Muslim who has had to waste so much energy unbundling rhetoric like yours from the far more complex and textured reality of Muslim life in the West. And it’s a waste of time precisely because it draws badly needed focus away from the need to create space within these communities for alternative points of view to thrive.
A few points.
Every time one criticizes Islam, one is told that Muslim life is “complex and textured." Well, yes - all life is complex and textured; that doesn’t mean it’s illegitimate to make honest observations about general patterns and tendencies and to report honestly on (for example) what scriptures say and how theologians interpret them. I want to stress, moreover, that when I criticize Islam in the West I’m not condemning Muslims; on the contrary, I’m supporting the right of Muslims to break free of oppressive Islamic structures and live as free individuals.
To this end, I share this reader’s belief that it’s vital to create space, as he puts it, for alternative views within Muslim communities. And in order to ensure that there are alternative views in those communities, Western immigration policies must be more intelligent. Immigration officials must draw distinctions between people like that Toronto imam and Muslims who want to come to the West precisely to get away from people like that Toronto imam. The immigration system must strive to keep the former out and let the latter in. I don’t think such a policy is either immoral or impracticable.
A fifth reader cites Hitchens’ always quotable comment about the word Islamophobia (with which I fully agree):
This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be "phobic." A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.
Finally, a reader writes:
People like Mr. Bawer diminish the evil that is here in the West while inflating the evils that exist in the Muslim world. The argument about Fred Phelps is preposterous. Sure, Mr. Phelps (and Robertson and many others) do not explicitly preach that people should go around killing gay people. They just say that homosexuality is the cause of so many of our troubles, like 9/11. What can be the logical conclusion of such statements, other than "we need to just get rid of the gays"?
What to say about this, except that, um, Western countries do not, in fact, execute gays, while several Muslim countries do? This reader accuses me of diminishing Western evil while inflating Muslim evil; in fact he is one of many liberal and obviously intelligent Western Muslims (and I have heard from several of them in the last couple of days) who are loath to fully acknowledge the problems with Islam and the extent of the need for reform. Such people are fond of identifying all the unpalatable aspects of Islam with Salafism and Wahabism, and of arguing in turn that these aspects are somehow all the West’s fault (as this particular reader puts it, “The reason that these sects continue to exist and influence Islamic thinking is because we continue to subsidize their benefactors in places like Saudi Arabia”). This kind of reflexive defensiveness is dispiriting, because these liberal, intelligent Western Muslims are the very people who should be leading the effort to reform their religion. But you can’t reform something if you refuse to face up squarely to the extent of the need for reform.
The Dish 