My article is out in the new issue of Armed Forces Journal: How to Teach About Islam. This is the paper's thesis:
Government agencies will never escape their dilemma if they continue searching for an authority who can speak for “true” Islam. Islam is a deeply contested religion, even among Muslims, and the arguments of both extremes are shot through with truth, falsehood, exaggerations, omissions and assumptions. Much of the debate about Islam in the United States is intellectually dishonest. Rival voices are less concerned with sincere discussion than with heavy-handed tactics to dominate the conversation, such as efforts to control government classrooms. The only way out of this dilemma is also the most intellectually honest one: to understand the battle for American perceptions of Islam, to map out the topography of the debate and to teach students to critically evaluate rival arguments.The paper will probably upset some people at both ends of the debate, because each side wants to a priori sanction certain opinions and silence other ones. I believe that in this toxic atmosphere, the only way forward is to give each voice a hearing, but rigorously scrutinize what each is saying.
1 comment:
It is NEVER right to validate hate---never. It is always better to err on the side of civility and respect.
Since its founding---America has always been a racist, bigoted nation. Starting with the American Indian wars and the idea that they were inferior "Savages". Should I therefore reccommend my government and military to teach about America soley through its idelogy of "Manifest Destiny" how this ideology influences American actions and atrocities domestically and abroad? Should I bring forward the rhetoric of "Scientific racism" of eugenics and miscegenation in the U.S.? or the Jim Crow Laws and the ideas of Rev Richard Furman and others that justified racism and bigotry against blacks through the Christian Bible? Should I insist space be given to the anti-semitic rehetoric against the Jews and the discourse that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans as important and valid views of all American citizens? Of how the KKK might be a fringe terrorist organization but its prejudice and bigotry are just an "extreme form" of mainstream America? Should I link todays American Laws of indefinite detentions, restrictions on civil liberties, and justification under the law of the use of torture, to the ideas of Manifest destiny, Jim Crow laws and the use of Christinaity to justify prejudice? ---would any actual American today recognize themselves in this type of narrative?---I doubt it.
By the way----this is what the internet says is the American ideology of Manifest Destiny.....
It is a concept of American expansionism based on---
1) Virtue of the (white) American people and their institutions
2)Mission to spread these institutions thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.
3) Destiny under God.
Does any of this ring a bell?---its pretty similar to the assumptions and accusations of the Islamophobes....don't you think? There is a theory that much of the rhetoric of the Islamophobes is simply a projection of their own worst aspirations onto the "other".
Eventually America will look back and see the hate for what it is---just as it has had to do with the American Indians, the Blacks, the Jews, the Communists, the Catholics.....and on and on....
In the meantime....I'll just sit back and watch America and its citizens muddle through without a clue......
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