Fitna

Although I absolutely do not endorse in anyway, shape, or form, the ideology that is behind the people who made this video, I would encourage people to watch it. I really hate having to get into bed with right-wing extremists like the people who made this video, who are a dutch, anti-immigration Christian lobby, it pains me greatly. I wish instead it had been made by people I actually admire, like Christopher Hitchens. I would also point out that I don't necessarily agree with everything in this video, particularly the stuff about the Netherlands. Nevertheless, given this has largely gone offline because of the death threats that Muslims around the world have been sending people who had shown this video, I think it's extremely important that it does stay up.

You can see it here in dutch and in English:

http://www.debaasjes.nl/index.php/comments/fitna1/

Please remember, I am not opposed to Muslims. I loath all religions fairly much equally. Credit where credit is due, it was the Jews who started the whole violent god thing, and the Christians who perfected the concept of a just and holy war. It just happens to be Muslims in this day and age who are the ones who scream and carry on when anyone dares raise an alternative to their dogmatic belief systems. My I remind you also, that these people in the video are AS MUCH Muslims as Sufi mystics who practice peace and love. They both claim to believe in the same book. Just as I have many Christian friends who are liberal and left-wing, and still believe in a the ludicrous, violent nonsense in the Bible, I have many Muslim friends who love humanity as much as I do, and yet claim a belief in a book described at best as a "confused pile of dreams".

Racism and faith

This will not be an interesting study into the correlation between racism and religious faith (although I do think that would be exceptionally interesting given all the references to Hamites in the Bible, dark skin and light skin in the Book of Mormon and slavery in Islam). Instead, it will focus on the tendency in western society at large to associate legitimate criticism of Islam with racist attacks against an "ethnic group".

Overwhelming advances in the field of genetics have shown that, for all intents and purposes, race, as it is popularly understood, does not exist. Skin colour is literally...skin deep. Despite this, I believe that pejorative concepts such as ethnicity and nations do serve some purpose, even if they have very little grounding in reality. To ignore altogether the concept of a nation or an ethnic group would be to ignore significant cultural and historical borders that separate peoples. As such, Arabs are still Arabs, Germans are still Germans, San are still San, regardless of whether we're all pretty much the same genetic stock.

A movement that does have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever however is the attempt to associate opposition to Islam with a hatred of ethnic minorities. Let me make this clear from the beginning: you cannot change your skin colour or genetic makeup, in the same way you cannot change your sexuality or your eye colour. It will always be what it is. You can however change your faith. People do it all the time - it's called conversion. There are white converts to Islam, and there are black converts, and there are Chinese converts and Jewish converts. Muslims are not some monolithic ethnic group, nor do they share a single culture. The huge difference between Islam as it is practiced in Saudi Arabia and Islam in Java is indicative of this.

When I criticise Islam, then, I am not criticising an Arab for being an Arab, in the same way that when I criticise Judaism, I am not slandering Jews, or when I criticise Christianity, I am not defaming Romans (or who else?). What I am in fact criticising is a single book, and then a corpus of literature associated with that book - the Qur'an and the hadith. These are perfectly legitimate targets of criticism in a pluralistic, democratic, and free society. Just as I am able to criticise Shakespeare without fear of being labelled racist against people of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origins, so should I be able to criticise the Qur'an without fear of being labelled an anti-Arabist.

If my (or anybody else’s) criticism of Islam was largely based on the idea that Arabs were a threat to humanity, or that Bangladeshis were intellectually inferior on the basis of their birth, or that Persians were a particularly ugly people, then yes, that would be racist. However, I have yet to come across sophisticated discussions of Islam that fall to that level. Admittedly, on the academic playground that is YouTube, there are some instances where grievances boil down to slanging matches with statements like "Muhammad was a dirty Arab pedofile" and "fuck you, jewdog", but overwhelmingly, this is not the case. To slander people like Hitchens et al with the ludicrous title of being a "racist", simply because they do not feel the need to genuflect before a vile religious ideology, shows the extent to which the children of the enlightenment have lost their way.

The stupidest book ever written...

There are so many books deserving of this title. According to Red Dwarf, "Football: It's a funny old game" gets the award, but in my opinion, it really has to be the Qur'an. What's even more terrifying is that Qur'anic literacy seems to be much higher in the Islamic world that Biblical literacy is in the Christian world. I mean, most Christians don't really seem to have a clue what's in the Bible, and yet many muslims spend years memorising the Qur'an from go to woe. Admittedly, it's in Arabic, and classical Arabic at that, so there is a sizeable chunk of the world's muslim population who have to rely on translation than the actual text, but nevertheless, devout muslims seem more familiar with the book than devout Christians are with theirs. This is what really worries me - can' they see just how amazingly, stupidly, incredibly erroneous this book is?

The Qur'an starts with a prayer, which, to the skeptical mind, might straight away bring into question the idea that it was dictated by god verbatim. After all, why does god need to pray to himself? Oddly enough, the one "atheist" I found who converted to Islam (and is now a lecturer in mathematics at Kansas university) considered this to be a really smart move - it really pulled him. I don't see it for myself, but there you go. The book itself is not organised thematically, or chronologically, but rather by length, and often the suras themselves will jerk randomly from one topic to another, without any kind of coherent reason. Many of the topics raised in the Qur'an require some kind of relevant historical knowledge that most people don't have today.

Despite what muslims say, the Qur'an just repeatedly contradicts itself, again and again and again, hence the necessity of the doctrine of abrogation, where by later suras abrogate earlier ones. This leaves us with a situation where all the Qur'anic nasties (jihad, killing infidels, beating women etc) are pretty much the only ones still relevant. All the niceties (don't force your religion down other peoples throats) are abrogated. On top of this, the Qur'an is piled high with really boring, uninteresting, go nowhere stories. It's kind of like Muhammad picked the worst, most bland stories from the bible, forgot most of the details, and cobbled together just the bare bones of the story. How 1.3 billion people can believe (or at least, claim to believe) this is the pure word of god, unadulterated, good forever, is really beyond me. Worst of all though, is that I've never heard a muslim give a good answer. They always fall back on the "you haven't translated it properly" excuse. Well, I'm reading muslim sources guys, you'd think they'd at least try and get it right.