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.