Perceiving Islam.
I really liked this post by Ogged, guesting at Washington Monthly on the new WaPo poll finding that a plurality of Americans (46%) now have a negative view of Islam. That's up from October of 2001 when the same plurality (47%) had a favourable view of the religion just after 911. It's also up from the numbers reported in the Global Pew Attitudes Project survey released last year (57% favourable, about average among Western nations). The new WaPo figures confirm a CBS News survey conducted last month that also found a smaller plurality (36%) declaring an unfavourable view of the religion, with 32% saying they didn't know enough to judge. More numbers are archived at Polling Report.
Ogged writes:
We [liberals] lose credibility when we don't admit what's obvious to everyone: insofar as we're worried, it's about Muslims (note to those who don't know me and didn't get the opening joke: I'm a (non-practicing) Muslim, born in Iran; no, I'm not pulling a Michelle Malkin on you). We get into these bizarre dynamics because we don't want to give any ground. We worry that if we give ground, unscrupulous people on the other side will take advantage and say things like, "even the liberal Washington Monthly admits Muslims are crazy." But our denial of the obvious is the only thing that gives right-wing complaints any credibility. We make it possible for them to cast their bigotry as truth-telling.
This is, I think, really important. The right completely gets off on its "truthteller" narrative, and its counterpart, the idea that recent displays of Muslem intolerance -- the Paris riots, the Danish cartoon demonstrations -- throw a wrench into the liberal worldview, based as it is on the shibolleth of tolerance (the "true god of the American lefty" according to conservative blogger Tigerhawk not long ago). The caricature is that liberals will, in fact, tolerate anything so long as the perpetrating group isn't in the traditional cultural majority.
This is ludicrous, of course, but it's also true that there's not much of a distinct, powerful mainstream counter-narrative. I rarely read about moderate Muslim activity in the papers and news magazines, unless it's activity directly opposing or reacting to extremism. The "liberal media" tends to take the existence of the great moderate Muslim masses in Europe and North America for granted, and then to startle us with profiles of the extremists who somehow emerged from these masses (like the famous Leeds teaching assistant who became one of the London subway bombers), or of the forces working against moderation within or on the edges of these moderate communities.
For instance, I was actually startled reading the following about European Muslims in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago:
Denmark, a fairly typical European country in this respect, has an estimated 180,000 Muslims out of a population of five million. They are served by 80 to 100 mosques, with an estimated 15,000 worshippers. In other words, fewer than 10 per cent of Denmark's Muslims are even religiously observant. A similar majority of Western Europe's Muslims are believed to be secular — in France, only 5 per cent visit a mosque weekly. The rest presumably view Islam as a culture rather than a religion or a basis for politics.
That was evident last year when France, whose six million Muslims are the continent's largest population, passed a law that bans the wearing of head scarves by girls in schools. It was fiercely opposed by the fundamentalist Muslim leadership...But after the law came into effect, the number of girls who tried to defy it, nationwide, numbered in the low hundreds. For all but a tiny group of Muslims, expressing the orthodox version of their faith held no interest — but being French, and European, was very important.
It's not the information itself that surprised me so much as the perspective. I'd always assumed that the debate over headscraves in French schools was yet another indication of Western Europe's difficulties in dealing with its religious, cultural and ideological diversity and messy history. The idea that, for many of the people affected, the ban just wasn't a big deal... well, that was something new. It wasn't due to a lack of personal experience: I've worked for and studied with Arab Muslims, both secular and devout. I expect like most people, I've known Canadian Muslims who were the victims of prejudice, both professionally and in casual dealings with the public. I cracked Osama jokes with Arab Muslim graduate students in England the year after 911. But like the people quoted in the WaPo article, I saw all these as individuals and hard to extrapolate from to see whole communities, societies, cultural worldviews.
We get a larger working worldview from following the news and reading and viewing editorial opinion. In the WaPo article, Juan Cole worries that Americans "have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass media and by select special interests...I think anti-Arab racism and profiling has become respectable." I think he's increasingly right, and that it's a big, self-perpetuating problem, fed by those who enjoy exacerbating conflict. But the respectability has to come a lack of explicit, obvious context about Arab Muslims in the West. Maybe instead of taking that context for granted while decrying profiling ("of course most Muslims are peace-loving types" etc. etc.), liberal opinion-makers should work to push it, to push images and examples of it, to the forefront of what North Americans see, and force conservatives to grapple with it too.
Ogged writes:
We [liberals] lose credibility when we don't admit what's obvious to everyone: insofar as we're worried, it's about Muslims (note to those who don't know me and didn't get the opening joke: I'm a (non-practicing) Muslim, born in Iran; no, I'm not pulling a Michelle Malkin on you). We get into these bizarre dynamics because we don't want to give any ground. We worry that if we give ground, unscrupulous people on the other side will take advantage and say things like, "even the liberal Washington Monthly admits Muslims are crazy." But our denial of the obvious is the only thing that gives right-wing complaints any credibility. We make it possible for them to cast their bigotry as truth-telling.
This is, I think, really important. The right completely gets off on its "truthteller" narrative, and its counterpart, the idea that recent displays of Muslem intolerance -- the Paris riots, the Danish cartoon demonstrations -- throw a wrench into the liberal worldview, based as it is on the shibolleth of tolerance (the "true god of the American lefty" according to conservative blogger Tigerhawk not long ago). The caricature is that liberals will, in fact, tolerate anything so long as the perpetrating group isn't in the traditional cultural majority.
This is ludicrous, of course, but it's also true that there's not much of a distinct, powerful mainstream counter-narrative. I rarely read about moderate Muslim activity in the papers and news magazines, unless it's activity directly opposing or reacting to extremism. The "liberal media" tends to take the existence of the great moderate Muslim masses in Europe and North America for granted, and then to startle us with profiles of the extremists who somehow emerged from these masses (like the famous Leeds teaching assistant who became one of the London subway bombers), or of the forces working against moderation within or on the edges of these moderate communities.
For instance, I was actually startled reading the following about European Muslims in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago:
Denmark, a fairly typical European country in this respect, has an estimated 180,000 Muslims out of a population of five million. They are served by 80 to 100 mosques, with an estimated 15,000 worshippers. In other words, fewer than 10 per cent of Denmark's Muslims are even religiously observant. A similar majority of Western Europe's Muslims are believed to be secular — in France, only 5 per cent visit a mosque weekly. The rest presumably view Islam as a culture rather than a religion or a basis for politics.
That was evident last year when France, whose six million Muslims are the continent's largest population, passed a law that bans the wearing of head scarves by girls in schools. It was fiercely opposed by the fundamentalist Muslim leadership...But after the law came into effect, the number of girls who tried to defy it, nationwide, numbered in the low hundreds. For all but a tiny group of Muslims, expressing the orthodox version of their faith held no interest — but being French, and European, was very important.
It's not the information itself that surprised me so much as the perspective. I'd always assumed that the debate over headscraves in French schools was yet another indication of Western Europe's difficulties in dealing with its religious, cultural and ideological diversity and messy history. The idea that, for many of the people affected, the ban just wasn't a big deal... well, that was something new. It wasn't due to a lack of personal experience: I've worked for and studied with Arab Muslims, both secular and devout. I expect like most people, I've known Canadian Muslims who were the victims of prejudice, both professionally and in casual dealings with the public. I cracked Osama jokes with Arab Muslim graduate students in England the year after 911. But like the people quoted in the WaPo article, I saw all these as individuals and hard to extrapolate from to see whole communities, societies, cultural worldviews.
We get a larger working worldview from following the news and reading and viewing editorial opinion. In the WaPo article, Juan Cole worries that Americans "have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass media and by select special interests...I think anti-Arab racism and profiling has become respectable." I think he's increasingly right, and that it's a big, self-perpetuating problem, fed by those who enjoy exacerbating conflict. But the respectability has to come a lack of explicit, obvious context about Arab Muslims in the West. Maybe instead of taking that context for granted while decrying profiling ("of course most Muslims are peace-loving types" etc. etc.), liberal opinion-makers should work to push it, to push images and examples of it, to the forefront of what North Americans see, and force conservatives to grapple with it too.
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