How Fetishizing the Prophet's Image Backfired

Quick thought for further deliberation:

There is a great irony in that early Muslims forbid the depiction of Muhammad because they feared that he might be worshipped alongside Allah only to have modern fundamentalist Muslims elevate Muhammad so high that they deem him important enough to kill those who dare draw his fetishized image.

Ignorance, Feigning Ignorance, and Making Fanes of Ignorance

Scott Walker isn't sure if President Obama is Christian. Many other conservatives are quite sure that he isn't. Many liberals are equally certain that the Islamic State isn't Muslim. Two problems. First, inasmuch as religion is about belonging, this is all quite simply about delineating group boundaries. See the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Second, it's all fruitless anyway since it rests on the assumptions that "Christianity" and "Islam" are monolithic institutions. In reality, there are many Christianities and many Islams. (See previous posts here and here.) Pretending otherwise is only about maintaining oneself as the legitimate arbiter in problem one above. Rinse and repeat.

Darren Sherkat has a good related post--albeit in his typical style.

Correlation and Causation, Muslim Interwebs Edition

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life recently released the results of a survey, titled "Among Muslims, Internet Use Goes Hand-in-Hand With More Open Views Toward Western Culture." The Pew researchers, a group of folks who know their stuff, are careful to note that behavior goes "hand-in-hand" with attitudes; in other words, these two things are correlated. And, right on cue, an ill-informed reporter gets it all wrong: "Want to improve Muslim attitudes? Get them online." Sacirbey writes:

That [i.e. getting Muslims to use the internet will lead to an improvement of their attitudes toward the West] would seem to be the lesson from an analysis...by the Pew Forum....

This is simply wrong, and if a student in my undergraduate Research Methods course wrote this in a paper, s/he probably wouldn't pass. The Pew report does not make any causal claims. To do so, their study would have needed to have been longitudinal or, at the very least, had a qualitative component. Because of this, prescriptive statements, like both the title of the RNS article and the first line of the story, are incorrect. In fact, the likely causal story here is the opposite of what Omar Sacirbey claims in the RNS story: Muslims who start out with more tolerant views of Western culture and Christianity are less likely to view the internet suspiciously and, thus, more likely to use it.

Aside from my disappointment in the media coverage of the findings, the Pew results are intriguing because they run up against the common conception of the relationship between the Ummah and the internet. Fueled most recently by the revelation that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a YouTube channel and that he followed an al Qaeda internet magazine, the assumption has been that the internet has the effect of making extremists of otherwise-moderate Muslims. We now have compelling evidence that the opposite relationship is true.

Christianities and Islams

Turns out that while Muslims generally agree on a couple central tenets, there is widespread diversity in their beliefs (based on Pew data comprising 38,000 face-to-face interviews in 39 countries). One might even say that there isn't a single "Islam" as much as there are multiple "Islams."

In previous posts (here and here), I have argued that we should stop referring to "Christianity" and instead speak of "Christianities" because of the immense diversity of belief and behavior (not to mention belonging) among those who call themselves Christians. One might begin to think that I'll eventually push to pluralize every religious moniker, but I don't see that becoming the case. In fact, I can think of a few examples of religions that are still homogeneous enough not to need an "s." Mormonism comes to mind. Sikhism would be another. These are comparatively smaller religions--and that is the point, I think. As religions grow larger, they inevitably fragment into divergent traditions, sects, and denominations at which time we need to acknowledge their heterogeneity. 

Trends in Anti-Muslim Bias Complaints

The following graphic from the NY Times demonstrates a couple things pretty well.

First, we see a major bump in the number of bias complaints by Muslims after September 11th. While unjustifiable, these are at least socially understandable. Second, we see a more modest rise that coincides with the recent economic decline. Discrimination against those seen as "others" increases when natives feel economically threatened. Those fears are irrationally directed at the most easily identified other, not to the actual causes of dis-ease. Finally, we can see an overall upward trend net of these two factors. This is probably due to rising levels of awareness of and interaction with Muslims and Islam.