I don’t understand a version of “freedom of speech” that means that people have to accept anyone to speak to them. If you truly believe that something someone says is bigoted, there is no liberal rule of tolerance that says you have to listen to them.
Maher is not being prevented from voicing his beliefs. That would be a freedom of speech issue. The point was to attempt to prevent him from speaking at a certain venue. It’s exactly as much a freedom of speech issue as having Ann Coulter speak there.
He may align with the liberal beliefs of the college in other aspects, but he clearly doesn’t in regards to Islam. The reasons have been stated here. He refuses to add tolerance to what he says. And his intolerance is dangerous. So is anyone’s intolerance. That’s the reason why we view it as a bad thing and try to stop it.
I view not having him speak as similar to how I would view not having Der Trihs speak. (Except Der Trihs is at least sometimes funny.)
I just wanted to express gratitude and tremendous respect to nani (sorry for the lack of accent marks) for taking the time to share such insight and expertise.
So in addition to the other vilifications that have been heaped on him, it’s also your view that Maher isn’t funny, either? You might find it curious, then, that this unfunny bigot’s show, Real Time with Bill Maher, has garnered 18 Prime Time Emmy nominations in its eleven years on the air, and has been nominated as “best variety” or “comedy” show in every one of those, along with numerous other awards for writing and production. And that reflects the following he has by large numbers who think he is both entertaining and informative; the panel discussion format with key political and social figures works really well under Maher’s moderation, as do the one-on-one interview segments.
So there’s definitely some kind of disconnect here when he’s vilified and dismissed, and I think it’s simply the fact that Maher is outspoken and polarizing and the people who don’t like him tend to really, really not like him (whereas those who like him tend to feel equally strongly).
Let’s remember that Maher is a guy whose whole schtick can be summed up by the name of one of his old shows, Politically Incorrect. When he says things about Islam and omits the qualifiers, it just needs to be understood in the context in which Maher operates, not as a blanket condemnation of one of the largest religions in the world. And in the context in which he operates, most of the things he says are essentially correct.
I find it extremely ironic that we are supposed to overlook the fact that the Qur’an and the hadiths explicitly dictate many barbaric acts of violence because we know that the vast majority of Muslims don’t take those things literally, yet when Maher speaks, his exact words must be analyzed with all the humorless grimness of a Torquemada inquisition. That seems like loading the dice for a predetermined finding of guilt.
Sorry. When he says that stuff on Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher I’m willing to cut him some slack. When he takes the exact same comments to CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News and defends his comments as totally accurate, he demonstrates that he is nothing but a hate filled, (or fear filled), polemicist who is more interested in pushing his fears on the world than in actually learning the facts about his target.
Nah. He is often completely wrong or sufficiently wrong as to earn either the label “liar” or the label “ignorant twit” on the topics on which he rants.
I don’t fall into the love 'em or hate ‘em dichotomy that you proposed, above. He is witty and often makes excellent points beyond the humor. I just note that in one area, he has simply lost it. Treating “Islam” as “the enemy,” (particularly with error filled false claims), is more likely to foster more suspicion and less cooperation between Muslims and others, making it harder to isolate the fanatics who really are a genuine threat. (I doubt that he has all that much influence in the world as to actually do more than cheer for others’ hatreds, but he is certainly lined up with those who promote violence in both camps.)
But Wahhabis do suck - just the majority of the time, the way they are doing their violence and oppression (both in terrorism and in a structural fashion) is not really distinctive. The important thing to remember about different forms of sanctioned violence in religion and especially in Islam is that it is not just the idea that violence is justified in certain instances or against certain groups, it also involves who has the authority to order and to carry out that violence. It’s like when Yusuf (formerly Cat Stevens) said that Salman Rushdie should be put to death, then clarified that this could only happen in an “Islamic State” and that vigilantism is wrong. Or when people say that you can’t beat a random woman but disciplining your wife with a miswak is ok. Calling Yusuf non-violent is technically correct but it doesn’t change that the violence is not inherently rejected, just limited.
This is why in Islam, arguments over who has the authority and duty to interpret and carry out God’s will have such large consequences. It’s also why you can have hyper-conservative Salafis be apolitical and supposed “liberals” massacre protestors in Egypt.
Malika Zeghal is an excellent scholar on Islamism, the state, and the question of religious authority. I can suggest some articles if you want.
None of this suggests that there’s anything special or unique about Islam as a whole that necessarily causes or leads to more violence than other religions (many and perhaps most Muslims outright reject the sorts of violence that Yusuf sort of condoned), which is my main point.
Well, I just think that quantifying how much violence is caused by a religion is basically impossible, so it’s more manageable to look at specific situations and see how religious traditions are contributing there to what’s going on. Islam has many unique things, but none of those things necessarily must be a part of Islam, or must be interpreted/applied in only one way. At least not when viewed from outside. So we can look at ISIS and talk about how Islam is a unique influence, but we shouldn’t necessarily think that Muslims elsewhere are influenced by Islam in the same way.
Maher feels that religion, and all that follows from religion, is the enemy. He has always made that clear. He focuses on Islam for reasons that should be obvious, but he could just as well pick on Buddhists.
Following 911 the only person who questioned the US nationalistic fervor and suffered for it is was Bill Maher. He was fired from his first show for saying that the Islamic terrorists were not cowards.
He wields reason and rhetoric with no other aim but to promote reason and rhetoric, and for that I admire him, even if I don’t always agree with him.
I noticed I missed this response after reading back through the comments.
I explained myself very poorly in reference to this point. What I should have said was that major religious texts have remained largely unchanged since their inception. It’s clear that the texts haven’t kept with the evolving interpretations you speak of. Because interpretations are constantly evolving due to pressures you can theorize on; It’s meaningless to identify any stagnant basis in religion to critique (like the bible’s “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”).
Comparing ISIS to the LRA is productive as an argument against the concept of a stagnant comparison. It challenges the assumption that interpretations are confined, to some known degree, to a literal adherence to their source material. It works as a rebuttal to the argument supporting this that you don’t find Christianity being used in terrible inhumane ways like Islam post-18th century. The reasoning being that biblical text is more receptive to Enlightenment ideas than the Quran. The fact is you do find Christian interpretations very contrary to Enlightenment values.
As for your second argument; You’re identifying factors that reduce the role of religion as the only factor. It’s undeniable that pleading to religious interpretations is a method used to justify the discrimination in all examples. I cover this reasoning more below.
I understand there is overlap and interrelatedness of religion in several facets of life , however, if it has any meaning at all and affects anything; It is factorable, and is quantifiable from a scientific perspective. For an extreme example; If someone hits me and I impulsively strike back; We can limit the role religion played in that, but if I kill a man for insulting my prophet; We can say religion played a larger part than in the first example. I don’t claim it’s a root cause; Just that the part it played is quantifiable.
“Liberals have failed on the topics of theocracy.”-Sam Harris
I think some people who identify as liberals don’t want to criticize Islam because while it’s a major religion, Muslims themselves are a minority in the west, and most Muslims tend to be non-white. So many of the people who are Muslims can consider themselves minorities in two ways. Christians are less likely to be discriminated against as a whole, which is why it’s more socially acceptable to criticize or parody them. There’s still a lot of bigotry towards Muslims in the west which is why I can understand why some liberals don’t want to make things worse for them.
For anyone interested in the Sunni-Shia split and it’s implications and impact on the Middle East, here’s a short video from Bernard Lewis, who when he’s wrong is very, very wrong but when he’s on point is probably still the greatest living scholar of medieval Islam.
He also deals at length as to why comparing the Shia and Sunnis to Catholics and Protestants isn’t terrible helpful or productive.
No problem. I thought you were saying that religions were stagnant.
Then I’ll just re-emphasize the point that texts are not the only source for interpretation and authority in a religion, partly because different sects conceive of their texts (Assuming they have texts) as works in different ways. That’s why I made the point that thinking of a category like “Scripture” and saying, “the Bible is the Christian version, the Qur’an is the Islamic version…” is unproductive.
A very interesting (if at times slightly meandering) book on comparing texts from different traditions is Veda and Torah, by Barbara Holdrege.
But most people don’t say that Christianity isn’t used badly at all, they try to say that Islam is the most violent, either these days or in general. Comparing ISIS and the LRA is just buying into the “counting the bodies” game. Aside from the fact that they identify their groups as religious and they are violent, they have practically nothing in common.
Maybe I am not explaining it well, but I don’t really identify religion as a discrete factor in these things, I look at other factors and see how religion is involved with them. So if someone says - Group X isn’t killing because of religion, they are killing because they want oil - I’d investigate how relevant religious traditions impact Group X’s pursuit of oil.
I agree with this in theory, but the problem is that it becomes exponentially harder to quantify when you have more people and more actions involved. How much each individual ISIS soldier is with ISIS because they believe in re-establishing a Caliphate versus wanting to fight and get a hot meal (or rape and pillage) is a really difficult thing to measure. Maybe they want both. Maybe they didn’t care about the religious stuff when they started but now they are into it. How do we start to quantify it? Also, again, the issue of structural violence. How would we measure how violent the US was during, say, the Civil War? Do we just count the battles, or do we count the man in Maine who beats his wife and the shop owner in California who won’t serve Asians?
This is a good video. But to clarify a minor point for others: When Bernard Lewis says that the dispute that separated Sunni and Shia was political, he didn’t mean that Muslims did not see the issue of who would be Caliph as something without religious dimensions. Just that what was at issue was not a theological dispute the way Christians and Westerners would typically define the term.
Sunnis (which refers to “the people of the Sunnah” and is more of a counter identity against groups like the Mu’tazilites than the Shia) to this day call Ali a rightly guided Caliph and see the early Shia Imams as reputable scholars.
There is obviously huge intolerance in Islam. It is ignorant to deny that, or to pretend that citing a poll wherein 88% of Egyptians advocate death penalty for those who leave Islam (:eek: ) means that one ignores the other 12%. Islamic moderates need to be more vocal.
Reread that: 88% of Egyptians advocate death penalty for those who leave Islam. Do 88% of Americans advocate bombing abortion clinics?
I don’t want to quibble about the definition of “theocracy,” but do you consider Malaysia to be secular?
[QUOTE=one of many stories in Malaysia]
Revathi Massosai is a Malaysian woman who was raised as a Hindu but her identity card designates her as a Muslim. She has declared her religion to be Hindu and has petitioned unsuccessfully to have the word “Islam” removed from her identity card. Massosai married a Hindu man, but her marriage is not recognised by the Malaysian government because of the religion issue. Massosai was incarcerated for six months in an Islamic re-education camp because of her attempts to renounce Islam in favour of the Hindu religion. Revathi was denied the guardianship of her new born baby and was not allowed to meet her Hindu husband.
[/QUOTE]
If a brand-new religion called HoogyBoogy did what so much (not all) of Islam does, it would be soundly condemned. Islam gets a pass because of its antiquity.
It is more “ignorant” to look at polling data from one country, (a country that is not actually enforcing the point on which the poll was taken), and extrapolate that that poll represents the views of “the religion” when this thread has already pointed to the many different ways in which that religion has manifested itself in many other places in the world.
I just consider Malaysia to be odd. Its constitution defines every ethnic Malay as Muslim and indicates that all those people are subject to Islamic courts on religious matters. (Unfortunately, marriage is one of the matters deemed religious.)
I am not sure what your point would be. Malaysia is no more representative of all Islam than is France, but its laws regarding most civil matters are secular, not Islamic.
