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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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the elusive moderate Muslim

Every Muslim I have met in the US, and I have met a fair number, has been moderate. Though only one has been from the Middle East.

I have never met a moderate Muslim, and I have met a large number of US Muslims.

Now, don't get me wrong, most Muslims I have met do not want to throw homosexuals off of buildings. But for the most part, these men are Muslim in the sense that the religious services to which they do not go take place on Friday, in a mosque. They eat turkeybacon but get the pulled pork at Dickey's. They shave, fornicate, have a beer, go on hajj for a vacation, borrow money at interest for their convenience stores, and keep a Quran they've never opened on the nightstand by the bed in which they sleep through morning prayer.

This isn't the "moderate Muslim" of progressive legend; it's a not-particularly-religious man who might or might not follow a few cultural eccentricities.

  1. Then I am a little unclear on what makes them representative of Muslims in general, since the reference to moderate Muslims being elusive surely is a claim that the norm among Muslims is to be an extremist.
  2. Where were they from?

  1. Frankly, I think this is simply the norm among religious people- that ‘liberal’ or ‘acceptable to progressive’ types are mostly not practicing, or at least not practicing well.

  2. They or their parents were from the eastern med- Egypt, Turkey, the Levant, and some balkans.

Frankly, I think this is simply the norm among religious people- that ‘liberal’ or ‘acceptable to progressive’ types are mostly not practicing, or at least not practicing well.

Yes, that seems to be the case. But, I don't understand how they are not moderate. They obviously are not fundamentalists or religious zealots of some other stripe.

The argument seems to be that you have fundamentalist Muslims and non-Muslims pretending to be Muslims for social acceptance, but not actually showing any sign of actually being religious.

Between stricter selection and the fact that a lot of Muslims are black and picked it up as a civil rights thing I'm not surprised by this.

Actually, none of them have been black. South Asian and from the Balkans, mostly.

You're probably not hanging around with the women in beekeeper outfits though.

Consider also, taqiya. While I personally know Muslims that are quite evidently "moderate" based on the part where they don't seem to follow the actual religion and like drinking just fine, it's worth keeping in mind that lying about one's beliefs is explicitly covered as an acceptable thing to do in Islam.

I don’t think lying is the reason, I am led to understand taqiya is more of a shia thing, and I am reluctant to go straight for the bad faith accusation .

But it’s easy to miss the radicalism if you don’t ask specific questions. About apostates, jews, cartoons, palestine. I was taken aback more than once by the complete change in demeanor and attitude once I breached those subjects with educated , otherwise pleasant acquaintances. I realized then that not only were we not going to be friends, but peaceful coexistence with those who believe what they believe was going to be a tall order. Most were middle eastern though, and this was in europe (turks were generally ok).

I've rarely seen the word "taqiya" used in some other context than basically making the whole idea "all Muslims are fundamentalists" unfalsifiable; should some Muslim appear to be moderate, then they are just a fundamentalist who is lying, because taqiya exists.

Actually, I knew a palestinian relatively well at uni, and I asked him about taqiya, and he said ‘taqiya? Taqqiyyya? Oh, yes, it means small hat’. He could have been lying of course, but given that we had already discussed politics extensively, and he had candidly admitted to supporting death for apostates, cartoonists, jews, calling all western women whores , believing all kinds of conspiracy theories, mostly about jews, and so on, (nice guy otherwise) , I think he was being honest.

He's probably playing dumb; the words are near-homophones. Small hat, Lying to hide one's beliefs

Hold on, we got an arabophone right here : @ymeskhout , ever heard of taqiya, the thing that isn't a hat ?

No, the only time I ever see taqiya mentioned is within discussions in the US about how "all Muslims are fundamentalists and will pretend otherwise".

I've been an atheist for several decades, but I don't know if I'd be accused of taqiya. There are some things I can say here that might be sufficiently persuasive, but I also don't want Zorba to get Charlie Hebdo-ed because of me.

Right, as I thought. I don’t think anyone here would accuse you of taqiya.

As far as you can tell, is there anything resembling this religious lying concept in the arab culture?

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I think the taqqiya as lying about your beliefs is a shia doctrine and most palestinians are sunni, anyways.

I think it more likely he didn't know the other meaning, because it's archaic/obscure.

turks were generally ok

This matches my experience perfectly in the States. My Turkish work buddy informed me on a couple occasions with questions I had about decidedly non-Islamic behavior that he's, "not that kind of Muslim". In stark contrast, I had an Egyptian colleague that was entirely serious and entirely literal about Islam in a disconcerting way. Good guy, good family man, good scientist, but damn, his view of the world is not reconcilable with mine and the only extent to which we can live together is the extent to which he has no political power.

Many American Turks are wealthy and secular (this is true in all Anglo countries including the UK and Canada). It’s German, Dutch and other European Turks who tend to be descended from poor, deeply religious Anatolian peasants. See this chart.

A similar situation exists between American Pakistanis (largely upper middle class, many doctors and engineers, some migrants from non-Sunni minority religious groups) and British Pakistanis (overwhelmingly descended from poor, highly religious peasants from around the city of Mirpur in Azad Kashmir).

Most ethnic Turks in the UK in my experience are actually Turkish Cypriots (Wikipedia confirms this), and are descended from people who took low-grade civilian jobs at the British military bases on Cyprus. So not wealthy, although in practice usually secular.

I bet you don't know any young earth creationists either, despite them being 46% of Americans. Filter bubbles are crazy.

Amusingly, that statistic means that the median YEC believes a doctrine taught by a church whose services he sleeps through on an average Sunday. If it's true and not an artifact of bad poll design.

It’s a dumb question because most people are stupid and don’t have a strong opinion on evolution, so if they believe in God they may well check the “humans were designed by God in their current form” box without thinking about it.

That’s different from a movement in which many even intelligent and educated people believe in the specific conspiracy that science is covering up the fact that the world is just 6000 years old and that every biblical story happened literally.

In 2009, Bishop ran a survey that clarifies how many people really think the earth is only 10,000 years old. In survey results published by Reports of NCSE, Bishop found that 18% agreed that “the earth is less than 10,000 years old.” But he also found that 39% agreed “God created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and the first two people within the past 10,000 years.” Again, question wording and context clearly both matter a lot.

I’d guess perhaps 10% of the US population are actual YEC.

The point is that moderate Muslims are hardly elusive. If OP had referred to "the elusive Christian who is not a young Earth creationist," s/he would have have been inaccurate as well. And it is OP that is the victim of a filter bubble.

The equivalent claim would not be "There are no YECs", it would be "there are no Christians that are not YECs".

Okay? 62% Christian - 46% YEC = 16% Christian nonYEC (very very roughly).

I didn't expect that to be a smaller subset of Americans and I'm still not confident in the calculation, but filter bubbles are salient because they break your intuition.

It's a common failure mode to take poll results literally.

People are using polls to "vote" a certain way based on their feels. For example, during the pandemic, a significant percentage of Democrats said they wanted to jail people for not taking the Covid vaccine and even take away their kids. Was this really how they felt? Would they really want to embark on this reign of terror which would make Hitler blush?

Of course not. The respondents were just "voting" based on their feels. They were scared and angry, and didn't have to face any consequences for their vote.

Unless there is skin in the game, or the poll is a literal vote, then these polls should be entirely discarded.

Where are you getting the numbers? If we go back to the poll Scott cited, it would show 46 % answering "God created humans in present form" and 32 % with "Humans evolved with God guiding", which would probably correspond to YEC and OEC.

Of course, this poll is over 10 years old, and the American society has, to put it mildly, gone through quite a bit of change since then.

More to the point neither one directly states support for YEC claims other than the narrow point about human evolution, so reading either one as "X% support for YEC" is running ahead of the evidence. (Even if we assume these polls directly measure people's literal beliefs, which per jeroboam, they probably don't.) Elsewhere in the thread, results from polls that did directly ask about the age of the Earth have been mentioned that got much lower numbers (30% at most, less if you change the wording of the question a little).

62% from one part of the "Religion in US" wikipedia page (they have other numbers elsewhere), and 46% from the linked post. I don't think the actual calculation is important, as I would've made the same argument if it was 40% or 4%.

But it's an apples to oranges comparison. The Wikipedia page gives current numbers, the poll gives numbers from ten years ago. There's been quite a considerable process of secularization since then.

You're quibbling with the numbers, when the bigger issue is that polls of this sort are complete garbage and should be discarded immediately.

The poll might as well have asked "Are atheists correct about God?". Because that's how people will view the question.

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