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Good question, and one I have been thinking about for some time. There does seem to be a larger semblance of integration that Islam seems to be achieving in the west in certain circles, and Muslims seem to be the only religious/ethnic group that is reproducing over levels of replacement. Like you said, I think it's adherence to a strict dogma and it's insane ability to deflect liberal criticisms make it extremely likable/humorous if you are in any way a dissident to liberal orthodoxy. Muslims seem to be the only group of people that simply tell the emperor he has no clothes on. I find the recent uptick in social media celebrities to be more generally influenced by political reasons than religious ones. Andrew Tate for example made a large deal about his Islamic religious conversion, but did not seem to make any tangible behavioral changes that usually result from genuine conversions. He still promotes having pre-marital sex with multiple women and engages in alcohol consumption.
On the other hand, Islam has number of problems which make it difficult for it to fundamentally ingratiate itself within personal imagination and cultural relevance.
It's aesthetics are terrible. From a purely outsider perspective, Muslim appearance is extremely unappealing. The long gowns and unkempt beards are extremely unattractive for the average white/western person. In both my WASP and secular social circles it comes with an extreme amount of mockery. They are constantly made fun for "looking like they smell" and seemingly having no social awareness of public norms. No white male (even if he was a genuine religious believer in Islam) would ever be caught dead looking like a traditional Islamic man, simply because it would be absolute social suicide and would act as pussy repellent for the vast majority of white women. Since the connotation in the western mind (even if most wont outwardly admit it) is the degradation and subjugation of women, it is extremely difficult to imagine it would ever lead to genuine conversions for both white men or women. Now i understand that traditional Islamic garb is not primarily worn by most Muslims in most social settings, but it is worn regularly enough in their religious practice that it is attached to it within the western mind.
In a more technical aspect, the theological implications of Islam are extremely radical compared to more traditional Christianity, and also much more confusing. The Quran is considered to be exclusively revealed in Arabic, and as such any translation of it to other languages are not considered to be as 'legitimate' as in the original. Compared to the christian bible, all translations are considered to be as genuine as one another, and still transfers the message of Christianity as authentically as each other. If a genuine Muslim upheaval was undertook in the west it would require millions of people to learn Arabic, something which is almost more ridiculous to imagine then swarms of white men wearing thobes. There is also a strong semblance within Islam to have the government and religious system be thoroughly connected with one another, and even among most religious believers that does not seem to be a desire they have, and among secular people that is literally something i feel they would go out and die to prevent.
It is true that Islam seems to be far more comfortable than it was in previous decades, but just like western hegemony is hell bent on destroying christian moral attitudes, they will do the same to Muslims through the next generation. While fundamentalist Muslims may resist the more outlandish demands of modern liberalism, they will still have control over their children and they will be just as thoroughly indued with materialist attitudes, sexual liberation and consumerist pop-culture like the Christians were who proceeded them.
It sounds like you think all Muslims look like Taliban elders from the videotapes from 00s? Even the Taliban government today don't look like that. Beards: kempt.
In Europe, Muslim men recognizable as recent arrivals are sharply dressed, serious about their hair and beard and clothes. The style is perhaps weird mix of the 80s, 90s and 00s, but it definitely is a style and increasingly has been converging with the overall weirdness that is style in anno domini 2024, so it is difficult to tell who is the trendsetter here. Muslim women recognizable as Muslim women wear hijab or niqab (or random variations of long dress and head scarf that may or may qualify as a hijab.)
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Your two points are funny to me, because I wouldn't really care about either. I have no idea how unusual I am in this.
Of course, I have no intent to become muslim.
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I can assure you that people get by fine without learning Arabic. I honestly wonder if even the "high effort" types fully learn it (a lot of people burn huge amounts of time on phonetic memorization more than anything - the most annoying educational gauntlet with the least value).
In essence, it works on Harry Potter rules for most people: you don't need to speak Latin to cast the spells. The most important thing is to know enough to be able to pray and perform the common rituals. That can be a relatively light load (especially if praying in groups).
This can honestly be useful: you don't need to learn theologically problematic things directly.
That is a real problem.
There's also the Problem of Mohammed. A person who actually had to rule combined with prophetic infallibility, so he cannot simply be hollowed out and worn as a skin by secular cosmopolitans like Jesus (who is basically just some hippie in modern Westerners' view), nor can he be treated like the fallible rulers and sometimes prophets of the Jewish and Christian tradition.
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I wonder if some of that is the unique geography of the Middle East? It's the only region that can claim to be African, European, and Asian, all at once! Arabs are an odd group since they're officially classed as "white" in the US census, but a lot of people think of them as a racial minority, so it kinda skates by the whole priviledge/URM thing. Meanwhile Islam also appeals to a lot of African-Americans looking for an authentic "African" spiritual identity, as well as Asians (the single largest Muslim country by population is Indonesia, and the second largest is Pakistan). It's a remarkably trans-racial religion.
They actually got their own category last week.
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Comment from a person who wrote a book on the topic
Oh cool. I had heard that was on the table for a long time, but I didn't know it had actually happened. I wonder if it will take off in the popular conscious? I think most normal Americans are genuinely confused about whether Arabs are white.
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You overstate the degree both to which beards and Muslim robes are "pussy repellent" and the difficulty of spreading Islam for linguistic reasons.
I think your tirade about how Islamic men are aesthetically unappealing looks like projection. Apparently they are unappealing to you. People used to say similar things about black men (some still do), and yet black men have no trouble attracting white women in the west (another contentious culture war issue). If Islam were to become truly popular, I don't think women would be going "Ewww" at beards. (And Western Muslims generally do not walk around in thawbs and kaffiyehs.)
As for Arabic, what you say is true, but only to a point. Translations of the Quran are allowable for people who can't read Arabic, it's just understood to be an imperfect approximation. Serious converts are expected to try to learn Arabic, but trust me, Muslims will welcome a convert whose Arabic is shitty or nonexistent. Islam achieved spectacular success in spreading itself even in non-Arabic-speaking countries. Iran and Indonesia and Malaysia are not Arabic-speaking countries, and while most do learn some Arabic for religious purposes, very few are fluent. A spread of Islam in the West would result in a lot more Arabic classes and many more Americans and Europeans knowing a smattering of Arabic, but mostly getting by with translation apps.
Now, whether a real Western Islamic wave could survive contact with liberalism and wokeness is an interesting question. We've seen the friction in a few places (the much-mocked "Queers for Palestine", the shock of liberals in Loudon County, Virginia discovering that Muslim parents weren't keen on their kids being transed, etc.).
Right now, Islam in the West is very much a youth movement, in the current moment largely motivated by sympathy for Palestine. A lot of young people are posting their TikTok and Instagram "reversion" stories about how after seeing the beautiful strength and resilience of the Palestinian people they decided to "research" (pardon my mocking laughter) Islam and took the shahada like, a week later. Yeah, once they are actually told they need to follow Islamic rules about dress (and the hijab stops being cute and fashionable), sex, alcohol, gender roles, and attitudes towards queerness, we'll see which one bends.
Yes they do. Miscegenation in the USA is overwhelmingly white man/minority woman and blacks are less likely to miscegenate than other races anyways.
There’s lots of black men who claim to have slept with white women, but I think that AADOS culture is big on promiscuity as a male status symbol and sleeping with white women as a particular example, so this is probably lies.
This feels…weirdly uncharitable. Do you have any data to back it up?
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Hmm interracial marriage rates are twice as high for black men as black women and have been pretty steadily for decades. Whereas for asians it is the other way round. I don't think that can be attributed to lies from black men particularly.
"Among blacks, intermarriage is twice as prevalent for male newlyweds as it is for their female counterparts. While about one-fourth of recently married black men (24%) have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, this share is 12% among recently married black women."
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While most interracial relationships involve white men, most interracial relationships involving black people involve a black man and white woman. Class differences essentially lead to soft segregation, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the average black man in the PMC/UMC has been in a relationship with a white woman, just because they’re the vast majority of women in those circles.
this is evidence that black women have very large troubles attracting anyone rather than "black men have no trouble attracting white women in the west"
It's not so much that they have large troubles attracting anyone as that they have large troubles attracting non-Africans. The old OKCupid data showed a huge effect of non-African men finding African women less attractive, but it didn't apply to African men.
Look at the numbers again, it did apply.
Okay, I looked again. "Black" (which I will take to mean sub-Saharan African here, this being largely US data and all) men rated "black" women about the same as other women (varied between -4% and +1% over the years, whereas e.g. white men rating "black" women ranged from -25% to -17%).
(I use the scare quotes and distinguish "African" because there are South Asians and Aboriginal Australians with similar skin tone to sub-Saharan Africans - and the latter are even called "black" - but the face shape is very different and that almost certainly affects these kinds of figures.)
Thanks for clarification.
I don't quite understand what QuickMatch means.
You can say that, or you can say that for every single year between 2009 and 2014 black men rated black women below both Asian and Latina women and that Black men are the only group of men who didn't not rate their women positively.
If you scroll down page to DateHookup data, it is worse for Black women: here Black men prefer White women over Black.
I guess reply rates, female sender is closer to actual rather than stated preference, black males respond only to 37% messages from black females, and 46..57% to other categories, it's not even close.
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The main reason is that black women are substantially fatter than both white women and than black men. 57% of black women are obese, while 41% of black men are, which is closer to both white men and white women.
Certainly obesity is a factor, but black females have other traits reducing SMV: those that are considered masculine: prognatism and dark skin (remember that ancient Egyptians drew their women white and men brown). With this, Black males partially offset their SES disadvantage in SMV.
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So would you say that Asian women's exogamy rates say more about how much it sucks to be an Asian man rather than them just being able to find white mates (as the stereotypes insist)?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the same dynamic with similar numbers (AA women also date out twice as much)
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When did black men suddenly have no problem attracting white women? Ignoring celebrities.
In general it still seems like they tend to get the women that can’t get white men. Lower social class and chubbier.
That often describes their men, too, though. A man of an equivalent social class (say someone like [young adult] Obama at Harvard) wouldn’t have much of an issue dating women in his social class, assuming all other factors (looks, charisma etc) are there.
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There's even a not-so-clever-but-somehow-still-hilarious neologism in the crimethink-sphere espoused by sexually unsuccessful black, South Asian, and East Asian males alike: Just be White (JBW). One that gets "yes_chad.jpg"'d by sexually successful and unsuccessful men all around.
Online women often shriek and fingerwag at South and East Asian men for supposed "entitlement" when it comes to white women, or supposed "entitlement" when it comes to not "losing" "their" women to white men ("you're not entitled to white women," "you're not entitled to women of your ‘race’").
However, black men are typically spared such well-poisoning and condescension. "You fucking donkey" vs. "there, there, princess" along the lines of the Gordon Ramsay meme.
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I don't think I do actually. I apologize if my tone seemed to be inflammatory, and It is important to note that i don't hold any personal hostility towards Muslims as a whole. But i will still stand by my previous statements that I admit are almost all influenced by my own personal experience and social circles. I don't think it is radical to notice that western women do not swoon over traditional Muslim men.
I think this could be argued against pretty confidently as well although like you say it often comes with cultural baggage and butthurt from everyone. But 89% of all white people marry within their race and i don't think it is inappropriate to claim that ethnic men face a certain degree of hostility from white women in general. I also don't put it out of the realm of comprehension that many white women could desire to date a black or muslim man but fear the loss of social status that could come a result of it. Once again my view of this comes from both empirical data and my own personal experience. I've heard white women say absolutely insane shit that they would never say in public when they are confident it will remain in strict confidentiality. I may also be completely wrong and be biased by these experiences.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
You are correct in saying that Muslims will absolutely give grace to those who are genuinely attempting to learn, but thats the thing, i can't imagine in my mind a wide-scale movement of hundreds of thousands or even millions of westerners seriously attempting to learn Arabic that is motivated by genuine religious belief in Islam. If materialist/atheists can't even drum up the motivation to engage with the bible in a serious way, I don't see how they would have the discipline or religious belief necessary to engage in learning a language that is one of the most difficult for English speakers to learn, with an estimated 2000 hours to learn to even a simple degree of competency. It seems out of the range of belief for me to actually imagine.
The majority of people (of all races) prefer their own race, sure. But fifty years ago, the almost universal reaction if you asked white girls if they'd date a black man would have been "Ew." Now, the majority will at least pretend to approve and a substantial minority actually will. Likewise, fifty years ago, black culture was widely considered low class and undesirable. Now, we've had lots of culture war discussions about the elevation of African American culture, for better and for worse. So it is not inconceivable to me that the perception of Muslims and Islamic culture could undergo a similar transformation, especially given that, to be honest, Islam actually has a lot more going for it to begin with. I just don't think the disgust reaction you perceive is going to endure - the stereotype of Arabs as a bunch of bearded camel-jockeys is already pretty outdated.
As for learning Arabic, there's a huge difference between becoming conversationally fluent and learning enough to get by with praying and reciting the Quran. (You know there are a bazillion apps now to help converts with that exact thing, right?) Most atheists don't seriously engage with the Bible because they don't consider it worth their time. Someone who actually converts to Islam would have to consider the Quran worth their time. Sure, the average TikToker is not going to have the dedication or sincerity to stick with it, but "needs to learn the language" is not the huge barrier you think it is. (There are many Muslims, including Arab-American Muslims, who speak little or no Arabic.)
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