[CW: mentions of Islamophobia] Is Islam as homophobic and sexist as westerners claim?
[CW: mentions of Islamophobia] Is Islam as homophobic and sexist as westerners claim?
I'm guessing it's like Christianity where there are leftist Christians who follow Jesus' more progressive messages such as giving to the less fortunate and healing the sick, and then there are the scary Christian evangelicals that want A Handmaids Tale and conversion therapy. Logically, Islam probably isn't a monolith in a similar way other religions aren't.
However, I have never heard about what those of the Islamic faith actually believe outside of the hysterical post 9/11 Islamophobia I've been indoctrinated with as a child.
I want to know what the truth is and hear the other sides story. To me it's obvious that Islamophobia is wrong, however when Islamophobes make wild claims about it, I can't really refute them confidently because I'm simply ignorant of the facts. Please educate my dumb, white ass.
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There is Islam and there are muslims. Muslims can be homophobic and sexist. Islam is their belief, religion being used to justify ones bigotry is nothing new.
A lot of the times westerners have this view of Islam as if it's a dogma like calvinism. But it's a whole religion, it's a lot more cultural, it's very unique to the individual and what they make of it. There are very dogmatic views of Islam for sure, but if people are talking about "Is Islam X" or "Does Islam teach Y" there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is. Look at how different orthodox christianity, catholicism and protestants are. If you try to pin-point "what does christianity teach?" you will end up with a set of very broad universally-agreed truths "Love thy neighbour etc." and the bare-minimum of christian lore "Jesus was the messiah and died on a cross for our sins and rose again 3 days later from the grave". Other than that everything open. Was Mary a virgin her whole life? Is it ok to pray to idols? Is the bible sent by god? What books should be in the bible?
Pretty much the same for Islam. There as many perspectives to Islam as to Christianity. A historical, an individual, a theological (which depends on the school), a cultural and probably a couple more I'm currently not thinking of. If someone is talking about Islam as if it was a tangible thing there are deeper brainworms at play.
Islam teaches nothing. Mohammed has taught. Allah teaches. A hoca, imam, your mom and dad might teach you what it is to be a muslim. And what they teach you might be completely different from what another muslim is taught.
One difference about Islam is that it appeared all at once, instead of emerging out of a cultural milieu over multiple centuries like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism did. You have the Quran and you have Muhammad recognized as its author and the final prophet and the founder of the religion, there's not a whole lot of room for debate about what the Quran says.
Not sure I understand your point, the Bible is as central to Christianity as the Quran to Islam. There is a definitive and large intersection of books that every christian bible contains, so you can point to a lot things in the bible that almost every christian will agree is in the bible. And the rest is as wide and varied as which Hadiths are accepted and which aren't.
My point was that Islam, as Christianity, is more than the book. A lot of muslims dont read the Quran. A lot of muslims that read the Quran don't understand arabic. A lot of muslims live Islam by picking and choosing what "sounds right" from what the people around them are saying, fitting it into their worldview, molding it into something unique to them. My experience of Islam was that it was a lot more oral tradition and open to superstitions than my experience of christianity. Muslim friends would trade religious views by saying their mom said this and then the other couldn't really go against what his mom said, because she's his mom and if it's that important to him, fine. Whereas in my experience of christianity people would immediately whip out the bible and start throwing verses back and forth sometimes even breaking out some ancient greek dictionary. So people might say that according to Islam whoever does not accept the prophet goes to hell, then point to this verse or that hadith, but a lot of muslims I met said that it doesn't matter as long as we all believe in the same God. And that's what these people of "Islamic faith", to quote OP, believe.
I had a teacher who said pork wasn't haram, Allah just said it was because back in the Prophets time people didn't know about proper food hygiene but they do now. There was a huge trend in my school with a very specific ritual involving bread that fell on the floor because wasting bread was seen as a sin. Some kids were uneasy with my infidel ass going to the mosque to drink water. There was a lot of superstition and tradition inextricably linked to Islam depending on the local culture which invariable affects how the Quran is interpreted or whether people just choose to live with certain contradictions in their belief system. And saying that "Islam is X" is almost always wrong as it would have to describe something common to every muslim there is.
There is no objectively true Islam, it's nothing material. Islam is not something that exists but it describes a wide and varied collection of different beliefs, rituals, expressions and so on. Even if you point at something in the Quran and say "See Islam teaches this, it's in the Quran" there will be so many different interpretations of that thing that you will not be able to find a intersection contained in all.
In 610 there is no Quran, no Islam, no Muslims. Muhammad dictates the Quran later in his life, and by 640 there is the Quran in the form we know it today, and Islam, and Muslims, all at once. It emerged very discretely and with relative unity.
For Christianity, there is a historical record of Christians as early as Nero's reign, but the earliest books in what is now the New Testament don't get written until the end of the 1st century AD, and as far as we can tell are not written by anyone who witnessed the life of Jesus on Earth. And then the canon isn't formalized until almost 3 centuries after the Crucifixion; meanwhile, there have been lots of parallel and related religious movements going on that get sorted out by councils of elders/bishops long after the fact. The Old Testament/Tanakh was written by dozens or even hundreds of authors, over a period of at least 700 years.
There might be historical and cultural revisionism going on, as you'd see anywhere, but Islam emerges clearly in a moment, as opposed to Christianity which is the product of much longer and more blurry processes. This makes for much less ambiguity over what Islam does or does not look like.
My experience of Islam largely comes from roommates who had the Quran very thoroughly taught in schools. I got the impression that there's a lot less picking and choosing; it's a package deal that you either wholly embrace or don't.