The Left's Infatuation With Islam
I have never considered myself of the Left but like most libertarians I have made common cause with the Left on many issues. in the past five or ten years the Left has gone of the rails on a number of issues, but none more than its attitude towards Islam. Islam, as currently practiced in much of the world, is simply awful on any number of issues important to the Left -- treatment of women, respect for sexual heterodoxy, treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, authoritarianism, strongly patriarchal family organization -- all of it makes the things the Left marches in the street against here look moderate in comparison. Readers know I am no fan of Trump but is there any dimension we criticize him on that Hamas or Iran or Gaza aren't substantially worse on? Do current Republicans in the US or the Iranian state look more like the Handmaids Tale?
And yet the western Left has a love affair with Islam as currently practiced, with perhaps the weirdest example being the Gays for Gaza protestors last year. By the way, I keep using the term "as currently practiced" because I am exhausted with retorts to criticisms of Islam that are something like "well, that is not true Islam" (a strangely parallel statement to "that was not real socialism".) I am not an expert on Islam and usually neither are the people using this argument, but it does not matter. Islam as practiced in places like Gaza means treating women as one step above chattel and throwing gays off buildings. Whatever the true nature of Christianity, none of us would have liked it much in the 13th century when it was leading Crusades and Inquisitions.
To this end I thought this X post from Tahmineh Dehbozorgi was a useful framework for trying to understand this odd hookup:
Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased.
By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely.
I can confirm from reading a couple of books on Persian/Iranian history and having had a number of Persian/Iranian friends that this is absolutely no better way to really tick off an Iranian than to call them an Arab. Iran is a great example of why the Left is so befuddling on this issue. There were a number of good reasons to have wanted the Shah gone in the late seventies, starting with his tendency to jail and execute critics. But one of the most important causes for the Islamic revolution there was the Shah's granting of full civil rights and education opportunities to women, which really drove the hardcore Muslims crazy and created a lot of the anger that fed the Revolution. In a sense, then, by defending the Iranian state the Left is defending a revolution meant explicitly to enslave women.
Postscript: While I think the above is a pretty good take on the philosophical underpinnings of the Left's support for radical Islam, I have my own theory of how this got started. I think it started in the aftermath of 9/11 when Republicans were particularly hawkish on countering what they saw as Islamic threats, particularly after we started a couple of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In what is a fairly typical historical pattern, the Left reflexively started to support Islam where Republicans were perceived to be against it. And as often does, a desire to stop a bad war and reach peace morphed into rooting for the other side.
"gone of the rails"
spellcheck betrayed you. Long time reader and really appreciate the time you spend on all your essays.
Long, long ago, in my undergraduate days in a STEM discipline, there was just one female student in the department - an Iranian a couple of years ahead of me. She was great fun; pretty, vivacious, well educated, a boon to her classmates who all seemed warmly to approve of her even though she was rather a sophisticate compared to them. Daddy was rich, being in the oil biz.
There was a downside to the Shah's regime, though. A few years later I shared a flat with an Iranian girl. One day our doorbell rang and I answered it. Outside stood a man who was obviously an agent of SAVAK. He was just as Graham Greene, say, would have described him - short, wide, strong, sullen. He wore a trench coat presumably well suited to hiding a pistol.
He asked a couple of questions which left me in no doubt of his occupation: I gave him a flea in his ear and he went off, glumly. In retrospect it's maybe just as well that SAVAK men were presumably under instructions not to use their guns on British soil.
Whether he was there to threaten my flatmate, or beat her up, or kidnap her, I'll never know. The lass was pretty upset that he had discovered her address. She moved.