Casual Islamophobia and direct Islamophobia

So I keep trying to write actual content and my brain keeps short circuiting.  So I’m going to try to write something about the relationship between casual Islamophobia and direct Islamophobia as it relates to the Boston bombings and subsequent manhunt.  Possibly this will be terrible and I’ll take it down tomorrow.  We shall see.

Firstly, in terms of cataloguing all of the direct Islamophobia surrounding the Boston bombings, others have already performed this depressing task more effectively and eloquently than I could – check out loonwatch and Islamophobia watch, as well as Wajahat Ali’s moving discussion of the open wound of “the Muslim terrorist” trope over at Salon.com.

Depressingly but not surprisingly, the fear and panic of the Boston bombings led to some truly reprehensible acts of Islamophobia, including a Saudi student having his home search for no reason but that he was running away from an explosion, a marathon runner who was similarly hounded by the FBI, and a Palestinian woman and her child attacked on the street in Malden.

But there was also a heavy cloud of casual Islamophobia that covered the entire media presentation of the bombings.  Descriptions of the kinds of bombs used referenced similar bomb-making techniques used by al-Qaeda or the Taliban.  Internet sites and reddit threads popped up full of pictures of the crowd in Copley Square with ‘potential people of interest’ circled, almost all of them people who looked of African, Arab or Central or South Asian descent.  Even after the suspects were named, the internet and mainstream media were full of accounts of Chechen Islam, before there was any evidence that there was a religious motivation (and despite the fact that the Chechen Republic as a nation has a long and tragic history of domestic terrorism, much of it secular and nationalist).

It’s hard to imagine that these things are not related.  The direct acts of Islamophobic behavior would seem to stem from the same immediate, almost unconscious association of “terrorism” with Islam.  The problem with this sort of casual association is that it’s almost entirely tautological – yes, there are some examples of genuinely Islamic terrorism – that is, acts of terror undertaken in order to satisfy the terrorist’s concept of Islam – but there are also examples of terrorism from nearly every other religion.  The reason we so readily associate Islam with terrorism is that we so often see them linked together.  Again, this is a tautology, not a fact – we think “Islamic terrorism” is a thing so we associate all supposed acts of terror to Islam, which makes us think that “Islamic terrorism” is a thing.

I don’t really have a point to this, except that it’s a crappy thing and we need to stop.  We need to stop not only because it’s sloppy rhetoric.  We need to stop because the casual association of Islam and terrorism is a distraction for law enforcement – it wastes law enforcement time running down random Middle Eastern students and interrogating people based on their background instead of the facts.  We also need to stop because, again, this casual Islamophobia helps feed the acts of overt Islamophobia.  I have no doubt that the people who harassed a Palestinian woman and her family thought they were doing something good.  So do the people who throw pork at mosques or pull off womens’ hijabs in public or scream insults at anyone with a turban or a beard or brown skin.  These acts of over Islamophobia are disgusting and terrible, but they’re not surprising, and on some level, that’s the most heartbreaking thing about them.

Some Boston links

I had intended to sit down and write a post this evening, but I’m finding that I just can’t focus, so instead, some helpful links for anyone else in Boston or who is looking for people in  Boston:

Official Boston people-finder: 617-635-4500

There is also a crowd-sourced google people finder here (there were early reports of cell coverage being shut down, but it seems to be fine now).

There’s another crowd-source for people who traveled in for the marathon who need a place to stay.  I’m also local – I don’t have much space to offer myself, but I know a fair number of people in the area, so if you need accommodation, feel free to hit me up (askanislamicist at gmail dot com).

The most recent reports I’ve seen say that the Red Cross is not actively seeking blood donations, but blood has a short shelf-life – if you’re still interested in donating, you can set up an appointment for it later in the week here (the Red Cross site is understandably overburdened, so if the link doesn’t work, check back in a few hours).

For anyone affected by today’s events who wants some help coping with what you’re experiencing, the Red Cross also offers some mental health care.  In addition, you can contact the Samaritans 24/7 by phone at 877 870 4673 or online at samaritanshope.org.

If anyone has any other resources for supporting people in Boston or beyond, please feel free to leave a comment.

How to write about Muslims

So it turns out my little rant last week about Dawkins and Krauss and ‘How to be an Ally 101’ was a little more relevant than I expected, as this seems to be a big week for ‘really kind of failing at being an ally.’  Between Femen, and the current wave of Islamophobic bus adverts and the responses to those, it’s been a great week for people who really enjoy rolling their eyes.  There’s a great recap of these events over on woodturtle and also a brilliant collection of the Muslim feminist responses to Femen on badassmuslimahs (via arzitekt and theuncolonizedmind).

So it seems reasonable to revisit the subject of how to be an ally, and as it happens, my good friend and all-around awesome person Lydia over at thebookarchaeologist sent me this article from Al-Jazeera English last week, which works as a nice starting point.

But first, a disclaimer – for casual readers of this blog who might be unaware of this fact, I am not a Muslim.  I am an Islamicist, that is a person, Muslim or non-Muslim, who studies the history, culture, art or theology of Islam as part of a field of academic research.  I’d also like to think of myself as an ally, and it’s those experiences I’d like to speak to.

As someone who has worked with Muslims in the US and the UK for most of the last decade, the Al-Jazeera article strikes me as good advice, but also as missing the forest for the trees.  I think the most basic advice for ‘how to write about Muslims’ is – don’t.

By that, I don’t mean that no one from outside a tradition ever has reason to discuss it.  What I mean is that discussions of an individual’s or a group’s religious beliefs crop up an awful lot when discussing Muslims, in situations where it’s really not relevant to the discussion at hand.  “Muslim terrorism.”  “Islamic extremism.”  Even I did it, just now, calling attention to “Muslim feminist responses.”

In technical terms, this kind of calling attention to specific features of otherwise common or recognizable concepts is a kind of exotification – making everyday things seem foreign or strange.  Robes are common, kimonos are exotic.  Hats are common, turbans are exotic.  Exotification often expresses institutional bigotry – it’s the reason we talk about surgeons and doctors and psychiatrists, but nurses and male nurses.  Being a doctor has (sometimes begrudgingly) become a genderless profession – you don’t need to refer to the gender of your doctor, although we often find it useful to refer to specific kinds of doctors.  But we still think of ‘nurses’ as essentially female, and so we feel the need to point out when they’re not.

But this kind of calling out of that particular feature also perpetuates the system that considers it abnormal or extraordinary – every time we talk about a male nurse, we’re reaffirming, however unconsciously, that a man can’t ever just be a nurse.  The same goes for the constant repetition of “Islamic extremist” and “Islamic terrorist” – each time it’s repeated, it makes it feel slightly more true that there’s something particularly “Islamic” about this terrorism.  After all, if there wasn’t, why is that word there?

The other thing I would suggest is really more advice for authors who want to write about people who write about Muslims[1], which is not to assume that Islamophobia is only something that conservatives do.

Certainly there’s a kind of conservative Islamophobia – after all, Pamela Geller’s website, despite being largely Islamophobic fearmongering, is entitled “Atlas Shrugs.” This same brand of conservative Islamophobia was seen in Senator King’s Homeland Security congressional hearings last year, and in the ‘foreign law’ prohibitions making the rounds in state legislatures throughout the US.   But conservative Islamophobia is not the only kind of Islamophobia.  Casual Islamophobia is common throughout Western culture, and it’s exactly what we witness in the Femen responses to Tunisia’s repression of Amina Tyler.  Tyler was threatened by a specific person in a particular position of power in Tunisia, but much of Femen’s response was against a whole of range of vaguely Islamic things – in their announcement, they called for a new Arab spring “free of mullahs and caliphs.”  I’ve explained before that “mullah,” if meant as a title of authority, really only applies to Shi’is, and Tunisia is a predominantly Sunni country. The reference to caliphs is even less applicable – the last caliph was the leader of the Ottoman empire, and he was removed from power by the Allies.  Even then, he wasn’t even widely recognized by Muslims as a caliph (as he was Turkish, and Islamic law generally holds that the caliph must not only be Arabian, but Qurayshi, that is, from the clan of the prophet).  The last widely-recognized caliph died in the sack of Baghdad in 1258.  Thus, in their call to defend Tyler, Femen also revealed both their ignorance about Islam, and their apparent disinterest in being less ignorant about it before attacking it – a quick google search would have revealed that their call sounded slightly ridiculous.

This is not simply an attack on Femen, however – this kind of casual Islamophobia, characterized by a general, comfortable ignorance about Islam, is common throughout Western rhetoric.  “Mullah,” “Taliban,” and “burka” are quickly becoming rhetorical catch-alls, in the same way as “Hitler” or “organized religion.”  The vast majority of people who use these terms are not concerned with the precise history, culture or philosophy of the thing they’re referencing.  They’re not really interested in the thing they’re referencing, at all.  Instead, it’s metonymy – the thing stands for something else entirely, usually something to do with Western culture and Western identity.  In the same way people get called Hitler on the internet because they want to regulate gun ownership or because they don’t like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, they get called Mullahs or the Taliban.

It’s certainly debatable if this sort of metonymy is exotification when it’s applied to Hitler – I would argue probably not, as most people who use it are actually aware of at least the general history of the Third Reich (although you do get the weird outliers, like the long-standing belief that things in Germany changed almost imperceptibly slowly, and that we could all ‘slip’ into a fascist state without noticing it, despite the fact that both Hitler and Mussolini made quick and sweeping changes to state structure).  However, with concepts like “mullah” and “burka,” the probability of exotification is much higher – many people honestly don’t know what these terms mean outside of their metonymic usage.  Just google image-search ‘burka’ and you get the clear picture that most Westerns are largely unaware of the distinctions in kinds of Muslim, or even generally Middle Eastern and Central Asia, dress – some of those things are burkas, some of those things are niqabs, some of those people are men, some of those images just show traditional Central Asian styles of dress, and some of those are pictures of dogs.  I don’t even.

Metonymy is supposed to work because the two things being compared are closely related (so the White House and the President – the White House doesn’t really release press statements, because it’s a building, but it’s obvious why it’s directly associated with the actions of the President, a human[2]).  But with casual Islamophobia, the original meaning or concept disappears, become completely subsumed by the figurative meaning.  It doesn’t matter what mullahs actual are – it matters that they’re standing in for repression or sexism or whatever else the person is discussing.  And that’s the danger of it – it completely silences the reality of the thing being discussed, for the sake of a rhetorical point.

So that would be my advice for how to write about Muslims.  First off, don’t, unless there’s a really clear reason why it’s important to the thing you’re talking about that Muslims are involved.  And if so, do research, find out about the thing you’re discussing, and don’t simply use vaguely Islamic references as stand-ins for other concepts.

[1] Did I mention that my alma’s unofficial motto was ‘anything you can do, I can do meta’?

[2] Or lizard, depending on the President.

 

Dawkins, atheism, and the right to discuss religions

Okay, so this has been sitting in my ‘to post’ folder for a while, so now it feels a bit dated, but I’m posting it anyways because… well, because it’s my blog and I’ll do as I like, really.  But for the datedness – mea culpa.

So continuing my desire to post cool stuff before I delve into horrible ridiculousness, Nahida has an absolutely brilliant post over on the fatal feminist about how the Western desire to depict the Prophet (peace be upon him) intersects with racism.  Check it out!

Also, apropos of nothing, here’s a video of a very responsible cat walking a very confused dog.  I particularly appreciate the dog’s look.  “I… I don’t think I like this?… But I? … Okay..”

Okay, now that we’re filling sufficiently chill and full of good idea and reasonable arguments – Richard Dawkins!

So for those who haven’t heard, Professor Dawkins decided to defend Lawrence Krauss’ decision to ‘almost’ walk out on a debate held at University College London and hosted by the Islamic Education and Research Academy because the attendees appeared to be segregated by gender with the greatest weapon in his arsenal – twitter.  He tweeted several sarcastic comments about the event, including “I don’t think Muslims should segregate sexes at University College London events. Oh NO, how very ISLAMOPHOBIC of me. How RACIST of me.”  Because if there’s one thing that’s hilarious, it’s RACISM.  Amiright?

First off, I want to point out on behalf of my fellow ladies (heeeellloooo, ladies) that “almost walking out” on something that you think might be sexist isn’t exactly gold-star ally material.  Generally speaking, most oppressed groups expect allies to speak up, present ideas and (God forbid!) use their position of privilege to open up spaces for members of the oppressed group to speak for themselves.  Krauss could have called attention to the gender segregation and used it as an opportunity to allow women in the audience to speak for themselves, instead of “almost walking out” and then praising himself for doing so on twitter, which is nearly indistinguishable from doing nothing.

How to be an ally 101 aside, though, I think the real question I want to raise about the whole thing is: how much should we care what Richard Dawkins thinks about Muslims?

Now, I can’t deny that I’m not Professor Dawkins’ biggest fan, but that’s partly because I end up being asked to talk about him more than I think is reasonable, which makes me feel like people are already over-valuing his opinion.  When people find out what I study, “what do you think of The God Delusion?” is a pretty common follow-up question (along with “have you converted?” and “so do you want to work for the CIA?”).  My stock answer is that I’m not terribly impressed by it, in the same way that if I decided to sit down and write a biology textbook tomorrow, I don’t expect many scientists would be terribly impressed by it.  It strikes me as having been written by someone with a better-than-average but by no means expert understanding of hermeneutics, Biblical analysis or church history, who doesn’t appear to have any understanding of comparative religion or the methodology for studying non-Western religions, and who hasn’t really done much reading on the subject, which is what I would expect from a book on theology written by the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science.  For the same reason, if someone inexplicably asked me to write a book about biology, I might suggest that they go speak to Professor Dawkins at St John’s College, Oxford, as being way more qualified.

Which gets us back to the question of how much we should care what Richard Dawkins thinks about Muslims?  He’s not speaking from a position of expertise, he’s speaking as a vocal defendant of an alternative perspective on divinity.

I’ve talked before about whether atheism should be considered a religion, and the fact that, from an academic standpoint, it’s hard to come up with a definition of “religion” that includes everything we want to include that doesn’t include atheism, particular the vocal, organized atheism of Dawkins and Krauss, by default.  After all, the title of the debate that Krauss ‘almost walked out’ on was “Islam or atheism: which makes more sense?”  Replace “atheism” with the name of any other religion, and it’s obvious that that debate is pointless.  “Islam or Christianity: which makes more sense?”  Oddly enough, I’m going to guess that the Muslim respondent is going to say Islam, and the Christian respondent is going to say Christianity.  And more amazing still – they’re both right.  Or at least, they’re both speaking genuinely of their own experiences – their religion does make more sense to them than the other religion.  The same goes for atheism – atheism makes more sense for atheists than theism, but there’s a big difference between that and any sort of provable, objective standard of “makes more sense.”

And here’s where I think it starts to matter how much we care what Richard Dawkins thinks about Muslims.  There’s nothing wrong with caring what he thinks, but we need to do so in a valid context, one that recognizes that not only is he not immune to the normal human tendencies towards bias and bigotry, but perhaps more susceptible to them, because he has dedicated a rather sizable portion of his life to defending a variant view on the nature of the divine.  Messages which speak of Muslims as inherently wrong will always fit well with members of variant viewpoints, because they share certain assumptions, and unfortunately Islamophobia is one of those messages which speaks of Muslims as inherently wrong.  Most people who work with interfaith dialogues are very aware of this point, and work hard to create spaces in which religions can communicate with one another, not by ignoring their differences, but by addressing them and then putting the unsolvable differences to one side, and speaking to the points of shared belief or possible reconciliation.  But atheists stand apart from this tradition, because being part of ‘interfaith dialogue’ would essentially label them as a faith.  This is, of course, their prerogative – their community of like-minded people should be allowed to gather under whatever rules they like – but if they want to do so with members of religious traditions, I think some consideration of the other side needs to be made, and that’s what I see as lacking here.

Pope facts

Okay, this is slightly outside of the normal purview of this blog, but since I seem to be fielding a lot of Pope-related questions in my real life, I figured I would post some helpful* Pope facts here.

1.) The (sort of) first Pope was (probably) married.

Peter the Apostle is generally held to be the founder/first head of the church of Rome (although there are several references in the Christian Bible to him serving in Jerusalem along with James the brother of Jesus).  He was also (probably) married.  In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that Peter and other apostles had visited the church accompanied by “sister women” (adelphys gynaika).  Although it’s possible that Peter traveled with his sister, who was also in the church, his wife (who was a sister in the Lord) is generally accepted as a more plausible translation.  Thus, in the Revised Standard Version, it says “believing wife” (1 Cor 9).

2.) The first popes weren’t the singular heads of the church.

Well into the Middle Ages, the head of the church at Rome was still considered a Patriarch, and in the official church hierarchy, was equal to the other Patriarchs.  Indeed, after the fall of Rome, the Eastern Patriarchs often had more power within the church, because their Sees were the sites of either Biblical importance (i.e. Jerusalem) or political importance (i.e. Constantinople, after its founding in the fourth century).  However, the Roman Patriarchs were still Popes, in the sense that they were called Papa in Latin, and they did exert considerable control over the western church.

The Pope became the singular head of the Holy Roman Catholic Church after the East-West schism in 1054.

3.) The Pope wasn’t infallible until the 11th century (or technically the 1870s).

The first clear references to the Pope as infallible, that is, holding a sacred knowledge of the correct interpretation of scripture over that of other members of the church, didn’t appear until the period of the Great Schism, in particularly in the period immediately following the Schism in works attributed to Pope Gregory VII.  Although the term ‘ex cathedra’ had been used throughout the Middle Ages to signify writings coming from the Roman Patriarchate, before this period, there was little implication that these writings should hold any particular significance above those of the other Patriarchs or theologians.  So presumably before the 11th century, Popes were just really clever, not infallible.

The first canonical reference to infallibility didn’t appear until the 14th century, in reference to Papal disputes with the Franciscans over the correct interpretation of the Age of the Holy Spirit.  Most scholars point to the 13th and 14th centuries as the revival of Papal infallibility.  However, to be technical, the concept itself was not canonized as a specific feature of the Papacy until 1870, at the First Vatican Council.

4.) There have been more than a dozen anti-Popes.

Antipope really is the technical term for religion figures who had a genuine claim to the Papacy, but for one reason or another, were denied investiture at Rome.  There have been at least a dozen of them, and for a while in the late 14th and early 15th century, in addition to the Pope in Rome, there were two antipopes, one in Avignon and the other in Pisa, all three being supported by political factions attempting to maintain control over the Papacy.

Technically, anyone who is not listed in the official registry of Popes in Rome is considered an Antipope, although some of them may have been fairly elected, depending what source you’re reading.

As far as anyone is aware, combining Pope and Antipope will not result in the destruction of both.

5.) The Popemobile is really called the Popemobile, thanks to Pope John Paul II.

Although several 20th-century Popes had special vehicles commissioned with extra security precautions, the cars JP II commissioned were really called Popemobiles (Papamobile).

So there you go, five fun facts about Papal history.  And just because it’s St Paddy’s Day, one more about St Patrick:

St Patrick wasn’t Irish.

According to his biography, Patrick was a Roman citizen living in England.  As a teenager, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and brought to Ireland, where he was forced to work as a shepherd (because apparently that’s something people did back then?).  Although there are obvious narrative reasons why this story might have been invented (that he went from being a literal shepherd to being a figurative one), that he was a Roman is actually very likely, since one of his  accomplishments was teaching Irish monks Latin – something that would have been much easier if Latin was his mother-tongue.

For anyone out there who is interested in monastic history and hasn’t read it, I strongly recommend Thomas Cahill’s very readable and only slightly aggrandizing How the Irish Saved Civilization.  Now go enjoy some corned beef and green beer!

*Warning: these facts may not actually be helpful, unless you’re entering a Pope-round of pub trivia for St Paddy’s.

School recites Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, Fox News freaks out.

Okay, this is a bit of an old story, but I’ve been wanting to comment on it for a while – in late January, Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Colorado continued the project of their Cultural Arms Club to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in different languages.  So a bunch of high school students recited the Pledge in a language other than English.  Not really news-worthy, right?

Except that they recited it in Arabic, and then Todd Starns over at Fox News Radio flipped his sh*t, to use the technical term.  Because reciting the Pledge in Arabic means that all of those students just swore allegiance to “one nation under Allah.”

Actually, hopefully, they didn’t, because that phrase implies that they translated half the sentence, but not the other half.  They probably said something like “aa-ma tahta allah” (or “aa-ma wahida tahta allah,” if they felt the need to stress the singularity of America), which means they said “one nation under God,” because those two phrases are direct translations of one another.

I think the uproar around this issue has two parts.  One is our continued sanctification of the Pledge, the other is the question of are all Gods equal.

As for the first, let me state at the outset that I really don’t understand our obsession with the Pledge, and I don’t understand why we still make children say it.  To be fair, if the Pledge is meant as a pledge, that is, a spoken oath of allegiance or action, then we should never let children say it in foreign languages, because you can’t swear to an oath you don’t understand.  At the same time, if it’s an oath, we should never make children take it, for the same reason we don’t like them get married or vote – minors don’t have the intellectual maturity to understand oaths[1].

For people who don’t know, the Pledge dates from 1892, it original had children swear allegiance to “my flag” (so presumably it wasn’t treason for children to plot against the government in the 1890s, so long as they had their own flag), and the words “under God” were added in the 1950s.  The addition of “under God,” as well as our current obsession with the Pledge, owes a lot to the Red Scare, the belief that commies had infiltrated all aspects of government, entertainment and media by assuming false identities and lying to everyone around them, but that they could be found out by forcing them to swear allegiance to the US under God.  They were also made to pinky swear their allegiance.

As it turns out, it didn’t work – loads of people who worked in government and media in the 50s and 60s have since been discovered to be either communists or USSR spies, and almost all of those people signed loyalty oaths and said the Pledge, because it turns out if you’re willing to lie to everyone around you, you’re willing to lie to everyone around you.  The people who refused to sign were mostly independently-minded intellectual types who didn’t like the idea of everyone swearing allegiance to the flag.  So basically, if we need a way to play “spot the indie kid” in schools, the Pledge works well.  For everything else, not so much.

The second half of this problem, of whether all Gods are equal, is unfortunately much more complex.  But the short answer would be something like this: to you, no, under the law and in public discourse, yes.

As with “what is a religion,” this system is imperfect because there are times that we want the government to define what is and isn’t a religion, and by extension, what is and isn’t a God.  The IRS has declared that the Church of Scientology can’t claim itself as a religion on its taxes, but does that means that individual Scientologists shouldn’t have protection under the First Amendment to express and practice their beliefs?  In general, as a scholar of religion, I tend to ere on the side of cooperation for defining religions – if you tell me you’re a religion, I’m inclined to believe you.  I won’t necessarily let you take a deduction of your taxes, but I will do my best to give you free space to practice your faith.

There’s also the problem that I’ve discussed before with Islamophobia of needing to separate out “Arabic” and “Muslim.”  There are a lot of things that fall into both of those categories, but those terms are not interchangeable.  Not all Muslims speak Arabic, and not all Arabic-speakers are Muslim.  By the same measure, “Allah” is not a term that applies exclusively to the Muslim conception of the divine.  Quite the opposite, in fact – Arabic-speaking Christians use “Allah” for God, as well, in order to refer to the God of the Christian Bible.

Which gets back to the issue of is the Pledge of Allegiance an oath.  Because if it is, then people should swear on their own God, on whatever concept of divinity means the most to them, because it’s supposed to be the sacredness of that relationship between worshiper and worshiped that makes the oath real.  But if that’s the case, then we definitely shouldn’t make people we don’t trust to vote, marry, gamble, or defend our country take it.

[1] Obviously some do, but in terms of laws, we work on averages, and on average, children don’t take oaths to the state any more seriously than they do their oath to clean their room today.

CAIR protesting teacher’s use of Godwin’s Law

Alright, I feel the need to start off with something pleasant, so before we start discussing Islamophobia and excessive Hitler analogies, go check out woodturtle’s series on being unmosqued.  It’s really brilliant, and on a subject I think a lot of non-Muslims rarely consider, that the mosque doesn’t play the same role for Muslims as a church does for Christians.  So yeah, go read that and hear intelligent, thoughtful, interesting people talk.

And now for the excessive Hitler analogies…

So the Council for American Islamic Relations is asking the Department of Justice to investigate a science teacher at Skagit County Middle School in Washington State, after receiving a tip from a student that, in an aside about bullying, the teacher said Arabs and Muslims are “just like Hitler” and that they raise their children from birth to give their lives to Allah, to be martyrs and to murder innocent people.  CAIR has also said that they approached the school board to ask to work with them to address Islamophobia in the classroom, but the school has denied that the event happened, saying that the teacher’s comments were specifically in reference to the Taliban and taken out of context.

What’s really sad about this whole story is not that Godwin’s law is invading real life (although for serious, people, there are tons of genocidal madmen in history! How about some Pol Pot references!?), but that I genuinely believe the school’s story that the teacher was just talking about the Taliban.

Or at least, I believe that this teacher probably started out ‘just talking about the Taliban’.  Because I’ve had this conversation, time and time again.  “The Taliban” is become as much a trope in common parlance as Hitler.

I’ve talked about before that one of the problems with Islamophobia (or any kind of bigotry, really) is that when the only image people have of a community or group of people is a stereotype, it becomes incredibly difficult to convince them of this fact.  It’s the ‘everybody knows’ argument – everybody knows that *some* Muslims are violent.  Just like how even today, some people still say that ‘everybody knows’ that non-straight people can’t really be in love, or make good, stable parents.  And a few decades ago, it was true that everybody knew that African-Americans and Latinos were just naturally lazier, and that’s why so many of them lived in poverty.  Or how a hundred years ago, everybody knew that Jewish people were cunning and Irish people were criminally-minded.  So long as the stereotype rings true, a truly tremendous amount of evidence has to be stacked up against these kinds of reductionist statements for anyone to start to question them.

More and more, I think in cases like this, what we need to be talking about is not the crazy stereotypes being spewed by a teacher.  Or, at least, not just that.  When we hear about racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism or cissexism in schools, we need to remember that these are not isolated events, but rather visible outgrows of a whole system of institutionalized privilege and oppression.  It’s like a rash – it’s not just a problem in and of itself, it’s a problem that may be symptomatic of something much larger and more significant.

In the case of bigotry in education, it’s symptomatic of how little we stray from a Eurocentric, patriarchal and heteronormative vision of history and humanity.  These exchanges stand out because they may be only reference students hear to Arabs and Muslims.  Moreover, it may demonstrate the genuine level of under-education or miseducation teachers have about these communities.  Even if all teachers in schools are university educated, that’s still no guarantee that they’re well-informed about non-Eurocentric history or cultures.  For most of us, if you did learn about these things in college, you probably had to seek them out as electives, and not everyone will have done so (and for a field like education, where recruiting qualified, competent people is already a problem, adding more requirements of secondary education to the list isn’t really anyone’s top priority).  Thus the whole system becomes self-perpetuating – schools don’t have the space in their curriculum or the breadth in their staff to teach a wider view of the world, so students, for the most part, aren’t exposed to this ideas, and then those students go on in their education and become teachers, and return to a system with an ever-narrowing view of curriculum.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we shouldn’t call out schools when their teachers spew drivel like this.  I absolutely support what CAIR is doing, including their attempt to meet the school half-way and have a discussion about Islamophobia in the classroom.  But I think that can only be a first step.  In order for things to change, we need to recognize that these outbursts are a symptom of a much larger problem that is currently not being addressed at all in our national dialogue about education.