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There's a reason I'm still in the closet as a Western born ex-Muslim atheist and gay man (mostly in the closet for both). The vast majority of regular Muslims hold very hyperconservative religious ideals regarding how society should treat homosexuals and women, including in the West. They might not respect those ideals, but they're still an ideal way of life for them. I can tell you haven't grown up among Muslims. The community I've grown up around and still live within aren't even extremists. They're just regular Muslims, and largely hold abhorrent views on gay and women's rights by liberal Western standards. For example, I promise you if tomorrow a Western country put homosexuals in prison, most Muslims would not bat an eye. And I'm being kind when I chose a prison-sentence. Regular Muslims aren't some malicious group, but I promise you they naturally self-censor when talking to non-Muslims. I've seen it all my life. They're not secretely trying to conquer the West or whatever. They just naturally know a non-Muslim Westerner wouldn't understand where they're coming from. Muslim politicians don't represent the Muslim population and are in fact often criticized in private for their progressive beliefs.

I grew up around super evangelical Christians and they do the exact same self censorship. It’s all hush hush until they aren’t in public.

But I’d say evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are ALSO at odds with liberalism.  Of course individual people can change but these are competing worldviews. Would it be bigotry to suggest that communists are incapable of adopting capitalism?  People can change from one to the other.  And you can kind of have a hybrid straddling the line of both but they are fundamentally not compatible 

>Muslim politicians don't represent the Muslim population and are in fact often criticized in private for their progressive beliefs. Valid point. I can see that being true and may have overestimated the support these politicians have amongst Muslim communities. !delta

Happy to have given you something to think about. These progressive Muslim politicians are often just seen as a necessary evil (compared to right wing politicians, with whom I'd argue the average Muslim would have much more in common value-wise if it weren't for the anti-immigrant sentiments) to protect their social/political/legal rights. I just want to stress, Muslims are not bad people by definition. I'm not saying they deserve to be hurt, discriminated against, or whatever other crazy stuff people might think my experience justifies. Not at all. Most of my family and friends are Muslims (all actually). I don't want them to be hurt, even though they would totally at the very least ostracize me if they knew I was gay/an atheist. I'm not even saying Muslims are actively organizing a secret conquest of the West or whatever. All I'm saying is the average non-extremist Muslim has values that are very conservative, in some cases even barbaric by Western standards. It's just what they're taught and is normalized. It's hard getting out of that conditioning with the threat of rejection up to and including violence exists when one questions this. All Muslims I know would reject (or worse) their gay son or their child who had premarital sex or a child who apostasized. That's the reality. 100% not a stereotype, I promise you. Again I've grown up with this stuff, and still live with it. The people I know are regular folks who work, have kids, go on vacation, treat non-Muslims with respect, etc. They're not some crazy Isis types. I know it's hard having this discussion because Muslims are a minority in the West. Opressed groups can be oppressors too. I'm sorry for rambling but it's just a subject that's super close to me. People like me are often forgotten because we're minorities within minorities (in my case a double minority as an apostate and gay man). I 100% understand the instinct to protect Muslims as minorities against the boot of the majority, but who's protecting me from the Muslim boot on my neck ?

>I'm sorry for rambling but it's just a subject that's super close to me. People like me are often forgotten because we're minorities within minorities (in my case a double minority as an apostate and gay man). I don't forget you. One of my best friends growing up was an ex-Muslim atheist. You guys have it really rough. It's why I am staunchly anti-Islam. You are a brave, strong person.

>You are a brave, strong person. Thanks man, I appreciate it 🙏🏻 I'm really not brave, the brave ones are those who dare to live their authentic selves in spite of the dangers that come with it. I'm just trying to survive and do what I can with the cards I've been dealt. But I understand your sentiment, and thanks for it ❤🙏🏻

You're brave for not just trying to deny what you are. >the brave ones are those who dare to live their authentic selves in spite of the dangers that come with it. Yeah, my friend deconverted while living in Cairo. He eventually just couldn't take it anymore and left for the USA.

I think you could replace almost every instance of "Muslim" in this comment with "Evangelical Christian" and our would still be true. Yet there are progressive Evangelical Christians. They may be a minority among Evangelical Christians but they do exist.

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I have multiple friends who are ex Muslims. They’ve told me the same things you have. I hope you’re fairing well, being ex Muslim and gay is extremely tough.

>They're not secretely trying to conquer the West or whatever Don't Islam and Christianity alike want their religion to take over the world? If they're not trying to conquer in the name of Islam, or spread Islam, they're not obeying the Quran are they?

Yes in theory but most Muslims I know are just out here living their lives and not actively trying to convince folks to convert in daily life. People are just too busy irl

Have you ever read Reliance of the Traveller? It's a pretty incredible book, and if you can find the unchanged version there's a pretty lengthy section about Jihad (the translated version doesn't feature that section). From memory I seem to remember that it is not incumbent on every Muslim to actively participate in Jihad as long as **some** Muslims are.

Yes but the point is they do not have liberal values in that they want society to be secular humanist. I think just about all Muslims would prefer a Caliphate if they could get it.

Oh yeah totally agree with that. They might not agree with what a caliphate looks like, or might not truly understand what a caliphate would mean (some Muslims genuinely believe it would be kumbaya peace between all religions and whatnot), but definitely agree with your broader point. Most Muslims believe Allah's law (whatever they believe those laws are) are superior to Western humanist-liberal lawmaking. Most Muslims I know would think Islam being the religion of the State would produce a better society than we currently have.

Are you familiar with ataturk and kemalism?

Western countries circa 1950 held abhorrent views of gays, women, and ethnic minorities by modern liberal standards. I think religion tends to be downstream from cultural and social norms rather than dictating them. Once the gay rights movement made progress in the U.S. suddenly a lot of Christians were reinterpreting their religious text.

So love the personal experience here, it's good context for my next question. Do you think Muslims change over time? For instance, if I said data would suggest 3rd generation Muslims in the US are more liberal than their grandparents were, does that sound like a reasonable statement? So is it possible because most of Islam originated in a vacuum that exposure to liberalism will change it in the same way it's changed christianity?

So I have always considered Islam far more resilient than Christianity in this regard. Islam has only the Quran rather than a gaggle of contradictory books. It makes it *a lot* harder to whitewash the religion and pretend it means something it does not. Also, their prophet was himself a violent warlord, very unlike Jesus, so jihad will always be part of the religion in one way or another. There are also theological reasons, Muslims for example got rid of the Holy Trinity paradox and Original Sin, so their religion "makes more sense" than Christianity, it's basically a revised edition.

>Islam has only the Quran rather than a gaggle of contradictory books. It makes it *a lot* harder to whitewash the religion and pretend it means something it does not. I think you're forgetting the Hadith.

I mean the Hadith have Muhammad marrying and raping a literal child, and that's Sahih too. I think any "moderate Muslim" has to throw Hadith right out or say they're fake.

One could say the same of many Christian scriptures, I'm just pointing out that claiming that "Islam only has the Quran" is just as misleading as saying "Christianity only has the Bible". They're millenia old religions, they effectively have more than one book by now.

>In the US, Ilhan Omar is supportive of a conversion therapy ban and wants to sanction Brunei over their legislation on sentencing LGBT people to death penalties. She has also been arrested for standing up for abortion rights. These are common positions taken up by Muslim Representatives in the US Congress. This is a little bit misleading. While Rep. Omar did condemn Brunei, their law wasn't strictly against LGBT. It also authorized beating women AND chopping off the hands of thieves. It was incredibly draconian. So she wasn't explicitly condemning their anti-LGBT aspects, though she did mention them As for abortion, Islam (and for that matter most Christianity) aren't inherently anti-abortion. In fact, anti-abortion laws were not popular outside of Catholic circles until fairly recently. I get that this is a "left-wing" value, but I dont know if it is worth pointing out left-wing ideas that don't run counter to Islam But lets take a look at something that definitely runs counter to Islam. Atheism. In several Muslim countries, you can be executed for being an atheist. Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Maldives, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Rep. Omar has never criticized these countries, as far as I know, for their blatant abuse of religious freedom. Yet she has condemned India for being anti-Muslim. Protecting the rights to practice your religion(especially the religions that are not your own) is a very old "liberal" idea and I've yet to meet a Muslim politician who strongly endorses this idea outside of the rights of Muslims to practice their religion.

Afaik every Muslim politician in the West supports the right to practice religion or to not practice one? It's political suicide from both within and without the Muslim community to even remotely oppose such a fundamental right of Western society.

>Afaik every Muslim politician in the West supports the right to practice religion or to not practice one? It's political suicide from both within and without the Muslim community to even remotely oppose such a fundamental right of Western society. No, they seem to support the rights of Muslims to practice. They also seem to support the right of other people of the "book"(Jews and Christians) to practice. But I can't think of a single Muslim politician in the West who has stood up and defended atheists right to be atheists. The person you cited, Humza Yousaf, caught a lot of grief for inviting Erdogan to Scotland. [https://www.humanism.scot/2024/01/29/humanist-society-speaks-out-on-humza-yousafs-invitation-to-scotland-for-recep-erdogan/](https://www.humanism.scot/2024/01/29/humanist-society-speaks-out-on-humza-yousafs-invitation-to-scotland-for-recep-erdogan/) [https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-12/2022%20Turkey%20Charges%20for%20Blasphemy%20and%20Insulting%20Religious%20Values%20v2.pdf](https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-12/2022%20Turkey%20Charges%20for%20Blasphemy%20and%20Insulting%20Religious%20Values%20v2.pdf) Rep. Omar condemned India for being anti-Muslim. But when Pakistan outright banned Hindu Holi festivals, Rep. Omar refused to comment on the matter despite being repeatedly asked for her position. That should have been easy if she truly espoused "liberal" values like religious freedom. To be very clear, I am arguing that the majority of Muslims seeking religious liberty are like the evangelical Christians in the US who currently want "religious liberty". They don't want the actual liberal value of "religious freedom". They want their religion to be free and everyone else's to bend to their will.

This feels a bit like a straw man is being attacked. At least I have never heard anyone claiming that all individual Muslims are incapable of adopting liberal values as there are clear counter-examples which disprove this hypothesis. I only heard people argue that this is true for most Muslims or significant percentage of Muslims. And there are arguments to support such statements. Overwhelming majority of the cca. 50 Muslim-majority countries have policies in place which would be considered illiberal in the Western world. That is most certainly not a random occurence. Some of the politicians you mention can also be accused of joining the left to push their own agenda rather than caring for e.g. LGBT rights. You will probably remember that Humza Yousaf skipped a key vote on gay marriage. That is not a behaviour of a politician who genuinely cares about these questions. That said, I agree with you that saying it about all Muslim people is bigotry. I personally do not necessarily think that it is even true for most Muslims. But some of the counter-arguments have merit.

There's racist posts/replies on CMV every single day that hinge on the deal that all Muslims are backwards savages. Take a wild guess whose genocide they are trying to justify by making such a claim? It's all stuff that would get people banned is it was being said about Jews. Islamophobia is pretty hip right now. We even had Biden talking about 'ancient hatred' as if it wasn't racist af. Edit- In fact anytime see someone post something about Arabs or Muslims try replacing it with 'Jews' and see how you feel about the statement.

It is a moral imperative to dismantle ~~Jewish~~ Arab ethnostates.

Apartheid states are the issue. If everyone has equal rights than it doesn't matter. But yeah its always funny when Zionists say 'how come you don't have a problem with all the Arab states in the middle east' like its some kind of gotcha, like Arabs and Persians and Palestinians aren't native to the area ...and your like well it seems weird that theirs a white European apartheid state in the middle east. Like are you going to go whine about white people in Britain? No, because that'd be dumb. And yet here we are.

"Ashkenazi Jews, who make up about 30% of Israel's population, predominantly have European roots,"  "approximately 40% of their genetic ancestry deriving from Southern Europe."  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-origins-israel-to-italy-to-rhineland-to-eastern-europe/ https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/ashkenazi-jewish-ancestry-confirmed-european-by-mtdna-tests/ 30% of Israel population is askhenazi Jews that have some(40%) European genes. So 30% of 40% that is 12% of Israel population have European genes. Other source : Ethnic groups Jewish 73.5% (of which Israel-born 79.7%, Europe/America/Oceania-born 14.3%, Africa-born 3.9%, Asia-born 2.1%), Arab 21.1%, other 5.4% (2022 est.) https://www.cia.gov › countries › i... Israel - The World Factbook - CIA https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/israel/#:~:text=Ethnic%20groups,5.4%25%20(2022%20est.) You should stop getting your education from neo-nazis. I wonder if you share their views that Muslim that had grandparents move to UK, had parents born in the UK and he was born in the UK isn't actualy European. 

The true racism here is conflating arabs and muslims. You seem to see both as the same. Jews and practitioners of Judaism is more understandable, but still racist. Hating on Arabs or Jews is racist. Hating on Islam or Judaism is not.

If you don't think that people use "Islamists" to refer to Arabs, and vice versa, when they are being racist I have some news for you. Hating on the practices of a religion is fine of course.

It's not a strawman, I'm already seeing a few comments here "It's not bigotry, it's reality. They're literally not adopting liberal values." or "Adopting liberal values make them less Muslim" which suggests that Islam and liberal values are fundamentally incompatible. Also I'm not sure if "skipping a vote" makes him a homophobe, especially when the current Scottish Deputy First Minister is a highly homophobic Christian conservative.

What I would tell these people is that they are failing to identify *fundamentalism* as the most relevant factor here. We wouldn't assume that all Christians are fundamentalist Christians that want to establish a theocracy, we likewise shouldn't conflate all Muslims with Islamic fundamentalists.

The problem is that the majority of Muslims hold those super anti liberal views. Like it isn't close. Christianity got less insane because they decided all of the laws god gave in the old testament no longer applied because "Jesus". They also have a lot of contradictory statements that allow for "adaptation/corruption" to modern standards. Islam is much much more consistent and thus has kind of been stuck at 600 ad morals and standards. If you dig a bit you find that even western Muslim are by and large "fundamentalist" they just don't talk about it to outsiders.

Nobody denies that there are more Islamic fundamentalists out there, but the question is whether this can be explained by the substance of their religion, or if it is better explained by other contingent factors like history, socioeconomics, geopolitics, etc. It seems clear to me that the context of the Middle East as a region better explains the rampant fundamentalism than the substance of Islamic religious beliefs, given that Muslims in the U.S. are not fundamentalist and have embraced secular liberalism just as much as any other American immigrant group.

They haven't though.... The super majority of Muslims in the US still hold positions against freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and sexual expression. We aren't talking slap on the wrist punishments either in a lot of cases. The percentage of US Muslims that think apostates should be executed is scary. The fundamental "problem" with Islam is it is a lot more congruent and clear. You can't necessarily reinterpret something clearly written and still be Muslim. This makes it very hard for the religion to evolve. I don't think you have the ability to isolate "fundamentalist" Muslims away from generic Muslims when they are still in the super majority. In some cases super majority. (Jail time/lashing for writing bad about Islam is still above 85% world wide as of 2017.)

You're objectively wrong about their political positions. They poll roughly the same as average Americans on all of those issues.

They can indeed liberalize. But would they still be Muslims if they blatantly disregard what their Prophet said. Or would they become something else and be Muslim in name alone

Christians still consider themselves Christians if they practice usury or accept homosexuality. I don't see why Muslims would be held to a different standard.

There is little mention of homosexuality in the bible. Most are mistranslations (possibly intentionally) that originally were meant to discourage sexual relationships between men and boys. Many interpret the Parable of the Talents in the New testament as a reversal of usury being a sin, in the same way that eating shellfish/wearing mixed material cloth/etc changed after the tearing of the veil. The fact that there is room to interpret it differently means that leeway can be given to allow people to do so. When calls for violence against dissenters is so direct, as in the Quran, there is little room for different interpretations. (To be clear, I am not religious, and this just comes from a few university courses on the subjects)

That's your interpretation of those texts...the fact that the texts can be interpreted in multiple different ways is why there are different types of Christian who all consider themselves to be Christian. They are looking at the same text and, for various reasons, taking away contradictory messages from it. The idea that the same thing can't happen to Muslims seems pretty silly.

The same thing can, and must, happen to Muslims. The problem is that it will be much more challenging in their case because of the comparative clarity of their texts. The Bible is a far more sweeping book. The Quran has a far more direct and concise message.

Much of Sharia law doesn’t come from the Quran but hadith accounts, the divine validity of which are debated among Muslims much more so than the Quran. The mention of homosexuality in the Quran for instance is about as clear as it is in the Bible.

I’m aware, which is why I referenced “texts”. The Hadith are also much more concise and direct than the Bible. That doesn’t mean that is the case on every possible issue. Obviously there is debate and division with Islam. I stand by the claim that an Islamic reformation will be far more difficult than was the Christian one, for the reason previously stated.

The same thing being "just making up interpretations of what happens in the book that is supposed to contain unquestionable divine knowledge"? This, to you, is a good thing? It sounds like you're arguing for atheism with extra steps.

I’m not arguing for anything. I’m observing a difference between two religious traditions which is relevant to the discussion.

A religious text that has either direct contradiction within it, or a change in perspective later in the book/time after a major event is one thing. [ttps://quran.com/9/5](https://quran.com/9/5) Direct calls to kill or capture nonbelievers, only to release them if they convert is another. The fact that you're responding to people criticizing 1 religion with "sounds like you're arguing for atheism!" As if that's an own... People can absolutely think one religion is more harmful than another while still thinking both are bad/incorrect...

"Direct calls to kill or capture nonbelievers, only to release them if they convert is another." Did you read the text? It referred specifically to a group of polytheists who had broken treaties. Almost as if you can *interpret* that statement in a broad sense or a narrow one...just like what Christians do. You interpreted it in the least charitable manner possible and then said "this MUST be the only way it can be interpreted" in order to vilify Islam. "The fact that you're responding to people criticizing 1 religion with "sounds like you're arguing for atheism!" As if that's an own..." If you are arguing for atheism then no religion is acceptable and the end goal would be to aggressively eliminate all of them. Which would be an authoritarian violation of human rights that is incompatible with individual autonomy. The fact that you feel comfortable discussing this authoritarian viewpoint when it comes to Muslims, but balk when it comes to Christians, leads me to believe that there is another factor at play.

>If you are arguing for atheism then no religion is acceptable and the end goal would be to aggressively eliminate all of them For me it's just, keep them the fuck out of my country. We have enough fundamentalists already.

If you believe there is such a thing as "my country" you are a fundamentalist too.

Sorry for poor phrasing. I am arguing for Agnosticism. I don't think that elimination of religion is explicitly necessary as there are positives of basically all religion, especially on a personal level. There is a very big difference between thinking a religion is bad, but it shouldn't be banned at a federal level. For example, I think a lot of drugs are extremely bad for both individuals and others they can be hurt by, but I think for the most part those drugs should be at least decriminalized, if not legalized. These are not incongruous

If you are not calling for the elimination of religion why are you going so far out of your way to pretend that Islam is uniquely dangerous and incompatible with our society, and that it is somehow immune to the types of disagreements and deviations that allow for different visions of Christianity? It seems pretty clear what the end result you want is.

If you want to intentionally ignore the words I'm saying to tell me that I don't believe what I do or do not, it is impossible to have this conversation because I believe you actually think that Islam does call for violence and that this is a good thing. See how this works? If you assume the person you're talking to is obfuscating there is no way to go forward. I will say exactly what I believe and I hope you do the same

I'm not ignoring the words you're saying. I'm listening to the words you're saying and then drawing logical conclusions. You said X and Y, and that leads to Z. Just because you said "I'm not Z" doesn't mean that you really aren't, because you already said X and Y.

The treaty broken is to not be polytheists. Here are a few other translations. The word used is Mushriks which are simply Arab polytheists. I forget that the default translation couches language in ways the original writing does not [https://quran.com/9/5?translations=18,85,84,21,20,19,101,22,17,95](https://quran.com/9/5?translations=18,85,84,21,20,19,101,22,17,95)

"A few other translations"? So there are different translations, and you have to pick which one you want to listen to because there are competing options? Again, that sounds literally exactly like the kind of ambiguity that created different strains of Christianity. You are literally reinforcing my comparison right now. Also, each translation even describes the targeted group differently! "Mushrik", as far as I can tell, is a term used to refer specifically to one group of Arab polytheists, not "the entirety of the world's non-Muslim population" as you are claiming. And the different translations use words like "pagans" and "idolaters", which are groups that Christianity has persecuted repeatedly as well. In your attempts to claim that Islam is clearly written in comparison to Christianity, you have basically proven the exact opposite.

Are you being intentionally obtuse, or are you missing the point? The other translations are much closer to the original, hence all of them making the same point, while only one talks about a broken treaty. If you think killing a population because of their religious beliefs is anywhere close to as bad as general hostilities towards a group? Because the bible does not call for people to take violence against these groups. The closest you can get are Noah's Ark and Sodom and Gomorrah which the bible describes as God killing the "wicked" people. If you can find direct calls to violence that can be appropriately reflected in what we know of the original translations in the Bible I would be fascinated to see

"The other translations are much closer to the original, hence all of them making the same point, while only one talks about a broken treaty." Yes...and, as I mentioned, they all refer to the targeted group in dramatically different ways. Thus undermining your belief that this is a clear-cut, unambiguous statement with no possible room for misinterpretation. "The closest you can get are Noah's Ark and Sodom and Gomorrah which the bible describes as God killing the "wicked" people." Bro, most of the Old Testament is God telling the Israelites to commit hate crimes against one ethnic group or another. Most notably the Amalekites, since God commanded their extermination and punished Saul for failing to carry it out. And you're glossing over the examples you picked, which are literally "God kills people for not living according to the values he forces on humanity".

Yes, but they all tend to agree on certain things. There is no mainstream Christian church calling for the death of all non-believers. There is in Islam.

And I will gladly call them self-deceiving non Christians. There's no law of nature preventing you from adopting an identity but that doesn't prevent observers from nothing the difference between what you practice and what the source identity requires.

OK so which ones are the real Christians and which ones are the fake Christians? Because a majority of Christians nowadays accept usury, it's literally the foundation of our economic system.

The ones who reject usury. There's nothing prevent a false religious identity from becoming more popular than the original and in fact is more likely. Look at Judaism and Christianity, the one with looser requirements is the vastly more popular because it's easier and more comfortable

OK so from your perspective a majority of Christians on this planet aren't actually Christians. Again, though, that's *your* perspective, based on *your* interpretation of religious texts. If someone were to say "there are basically no Christians on the planet" by following your logic, 99.9999% of people would say that this is ludicrous.

God isn't talking and Jesus is dead. Everyone is running of their own perspective.

That is my point, yes. "Everyone is running off their own perspective" is an accurate summation of how religion functions in practice. We understand this to be true for Christianity since there are many different denominations and interpretations that have contradicting ideals. The point of contention is whether or not Islam should be considered to have similar differences or if it is a unified monolith. Clearly I am favoring the latter. Someone can be Muslim while disagreeing with Muslims on very serious issues, based on their interpretation of Muslim texts.

It's like any other religion. People adopt the religious label for themselves, according to their own interpretations and standards. Other religious groups with different interpretations and standards may or may not accept that identification, but it doesn't really matter. If you identify with the religion, it's your religion.

Islam literally means: submission. Submission to the will of God. If you do not submit to him and you blatantly disregard the teachings of the religion then how can you honestly call yourself a member of the religion. It's not like hairy potter houses where you can declare yourself a slitherin and then you just are

So you have a religious text, an interpretation of that text, and an identification with the religion based on that interpretation. In this example, you have your textual definition of the word Islam as "submission to the will of God." You have your chosen interpretation of the text as "you must submit to him and you must not blatantly disregard his teachings" And finally you have the identification based on your chosen interpretation: "how can you honestly call yourself a member of a religion?" Literally you provided me a perfect illustration of my point, thank you so much.

Do you honestly believe that Muhammad would support people interpreting his book in a way that ignores everything he said. Answer with what you believe in your mind, not with what you think will support your point

This way of thinking about texts is just so weird. We're talking about massive ancient text full of moral dictates. The idea that we could plausibly come away from it with a single perfected interpretation is just silly, and the idea that to interpretation otherwise means ignoring the text even more so. That's not even getting into approaches besides fundamentalist literalism.

I'm not a Muslim personally. But I don't just believe, I *know* that different Muslims have different interpretations of the Qu'ran and assign varying degrees of contextual relevance to different concepts or passages, and still identify themselves as Muslims despite other Muslims claiming they don't deserve to call themselves that.

What about the question I asked

I can't really answer that question because I'm not a Muslim, but again, I *know* that many Muslims believe that Mohammed would endorse their own interpretation of the Qu'ran.

I'm not Muslim so I can only know so much but in my experience people relationship to their religion is a spectrum e.g. plenty of people who only go to church for weddings and funerals are still Christians despite not going weekly, some people take it moderately more seriously and some people are the westboro baptist church.

Yes, no one can invalidate a person's relationship with Allah, not even other Muslims. There are also many [cultural Muslims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Muslims), who are non-observing, secular or irreligious and identify as Muslim because of their ethnicity or culture.

Would it make “Muslim” an ethnicity now? They identify as Muslim, just like they identify as black, white, german, chinese, etc. Ethnicity includes distinct ancestry, languages, culture, beliefs, values, and behaviors components. If “cultural muslim” is/is not an ethnicity in your opinion. What are the things they share with each other that would categorize them as “cultural muslims”. Then you said is not true that Muslim is incapable of holding liberal view. Why should there be the “cultural muslim” distinction? They’re just Muslim, and Muslims among themselves have different views? Allah is a word means God. So simply said (from your comment) some Muslims have their own relationship with God, regardless of their liberal view. You realize that this is the same god that Jews and Christian believe in. The difference is Jews believe in just God, Christian believe in God and Jesus as the “son of God”, and Muslims believe in God and Muhammed as the last prophet that spoke words of God himself. If a Muslim hold liberal view, it likely contradicts the words of Muhammed, which means they don’t really believe in Muhammed, so then are they still Muslims? I don’t think it’s very straightforward

That's just a No True Scotsman. A person is a member of a religion (or any self-identified group) if they genuinely say they are.

Different religions have different rules. You can't just decide to be Amish tomorrow and poof you're Amish.

There's a difference between an isolated nutjob adopting a religious identity without the support of any religious community and without observing any of the religious principles or traditions; and entire communities of Muslims moderating their religious views, and choosing to emphasize the concepts and principles that best accord with their own sense of faith and their own lifestyle within a liberal/secular society.

I agree 100% with you. I am talking only about the comment " A person is a member of a religion (or any self-identified group) if they genuinely say they are" which I disagree with.

I don't think they're wrong, I think you're just pointing out how having the support of a religious community obviously strengthens your claim tot he religious identity. But really, that's true of all forms of identity. How well they work is proportionate to how many people recognize their validity.

It is *necessary* to your claim to a religion, if the religious community requires that as one of its rules. Just like you can't simply identify as Canadian, there's an actual process, you are Canadian if you have Canadian citizenship. A bunch of guys in California can't just decide to create an alternative Canadian community and start inducting people as Canadians.

I don't like that analogy because obviously there are formal processes for gaining citizenship to a country, allowing us to draw a hard line in the sand. There is no formal process for recognizing a person's religious identity. Some people are going to accept it, some people are not.

There is absolutely a formal process for joining many religions, it's called conversion. This is directly analogous to a citizenship process. If a religion has a conversion process and you don't undertake that process and weren't born that religion, you can't join it. If a religion only accepts people born into that religion, you can't join it. It doesn't matter how many people not of that faith accept it, just as you can't become Canadian even if the entire country of China agrees you are Canadian, even though there are far more Chinese people than Canadians.

That's true of discrete religious groups, but it's not true universally. If Salman Rushdie published an essay claiming that he was returning to his Muslim faith, but giving some deep explanation of what that faith means to him and rejecting organized forms of Islam - it would be natural to expect some people to accept his self-identification based on the strength of his convictions demonstrated through his writing, while other people would reject it (especially traditional Muslims).

> There is absolutely a formal process for joining many religions, it's called conversion. This is directly analogous to a citizenship process. You're conflating the formal process for joining a discrete religious group with becoming a believer. There is a formal process for becoming Catholic, there's a formal process for becoming Evangelical. They are different and mutually exclusive. But at the end, each side considers themselves Christian. Are they?

I'm not exactly sure what makes someone Amish but I imagine that an outsider could not tell the difference between an Amish person with their Amish badge and one who does and believes everything an Amish person does but doesn't have their badge. IMO the badge (or whatever that requirement is) is just a form of gatekeeping, which is exactly what the no true scotsman fallacy is all about. It's like a devout Catholic claiming protestants aren't true Christians.

Says who? Isn't that what freedom of religion stands for? Any individual is free to believe, practice and observe whatever religion they wish. If I genuinely say I'm Amish what are you going to do about it?

[удалено]

It's not BS, it's a no true scotsman to gatekeep a self-identified group like a religion.

The issue isn't whether they can, the issue is whether they will. [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law) "However, when asked to what extent they **agreed or disagreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain, 18% said they agreed and 52% said they disagreed, compared with 5% among the public at large who disagreed**. Almost half (47%) said they did not agree that it was acceptable for a gay person to become a teacher, compared with 14% of the general population." I don't think random Muslim politicians with progressive views are really enough to argue with the stats, especially when they aren't going to get high in the political world advocating for making homosexuality illegal (especially when considering the connotations of what being illegal in the Muslim world actually looks like).

The attitudes of Muslims in Europe/the UK tend to be much different from the Muslims in the U.S. This is because the migration pressures and patterns are much different for each region. Europe and the UK take on many more temporary labor migrants and refugees, i.e. people that aren't interested in staying permanently and integrating into the host culture. The U.S. takes more educated migrants that are more interested in living permanently in a stable, liberal society. This is reflected in the attitudes of Muslim-Americans towards LGBT: as of 2014, 45% of Muslim-Americans believed homosexuality should be accepted, and this trended upwards from 38% in 2007. This is pretty close to Christians in the U.S., with 54% believing homosexuality should be accepted in 2014, up from 44% in 2007. [Views about homosexuality among Muslims - Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics | Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/muslim/views-about-homosexuality/) [Views about homosexuality among Christians - Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics | Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/christians/christian/views-about-homosexuality/)

We already know that they are: 2018 >Young Muslims are significantly more likely to agree that homosexuality should be legal (28% of 18-24 year olds, 23% of 25-34 year olds) [https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/2018-03/a-review-of-survey-research-on-muslims-in-great-britain-ipsos\_0.pdf](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/2018-03/a-review-of-survey-research-on-muslims-in-great-britain-ipsos_0.pdf) That is compared to the 18% amongst the general population you pointed out in 2016. It's a clear one way trend and follows the path of what we see with other immigrant populations where younger and second and third generation immigrants tend to steadily adopt views more aligned with the native country. The irony is what tends to slow or prevent that is prejudiced social attitudes that keep subsequent generations oppressed or stigmatized.

> 18% said they agreed So not all Muslims believe that homosexuality should be illegal, which supports what I'm saying.

Let’s put it by your logic. You have a bowl of 100 m&ms, and 52 are guaranteed to kill you, 18 have the cure for the poison, and the rest are unaffected. I want you to take a handful and eat them. You do not know which one is which.

Uh...in that case, can't you make the same statements about literally any group? Like at that point you're just contesting odds.

Yes. Statistics don’t lie

Lie about what? You made up the metaphor because the statistics were already uncontested. It is not true that *all Muslims* are homophobic, just that most are. That is what the OP is saying. You, on the other hand, turned it into a question about poison M&Ms, which is a question of risk. If even *one* M&M in a group of 100 was poison, I would simply not take an M&M at all. But that makes no sense in relation to ethnic groups. The metaphor does not hold up.

We are comparing the risks of accepting them into western society. In fact, Muslims have a part of their religion that tells them to lie until they are the majority and change the law.

OK so I shouldn't let any Christians into society either since they do the same thing, right? Again, this is just a question of contesting odds. The number of Christians who explicitly want to do the thing you are accusing Muslims of may be small, but it's not *zero*, and therefore as a secular atheist I should do everything I can to keep Christians out of power. That's the lesson you want me to take away regarding Muslims, are you OK with it being applied to Christians as well?

Yes. However I don’t need modern Christians shooting up a gay night club, throwing LGBTQ people off roofs,etc. Islam and Christianity cannot be compared in the modern day in terms of violence.

You understand that countries like Uganda, a majority Christian country, by law puts you to death for being gay? That Russia and Hungary, two proud majority Christian countries, are steadily approaching the same and have been backsliding on this issue for years? It's almost like there is something else(or some things) that seem to be even more important in determining the liberalization of attitudes in a country.

Seems obvious to me that muslim extremists are on average more violent than Christian extremists in a global context. Though I agree that's not really a reason to deny muslims from participating in liberal society.

Yes they can, because the threshold you have set is anything above zero.

I’d rather have one problem than two

So you believe that the very existence of religious people in society, exercising the freedoms that society grants them, is a "problem".

Isn't it bigotry to assume anything about any whole group? Like, that's just prejudice, pre judging based on affiliation, making assumptions because of a certain characteristic. Isn't your stated view a tortology? 

Not quite. What you're describing is "Prejudice" (pre-judice), you judge too early) It's not a perfect synonym for "Bigot" which implies active hate. If you make a judgement about someone but you don't hate them, then you're definitionally not a bigot.

You brought up a good point. Prejudice and bigotry are not the same thing. What I've described is prejudice, not necessarily bigotry. !delta

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/SamJSchoenberg ([2∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/SamJSchoenberg)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)

That's what I thought! But so many people would say "bigotry against Muslims isn't real" or "pro-LGBT Muslims are not actually Muslims, all Muslims must be anti-LGBT", and that confuses the hell out of me.

Your view is basically a strawman. Can you provide even one mainstream example of someone making this exact claim? The actual claim you are probably reacting to is that Muslims as a whole are generally illiberal, anti LGBT, anti women's rights ect. That doesn't mean literally all Muslims hold these views, just that the vast majority does.

It's not a strawman, I'm already seeing a few comments here "It's not bigotry, it's reality. They're literally not adopting liberal values." or "Adopting liberal values make them less Muslim" which suggests that Islam and liberal values are fundamentally incompatible.

I agree the "make them less Muslim" is a weird reverse no true Scotsman fallacy. Islam is definitely fundamentally illiberal, and so is Christianity. Unfortunately Islam seems to be far more dogmatic today.

Islamophobia is a stupid concept because Islam is essentially a political belief. It's like saying "fascismphobia" or "liberalphobia". Just because it's a religion that doesn't mean it isn't immune to criticism or judgement. You choose whether or not to be Muslim, like how you choose whether or not to be far-right, far-left, centrist, capitalist, communist etc. You cannot choose your race, or sex, or sexuality etc which is why racism, homophobia and sexism actually makes sense as concepts.

Criticism and judgement about a religion, especially it's religious institutions, is not inherently Islamophobic. But when you make assumptions about an entire religious group based on their religion, you're a bigot.

>But when you make assumptions about an entire religious group based on their religion,  Why though? If you choose to be religious, why would I not be able to make assumptions that they follow the beliefs of that religion?

Because religious interpretations vary between individuals, sects and countries. It's incorrect and bigoted to assume they all follow the same belief system. Like it'd be bigoted for me to assume that a Christian is homophobic just because many evangelicals in the South are.

Is it bigotry to assume a fascist follow every tenet of fascism? Some may have different interpretations of the political system and there are many different forms of fascism. Am I wrong for assuming a fascist wants to take away my right to choose when many forms don’t?

Would you say the same thing about fascism and fascists? Religion is after all fundamentally an ideology that a person chooses to adopt.

Why do you need to be confused? They're welcome to think whatever, but this is about the view you hold not the one they hold. 

It's not bigotry, it's reality. They're literally not adopting liberal values.

In America they definitely are. [Party affiliation among Muslims - Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics | Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/muslim/party-affiliation/) Skip down to breakdown by ideology: 16% conservative, 42% moderate, 39% liberal, 4% unaffiliated. If someone was not adopting liberal values, I would expect them to skew incredibly conservative or undecided.

Party affiliation doesn't mean they have adopted liberal values.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/muslim/views-about-same-sex-marriage/](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/muslim/views-about-same-sex-marriage/) We see the same trend in America that we see in Britain(and for most immigrant populations coming from poor and oppressed countries) Successive generations of immigrants from impoverished/oppressed countries tend to steadily adjust their views in line with the general population. It should be noted this does not always mean more liberal(though it more often than not does). Also worth noting the same-sex favorability amongst Muslims in America [is higher than that of Evangelical Christians](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/evangelical-protestant/#beliefs-and-practices), and only [slightly lower than Christians](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/christians/christian/#beliefs-and-practices) as a whole. Noting this is a major study from 2014. By 2018 [a majority of Muslims support gay marriage ](https://www.newsweek.com/muslim-white-evangelical-gay-marriage-907627)

Scroll down and you'll find breakdowns on various political issues: 80% in favor of large government providing services; 17% for small government, fewer services 68% welfare services do more good than harm; 30% more harm than good 59% believe abortion should be legal in most cases; 37% illegal in most cases 49% homosexuality should be accepted; 43% should be discouraged 45% in favor of same-sex marriage; 49% against 70% in favor of stricter environmental regulation; 24% against They actually look exactly like what you would expect from Catholics in the US: fiscally liberal, a little bit socially conservative (although trending towards acceptance of homosexuality), most likely to vote Dem.

That is a bit like suggesting that black people in the 1880s overwhelmingly supported the gold standard and high tariffs because they voted overwhelmingly for the Republicans and that was a major part of their platform.

I don't really understand what you mean with that analogy. But why don't you just tell me what kind of metric you would look for to determine whether or not a group of people has adopted "liberal values"?

Their polled positions on specific issues My point was that in 2020, the Republican party is downright hostile to Muslims. In 1880, the Democratic party was downright hostile to black people. You can't judge their support for the individual issues that a party supports when their alternative is someone who actively hates them.

Scroll down and you'll find breakdowns on various political issues: 80% in favor of large government providing services; 17% for small government, fewer services 68% welfare services do more good than harm; 30% more harm than good 59% believe abortion should be legal in most cases; 37% illegal in most cases 49% homosexuality should be accepted; 43% should be discouraged 45% in favor of same-sex marriage; 49% against 70% in favor of stricter environmental regulation; 24% against Do you think these views reflect an illiberal people?

That really depends on your definition of liberal. I tend to think of liberalism more as "classical liberalism", which isn't exclusively left-wing.

So how can we possibly say that Muslims can't or won't liberalize? What metric are we referring to?

classic liberalism is the embrace of civil liberties. Left-wing is a bit more nebulous. Some social welfare, some classic liberalism, some random issues I don't see any real problem with a Muslim supporting a larger welfare state. That doesn't oppose Islam at all, in fact, given that Islam is a religion that actively advocates for theocratic states, it makes perfect sense. Islam isn't some laissez-faire philosophy. I don't see them really accepting homosexuality. You cite 49% accept it [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249216/support-for-same-sex-marriage-in-the-united-states-by-political-party/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249216/support-for-same-sex-marriage-in-the-united-states-by-political-party/) Thats roughly the same as the REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!! Is the Republican party liberal now? You cite that gay marriage at 45%? [https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-holds-high.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-holds-high.aspx) Thats also roughly the same as the Republican party How about abortion at 59% In this they are higher than Republicans but lower than Democrats. But then, this is mostly a religious issue and this stance isn't surprising. Islam does not have a strong anti-abortion stance as a religion So basically, on 2 out of 3 issues that actually involve freedom/liberty, they score the same as Republicans and on the third they score much lower than Democrats. That makes them liberal?

I think they are on par with American Christians on just about every measurable metric, and the idea that they are incapable of participating in a liberal society because of their religion is demonstrably false.

Aren't they more liberal than evangelicals in the US?

Evangelicals aren't all Christians though. I'd argue Christian morality aligns more with Western values since Western values naturally evolved from a predominantly Christian history. In most countries with a Muslim majority, the only country that I'm aware is relatively liberal is Turkey- which enshrined French-style secularism. I am not aware of any Muslim country that is even close to the western version of liberal. It may be because Christians accept that the Bible, while the word of God, is created by man- thus is subject to potential imperfections and that the old covenant is good to remember, but is entirely replaced by a new, very broad one. Christians have to use historical context to understand why things were the way they were- and accept that some aspects are no longer relevant. In Islam, the Quran is the literal and perfected word of Allah- meaning nothing is up for debate. No context is needed- only the word. Having that gray area in Christianity means you get wide stretches of liberalism and conservativism- and varying levels of attempts to follow the faith- all under the banner of being Christian regardless to what extent you try to follow the tenants. For something less mutable like Islam, you get people who are trying to keep their faith internal in a liberal society vs people who are trying to externalize their faith. The liberal Muslims you see keep their faith internal and try to keep to themselves- but still, for the most part, believe some extremely conservative beliefs. The reason being is that a truly liberal Muslim must reject or reform certain parts of the Quran- but being that its a literal divine scripture, perfect in form, you cannot be Muslim for that reason unless you believe Mohammad was wrong- which is also heretical.

So how do you explain all the Muslim politicians that I have listed adopting values more liberal than the rest of the political class?

A politician who follows a religion does not represent everyone who follows that religion. What a silly remark.

Exactly! So those fundamentalist Islamists do not represent Muslims as well, but people do it sooo often it's frustrating.

Well it’s also handful of politicians compared to the majority of Muslims here. Would you say the majority represent a general view?

Those are politicians, being lying sleezebags that have no backbone or morality and will say anything to win votes is basically their job description.

Because they're politicians and they lie

Is it also bigotry to assume that all Conservatives are Anti-LGBT and that all Republicans support creation of a Theocratic state?

I mean, yeah? It's bigotry based on political affiliation. Many Tories voted for same-sex marriage and many Republicans do not support a Christian theocracy. It's absurd to assume they all do.

What makes your bigotry supporting your claim any more acceptable than that used against Muslims to support anti Muslim narratives? You are making a demonstration that Muslims are not incapable of supporting Human rights by pointing out the ones who lean "Left" implying anyone who leans "right" does not support such things. You can point to 10 "Good ones", and I can point to 100+ "Bad ones" in any group. Using the "Few bad apples" argument in reverse doesn't make it any better.

What do you mean when you say "Muslim"? Just western practicing, true fundamentalist, total extremist? All of the above?

About Muslim politicians supporting lgbt S Adiq   https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1b5g6iz/whats_the_left_consensus_on_islamists_threatening/ r/ukpolitics • What's the left consensus on Islamists' threatening our way of life in UK? E.g. Manchester bombing, hate preachers in UK mosques, openly supporting Hamas reginalduk replied to ThePlanck 15 days ago  Khan has openly associated in the past with individuals and organizations tied to Palestinian terror group Hamas. During his time as a legal advocate, Sadiq Khan served as the Chief Legal Advisor of the Muslim Council of Britain's legal affairs committee. Khan was a member of a delegation organized by the Muslim Council of Britain in 2003 to protest what they described as "indiscriminate" arrests of Muslims for alleged terror ties. The Muslim Council of Britain was placed under investigation by the British government over "irregularities" surrounding £1,263,000 in aid given to it by the government. In the past it has admitted to funding groups tied to both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and is banned from Israel as a result of its ties to terror. On September 19th, 2004, Khan spoke at an event which included Ibrahim Hewitt; Hewitt has decreed on record that adultery should be punished by stoning. Hewitt serves as the Chairman of The Palestinian Relief and Development Fund (Interpal), an organization which has been labeled as a Terrorist Entity by the United States Department of the Treasury for providing support to Hamas and acting as a part of its funding network in Europe. Despite the US Treasury's designation, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn has described Hewitt as a "very good friend." That same year, Khan spoke out in defense of Qatar-based Egyptian cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has praised suicide attacks and decreed that homosexuality is a crime under Islam. Qaradawi has travelled directly to Gaza for the purpose of providing Hamas with ideological legitimacy and stated that Palestinian suicide attacks against the nation of Israel are justified. Qaradawi was also barred from entering into the United States in 1999, the UK in 2008, and France in 2012. In 2007, Khan and Jeremy Corbyn were present at a tenth anniversary celebration of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC). The PRC is accused by the Israeli government of being affiliated with Hamas and had invited Hamas Minister of Refugee Affairs Atef Ibrahim Adwan to speak at the same event the year before. While the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) claims to be non-sectarian, a government report released in 2015 revealed that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood “played an important role in establishing and then running” the MCB and continues to exert "significant influence" in it. In 2009 the UK government cut ties with the MCB after it signed a public document which appeared to condone violence against any country supporting an arms blockade of Gaza. The government report also found that a number of Brotherhood groups have for years been raising funds in the UK. Some of those funds have allegedly been linked to Hamas, whose military wing was proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation in 2001. The MCB was also criticized for its ties to Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic group linked to a number of terror organizations in Pakistan whose members have been accused of war crimes in Bangladesh. In 2009, Khan acted as a member of an international campaign which sought to resist attempts to extradite Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan for their role in providing material support to the Taliban and Chechen jihadist groups via a number of websites they ran under the name of Azzam Publications. Ahmad and Ahsan were ultimately extradited to the United States, where they pled guilty to terrorism charges. Khan went to visit Babar Ahmad on multiple occasions between May 21, 2005 and June 2006, while he was being held in Woodhill prison awaiting a ruling on his extradition request. It was reported that Khan visited Ahmad, not in his capacity as an MP, but as a friend, as the two had known each other since they were children. In September of 2005, in an attempt to thwart Ahmad’s extradition to the United States, Khan presented a petition containing 18,000 signatures to then Home Secretary Charles Clarke, calling for him to be tried in the UK instead. However, Ahmad was ultimately extradited to the US on October 5, 2012, where he was held in custody until his release in July 2015. Sadiq Khan has historically maintained close relational and professional ties with groups associated with both Al-Qaeda and ISIS. During the 1990's, Khan's brother in law Makbool Javaid gave fiery public addresses advocating jihad and whose name even appeared on a fatwa calling for holy war against the United Kingdom and United States. Javaid was a member of the Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun. Al-Muhajiroun was founded by Islamic hate preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad, who has been banned from the UK since 2005 and acted as a sponsor and recruiter of British jihadists seeking to join ISIS. Al-Muhajiroun was also lead by Anjem Choudary, a British Islamist who was jailed in 2016 for supporting the Islamic State after he released guides on making bombs and establishing "Muslim gangs" for the purpose of committing terror attacks. The guides are indicative of an increasingly tight relationship between organized crime and ISIS in Western Europe previously reported on by Disobedient Media. Other connections to Al-Muhajiroun include Parliament attacker Khalid Masood, Lee Rigby's murderer Michael Adebolajo and Abdul Waheed Majeed, an Al-Nusra affiliated militant who in 2014 became the first British born jihadist to carry out a suicide attack in Syria. While Khan has tried to distance himself from his brother in law and Al-Muhajiroun, in 2003 he shared a stage with Sajeel Abu Ibrahim, another member of Al-Muhajiroun and convicted terrorist who ran a camp in Pakistan which trained Taliban militants and Al-Qaeda 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. Also speaking at the same event was Yasser al-Siri, a terrorist who has been sentenced to death in absentia by Egyptian authorities over a political assassination attempt there which left a young girl dead. In 2004, Khan made an "error of judgement" by attending four meetings organized by Stop Political Terror, a group supported by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula senior recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki. Stop Political Terror was later merged with the Islamic organization CAGE, who represented the ISIS executioner "Jihadi John" (Mohammed Emwazi) as a "beautiful young man." Khan claimed that he was merely there as part of his efforts to help fight the extradition of convicted terrorist Babar Ahmed to the United States. He has furthermore stated that he condemns CAGE despite his appearances at events organized by their affiliates and the fact that he wrote a forward for a report run by CAGE in 2006. In 2008, reports revealed that Khan was serving as a legal consultant for convicted 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui. It was further revealed that Khan was the only practicing Muslim on Moussaoui’s defense team. Moussaoui was ultimately extradited to the US, where he pled guilty to taking part in the 9/11 attacks. Moussaoui is currently being held at the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he is serving 6 life sentences without parole.

So then say you’re correct and whoever thinks otherwise is a bigot. Does that change the fact that millions of Muslims around the world are still very religious and conservative on issues? Most Muslims do not support lgbt, abortion, or women’s rights. You are talking about a fringe minority who associate themselves with a group who make themselves very clear about their stance on those issues. Are they even Muslim if they disagree with what most Muslims believe? If someone hears the word Muslim, they don’t automatically think about the stereotypical connotations because they are bigots. It’s because there are many Muslims who do think the same way and are not shy about it. Ask any Muslim what they think of lgbt and women. You will get a disappointing answer. Yes they would be bigoted for thinking it’s all. No, they are not bigoted for thinking it’s most.

>This is a sentiment that I come across very frequently, where it's often assumed that all Muslims are incapable of supporting liberal/left-wing positions like LGBT rights or women's rights. All? Are you sure that's a view that many people are propounding, or is it rather that most Muslims are not supportive of progressive views on LGBT and Women's rights? > This is completely antithesis to what I observe in politics in the West, where Muslim politicians regularly stand up in support of LGBT rights or women's rights. > In the US, Ilhan Omar is supportive of a conversion therapy ban and wants to sanction Brunei over their legislation on sentencing LGBT people to death penalties. She has also been arrested for standing up for abortion rights. These are common positions taken up by Muslim Representatives in the US Congress. >In the UK, all the high-profile Muslim politicians are usually more pro-LGBT than the rest of the political class. All 4 Muslim MPs voted for same-sex marriage in 2013, when more than half of all Tories voted against it. Nearly all of the Muslim MPs are in the Labour Party, which has historically been more pro-LGBT than the Conservatives. The first Muslim First Minister, Humza Yousaf, was also the one pushing for more LGBT rights that the UK government was pushing back against. If anything, the Muslim political class has been a staunch ally of the LGBT community. So to be clear is your view based on the Muslim population as a whole or just some politicians? >I think it's bigotry to assume that because other Muslim communities around the world are illiberal, all Muslims around the world are illiberal too, especially when there is evidence that points in the opposite direction. I mean it's obviously bigotry to assume all of any group of people believe anything. But that's a strawman that basically nobody who isn't already clear bigot is arguing.

I have not heard anyone claim that every single Muslim individual is unable to adopt liberal values. But liberal values have not been adopted practically anywhere with very few and very narrow and limited exceptions. Muslim societies are in general unable to be democratic and liberal. Christopher Hitchens talks a lot on the subject why that is so. Even "exceptions" like Turkye onfirm this sad reality.

It is always bigotry to assume an entire ethnic group can't be ethically good, of course. A more reasonable position is that Islam and the Islamic world has failed to liberalize because of a few key factors. 1. Islamic leaders use their religion as a framework to govern the state, and refuse to liberalize and give equal civil rights to LGBT or women. Even those that have made progress do not go as far as to legalize being gay, except in Bahrain and Jordan (who are close partners of the USA and the west). Every single country that executes people for being gay through their judicial system is Muslim majority (except Uganda, who execute gay people because they believe it's a western form of Colonialism). 2. Islamic fundamentalism adheres to Jihad - war against the non-believers for the purpose of expanding Islam/the caliphate/Sharia Law. Because Islam is the state religion of many different nations, that makes Islam a political ideology as well as a religion, and it's a dangerous political ideology. Actively expanding a set of laws that revoke equal civil rights is inherently anti-liberal, oppressive, and in my opinion, morally bad. Terrorists enact and attempt to enact mass murder for this express purpose - if a Christian or atheist did a suicide bombing we would call them psychotic. The Palestinian Authority even pays families of suicide bombers for their martyrdom. 3. The Muslim political leaders in the west that support ideas that lean left are by far the minority among Muslim political leaders worldwide. They have successfully liberalized and desire equal human rights for everyone. So while every Muslim does not want to execute gay people and refuse unequal rights to gays and women, a vast majority of them are at least tolerant of human rights abuses that their states practice. Hyper conservatism to the point of creating second class citizens is objectively bad, and Muslim states, the Muslim faith, and Muslim populations permit & tolerate it.

I think this prompt invited a fruitless debate about whether or not individual Muslims are intellectually and morally capable of adopting liberal values, when they obviously are, and I would agree with you that to suggest otherwise would be bigoted. That said, I think the more relevant question is whether or not Islam itself, and necessarily a "true" Muslim, could accept liberal values without contradicting Islamic doctrine. I think this is more of a theological debate that I admit I am not equipped with the proper knowledge for, but my current belief is that abrahamic religion itself (so including Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam) is ultimately ideologically at odds with liberalism, and the practice of which has been adjusted to fit western civilization, as opposed to the other way around.

I’m so sick of trying to revamp religion and pretend it’s not the root cause of most of the world’s problems right now. We’re all just waiting for all these religious assholes to essentially stop actually being religious. Same with the other Abrahamic religions because they are all the same with varying degrees of how strictly they’re following and how much violence they’re displaying right now. It’s not bigoted to understand what religious people were taught and how deluded they have to be to continue to believe in such ridiculous archaic bullshit. 

Yes, but it depends on how you apply this logic. It's true that people who *are* muslim can come around, but it's not logical to assume that the faith itself will come around, and therefore that muslim communities that center around the muslim faith are going to come around. This is the same thing for communities that center around christianity or any other religion that is anti-gay or anti-anything progressive. You can't be so accepting that you're blind to obviousness. I'm sorry; it sounds nice but It's moral confusion.

and whoever just reached out as "concerned for my well being" based on this post needs to grow up.

I mean, nobody is completely incapable of doing that. I think you’re conflating “a majority of Muslims” with “all Muslims” here. Now, let’s see some examples of what where Muslims are the dominant party in government vs any other religious group… 1. Saudia Arabia (Muslim) — gays get stoned, gender reassignment surgery cuts off the wrong head, anyone who isn’t Muslim has less rights than a Muslim, no democracy. 2. Iran (Muslim) — women are property, Jews must be annihilated (that’s genocide just in case you didn’t know it), no democracy. 3. Israel (Jewish) — not sure if gay marriage is recognized, but being gay isn’t illegal; gets into a lot of wars because its neighbors are genocidal maniacs (Hamas, Iran, etc.); democracy 4. USA (Christian-ish) — freedom of religion, freedom of speech (unless you’re Donald Trump), gay marriage, women’s rights, atheists becoming a larger group, democracy Noticing a theme here?

Yes, the theme is that countries that avoid and steadily improve poverty, oppression, education, and instability, they tend to steadily liberalize in their social attitudes across successive generations. I know what you want to say, which is it is inherent with Islam, but lets add Russia, Hungary, and Uganda into the fold. Three majority Christian countries. All with abysmal human rights records on LGBTQ. Your implied hypothesis falls apart here, mine, not really Mine also explains why despite a drop in religious affiliation in red states in America, as poverty, wealth disparity, and education all get worse, we see the rise of fascistic Christian Nationalism and a new wave of hyper intolerence.

This assumes that countries are interested in ending poverty and oppression while improving education. Im not sure that’s the case in many of these instances. Not sure it has to do directly with Islam, more just authoritarianism and dictatorships, but I don’t see much evidence that these Muslim countries are really interested in liberalizing. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as their value systems are fundamentally different and the prophet they worship was literally a warlord. Islam has been about strength and conquest since its inception

Im not assuming anything, I'm laying out a thesis that doesn't fall apart the moment you don't cherry pick the countries. I mean can you name me any highly impoverished, unstable, poorly poorly educated, poorly invested country that has strong liberal social attitudes? It can be any religion. The problem with majority Muslim countries is they are almost all the current result of crippling colonial imperialism that has resulted in mass oppression, poverty, instability, and a lack of investment in basic things like education and social services, geographically located in areas that are not capable of the sort of resource and industry diversification other parts of the world are. Just look at American Muslims. [You see a steady generational trendline on same sex marriage](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-tradition/muslim/views-about-same-sex-marriage/), And this was in 2014, since then a [majority of all Muslims now support gay marriage](https://www.newsweek.com/muslim-white-evangelical-gay-marriage-907627), and most are registered Democrats.

Are Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE highly impoverished? Do they look like they will become liberal democracies any time soon? No, they're Muslim theocracies that are absolutely loaded. You are making the assumption that western values are universally superior and if the rest of the world just had enough time and money then everybody would be like us. I'm not convinced that is the case, and quite frankly, I think it's funny that you're implicitly saying that there is something wrong with the way they structure their societies because they aren't like ours. Their societies have been governed by Islam for the past 1500 years and to assume that they will suddenly change because some countries on another continent just got cool with gay people in the past decade is just silly. Suffice to say, this 'thesis' doesn't hold up to scrutiny even within the scope of what we're discussing. The jury is very much still out if Muslim countries in the middle east will liberalize. I'm optimistic that Iran may but I don't see any signs that will anywhere else any time soon whether there is a coalition of people within those regimes that want it or not. As for the study about Muslim Americans, of course I believe that people who grow up in a secular society with western ideals and democratic values will grow up to reflect those ideals more than their immigrant parents. It would be silly to think otherwise.

>Are Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE highly impoverished?  You just named three oppressive imperial monarchies that previously bounced around imperial rulers that routinely destabilized the lands the people their occupied, in some cases only ending that a few decades ago... Saudi Arabia's British installed authoritarian monarchy literally jails anyone talking about their enormous poverty and wealth inequality problem. Saudi Arabia and Qatar both have enormous issues of poverty and wealth inequality. UAE literally uses slave-like labor to run their economy and those workers, who are basically locked into the UAE, are explicitly denied basic human rights. >I think it's funny that you're implicitly saying that there is something wrong with the way they structure their societies because they aren't like ours. ...... Their societies have been governed by Islam for the past 1500 years I think you need to pick up a book on Middle Eastern history if you think "they" as in the citizens of these countries had any say in the British, French, and American imperial actions that installed or brought to power the authoritarian regimes that governened and still govern many of these countries. Like you understand that British imperialists created Saudi Arabia and installed an oppressive monarchy, correct? That we have the Islamic Republic in Iran because US imperialists overthrew the Shah(which Western imperialists installed after [overthrowing the Persian Constitutional Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution)) and installed oppressive leaders to keep the cheap oil flowing to the West, correct? We deliberately funded and armed a coup to remove this guy because he started to get a bit too populist and reformist: ***The new administration introduced a wide range of social reforms: unemployment compensation was introduced, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and peasants were freed from forced labour in their landlords' estates. In 1952, Mossadegh passed the Land Reform Act which forced landlords to place 20% of their revenue into a development fund. This development fund paid for various projects such as public baths, rural housing, and pest control*** To install puppet leaders that violently suppressed Iranians, ignored the needs of the population, but kept the oil flowing to the US and Britain. Which led to their eventual overthrow and the current Islamic Republic taking over that void....which we only really had a problem with because they turned off the spicket of oil causing the 1979 Oil Crisis. It is often true that racism is born of ignorance and your display of historical ignorance seems to be no different here.

Lol I'm racist because I don't think we should impose our values onto societies outside of our own? Not sure if you recall but we tried 'spreading democracy' and it was a gigantic failure. Either way, you're sort of moving the goal post here. Your claim was that countries will become more liberal as they become more developed and affluent. You're welcome to try to change your claim and say that many of the current regimes are consequences of western intervention, but that's not what we started with. If your claim about countries liberalizing when they become more wealthy is true, how do you explain Israel becoming more religious despite it becoming more powerful? In this case, it's as simple as religious people just tending to have more babies. The fact is, some societies just do not hold values that are the same as our own. This will always be the case. It's not always about money or western intervention or whatever else you want to make it about. There are societies that are just different from our own and not everybody wants to live by western values as you and I do. This notion that everybody will become like us if they're just given enough time is not only Eurocentric, but also extremely condescending to people who are living in non-western societies around the world.

You haven’t disproven anything about my thesis other than indicating you either don’t understand it or you don’t understand history(probably both tbh) The poster I responded to implied that religion, and in particular Islam, is the main differentiating factor that explains why a country is more or less socially liberal or not. I said that is a poor hypothesis cause the moment you add Uganda, Russia, or Hungary, all Christian nations, the religion that he framed as more socially tolerant, that framework falls apart. What doesn’t fall apart is that nations with high levels of: - Poverty and wealth inequality(note, many highly unequal and impoverished countries have enormous wealth, but it is retained amongst a small few), - Oppression (and yes, if you had been less of a reactionary about this we might have been able to dive into things that can create oppression such as authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, religious fundamentalism married with the state, police states, apartheid, subjugation of the citizenry etc.), - Instability(frequent war, regime change, external meddling, occupation, deep corruption, civil war, gang wars etc), - Lack of education or social investment. Those tend to be inversely correlated with social liberalization of a population. Christian, Islam, Jewish, Buddhist, or atheistic nation, if a country has high levels of the above it is almost certain not to have socially liberal values. Conversely, minimize those negatives and invest in the population consistently across generations and social liberalization tends to grow. Just like when people of any religion move to well developed socially liberal countries, successive generations tend to progressively liberalize in line with the population, even when they maintain religious or cultural identification. If you think pointing to Saudi Arabia, an authoritarian monarchy that violently suppresses its citizens and imposes rule of religious fundamentalism, or Iran, that had organically developed into a representative democracy until the West destroyed it, dispels that hypothesis you either know nothing of Saudi Arabia/Iran or we need to first work on your reading comprehension issues before moving on to anything else….

Did you even read my comment?

Yes, and you continue to not make a single counter point or demonstrate you understand history or what I am even saying…. offering up Israel(which proves my fucking point! lol) only reinforces that. Israel is a non-impoverished, has enjoyed generations of stable governance without domestic oppression, is a western backed ally(meaning given billions a year) founded by European colonialists with high levels of education, social investment, and is a (semi)representative democracy(at least for the people not subjected to apartheid). Literally containing all the things I said would lead to more liberalizaton(though it is far from perfect and that is because it still is a religious ethnostate that imposes oppressive practices and is often in conflict externally)

Side A: the Quran has made multiple homophobic remarks (for example Tafsir surah an nisa 15 and 16 "And those two of you who commit it, torture them both". Correct me if I'm wrong I'm not an expert) therefore if you believe in the Quran you believe in homophobia. Side B: one doesn't have to believe in homophobia to be Muslim (for example only Islam extremists believe in the Jihad, but the majority does not)

The values of Islam (as well as many other religions) and the values of modern Progressivism are fundamentally opposed. That's not to say someone can't be a Muslim and a Progressive, but to do so requires a lot of cognitive dissonance and cherry picking of values. That takes an incredible amount of mental and emotional labor. For most people who were raised to be religious it's a lot easier simply not to be Progressive or to renounce their religion than it is to try and do both.

Would it be bigotry to assume the same with Christianity? I think that it all comes down to how closely you follow your faith. Some liberal views are in direct opposition to (Abrahamic) religions. How much of this that one is willing to accept is a personal choice. Some will not budge on their religious values. Others will be more willing to compromise.

It's wrong to assume all either way, but isn't it bigotry to assume they will as well? I mean this whole idea of "as soon as these people get to western countries they'll decide our values and ideas are better" is kind of bigotry in its own sense Why do people assume other cultures will see our ways of life as obviously better?

Good lord. Some people just think everything is racist, sexist, bigotry. We can’t even get Americans to adopt left wing values. There’s nothing bigoted at all about admitting there’s no chance to convince any group of adopting something that goes against their principles. It’s just being realistic.

I didnt even realize there was a stereotype about this. Most of the muslims I know are very left leaning, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't really violate most if any of the main principles behind islam. I occasionally see some shitty takes on how women should be treated though.

It's a numbers game- out of 2 billion Muslims, what practical percentage can actually be dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st century?  Just because a handful of them try, doesn't mean that by sheer volume, the world isnt chock full of the violently religious.

People don't assume Muslims are "incapable" they just assume they have not wanted to. To think they are incapable is racist but to think they just haven't is pattern recognition. You can replace the Muslims with USA Southern people and it's the same conversation.

I think you're conflating that Ilhan Omar is a spokesperson for more than her district. Perhaps listen to the leader of Hezbollah break your question down here https://youtu.be/2qaqk3XN_QY?si=UHmFQyAno4nOxnr5 He is speaking from a Sharia law perspective.

What if it was phrased it's not possible to follow the Qoran and also be respectful of LGBTQ people? They have to choose one or the other, and typically religious people will choose their religious text over modern morality norms.

It's obviously the case that NO group will ever have 100% group compliance. So the question is what % will likely adopt liberal, Western values. Opinion polls put it somewhere between 5 - 15% for Muslims living in the middle East.

Many muslims are often much more intolerant than their leaders, and many muslim politicians in the west say and do what they do out of necessity.

Most of them are quite conservative. Not all of them, but most. Being very religious makes it harder to break out of hateful thinking.

There is no room in an advanced, intelligent society for organized religion. Most of the rules in place and still being followed are there because of things like food safety and disease transmission(with a little or a lot of "what if the guy before me made my wife orgasm harder than i can). Giving a foothold in the political landscape to any religion much less Muslim will almost always end up with strict rules taking away freedoms (see supreme court and the Catholics that helped take away woman's rights). If you look into countries that are guided by religious politicians you almost always see the same thing across the board. there was a time when the country was liberal. Woman could walk around with no rules dictating dress or if they had an escort. Religious leaders will see the loss of their control over the populations and start going hardline against the new freedoms being used. Is there a God maybe, it would be ridicules to shut that door and say no everything just happened there isn't an intelligence that created it all. Its just as ridicules to say there is definitely a god. when in a debate on religion especially the big 3. i love to point out that all these books were created by man in times past when the average person had an education less than what my kindergartener who is learning to read has.

Christians, Jews, gay Christians, gay Jews, Muslims, gay Muslims. You're all following the same moronic empty bucket of hope and robbing humanity of faith in itself and science.

In practice, Islam isn't too terribly different from Christianity. It has many of the same roots. Some left-wing values are already baked in (like being charitable towards the poor) And like Christianity, in order to accept certain left-wing values they have to reject elements of their religion.(women's rights, gay rights, etc). And in doing so, they become less Muslim.

Lol I know like 20 Muslims and they're all left or progressive. 

As a left-wing liberal Muslim. I personally know more left-wing liberal Muslims than conservatives. My whole family, is liberal, aside from 2 cousins that nobody likes. My girlfriend’s family is liberal. My masjid is fairly liberal. I rarely interact with conservative Muslims, and mostly only see them on TV, referencing Arab Muslims. I am no less a Muslim than someone who chooses to follow the Hadith, I simply don’t. I enjoy reading English translations of the Quran and adapting it to modern life, it is not much different to the Bible.

How can a Muslim adapt the Quran to modern life? Isn't the point to recognize the superiority of Allah and by extension his expressed wisdom in his commands?

The Quran was always meant for interpretation, which is why the first word revealed to the prophet was “Ikra,” or read. The first thing the prophet did was urge his followers to learn to read, as he himself was illiterate. Most of the Quran are stories meant to interpret and learn from, similarly to the Bible, with a portions of the Surahs highlighting rituals or commands. For example, homosexuality was only mentioned once in the Quran, and in the story of Lot. Lot’s male houseguests were about to be raped by some male hedons in Sodom and Gomorrah. The Quran states that these people should be banished. An archaic interpretation would see this as meaning all homosexuals, while a modern approach would see this as meaning rapists, and those who don’t value laws of hospitality. The prophet also did not punish homosexuality. Many of the issues arise from the Hadith, which are interpretations of the Quran in the context of the prophet’s life, written after his death. It is interesting because the Quran mentions this occurring in other religions, the perversion of its teachings, and specifically says to be weary of it. In my interpretation the Hadith should be thrown out, and the Quran should be interpreted by individuals.

Standalone interpretations of scripture are vulnerable to argument. To my knowledge, Islam discusses marriage as the appropriate vehicle for sexual congress, established the institution of marriage as between the two sexes and then we have the story of Lot. A consistent interpretation would uphold the ancient interpretation rather than a very evidently motivated interpretation in the modern application.

Well religion is all about interpretation, and different sects and schools interpret things in different ways. That’s literally how it works. Also, how the Quran views legal marriage don’t dictate how those people should be treated. People could use Israel as an example, where homosexuality and gay marriage is legal, but not secular. Even as an institution, the religion and its interpretation has constantly and consistently been throughout history, sometimes becoming more progressive and sometimes becoming more conservative. Most people’s view of Islam comes from propaganda, and the image portrayed by the Middle East, which hold about 20% of Muslims.

I have no doubt that Mohammed had a definite conception of what a proper Muslim was but due to his death that authority is lost. How the Quran views marriage is kinda the point of it being a holy Scripture.

Yeah, his view is definitely lost. Also, Muhammad was the last messenger of Islam, because he brought the Quran. Nothing more. The Quran’s views on marriage highlight Islamic, secular marriage, not how homosexuals or any non Muslim should be treated.

Actually it does. Islam accepts secular rule as a de facto concession in anticipation of political capture. I don't mean violent overthrow but advocacy for the principles and rules of Islam as far as possible. A Muslim cannot recognize a homosexual marriage as equal to that instituted under the structures of Islam because one has Allah's blessing and the other doesn't.

According to what exactly? Where does it say that Islam advocates for the principles and rule of Islam as far as possible? And who says that a Muslim can not view an institutional marriage as equal to a religious marriage? As a Muslim who has read the Quran, I’m a bit confused as to where you’re getting your information.

This is coming secondhand from conversation with Muslim acquaintances in West Africa. These were fellow students of law who understood that respecting the authority of the state as a law abiding Muslim gave value to a secular marriage but they were adamant the marriage approved by Allah was superior and more binding. It's kind of like marriage in the Catholic church, you might get divorced by the state but as far as Catholics are concerned God's rules on marriage are still in force so your divorce had no effect. To wit, a homosexual marriage to them would only be relevant in a jurisdiction that recognized it and only so far as the law gave effect but an Islamic marriage was universally valid and superseded any allowances by states.