DEFINING RACE AND RELIGION

Can we just clarify here that Islam is not a race? It’s a religion. So whatever concern about Islam may be, it’s not racism.

It should be fairly easy to tell them apart. Race is about skin colour and other superficial physical characteristics and religion is about the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Hence black, Asian, Arab and white are “races” (yes, of course it’s a pseudoscientific concept) whereas Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and so on are religions.

Too obvious to be worth stating? Well, consider Monday’s National Post story that, “A board member with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, an arm’s-length federal government agency with a mandate to combat racial discrimination, is in jeopardy of losing her post over her writings on the controversial website Jihad Watch.” And her situation is far from unique. To raise questions about militant Islam, or the extent to which fundamentalism is inherent in Muslim scriptures and doctrines, is to invite accusations of racism.

In saying so I am not taking a position on those questions here. I am just saying that if people who worry about such things are wrong, they are wrong for different reasons and in different ways than people who are wrong about other races because they are bigots.

If you want proof that Islam is not a race, you could start by asking Muslims, who will respond overwhelmingly that their message and faith are for everybody. And in fact the history of Islam is relatively free of invidious distinctions based on race or ethnicity.

There is much to debate about religions, including whether atheism is one, as well as the oddly prevalent notion that all faiths are essentially the same despite their adherents’ stubborn hang-ups over doctrine. I have long treasured the retort of a self-described “skeptic” that “Atheism is a religion the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby.” But I am not persuaded. Atheism addresses the same core questions as religions from Hinduism to Mormonism, and offers firm answers. Its answers are different. But different religions’ answers do differ on key points.

It is also true that some religions have well-defined scriptures and doctrinal authority, like Roman Catholicism, whereas others have well-defined scriptures but far looser organizational structure, including much of Islam and Protestant as prickly mental rigidity: “Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.” Which if accurate would also encompass those unable to respond to a critique of Islamism except by labelling it racism.

Some might do so from a kind of cosmic belief that all ills are one, including that any form of fear and dislike of “The Other” has racism as its template and inevitable accompaniment. But this view is hard to square with sharp critiques of fundamentalism from within Islam. And especially as racism is widely seen today as the most despicable attitude a person can take, it is a scurrilous way to argue.

Others might allege that opposition to Islam is really driven by specifically anti-Arab feeling, since most people in the Middle East are both Muslim and Arab. But this argument will not long survive contact with basic facts like Indonesia having the largest Muslim population on Earth at just over 200 million, followed by India with 180 million.

There is a fallback position that Indonesians and Indians like Arabs are non-white so “Islamophobia” is just a reflection of generic antinon-white bigotry, especially if linked to concerns about immigration. But a majority of Christians worldwide are also not white, yet anti-Christian arguments, or bigotry, generally come from very different sources. So calling concern about Islam racism just muddies the waters, in your own brain then in public debate.

I’m also not impressed by the claim that Islam isn’t so much a religion as a political ideology. Islam as a theological doctrine has political implications including for the separation of church and state, implications worth discussing, debating and otherwise taking seriously precisely because they derive from a coherent set of ideas about man’s relationship to God.

Which is how you tell it’s a religion. Not a race.