Help educate your ‘racist’ friend about the Muslim faith
Following recent terrorist incidents, I have been receiving hateful emails targeting Muslims. Some pose as “jokes,” others outline “truths” about Muslims and terrorism. These emails are overtly racist, distorting facts and misrepresenting entire populations. Until recently, I’ve deleted them. But lately, I’ve felt that my silence translates into acceptance — or, worse, tacit approval. These emails come from one person who has many positive characteristics; she’s a caring friend to many people, including me. I feel uncomfortable telling her she is a racist bigot. How do I handle this?
Calling your friend a bigot accomplishes nothing. Not only will it destroy your friendship; such labelling often causes people to become even more extreme. Witness Donald Trump; confronted with universal condemnation of his, arguably, fascist attitudes, he only wallows deeper, like a contented pig ever more contented in his own excrement.
Your friend, and perhaps you, need a little education.
Anti-Muslim emails are not racist. They may be spiteful and prejudicial, but they are not racist per se, for the simple reason that Islam is not a race. Islam is a religion.
There are black Muslims, white Muslims and brown ones, too — with a variety of other shades. Just as there are devout Christians, casual Christians and a few fundamentalist, radicalized wing-nuts — the kind that blew up abortion clinics or planted letter bombs in Irish mailboxes — there are devout Muslims, casual ones and a few radicalized wing-nuts here as well.
Muslims are not Arabs, and Arabs are not Muslims. Many are, of course, but some Arabs are Christian and some Jews self-identify as Arab. Many Muslims are Canadian, American, British, French; in each of those countries, and many other “western” states, there are neighbourhoods where Muslims outnumber Christians, sometimes by a vast majority.
Muslims are not a race, not a nationality, not even a “people” — in the way that some ethno-cultural groups (Francophone Canadians?) identify themselves as a “distinct society” in the midst of others of the same race. Muslims are folks who practice a religion whose immediate siblings and soulmates are, for better and worse . . . Christianity and Judaism.
Why does this matter? It matters because, as insidious a force as racism has been in shaping the world’s sad history, it can’t hold a candle to damage inflicted as a result of inter-religious polemic and hatred. Auschwitz, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Holy Land, Burma, Sri Lanka — an endless list of conflicts that are the products of interreligious suspicions, fears and isolationism.
No Jew, with sensitivity to the forces that caused the Holocaust, could ridicule a Muslim in the current global climate of neo-fascism. Jews have been there. And no Christian who understands the dynamics surrounding the crucifixion of their founder, would participate in mob-mentality born of religious zealotry.
Don’t call your friend a bigot; that won’t help. Instead, invite her to participate, with you, in any of countless opportunities available to meet with Muslims in your own city. She, and you, will discover that the values and fears that unite them aren’t very different from your own.
Then the emails will stop. Send your questions to star.ethics@yahoo.ca