A response to Michael Huemer on why progressives like Islam

I initially wrote this as a note which I couldn't post and it would make me sad if I couldn't post it somehow

Michael Humer wrote this post on the question of why progressives like Islam and concluded that it was primarily because of progressive opposition to Western European societies and their offshoots. As a sociological matter, this could well be correct, but I also think that there is a principled defence of the practice of opposing Islamaphobia and treating Islam in a similar way to how we treat more obviously permanent characteristics like race or sex.

So why do I, as someone who is approximately a progressive (a liberal with social democratic sympathies), think Islamaphobia is an important issue and criticise anti-Islamic rhetoric more harshly than anti-Christian rhetoric in Western European societies and their offshoots.

I think that there is often significant prejudice against outsiders with significant differences in Western European societies and their offshoots and that that is often expressed as disliking Islam and is sometimes justified in an ad hoc way by arguments that Islam is socially harmful.

I think it’s important that all groups in society can participate on equal footing, and I think an important part of that is accepting the vast majority of religious practices of Muslims in Western European and offshoot societies. I’m even willing to accept some practices that I think constitute rights violations, like the circumcision of male infants in the cases of Jews, although I think there’s a large degree of reasonable disagreement over how wide that latitude should be.

I am mostly less concerned with discrimination against Christians because I think it’s much less often used as a way of trying to exclude groups lacking political and social power from society, although in some large, liberal cities, I think there can be genuinely harmful discrimination against Christians that we should use some combination of norms and the force of law to prevent (although again I think there’s a wide range of disagreement of what level of law is appropriate to provide those protections.)

I of course think that the specific views and practices of relgious groups should be open to crituque, but I think we should use social norms and potentially state power to prevent those critques from being used exclude groups from society (in the same that that I think it would be very bad if people with moderately socially conservative views faced systematic employment discrimination.)

I think that this is a difficult question, but I think there’s some justification in treating religious views in a similar way to the way in which we treat more straightforwardly permeant characteristics like race, sex or sexuality. It is often extremely costly for people to change their religious views, and for the sake of creating a liberal society, we should allow people to hold essentially whatever religious views they want so long as they adhere to the core restrictions of the public sphere. This isn’t a new argument - it’s really the foundation of liberalism in continental Europe that emerged with the peace of Augsburg to prevent Protestant-Catholic conflict.

It is entirely true that many Muslims hold views that personally condemn me, but so do many trade unionists, low-income people, and Uighurs. I don’t construct my politics on the basis of which groups would support me and others like me.

This tradeoff can look particularly sharp in the Israel-Palestine case. Clearly, any Palestinian government will have less liberal laws on, for instance, sexuality than Israel, and I do think that that gives some reason to support Israel in the conflict. I think this is totally swamped, though, by the strength of reasons we have to oppose colonial rule (which is, I think, how Israeli rule over the West Bank should be described) and that this is born out of history. The British introduced some genuinely good liberal reforms during their rule of India, but it was clearly the case that Britain was correct in leaving India (although perhaps they should have managed partition more carefully.)