As a Muslim...

by confuzzled dude Fri Jan 09, 2015 10:17 pm

In the wake of every crime perpetrated in the name of Islam, nothing is more predictable than the responses on my social network feeds. On Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, my Muslim family and friends waste no time in posting their denunciations, condolences, and explanations of every terrorist attack—and each one of them gets qualified with the phrase, “As a Muslim...” As news of the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris spread, revealing that the gunmen were not only Muslim, but inspired by political agendas cloaked in the language of Islam, the cycle and spectacle of Muslim response was set in motion. A Twitter search for the phrase “As a Muslim...” yielded thousands of real-time results, all of them related to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.

The prevalence of the “As a Muslim...” qualifier reveals what is common between the Muslims who attacked Charlie Hebdo and the rest of us trying to do damage control: the compulsion to speak for all Muslims. “As a Muslim...” packages Muslims as one group, effectively saddling us all with the burden of collective accountability. Of course, when “As a Muslim...” is most frequently deployed, the speaker’s intended aim is to disabuse others of the notion that Muslims are, in fact, a cohesive, monolithic group. What ultimately emerges from this phrase, however, is a form of a cognitive dissonance: “These Muslims don’t speak for us, but, as a Muslim, I do.”

“As a Muslim...” is a predictable reaction to an ideology that reduces complex and contemporary human beings to a uniform swath of Muslim-ness. Furthermore, it excludes them from the experience of collective grief. Muslims, it implies, are incapable of experiencing events as any other humans do. Instead, they experience things only in the capacity that their Muslim identity allows. It inadvertently feeds into the anti-immigrant fears and anxieties currently afflicting European countries—that Muslims are unfit for Western society. While “As a Muslim...” allows Muslims to assert narratives that contradict the mainstream story, we remain ensnared in the trappings of a religious identity claimed by 1.6 billion people around the world.

http://magazine.good.is/articles/as-a-muslim-response-to-the-charlie-hedbo-attacks

by Hellsangel Fri Jan 09, 2015 10:19 pm

Hmm. A ".is" domain....

As a Muslim...

As a Muslim...

Re: As a Muslim...