Religious Tolerance, Coexistence, & The Difference Between Islam & Islamism
My response to the San Diego Mosque Shooting
I was shocked today to learn about an attack on a mosque in San Diego, in the United States.
Two teenage attackers fatally shot three men at a mosque in San Diego, California, in a suspected hate crime, before taking their own lives, say police.
The shooting took place on Monday morning, two hours after the mother of one of the suspects called police to say her son had run away with a friend and was possibly suicidal.
Police were already on the hunt for the two when the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego began, and they found three victims with gunshot wounds outside the front of the building.
Genuinely: attacking someone else’s house of worship is just despicable. Nauseating. No matter what your view of someone else’s religion, they have a right to peacefully practice it without being interrupted by violent assault.
I’ve never been in a mass shooting. But I can imagine it must be terrifying. Skin-crawling.
I am a non-Muslim. I am an atheist. I am also from a Muslim ancestral background. So effectively—in some people’s eyes, especially those of a radical Islamist disposition—I am an “apostate”. Islamists believe that the punishment for apostasy is death.
But I don’t want to allow this to colour my view of non-Islamist Muslims, who for the most part are just normal people trying to get on with their lives, and have an absolute and inviolable right to live securely and free from attacks.
To anyone who has a negative view of Muslims—please try to remember that there are 2 billion people (roughly) of Muslim ancestry on Earth. They are not going anywhere. To live in peace, we need to live in peace with Muslims, even if non-Muslims don’t agree with their religious views.
Moreover, we live on a planet with many and varying different philosophies and religions. We need to be able to mediate between these different belief systems. This is not solely the case for Islam and Muslims, it’s the case for a vast array of different philosophies and religions.
In my opinion, a society based on a principle of religious tolerance & live and let live is viable. To be specific, I think that society should provide legal protections for everyone’s religion, so long as they want to practice it peaceably.
Yes—Islamism as a doctrine is different to this. Islamism is the idea that Islam should become the dominating political force in a given country, or polity. In some versions of Islamism, the goal is a worldwide Caliphate.
Obviously, I radically disagree. This is incompatible with my philosophy, which would try to give equal rights to all of the different religions. This kind of Islamo-theocratic government—historically—has implied the subjugation of Jews, Christians, polytheists, Zoroastrians, Yazidi, and various other groups who were crushed under the heel of Islamic rule.
Indeed, we have seen similar patterns of subjugation in Christian theocracies, as I wrote about earlier this year.
The pattern we are seeing, of rising religious tensions tied to political disagreements, and with escalations into attacks on religious institutions is tremendously dangerous, and it is driving us in the wrong direction.
More fear. More division. More hatred. More demonisation. More dehumanisation. This is the path that attacks on a mosque—or a synagogue, or a church, or a Buddhist temple, or any such institutions—drive us towards.
People are radicalised by fear and hatred of other people, as I wrote about last week:
Hatred breaks your brain. It is a stanch against rationality. It’s almost seems to me like a kind of drunkenness. Lowering your senses. Constricting your thought process. Leading to lashing out.
My hope is that in spite of great ideological and philosophical differences, we can find enough commonalities to weather this storm. Regardless of our differences, we all bleed the same. We all breathe the same air. We all stand under the same sky. Looking out over a great, vast, majestic universe.
Maybe for some people that counts for very little. But for me, it really counts for a tremendous amount.
It’s horrible about the Islamic Center shooting. Also strange they’d shoot up a mosque and were into Nazi iconography, since Hitler was aligned with Arabs and admired Islam.
But, it’s possible that the two teenage shooters thought the mosque was a synagogue. Drew Pavlov tweeted about the manifesto they left, which blamed JEWS for the world’s ills.