Silence of the white converts

Williow at TalkIslam has blogged about white converts.

She writes, "a lot of educated white converts (in other words, ones who grew up with a certain amount of implicit cultural authority) use their conversion as an excuse to analyze subjects with which they have no experience: honor killing, arranged marriage, poverty. They function, and to a certain extent see themselves, as religiously privileged anthropologists. "

Willow is making an assertion of moral relativism, which is defined: "the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances." Moral relativism was the death of liberalism and progressive development in the West. There are universal truths of good and evil. Don't you have to hold that as a basis of belief if you are going to call yourself a muslim?

I object to honor killings (though I've never written about them before now) not as an expression of my own neo-colonial dogoodery, or as an anthropological digression, but because honor killing is wrong, evil, bad, an offense against Allah (swt).

The consequence of Willow's dismissal of my objection (you're just a privileged white convert) is to silence me--to erase what I say and think and insert one's own idea. It reminds me of an argumentative crutch that was often heard among feminists when I was in college in the late 1980s (probably about the same time she was in college): A debate opponent would assert something and the response would come: "You're just saying that because you're a privileged white male" or some such thing. It was a rhetorical technique to silence the opponent and insert a more damning narrative, one that is completely ad hominen. It changes the subject and makes you the object of the conversation, and therein shows evasiveness and weakness in the position of the one making the charge. The position couldn't be defended on its own merits. The intended effect of such a rhetorical device is to silence the objection without engaging it. I found the use of this tactic to be quite hypocritical considering how much has been written in feminism about the tyranny of imposed silence on women.

So on matters of morality, where I've been able through observation, study and fitnah to make a determination that something is evil, such as honor killings, I will be neither silenced nor dismissed by someone damning me with accusations of cultural privilege.

All around the country in the 80s and early 90s feminists were engaging men and other women with this tactic, along with other hostile, confrontational insults and dismissals. The results were usually the same: nobody was educated, nobody's mind was changed, and no real information was exchanged. Feminists felt empowered, but it was a kind of nihilistic empowerment, since the population they were haranguing, antagonizing and dismissing was the demographic most likely to become lifetime voters. At a time when they should have been recruiting allies and making converts, they were pissing on everyone in sight. America saw the rise of the angry white male and the visceral right-wing hatred of anything "liberal." Enter George Bush and Dick Cheney et al. Politically, feminism today is a shrunken, faded movement that has spent most of the last 20 years in a defensive posture.

Is there an Islamic analogue? Yes. What happened to feminism could happen to Dawah in America (and Dawah is already pretty awful in America right now). Someone told me that Islam is a religion of association. Isolate white converts and they will drift away (hello vendor at ICNA who wouldn't say salaam to me). If you go looking for reasons not to associate with other muslims, what other result can you expect but the dissipation of Islam in America.

Another point
Willow has mixed up two categories of subjects here: Those of a moral nature that are offensive to god and decency, and those that are more cultural in nature. The cultural questions would include the example she gave of arranged marriage, or another such example would be something like cousin marriage. A person, white convert or otherwise, should be more sensitive and try to be more knowledgable before launching in, but I won't hesitate to criticize cultural practices either, since it presupposes weakness and inability in those who hold those practices to articulate an explanation of them and convince me of the error of my criticisms. If I say something ignorant, then cure me of my ignorance. Willow's call for silence is a call for paternalism, a defining characteristic of colonialism.