{"id":1499,"date":"2015-10-15T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/?p=1499"},"modified":"2015-10-14T18:58:40","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T23:58:40","slug":"islamism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2015\/10\/islamism\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s no ‘Islamism’; it’s Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n

Unlike cultural authoritarians and reactionaries, I don’t see language or speech as prescriptive for society \u2014 quite the opposite: language is an expression of society, a symptom if you like.<\/p>\n

So when I find neologisms or new expressions I don’t particularly like, I don’t try to censor them; instead I use them to analyse society. Take, for example, “Islamism<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Islamism, often referred to as \u201cpolitical Islam,\u201d is the desire to impose a version of Islam on the rest of society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So… how is Islamism any different than Islam?<\/strong> As far as I’m concerned, religion is<\/em> political, all religion, Islam included, so defining anything as “political Islam” is redundant.<\/p>\n

As for the desire to impose a version of their religion on the rest of society, that’s what most religions do (and why “religion of peace” is an oxymoron).<\/p>\n

For example, we all can think of a politician who tries to poison public policy with his Christian beliefs, and, although it’s been suggested<\/a>, we don’t need a special word for it. It’s a Christian trying to impose his brand of Christianity, and that’s Christianity \u2014all<\/em> Christianity\u2014 because that’s embedded in their doctrine. There’s no “Christianism” or any other politically correct neologism trying to set apart moderates from extremist (and that’s not our job<\/a>, either!) or any other attempt to protect the feelings of Christians who disagree with their comrades.<\/p>\n

So why the special treatment for Islam?<\/strong> For me, this is a reflection of the religious privilege Islam enjoys nowadays in society. “Islamism” along with “Islamophobia<\/a><\/strong>” are words that reflect how society has pandered to the religion of special needs.<\/p>\n

I don’t like this fact, but it’s futile to deny it or to pretend that by having any of these terms censored reality will change \u2014 I know better, it’s the other way around (change society first and then language will follow suit) so the best I can do is avoid using those words and advocate we stop giving Islam special treatment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

We’ll see how this goes, but I’m not holding my breath.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All religion is political and tries to impose itself on the rest of society, so there’s no actual difference between “Islamism” and “Islam”. It’s just politically correct crap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,196,9,291],"tags":[110,138],"class_list":["post-1499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism","category-philosophy","category-secularism","category-skepticism-and-science","tag-islam","tag-religious-privilege"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}