{"id":5711,"date":"2012-07-12T14:12:59","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T13:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.richardlittledale.co.uk\/?p=5711"},"modified":"2012-07-12T14:12:59","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T13:12:59","slug":"a-shared-misunderstanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/2012\/07\/12\/a-shared-misunderstanding\/","title":{"rendered":"A shared misunderstanding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Freedom of speech and religious prejudice<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Any blogger who reads this will know the slight twinge of anxiety felt whenever the send button is pressed. \u00a0In that split second your private thoughts journey from the containment of your mind out into a wide open space where\u00a0they\u00a0may be digested, absorbed, reproduced or criticised. \u00a0Rarely have I felt that anxiety so acutely as I did on October 21st \u00a0last year when I posted a response to news footage of Colonel Gaddafi’s death entitled “Victory Porn”.<\/a> \u00a0Ministers of\u00a0the\u00a0church don’t usually use that<\/em> word, least of all in an\u00a0environment\u00a0where a\u00a0search engine can pick it up! However, it opened up all sorts of interesting conversations for me. Some were with Christians, some with news broadcasters, and some with Muslim journalist Myriam Francois-Cerrah<\/a>. We have stayed in touch ever since, and so it was with particular interest that I read her Huffington Post article<\/a> today on Islamophobia.<\/p>\n

I won’t attempt to summarise it here, as you can just as easily read it for yourself by clicking<\/strong><\/a>. \u00a0However, I would ask my\u00a0Christian\u00a0readers to reflect on how many of the selected points below seem to apply to the treatment of Christian faith in public discourse as well. In many of them you could substitute the word “Christian” or “evangelical” for Islam.<\/p>\n

A personal bugbear is the suggestion that Islam or the Quran ‘says’ – Islam \u200edoesn’t speak – people speak in the name of Islam, filtering the texts \u200ethrough their experiences and drawing on interpretive traditions.<\/span> Couldn’t the same be said of the church?<\/p>\n

This \u200ereification of faith assumes that, unlike other religious traditions, Islam is \u200emonolithic and can be gleaned from a brief perusal of sacred texts. It can’t. \u200eTo do so is to misrepresent Islam, the faith of over 1.3 billion people in the \u200eworld<\/span>. Christianity, in the end, is defined by its interpretation in the lives of its followers – for good or ill.<\/p>\n

Islamophobia is only unclear to those who seek to obfuscate its meaning. It \u200eis the tendency to reify Islam – that is to assume the behaviour of given \u200eindividuals (typically extremists) reflects an accurate concretisation of the \u200eprinciples of the faith itself.<\/span> \u00a0Finding your faith defined in the public arena by the behaviour of its most extreme proponents is both insulting and dangerous. (Remember Harold Camping?)<\/p>\n

The struggle against islamophobia is the struggle for a nuanced and \u200econtextualised appraisal of events involving Muslims, a refusal to accept \u200ethat everything can be explained away through a facile reference to ‘Islam’.<\/span> A nuanced and contextualised approach to interpreting any faith serves us well as human beings, I think.<\/p>\n

Myriam goes on to make many other points about ignorant portrayals of Islam which bear a fuller reading.<\/p>\n

I have never been involved in inter-faith dialogue, and I am not at all sure that I will be. However, this Muslim journalist has given me cause to reflect on how any faith – whether hers or mine, may be caricatured in the pursuit of a quick headline or a sound bite.<\/p>\n

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Freedom of speech and religious prejudice Any blogger who reads this will know the slight twinge of anxiety felt whenever the send button is pressed. \u00a0In that split second your private thoughts journey from the containment of your mind out … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}