Hyphenation Of Cultures Continues...

The 'Moderate Muslim' Litmus Tests

Barry Rubin writes:

There are relatively few "moderate Muslims" but there are millions of Muslims who are relatively moderate.
The former refers to people whose main identity is as a Muslim and who explicitly want to reform normative Islam.
In contrast, the latter are those who are equally Muslim but have their primary identity formed by ethnic (Turkish, Arab, Persian, Kurd, Berber, etc.) or national (Egyptian, Indonesian, Indian, Moroccan) loyalty.

***
Your average Anglo-Saxon Westerner, be he "conservative" or liberal, cannot or will not accept the simple fact that billions of people "have their primary identity formed by ethnic or national loyalty" -- what used to be called "race."
While these Westerners, right and left, are busily burnishing their images as "citizens of the world," millions of these billions giggle and plot their demise.
These Ango Saxon Westerners think their multicultural co-workers share their "enlightened" views, and will side with them when the time comes.
They are mostly mistaken.
This fault line doesn't always look like you'd expect, by the way.
I once worked at a very famous charitable organization that, being based in Toronto, boasted a large staff representing an array of races and faiths.
And, this being Toronto, it came up at some meeting or other that one group we'd be funding that year served the supposed "needs" of supposed "homeless" "transsexuals."
Around the very large boardroom table, gasps and tsks could be (just barely) heard.
They all came from my Asian and black female co-workers, who, after the meeting, were seen whispering to each other, arms crossed, their heads tilting around, birdlike, to see if anyone important could hear them.
At a later meeting -- one limited to the white people who actually made the decisions (and me) -- there was much smug amusement at the silly, backward reactions by those silly, backward co-workers.
This was a few years ago, before Toronto officially became a white minority, immigrant majority city.
The shift in the way tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations will be allocated across Toronto will be fascinating to watch (hopefully from a very great distance...) over the next ten or twenty years.
Asians do not approve of putting old people into nursing homes, for example. And they don't have a lot of time for "the homeless."
I doubt a lot of the city's Muslims feel like giving money to battered women's shelters.
The examples will multiply.
And no one will talk about it, of course.
Except me.

# Kathy Shaidle