Why do I think You Should Know?
One only need look to the injustices done to the Muslim community of New York City by the NYPD and others for an example of what the consequences of not understanding a diversity of people for what they are… Any New Yorker worth their salt understands the importance of Muslims to New York City, to act like because some people from a different country who just happened to have the same religion… only vaguely? committed an act of terror would mean that Muslim New Yorkers liked it anymore than any other New Yorkers did? Yet history repeated itself and Mosques were treated as compounds to be monitored like the US did to US Japanese descendant populations in WW2…
What I mean by that point is that I think right now it is important to understand the nuance to groups that people want us to simplify down to a soundbite that serves as a justification.
The Website I linked is a University Of Michigan curated list of resources to learn about Islam (and I mean that in a very basic sense of learn about the history of it) that is mostly focused on the resources the University provides but is nonetheless a really compact extensive list you can quickly use as a starting point if you want to research something.
This is also a nice simple website I found that visualizes populations of Muslims on earth in a nice easy to understand way.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-population-by-country
Personally growing up in the US I know until pretty late into my life that I simply had no idea there were so many Muslims on Earth. Living through the post 9/11 years I would often hear statements said about Muslims or people who follow Islam from people who didn’t really know any Muslims and the day I learned that there were that many Muslims it hit me as really unintuitive.
~2 Billion people is an incredible amount of human beings, there is no way even if you had infinite lifetimes to try that you could meaningfully reduce that many people down to anything other than the same spirit any human being is born with.
I don’t mean this post in aggressive way, I just think genuinely more people should know in Christian predominant nations that when somebody starts generalizing about Islam or Muslims the correct response is to call attention to that fundamental logic error. Sure, criticize Islam, analyze it, talk about the politics of it, but be specific and be curious about the actual nuance to the story!
I generalize that all who follow religious dogma, especially the three Abrahamic religions, are brainwashed, usually from birth, and usually follow the religion they are born into geographically. It’s the main reason I reject the whole thing. But I’ll still treat people as they treat me, ideally with kindness, or at least indifference :)
This only relevant to people who’s from western country, where the religion practice itself isn’t as strict and they’re marginalised group of that place.
I know i might get shit for saying this, as someone who born, raised, lived, and will probably die in an islamic country, living here as a minority, the rose tinted glass wear off so long ago. To me, to say there’s 2 billions of muslim on earth kinda mean there’s 2 billions people that potentially exposed to harmful teaching material that teach how it’s not okay to be gay, lesbian, trans, or to be apostate, how women is lesser than men, and so on, all that is written by men to control women. You’re taught to “advice” other muslim to conform, or be alienated, even if it’s your own family. Islam is a religion that control and oppress muslim, you can’t even quit the religion once you’re in it, and majority of muslim are born into the religion without their consent. And westerner is okay with that, and call people who oppose that as islamophobe. The story are so much different in islamic nation.
That said, the religion does have good advice, and i do believe in good people to selectively practice the good and reject the bad(which a lot of my friends does), but i do not have faith in the authority that control it. But then again, guess who vote the authority in.
Am i wrong to assume this post is more like a YSK if you’re from the US? I think many Europeans, Africans and Asians are much more aware of the size of the Muslim population, maybe because we live much closer to them / have a bigger % of them living among us. Not sure why i feel this is important to point out, but i did want to write this.
And yet a whole lot of people (let me name Sam Harris) have it as their goal to flatten that to a caricature that is then easy to target.
It took Oct 7 for me to realize that the most islamophobic shit I’ve heard in my (real) life all came from zionist friends.
