The Secular Islam Summit

Someone asked me recently what I thought of the Secular Islam Summit. I was chided for taking Svend White’s comments at The House of Apostasy personally because apparently, White was talking about the Secular Islam Summit, not the blogs that were being quoted there.

I don’t think there is any official connection between The House of Apostasy and the Secular Islam Summit, so I don’t understand why White commented there about the Summit. Perhaps because he dislikes any gathering of ex-Muslims and secular Muslims on principle? And this stuff REALLY gets to him. I don’t really understand why because I’ve never felt moved to rail against the ’silly’ conferences of Muslims. In fact, I actually listen when Muslims talk, and for three years, I debated Muslims directly on many message boards (particularly those of www.islam.com). He doesn’t seem to have any real criticism – he just thinks the fact that it’s even happening is ludicrous. All the speakers are ’shrill’ (White’s favorite word for ex-Muslims) and ‘marginal,’ utterly without worth in the Islamic or Western world. Really? Even Amir Taheri, whom I grew up reading in the Arab fucking News?

Be that as it may, I had not heard of the Secular Islam Summit until I was asked about it directly. I had even not noticed the passing mention of the Summit that The House of Apostasy makes in the first paragraph introducing ex-Muslim blogs. Now I know a little more about it and thought I’d give my opinion.

I’m kind of excited about seeing these people – whom I’ve read but never heard speak – actually move their hands and talk. I don’t have a TV so sometimes my imagination is overtaxed. I like the YouTube videos of these apostates and secular Muslims. I’m also impressed by the line-up – a lot of intellectuals, many engaging minds – and the diversity was lovely.

And I was thinking, we really are very much in need of visibility. There are all these voices, liberal Muslims, ex-Muslims, secular Muslims – and nobody really hears them. When it comes to Islam, there is only the wretched defeaning silence of the miserable third world, punctuated now and then by mass protests over cartoons or other tomfoolery.

This is not all about ‘reforming’ the Islamic world and doing it according to White’s decree. It’s also about diversifying the discourse that comes under the rubric of ‘Islam.’ I and other apostates are technically not part of Islam any more but because of our heritage, close association and personal experience, we too form part of that wider community. White is dismissive of some of us because the Islamic world rejects us. Well, the greater visibility we have, the more people who listen to us, the more the conservative Islamic world – the mainstream Muslims – will be forced to engage with us. They need to engage with us. They need to acknowledge Irshad Manji’s homosexuality. They need to acknowledge Asra Nomani’s ‘illegitimate’ son. They need to acknowledge Schrodinger’s apostasy and self-exile, typical of so many of us.

This is actually one of the reforms we need in the Islamic world. Their refusal to grant us relevance is a fault in their intellectual life. The fact that they hate us and any association with us retards reform (which White fears is so fragile that it must be protected from our sullying influence) is something that itself needs to be reformed. And the only way to reform that is to force them to engage with us on OUR terms, for once. For all of my life, I have engaged with Muslims on their turf, by their rules. Now it’s their turn.

These ‘outsiders’ are not so by choice. Many of them are being forced away and out by Muslims. To make us outsiders and then mock us for being so and calling us ‘irrelevant’ is pretty rich. Whether our styles of dissent displease Muslims or not, we are an integral part of Islam’s reform, even if that is not our explicit agenda. In a way, White’s constant anxiety about image and how something is going to impact the mainstream Muslims is really patronizing. His instinct is to protect this infantilized Islamic world from our brutal assaults, not to let Muslims learn to handle unsavory criticism. They’ve been shielded long and hard enough – it’s time they joined the real world.

Look, Muslims are not going to be reformed by being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twenty first century. They need to take some initiative too. They need to basically wake up, stop being defensive, and start asking, “What went wrong? And how can we fix it?” Enough with the colonialism and imperialism talk. Enough with pretending they get to decide who says what about Islamic reform, and unless they give legitimacy to a voice as sufficiently inoffensive, that voice must be denigrated and silenced. Wafa Sultan is right: The Jews got nearly wiped out, but did they get progress and respect by whining? No, they built, they contributed. Typically, from all of her powerful words, Muslims (progressive, White ones) enthusiastically pounce on one sentence about church burnings and ignore everything else she’s saying. She’s a quack. Nothing there to hear or learn.

There is altogether too much talk of the offense caused to a billion people. You know what? Learn to be offended along with the rest of us.

You know what would NOT lead to reform? No, not a harmless and much-needed conference, but this contemptible endless whining.

Watch Wafa Sultan – deeply moving, preternaturally powerful. What a formidable woman.

Update: I just read an insider (one of whom White would approve) Muslim’s account of the Secular Islam Summit. It’s quite positive, even though the writer was coming at it prepared to be offended by all the “Islam bashing.” A picture of civilized debate emerges between people of varying levels of religiosity. I wish White would actually read/listen to whatever he is criticizing.