‘Islam’ is not in crisis, liberalism is
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"The most urgent priority is not for Europe to understand its alters better, but rather itself and its own history —for it is within Europe's own longstanding structures of self-definition that pluralism in general, and the Islamic presence in particular, have been rendered into nightmares. If so, it is Europe itself which stands in urgent need of therapy. But as yet the patient is still in denial, and as any spychotherapist would confirm, those who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of their self-generated plight find it far easier to engage in a process of transference. Rather than confronting the illusory character of their own mental construction, they prefer to ascribe the very behavior which they refuse to acknowledge in themselves to those whom they believe are harassing them."
— Roger Ballard, quoted by Jospeh Massad in Islam in Liberalism, 2015, p. 311
"If, according to Zwemer, the truth that Islam fails to grasp is that “Jesus is lord and savior,” and that he must be chosen as such, liberalism demands that the individual, in order to be an individual, must choose liberalism; this, as Massad notes, is a weaponized “choice,” for the only choice that liberalism can accept as a choice is liberalism. The new choice, then, appears as the liberal form of damnation; Muslims who do not choose liberalism, like those who do not choose Jesus, are the new forsaken, to be converted or killed. It is this structure of liberalism, as an ideology of imperial missionary work in the name of secularism, that Islam in Liberalism demands that we confront."
— Murad Idris
"With ... entrenched notions as background, the United states began to waiver on the Huntingtonian notion of clash of civilisation and adopted a new project of pluralizing the one Islam identified by Huntington and his culturalist predecessors while maintaining Christianity as singular. This pluralization of Islam, as Islams, would allow the US to support the emergence of a new 'Islam,' a liberal form of Islam, that is more in tune with US imperial designs, and which would approximate modern Western notions of religions and religious subjectivities, as well as Western liberal citizenship, so as not to be incompatible with the rhetoric of democracy, while at the same time allowing the US to wage war against that other 'Islam' which continues to resist the Western (neo)liberal order."
Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 2015, p. 59
"The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicization of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'."
— Talal Asad, Conscripts of Western Civilization, 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2
The obsession with the ‘oppressed Arab woman’
The limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women
Do Muslims belong in the West?
Can we be Muslims in the West?
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