Before I went to Iran, I was so tired of hearing about Islam all the time in Danish media. The debate on the Danes and the Muslims have been going on for almost ten years and have only intensified and intensified. Ever since the Cartoon Crises I had personally gotten more and more critical of Islam as a religion and more and more critical of persons with a Muslim background as a whole. And I was really tired of being confronted with this issue all the time, and this goes for both the Islam-bashing of Danish blogs and the Danish People’s Party as well as the all too sugar-coated multiculturalism of the Danish Broadcasting Cooperation. And yet, I couldn’t and can’t help writing about Islam all the time.
I won’t say that my trip to Iran changed my views so much as expanded them greatly. I’ve met so many different people with so many different views and although I have an even worse picture of islamism as a political project, I’ve seen the incredible complexities of what we in the West call the Islamic world – even though I’ve really only scratched the surface. I’ve met devout Muslims who were thorough democrats and against the hejab, I’ve met anti-muslim Persians who hated George Bush and 300, and I’ve met an Iranian who grew up in Denmark as a refugee from Khomeini, but simply couldn’t take the heat anymore and went back to Iran – because off the hostile climate in Denmark towards anyone of Middle Eastern decent. All this made me think, and the bottom line is:
Let’s all just shut up about Islam for a while and try to see people as individuals. Try to listen some more, please.
Well, I shall try 😉
I sometimes feel the same way. I don’t read the rigthwing anti-islam blogs like uriasposten, just like I rarely read liberator anymore. You kinda know what they’ll say about just about anything and well, why bother?
The problem is that the people who would probably gain most from following your advice, are unfortunately also the people who benefit from the current debating culture, making change very hard to implement. Even if all you do is listen these days, you don’t get to hear a lot of different voices. You hear the same voices over and over again.
On the supply side, the medias prefer “somewhat extreme” and “wellknown debaters” to “moderates” and “average joes”. It’s always better to have two interviews with people disagreeing than it is to have two interviews where you don’t quite know what the end result of a debate might look like. Confusion is a killer. Another problem on the supply side, on a different part of the supply chain, is that an “average muslim”, just like an “average” whatever, don’t have a lot of incentives to speak out. Why would (s)he? Maybe in generel things would be better if (s)he did, but why should _I_ do it? Why not someone else?
On the demand side: Many people for obvious reasons like to keep things simple and don’t much like to have to deal with a 100 different sorts of Moslems, or socialism, or whatever. It’s a lot easier to think in boxes. It’s hard to change the shapes and sizes of the boxes already in use. By going to Iran you did. There’s a long way to Iran…
You know all this of course, consider it repetition to the reader who might not be aware of it. It has some consequenses though: Your advice is a good one, but given the way things are at the moment, do not expect a lot of people to turn into nuanced, staunch individualists anytime soon. Add more layers of institutional tyranny of the status quo to the above, and you’ll expect nothing to change anytime soon.
– Nice to see that you’ve started blogging again by the way (about subjects in which I am somewhat interested, that is).
Hello US.
Thank you for the long comment (I guess we both choose to write in English). It should come as no surprise that I agree with you, and propose an interesting subject for economic research: “Public choice dynamics of public opinion”:
Which points of view are more likely to be reported than others (I think you’ve already given the answer) thereby strengthening certain positions? Also: The dynamic between the need to grasp complex issues, and the necessity of keeping it simple.
Maybe it has already been done?