Why do I defend Islam?

I am on Twitter and often get called a heretic and such like for defending Islam against the ridiculous and bigoted onslaught Muslims face on the site. To think, the lovely Elon has used all that money and spent it on normalising irrational hatreds and debasing truth.

That hatred is leaking now onto other social media platforms and right wing media networks. Truth has become so debased by the glorification of free speech that anyone can say anything, no matter how potty and untrue, and hide behind ‘well that’s my opinion’. But when truth means anything it means nothing – that is Musk’s ‘gift’ to the world. And ‘my opinion’ must sometimes be judged in the court of facts.

All religions begin as something inherently good as they give wings to a people’s innate desire for meaning and transcendence. But sometimes those longings get hijacked by people with their own agendas; patriarchy has often done so with Christianity for example. Women were treated as second-class citizens in first century Palestine, and Jesus invested so much of his divinely radical nature to liberating them from those oppressive traditional roles – only for the Church to put women down again as religion became itself a (literal) man-made system of thought in its early years. It has taken the best part of two thousand years to unpack those patriarchal traditions and still we have to fight – think of how Archbishop Sarah has been treated for the sin of being female and a priest.

Yes some Muslim women are deeply oppressed in some countries but, without reservation, these countries that oppress and marginalise half of their population are driven by a patriarchal system abusing and manipulating religious principles. Where women have no say in how they dress, for example, as in Afghanistan, that is because of the Taliban’s perversion of Islam, not because of Islam. Women were free once in Afghanistan and it was a Muslim country then too.

I will add that the real danger we face in the next twenty or thirty years will not come I think from extremist Islam (all extremism is a problem of course) but from Christian Nationalism. Look at the far right in this country and see the support and encouragement it is getting from over the pond – J D Vance, Elon Musk throwing their weight behind the likes of Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe despite the same movement claiming to loathe foreign interference. And what does that Christian nationalism in the US stand for – women back in the home, anti-abortion (under any conditions) and many now want to see women denied the vote. They certainly should not lead in churches, say the Christian extremists. A bit Taliban maybe?

So – I will keep defending the true and authentic representation of any and all faiths. Religion is not the problem – a bullish patriarchy masquerading as faith is.

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