One thing that bothers me a lot about how Muslims conceive their religious practice is how we seem to be very eager to separate our religion vs “culture”.

Latest example of this:

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/teen-shuts-down-idea-that-all-women-wearing-the-hijab-are-oppressed

Quote:

"Women — in the Middle East specifically — face oppression but it is due to culture not religion... People often mix the two and say the cultural practices are religious practices."

Like, let's be clear here, it's not this amorphous thing we call “culture” that oppresses Muslims or keeps us “backward” or prevents us from “progressing”. It's ignorance, and in the case of Lamyaa's commentary, it's misogyny.

I think this is really important, because this argument that there are two things Muslims do, and pure kernel of Islam and “culture”, is the argument that Muslim “reformers” since the 19th century have used.

Including the Salafis, takfiri and otherwise.

I think what makes it hard for Muslims to critique hard-line approaches to Islam is that we automatically assume that, because the spec is austere, that the nature of the religion is austere, when it could simply mean that the spec is *so* accepting because it, honestly, doesn't care.

Also, Salafis ignore criticisms to their poorly-thought-out mendacity buy simply saying, this is simply “Islam”, take it or leave it, ignoring scholars like Reza Aslan...

... who, incidentally, reminds us that interpretation plays a part in determining religious opinion, and that bias exists, all the time.

But tell that to the people who have, collectively, spent 150 years purging the religion of its “impure” elements, who then forget their own biases and positions, assuming them as defaults.

let's also not forget that the demand to make the religion austere and “rational” came at the same time that similar rationalist movements were convulsing other Big 3 Abrahamaic faiths. This was an era where all of us were purging “superstition” from our faiths.

Which leads to reification of bias, erasure of agenda, thinking that there is only one narrative on religion...

and this is why i get suspicious when progressives cite “culture” as the defining issue with how Islam is practiced. because it misdiagnoses the problem, it's the same poor argument that takfiris use, AND, it was something we did when white people — including some prominent white converts! — started mocking Muslims as “superstitious” and “uncivilised”.