You’d think it’s because I didn’t get on with fundamentalists or something like that. Actually it was because my fundamentalism — my colonial universalism — proved incompatible with the embodied, cultural specificity of Islam.

It’s put very well in this article:

While they differ over the character of their preferred “reformist Islam”, both Manji and the Islamists she castigates are on shared ground in assuming that the trouble lies in one interpretation of Islam and that the solution lies in another. But in fact the problem lies in framing this as a discussion about Islam as a religion to begin with, as happens in the never-ending debates about the compatibility of Islam with liberalism, democracy, or free speech. Such a framing puts the burden on a minority to prove its compatibility with the prejudices of a majority. This perpetuates the tendency, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, to think of Muslims as Muslims first and alone, rather than treating their concerns as those of any other citizen, for whom religion is one marker among many, including class and ethnicity.

 Religion is one marker among many, including class and ethnicity. This is a profound statement to make, given the pretensions of religious scripture. Islamophobia, therefore, is a reality — it occupies the same status as racism and class war.
For me to be a Muslim, I had to believe in the epistemic impossibility of Islamophobia. Which clearly isn’t sustainable — because clearly there are specific identity markers in place — and, as I’ve reflected often here recently — the Tailor (my westernized “mystical Muslim identity”) was the fetishization of these markers of identity (fetishization so as to make specific identity a diffuse universal).
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