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Originally Posted by Itse
For the record and by the way.
I can understand why people like Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz feel like it's liberals who refuse to have the conversations they'd like to have. Liberals are the people they've tried to have those conversations with the most. I'm sure they're not the only people who have personal bubbles where that discussion over "what can be talked about with liberals" feels super relevant.
However, I feel that if look at the quality of conversation outside the liberal bubble, you will notice the same lack of reasonable public speech on Islam and radical Islamism. Partly for the same reasons, partly for different ones.
Plus as I've said I don't think it's constructive or fair even to start calling out the kinds of people who very likely in other contexts are taking part in related important work, such as fighting for civil rights and against the discrimination of Muslims.
It's also important to remember when you listen to people like Harris and Nawaz that every expert thinks their field is the most relevant one. It's often why they became experts in that field in the first place.
The reason why I respect Maajid Nawaz as a thinker vastly more than Sam Harris is because the former clearly draws from a much wider range of fields (political theory, sociopsychology, history etc), whereas Sam Harris, while good in his own field, seems to have a rather simplistic view of things outside of his own field of religion and philosophy.
After all, the real world does not respect the boundaries of scientific disciplines. (Which is why it's just extremely unlikely that there would be a complex human phenomenon such as Islamic extremism that could be adequately explained with any one theory from any one field of study.)
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I'm not sure your right that they think they can't talk to liberals in general. They both consider themselves liberals and they can talk to each other. Rather there's a subset of liberals they can't have a conversation with; this is the part they call the regressive left. The subset that is more interested in calling names and judging their opponents by the group they are a member of than by what they say. The subset that is generally more interested in the feelings of the small minority of Muslims that live in the west than the actions of the majority outside the west. The subset that seems incapable of holding two thoughts at the same time, namely that you can treat your peaceful, hardworking, Muslim neighbors with the respect they deserve and condemn the atrocities committed in the name of Islam elsewhere. The subset that engages in the oppression Olympics in determining the validity of an opinion or fact. It is this subset, and only this subset for which they have coined the term "Regressive Left".
And I disagree that doing good in one area is not a reason to challenge a person in another. There's nothing incoherent in both fighting against discrimination against Muslims and acknowledging that human rights are being curtailed in the name of Islam.