Religious Tolerance Shouldn't Mean Accepting Lower Moral Standards | Big Think

There’s a section within the left. I refer to them as the regressive left, and I want to clarify I don’t mean all of those on the left. I mean a section that has come to the view for the sake of political correctness, for the sake of tolerating what they believe is other cultures and respecting different lifestyles.

They have an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities. I mean, at the end of the day, if we truly subscribe to liberal human rights values in their universality and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they apply not just in favor of minority communities but, in some instances, upon minority communities too.

And it’s what I call the racism of low expectations to lower those standards when looking at a brown person. If a brown person happens to express a level of misogyny, chauvinism, bigotry, or anti-Semitism and yet hold other white people to universal liberal standards, the real victim of that double standard are the minority communities themselves.

Because by doing so, we limit their horizons, we limit their own ceiling and expectations as to what they aspire to be, where judging them is somehow that their culture is inherently less civilized. And of course that we are tolerating bigotry within communities, and the first victims of that bigotry happen to be those who are weakest from among those communities.

And that’s who I refer to as the minorities within the minority. The minorities within the minority are every feminist Muslim, every gay Muslim, lesbian Muslim, every liberal Muslim, every dissenting voice, ex-Muslims. And these are people who mainstream society will judge because they have Muslim names and brown skin, invariably.

So they have to suffer a lot of the discrimination that anyone else may suffer from mainstream society but even within their own community and then further discriminated against because, of course, it goes without saying that levels of tolerance towards gays, and perhaps levels of anti-Semitism and liberal values, there are still many, many challenges when it comes to those values within the Muslim community.

So they suffer from both ends, and that’s why I say that if we truly, as liberals, care for the weakest among us, as any liberal society should be judged by, then those who are the weakest among us I believe are the minorities within the minority communities.

It’s the emphasis on group rights and on the identity of group rights rather than seeking out the individual within the groups, and thereby what happens is invariably those individuals within the groups, the minorities within the minorities, have a progressive struggle ahead of them. The group, you know, the Muslim community for want of a better term, doesn’t have a progressive struggle.

It’s identifying itself as a Muslim, and for whatever reason, good or bad, currently, the Muslim debate isn’t as liberal, isn’t as committed to universal human rights values as I would like it to be at least.

So in protecting the group identity, we end up reinforcing in liberal values because we prioritize cultural tolerance over the progress and the advancement of liberalism within minority communities. And that’s how they end up losing out on being allies.

Now I think that a true liberal would always prioritize individuals over the group, would always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo. That’s what a true liberal should be looking for.

Within the Muslim minority context, that means finding those voices while critical of their own culture. I find liberals very good when it comes to criticizing mainstream society, being introspective about our own foreign policy mistakes, and rightly so.

Yet there isn’t that expectation that a Muslim can, in turn, be introspective about their own Muslim community into which they were born. And the other thing I think is very important here is we talk about credible voices, authentic voices.

There’s an assumption, an orientalist assumption again because of the racism of low expectations...