Some thoughts

Submitted by Anonymous (United States), Jul 21, 2010 at 21:19

Having been involved in Christian evangelism in the USA and abroad when I was young, I think most people who change faiths or worldviews start out with some problem with the worldview in which they were raised.

Add to this, there is a powerful sense of grievance against the United States in the African-American community. The fact that Islam is not associated with the American founding or its European heritage, but with the continents of Asia and Africa was doubtlessly part of its appeal. This appeal is compounded by the fact that American Christians, being heirs of the Swiss-Rhenish-Puritan Reformation, have one of the most intensely self-critical cultures on the planet, leading to the ills and failings of the Christian West (including America) are recited and hashed-over in various learned litanies. For people like Malcolm X, area studies in America were still in their infancy, and more often than not guided by a kind of romanticization of the "Other" (to use Said's term) back between the 1930's and 1960's. This is now re-inforced by Muslims' own apparent inability to ever consider that they may be guilty of moral wrongs against the Kufr (apart, apparently, from a handful of very brave Turkish people who openly discuss the Armenian and Assyrian genocides).

Further, we have a Western Leftism that is nihilistic to the core. It will sacrifice its every guiding principle for an alliance with the most bigoted Muslims, as long as it hurts its own Western culture.

These factors, I believe, lie at the root of anti-Americanism among American converts to Islam.

Further, I second JT's statement that Sufi doesn't mean tolerant. This false equation is a lingering influence of the 1960's discovery of mysticism as a means of criticizing more scholastic traditions in Christianity and Judaism. Again, widespread ignorance of non-Western and non-American history hides how Sufis were often the major movers and shakers of jihad in much of the Muslim world.

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