steve_bank said:
What we call Islamicists are Muslims who believe their loyalty is to a future caliphate, not the country they live in, There is a p[rt of Islam that is fundamentally incompatible with western liberal democracy and separation of church and state.
What we call Catholics are Christians who believe their loyalty is to the Vatican and the Pope, not the country they live in, There is a p[rt of Christianity that is fundamentally incompatible with western liberal democracy and separation of church and state. ...
... "Islamicists" are not a sect of Islam. ...
Are you sure of that?
Aren't you? ...
Islamicism is a set of beliefs that form a subset of Islam, just as Catholicism is a set of beliefs that form a subset of Christianity.
No, not just as Catholicism is a set of beliefs that form a subset of Christianity. Islamicism* is a set of beliefs that form a subset of Islam, in a completely different way from the way Catholicism is a set of beliefs that form a subset of Christianity.
(* Steve used "Islamicist" in its secondary sense of "Islamist". The usual meaning of "Islamicist" is "Academic scholar of Islamic Studies".)
To claim that Islamicism is not a sect of Islam seems to me to require an unjustifiably narrow definition of the word 'sect', or a pedantic objection to the use of the singular.
To be pedantic, Islamicism is an umbrella term for a number of sects of Islam that share a particular point of doctrine, even though they may disagree considerably about others; As such, Islamicism is more analogous with Protestantism, than with Catholicism, but my choice of Catholicism as an example was made for rhetorical reasons.
No. The groups of people Islamism is commonly used to describe, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and Hezbollah, are not sects either. Calling them sects is Humpty-Dumpty language.
My purpose (which your nitpick overlooked) was to hold a mirror up to the bigotry inherent in
@steve_bank's post, rather than to conform to a pedantic level of detail over what is meant by "sect".
I overlooked nothing. The purpose of my precisely aimed dagger to the heart you call "my nitpick" was to point out the illogic of your transparently groundless accusation of bigotry against
@steve_bank. He said nothing bigoted. To equate his statement with your comeback you had to grossly distort his meaning.
His implication that Muslims are to be feared (because they are probably Islamicists, and hence beholden to non-US ideals) is wrong, just as an earlier generation's belief that Catholics were to be feared was wrong, and for the same reasons.
That is a distortion of his meaning. He never implied Muslims are probably Islamists, any more than you implied Christians are probably Catholics.
Some US Catholics might put the Pope and the Vatican ahead of the US Government and America; And Some US Muslims might put Islam and Iran (or Saudi Arabia, or some other foreign nation) ahead of the US Government and America.
Well, can you point out any American Islamist who doesn't put Islam and some foreign nation or future caliphate ahead of the US Government and America?
What you seem to be missing is that "Islamicist" in the sense Steve used it is an attribute of individuals they acquire by adopting particular political views, not an attribute of whole communities they acquire by being born and raised in a faith. If some US Catholic believes abortion should be legal even though the Church doctrine against it is officially considered infallible, we might call him a "Cafeteria Catholic" but we won't call him a "Non-Catholic". Steve appears to be in effect proposing that if some US Muslim believes it should be legal to draw cartoons of Muhammad, we call him a "Non-Islamicist" rather than a "Cafeteria Islamicist". Calling someone a Non-Islamicist does not seem like a bigoted slur to me.
But to suggest that doing so is mandatory and/or universal (or is even a majority position) for either Catholics or Muslims in the USA is absurd bigotry
He suggested nothing of the sort. This is just you misrepresenting him. Nothing in his proposed criterion for "Islamicist" says a bloody thing about the relative numbers.
- And I believe that Steve understands this in regards to Catholics. So I mirrored his claim about Muslims to highlight that point.
I was not making an absurd guilt-by-association argument; Rather, I was being deliberately absurd, as a way of pointing out by analogy that Steve's guilt-by-association argument was also absurd.
In the process of being deliberately absurd you were being absurdly guilt-by-association. There is no mirror here, no resemblance between defining a term that isn't the name a religious community chooses for itself and redefining one that is. One could as easily write "What we call Vatican-Supremacists are Christians who believe their loyalty is to the Vatican and the Pope, not the country they live in", with no bigotry or implication of numbers involved, just an attempt at terminological clarity.
As a matter of fact, there already are a few obscure historical terms that mean pretty much that, referring to the period when aggressive political Catholicism was a far more serious threat than it is now. "Integralist", "gegenreformationist", "recatholicizationist". So I'll come right out and say it. What we call gegenreformationists were Christians who believed their loyalty was to the Vatican and the Pope, not the country they lived in. There is a part of Christianity that is fundamentally incompatible with western liberal democracy and separation of church and state. Are you going to call me bigoted for saying that? Is there anything in there you even disagree with?
