And one reason I quoted the information that I did in the prior post…

…Here on this blog…is that I am so tired of hearing this ugly generalization that all Muslim men are misogynistic, oppress women, etc.  This is just a stereotype that enables a lot of people, including supposed “progressives”/liberals as well as conservatives, to indulge in a kind of racism that they can completely get away with in the present society, in the present day.

I am sick to death of the Muslim bashing that I see on every other Internet site, a narrow and thoroughly irrational kind of thinking that is indulged in by supposedly otherwise enlightened people.

If you want to talk about misogyny in the name of religion, Islam certainly has no monopoly on that.  (Try looking a little bit into the history of Christianity, for instance.)  If you want to, as so many people are doing, claim that there are more Muslims who would commit murder in the name of their religion, a brief look at human history will reveal that mass murders have been committed by people of all the major religions, in the name of either those religions or the collective followers of same:  Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, they’ve all committed atrocities, have all committed massacres, in the name of their respective sects.

Now, I got into Suzana Ansar (basically within the past week) because I thought her music was really nice, and I liked how she could split her time between working with very traditional music and working with very futuristic electronic stuff such as some of the work being produced by State of Bengal, and also do some very good rocking somewhere in between.   (Oh, yeah, and I did get into researching bangla music for my music blog not only because I’ve been so hooked on all kinds of South Asian music (again) lately, but also because I thought this would be a nice thing to do, a little show of sympathy and solidarity with a community of people who’ve suffered once again from a “natural” disaster that wreaked havoc upon their land.  And if you’re wondering why I put “natural” in quotes…well, that will take another post, sometime.)  Meanwhile,  from what I ended up reading about this revolutionary named Kazi Nazrul Islam, he does seem to have had a lot of great qualities.  I don’t really know that much more about him, nor do I claim to be some devoted follower of his legacy.  Nor do I intend to become a Muslim.  Nor, for that matter, am I suddenly the kind of Marxist who puts all his energies into supporting third world liberation struggles.  (Although I am discovering that I am becoming much more third worldist in terms of musical and cultural tastes/interests.  So maybe I’ll get into thrid-worldism through the side door, without having to deal with so much Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that I can’t stand.  You never know…)   

But, to put it simply, I just found it very interesting to read about this stuff.

And also, I am not one, especially these days, to condemn a movement and/or revolutionary individual because of their allegiance to any religion.  Some might find that surprising, but I really am less and less inclined nowadays to make judgments of that kind.  (Maybe part of the reason is that people can do a lot crappy stuff in the name of atheism as well.  I think that John Madziarczyk has a few interesting things to say about that.)

I admit that I may have sometimes given intolerant responses personally to some people upon hearing them talk about about their religious leanings or their tendencies toward magical thinking, but that’s mainly been a critique of such thinking, not a condemnation of them as people.  Because, I simply cannot, at the moment, understand how anyone could fully believe in a religion given all the things that we have learned in the past few centuries (at least).

But, really, it is such a complicated issue…  Yes, lots of atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, but many people who’ve done very good things were inspired by relgion too.  (And I personally think that a lot of people use a religion to sort of map a system of ethics and set of values that they would have anyway,  just from living and thinking as social beings.  That’s something else that I might write about extensively sometime.)

While I may have the same metaphysical (non-)belief system as so many anarchist or Marxist atheists, I feel sometimes that I am no longer as eager to consider this whole issue in the simple, black-and-white terms by which at least some of them tend to see it.