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The question of race also highlights room for intelligent inquiry as to what exactly “bigotry” is. It can be defined so narrowly as essentially to overlap racism. But there is also ethnic bigotry between members of the same “race” over matters from cuisine to foreign policy to religion, to say nothing of “white nationalist” hostility toward Jews, as if anybody could be whiter than Harpo Marx. Thus G.K. Chesterton defines bigotry very broadly as prickly mental rigidity: “Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.” Which if accurate would also encompass those unable to respond to a critique of Islamism except by labeling it racism.

Some might do so from a kind of cosmic belief that all ills are one, including that any form of fear and dislike of “The Other” has racism as its template and inevitable accompaniment. But this view is hard to square with sharp critiques of fundamentalism from within Islam. And especially as racism is widely seen today as the most despicable attitude a person can take, it is a scurrilous way to argue.

Others might allege that opposition to Islam is really driven by specifically anti-Arab feeling

Others might allege that opposition to Islam is really driven by specifically anti-Arab feeling, since most people in the Middle East are both Muslim and Arab. But this argument will not long survive contact with basic facts like Indonesia having the largest Muslim population on Earth at just over 200 million, followed by India with 180 million.

There is a fall-back position that Indonesians and Indians like Arabs are non-white so “Islamophobia” is just a reflection of generic anti-non-white bigotry, especially if linked to concerns about immigration. But a majority of Christians worldwide are also not white, yet anti-Christian arguments, or bigotry, generally come from very different sources. So calling concern about Islam racism just muddies the waters, in your own brain then in public debate.

I’m also not impressed by the claim that Islam isn’t so much a religion as a political ideology. Islam as a theological doctrine has political implications including for the separation of church and state, implications worth discussing, debating and otherwise taking seriously precisely because they derive from a coherent set of ideas about man’s relationship to God.

Which is how you tell it’s a religion. Not a race.

National Post