re-Orient

making commentary on how you Reconcile your new faith with your sexuality or gender identity. seriously. leave that to people to whom it’s not an intellectual exercise and who’ve spent their lives doing this up close and personal, sometimes at risk to their mental and physical wellbeing.

riffing on sociopolitical or religiously-motivated conflict in muslim-majority countries in which you have absolutely no stake. literally why would you do that

honestly? even sharing jokes/memes about growing up muslim. you don’t need to ‘me too’ about everything to practice a faith.

just generally overcompensating.

complaining about how hard it is for you to feel ‘culturally appropriative’ for your beliefs and/or dress. seriously.

complaining about other muslims viewing you with some degree of suspicion, given the political animus around islam in the west.

talking about anti-muslim sentiment as if it’s something that meaningfully affects you.

equating your experiences to those of people who grew up in the faith, certainly not those of muslims of color.

i dnt think its a matter of cultural appropriation but like, so much of classic Western anti-Muslim thought is based on a few ideas, for example:

1 - Imperialist / Colonialist ideas of the Muslim Orient (directly racial) - Islam is very directly racialised and it’s more about race / ethnicity than the faith, knowledge of the faith (about Islam + about a person’s religiosity and practices) is not necessary to racialise them /as a Muslim/.. like race + religion were/are idk interchangable in this context, for example the word “Turk” was used to mean all Muslims / (Muslim) subjects of the Ottoman Empire

2 - Crusades and the Reformation (the Muslim (or the “Turk”)) as the Antichrist, the enemy of Christendom (used by Protestants and Catholics against one another) etc etc (–> current ideas of the Muslim as the enemy of Western Civilization and Our Way Of Life)

(American anti-Muslim sentiment is different not in essence but in justification, there’s more focus on more recent events of course.)

and therefore Islam and Muslim-ness does not exist outside race / racialisation, and when someone treats me (a secular person with 0 grams of faith in her body) in a certain way for being Muslim, it’s because I’m Turkish and Look Like This (a combination of the two, usually, depending on the extent of my interactions with them). It’s what they assume my /essence/ to be, and my /culture/ to be, etc etc. Like, of course it changes from person to person (how you look, where you live, how you practice) and situation to situation but like, don’t go around pretending Islamophobia as an ideologic thing affects you like it affects us (it may even aim to protect you from our corrupting influences, lol)

making commentary on how you Reconcile your new faith with your sexuality or gender identity. seriously. leave that to people to whom it’s not an intellectual exercise and who’ve spent their lives doing this up close and personal, sometimes at risk to their mental and physical wellbeing.

riffing on sociopolitical or religiously-motivated conflict in muslim-majority countries in which you have absolutely no stake. literally why would you do that

honestly? even sharing jokes/memes about growing up muslim. you don’t need to ‘me too’ about everything to practice a faith.

just generally overcompensating.

complaining about how hard it is for you to feel ‘culturally appropriative’ for your beliefs and/or dress. seriously.

complaining about other muslims viewing you with some degree of suspicion, given the political animus around islam in the west.

talking about anti-muslim sentiment as if it’s something that meaningfully affects you.

equating your experiences to those of people who grew up in the faith, certainly not those of muslims of color.

i dnt think its a matter of cultural appropriation but like, so much of classic Western anti-Muslim thought is based on a few ideas, for example:

1 - Imperialist / Colonialist ideas of the Muslim Orient (directly racial) - Islam is very directly racialised and it’s more about race / ethnicity than the faith, knowledge of the faith (about Islam + about a person’s religiosity and practices) is not necessary to racialise them /as a Muslim/.. like race + religion were/are idk interchangable in this context, for example the word “Turk” was used to mean all Muslims / (Muslim) subjects of the Ottoman Empire

2 - Crusades and the Reformation (the Muslim (or the “Turk”)) as the Antichrist, the enemy of Christendom (used by Protestants and Catholics against one another) etc etc (–> current ideas of the Muslim as the enemy of Western Civilization and Our Way Of Life)

(American anti-Muslim sentiment is different not in essence but in justification, there’s more focus on more recent events of course.)

and therefore Islam and Muslim-ness does not exist outside race / racialisation, and when someone treats me (a secular person with 0 grams of faith in her body) in a certain way for being Muslim, it’s because I’m Turkish and Look Like This (a combination of the two, usually, depending on the extent of my interactions with them). It’s what they assume my /essence/ to be, and my /culture/ to be, etc etc. Like, of course it changes from person to person (how you look, where you live, how you practice) and situation to situation but like, don’t go around pretending Islamophobia as an ideologic thing affects you like it affects us (it may even aim to protect you from our corrupting influences, lol)