You absolutely can criticize the bigotry of religious texts - in fact, a lot of adherents of those religions do exactly that! The feminist translation of the Qur'an that I own pretty obviously was translated by a feminist scholar of Islam who was looking for a way to grapple with the misogyny in that text and her own faith. There's a long tradition in liberal Christian theology about figuring out what exactly to do with those parts of the Bible, especially those parts which can't be blamed on a bad translation (as is, for example, true of much of the homophobic stuff in the New Testament, at least that which was translated from Greek, as the original had no concept of just "homosexuality" or "gay sex" in general and was specifically condemning ancient Greek pederasty, not like, two adult men or adult women having consensual sex). In Judaism, arguing with religious texts and histories of theological interpretation is pretty much standard practice, and is a thing that I personally know has drawn many converts to Judaism. And of course, there are also secular critics of religious texts who separate that from drawing conclusions about religious believers.

This is not what New Atheists do, and was not what was the content of the specific post I was responding to, either.

I wonder if maybe some people are less aware of what the term "New Atheist" means, based on both your ask and other responses I got to that post. The group is a lot more marginal online than they used to be, especially in social justice spaces. So in brief: New Atheists are atheists who not only are proudly atheist but also believe that atheism is inherently superior to religious belief, that religious belief (of all kinds) is always irrational and always unjust and always leads to negative societal outcomes, including bigotry. One of the major things they believe is that progressive/liberal/etc. religious people are hypocrites or lying to themselves or somehow "picking and choosing" in their approaches to their religion's doctrine (which I think is why a lot of New Atheists come from fundamentalist backgrounds; they were taught that about liberal Christians, for instance, by their fundie Christian parents growing up, so they're naturally inclined to that way of thinking. And I think it's why, conversely, you don't find as many New Atheists who came from more moderate or progressive religious backgrounds, even among those of us who are no longer religious; I was raised by progressive Christians, one who is an ordained minister with a Ph.D. in theology at that, and I always felt New Atheist arguments were unconvincing and intellectually lazy).

(If you hit the "read more" just for the explanation of what a "New Atheist" is, this is where you can stop reading.)

I'm a historian so I've gotta put this in social context for my younger followers: New Atheists were so popular precisely in response to the excesses of the Religious Right in political power in the U.S., during the Bush era; they'd been ascendant in American politics for a few decades at that point, and the country was rapidly getting sick of them. This led to even more frustration in other Western countries who were drawn into supporting Bush's foreign policy, such as in the UK, or just had to deal with America's right-wing religious neuroticism leaking into broader Anglophone popular culture. This was at the same time as the War on Terror, meaning that the image most people in the West were getting of Islam was one of rigid, oppressive fundamentalism. Meanwhile, mainline moderate/liberal Protestant churches were leaking followers, and becoming an increasingly marginal sideshow in religious life. So the message that religion was inherently oppressive, and that's why the fundies at home in the West sound so similar to the fundies breeding terrorists in other countries, was uniquely appealing. I think that as the New Atheist movement became increasingly hostile to online social justice (that asked it to consider that being an atheist, especially a white, male, cishet, able-bodied, wealthy one, was not in fact the world's most oppressed identity; and as there was more awareness that minority religions like Jews and Muslims experienced oppression in Western countries far beyond anything white atheists experience there) it's waned in popularity and people have forgotten why it was initially popular. (Kind of like how a lot of people don't understand the context as to why sex positivity was so popular coming out of the purity-movement era of the same time period, though I think that now that we're seeing purity mentalities negatively impact real-world politics again, we're due for another wave of that in a few years.)

So no, in the case of New Atheists making those arguments: it's not about the text, it's about the people, because the point is in making the people and the broader religion look bad. They don't believe it's possible to embrace a religion that has problematic aspects without embracing those to some degree. This is separate from atheists/agnostics who are not New Atheists specifically criticizing those texts! (I'm an agnostic myself, I have no desire to make fun of non-theistic people as a group)

(Side note: I think the group that nowadays is more comparable to how New Atheists are and how they used to act more broadly across the Internet when they were more prominent, is [a lot of, not all!] white pagans. At least in the sense of "white people claiming to be more persecuted than other minority religious groups that also tend to be ethnic/racial minorities + have more documented histories of hate crimes against them" and "making insulting and reductive claims about other religions they consider their oppressors." White pagans, for instance, are one of the groups where I most see the particular kind of antisemitism I used to see all the time from New Atheists, in terms of blaming Jews for everything they see as oppressive about Christianity - which is particularly problematic in the case of paganism given how often the 19th- and 20th-century pagan revivals that are the actual source of a lot of what modern pagans believe were rooted in antisemitism, in the belief that Christianity was "too Jewish" and a need to find a non-Jewish "pure European" culture. But this is the digression of all time, so, lol)

Bringing it back to the specific post I saw.... It was a series of screenshots from a popular Twitter user who is an ex-Muslim from a theocratic Muslim country who has since moved to Europe, and was responding to seeing people in pro-Palestinian protests at the University of Texas-Austin (my alma mater, ftr) where student protesters were kneeling in Muslim prayer. She assumed - as did everyone else reading- that these students, because they looked "white" and maybe also based on stereotypes about who lives in Texas and attends that school, were not actually Muslims. But she instead decided to go on an Islamophobic tirade about how she shouldn't have to see anyone kneeling in prayer like that, because she moved to a liberal European country like Germany specifically to escape Islam, and people don't understand how any sort of kneeling in Muslim prayer was supporting misogyny because of the surah in the Qur'an that supports men hitting their wives.

People were conflating this with discussion that a lot of pro-Palestinian protesters were supporting Hamas and other Islamist groups - but there didn't seem to be much to support that these specific students just kneeling in prayer were somehow doing that, and it struck me that they were both jumping to conclusions based on that action alone, and not really reading what this Twitter user said: which, whatever she intended, was Islamophobic in that it was condemning all Muslims.

So let's break down the multiple problems with both her specific statement, and the discourse surrounding it and how it exemplifies that a lot of people who are sensitive to bigotry against Christians and Jews have a blind spot when it comes to Muslims. Again, this is going to be less relevant to you if you haven't seen the specific post, but this post is long enough already so why not:

Are we sure those students weren't Muslims? There are a lot of issues with assuming that "white" ≠ non-Muslim: a. plenty of predominantly Muslim groups, including ones with substantial populations living in the U.S., are white, such as Bosnians and Albanians, as well as Turks, many of whom are light-complexioned and blond/redheaded/light brunette. (Just looking at the gifsets from that Turkish historical drama about the Ottomans, The Magnificent Century, that was popular on Tumblr a few years ago will show you that. I still see period-drama blogs post and reblog those regularly!) 2. Arabs are stereotyped as "brown" and a lot of them are, but especially when you consider the breadth of the Arab world, they come in a truly wide variety of complexions, from a lot of Sudanese or Somali Arabs who look similar to other, black Africans, to people who are even paler than my pasty vampire-looking ass. I grew up in Detroit, center of Arab America, so I had a lot of Arab friends growing up, and knew more than a few who probably would've passed for white if they were not visibly Muslim in other areas (such as women wearing hijab). There's a substantial Arab Christian community in Detroit, and a lot of them do pass for white until they give their last names. Lastly, converts = they're a thing. There's a ton of stuff you can read about how a lot of white converts to Islam act and dress super-Muslim both out of cultural pressure within Muslim communities that treat "Muslim" as equivalent to "Arab (or South Asian)," but also because it's often the only way for them to be perceived as Muslim in the first place. And then how that often "minoritizes" them in the eyes of non-Muslims, and they get a taste of what non-white people in the U.S. experience constantly when they're wearing hijab or some other identifiably-Muslim dress.

As I said before, I think some of the assumption that they can't possibly be Muslim or they must be white is coming from stereotypes about Texas. As a graduate of UT-Austin, I think this misses a few important things: first, that Texas is actually a majority-nonwhite state, and is incredibly diverse, it's just that thanks to a variety of factors (not the least of them, gerrymandering and other deliberate ratfucking) it's the whitest people who define the politics of the state; second, that Austin and especially the university are more liberal and diverse than most of the state; third, that Texas has long had a substantial Muslim population in its major cities and their suburbs, and that population is growing; four, that UT and other Texas public universities are especially diverse because of their program of admitting and giving free tuition to anyone who ranks in the top 7% of their class in a high school in Texas, which means that a lot of students from impoverished urban (and rural) districts go to those schools to get the kind of quality higher education that they'd otherwise be denied. A lot of those students are non-white. The "top 7%" makes up something like 90-95% of the undergrad population at UT. Most of the rest of that student body are international students, from all over the world including Muslim countries (I remember having to accommodate a couple of students from Saudi Arabia in one of my classes during the COVID all-online semesters). Ergo, it's a much more diverse group than I think that commentators from elsewhere who just see "Texas" think it is. I lived just down the street from a popular, widely-attended mosque right in West Campus, Austin, that also provided room and board for a few Muslim UT students.

Maybe people were assuming based on how they were dressed? Along with the fact that there's no single uniform "standard" for modesty that all Muslims follow, might I remind you that Texas in May is really fucking hot and so especially if you're standing outside in the sun for hours upon hours, and marching, you're naturally not going to be wearing a lot of clothing! Take it from someone who attended more than a few protests at the Texas State Capitol during my seven years there.

Likewise, this was a group of like, five or six students IIRC. Most of the rest of the ones in the picture were still standing up and not praying. There wasn't much reason to conclude that this was a widespread thing that a bunch of non-Muslims were doing.

Praying five times a day, in the specific formation that was seen there - kneeling down with your face down and arms laid in front of you - is one of the five pillars of Islam, and therefore something that is common among Muslims the world over. Yeah, there are still some more secularized ones who don't do it, but it's not something that would mark you as an "Islamist" by doing it. Again, I've known numerous Muslims ranging from very liberal ones who dressed pretty much like anyone else to Saudi Arabian women who wore full body coverings, who all did this. It doesn't say anything about what specific variety of Islam you subscribe to, all it says is that you are a Muslim.

I think a lot of people were sympathetic to this woman's argument because she's an ex-Muslim who obviously escaped some kind of persecution, but again... think about what she's saying. She's saying that Muslims participating in a pretty basic expression of Islam are a) automatically endorsing the misogynistic interpretation of Islam that caused her to flee her home country, and b) doing something that she expected, and feels entitled to, never see again when she moved to Germany. I think it should be easy to see why A is an unreasonable conclusion - as we've established, this is a thing that is a cornerstone of Islam in general and not just radical right-wing Islam - and why B is an unreasonable demand. If you truly support a liberal society, that includes that people are allowed to practice whatever religion they want, including ones you dislike, however warranted you are in your dislike. Imagine, if you will, someone who is escaping fundamentalist Christianity in a Western country moves to, say, India, and treats the minority (and both presently and historically oppressed) Christian population there doing something identifably and universally Christian - say, hanging up decorations or hosting public events for Christmas or Easter - as something that is oppressing them, or that they should be entitled to never experience now that they're in a majority-non-Christian country. I think a lot of people would understand the problems with something like that who aren't seeing that this is the same thing.

And so, I think you can be sympathetic to where this woman is coming from while also agreeing she's unreasonable. It's not like there isn't a history of ex-Muslim communities embracing alt-right-adjacent ideologies due to what they say about Islam (based on what ex-Muslims themselves say about their experiences in those communities), and you have people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who survived some pretty harrowing stuff that anyone should be in awe of, who nevertheless has let that push her in a hateful, xenophobic, far-right direction in terms of her politics and those politics still being wrong. A lot of protests by Muslim student groups against her being invited to speak on campus are treated by the press as "look, these Muslim college students can't handle hearing from a woman who survived misogyny from Muslims! they can't handle criticism of their religion!" that conveniently ignore that Ali also supports state oppression of Muslims, and nativist immigration policies that would keep people like those students or their relatives (and ironically, her past self) from coming to the UK or US or the Netherlands or whatever other country is relevant. To me, this is all very similar to how like, you can sympathize with J.K. Rowling as a survivor of sexual assault while also saying it doesn't justify her bigotry toward trans people, who are not responsible for what she suffered at the hands of cis men (just as Muslims praying in Texas are not responsible for what this woman suffered).

Anyway, I guess I should have some kind of conclusion here. I know you can't really know what I'm talking about without having read the posts in question, but I hope that if you read this far, you get that this is not simply a case of conflating criticism of a text with criticism of a people. I'm always in favor of criticizing misogyny in any text, religious or otherwise. But the posts I'm talking about - and New Atheists as a specific group (who are not necessarily the people making those posts, but I brought up as an example of people who make similar arguments) - do in fact use those to criticize members of those religions, too.

My feeling is that texts are texts and I don't really approach any particular text as different from any other. Just as how I've said that I think pornography is subject to the same basic rules governing "textual analysis" as any other media, I also think that's true for religious texts. With the caveat that obviously, you should approach them somewhat more sensitively because some people do revere them in a different way than they do other texts, so you shouldn't be flippant and mean in your criticism especially if you have reason to believe members of that religion are following along. But you're not oppressing, say, Muslims by pointing out that the Qur'an is often misogynistic. It is.

But... is it significantly more misogynistic than the Bible is? I can't say for certain, having read substantially less of the Qur'an than the Bible, and also, the Qur'an was a thing I read one time years ago whereas the Bible was something I had hammered into me over years and years of being raised Christian doing stuff like Vacation Bible School - and also just living in a majority-Christian culture where the Bible touches every single aspect of our culture, is constantly referenced in secular media, and being at least somewhat familiar with what it contains is required in order to be an educated person. But the stuff I've seen under contention, like that one surah about beating your wife, is pretttttty similar to the stuff I remember seeing in the Bible about violence against women.

I also think, with any kind of media analysis, it's always worth asking yourself why. Not to mean you shouldn't do this, but just because you're going to be more clear-eyed in your analysis if you're checking in regularly on what is the goal of your activity. And I do think that criticism of subcultural, marginal texts within a particular society should look somewhat different from those of majority and widely influential texts. So while it's not exactly the same degree of scale, I see this as similar to stuff I and others have said before about how criticism of "problematic elements" in fanfiction and other super-niche media should look different from criticism of those same elements in mainstream media. Not because you shouldn't do it! Even in stuff with a very small audience, it can affect people within those small communities in a way that can reify and worsen broader societal oppressive dynamics, and can feel all the worse for those people in there given that it's meant to be an escapist activity. It feels shittier if you deal with sudden out-of-nowhere racism or misogyny in your space that is a refuge from the shittiness of day-to-day life and want to let your hair down, than if you get it from someone who you more expect to get that from in a situation like your job. (Or at least, it's a different kind of shittiness.) But when we're talking about the influence of those ideas, the "dangers" of the wrong person coming across them.... there probably should be a sense of scale of why like a tentacle rape fanfic that is largely being read by people who already know they like tentacle rape and who are opting-in to that experience is different from like, a mainstream TV show eroticizing rape.

And so - likewise - I think that criticism of the texts and tenets of minority religions should necessarily look somewhat different than ones of mainstream religions in whatever society you're operating and doing this criticism in. Again, not because it shouldn't happen! It can be especially frustrating when in your place that is supposed to be a refuge from the mainstream of society that oppresses you based on X is one that reminds you that you're still oppressed, even there, for also being Y and Z. I know multiple women and especially, LGBTQ+ people who were interested in Islam who ended up not converting precisely because it was so hard for them to find an imam and a community that accepted them to the degree they felt (and should feel!) entitled to - which is probably exacerbated by the fact that Islam is a minority and in a lot of parts of the country, there is just one mosque, whereas you have a whole spate of churches to choose from and so it's easy to be a Christian who is pro-LGBTQ+ and pro-choice and still have somewhere you can go even in the depths of Bible Belt Hell. So the fact that LGBTQ+-affirming approaches to Islam are not more mainstream than they are is an issue that absolutely should be addressed, and the parts of the Qur'an and the hadiths that support a homophobic interpretation should be criticized both within and outside of Islam.

But you should also be aware always of what your goals are, and how it looks coming from you in particular. A big part of how New Atheism gradually fell out of favor in social justice movements was that it was dominated by the most privileged of cishet white men who refused to recognize how different their criticism of Christianity vs. criticism of Islam looked, and who gradually revealed that in the case of... honestly, most of the original Thought Leaders of that movement (e.g. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins), they also did in fact hold Islam in more contempt because they only saw Muslims as terrorists and fundamentalists whereas they knew more of a variety of Christians because, you know, they were raised by and continued to be surrounded by Christians!

It's just the classic punching-up vs. punching-down thing. That doesn't mean you should never punch down especially when the person you're punching down at is also punching down on someone else even lower, but you should be more careful about how you do it. And there are some particular criticisms of Islam - not about its misogyny, which a lot of people are critical of understandable reasons and I'm never going to say we shouldn't be critical of misogyny, but like when people roll out shit like "Muhammad was a pedophile!" - where I do have to wonder what the point is other than making Muslims feel bad. (Context for that one: one of Muhammad's wives may have been a child bride; from what I understand, the scholarship on this is inconclusive. Which, sure, gross if true, but also.... is there really any point in dragging the marriage of this guy who has been dead for 1400 slutty slutty years except to upset the people who revere him as a prophet? And indeed, I've never seen that talking point from anyone except people who were just straight-up, no-frills, unambiguously Islamophobic. The last time I saw it was from a "pro-Israel" blog that followed me and I blocked because it was clear that their "support of Israel" was "I think it's good that we're flattening Gaza, because Palestinians are evil actually." Yuck yuck yuck.)