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Using Law and Social Control to Improve Islam's Image in America | | | American Muslims have employed two primary ways of combating this anti-Muslim sentiment. First, we want to educate other Americans about Islam, a cooperative approach. The second is organized protest and litigation, and adversarial approach. | |
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< | When my father, a doctor, recaps his day at work, nearly all of his stories begin with some variant of "so I asked the patient, what hurts?" When you want to fix something, it helps to know what hurts. So we have a problem. Education is one form of coalition building; the use of inter-faith panels, for example, can bring your allies together so that an organized support structure is in place. But what about the gentleman holding the sign in the streets? Education will not touch him. It's effectiveness hinges, in part, on one's willingness to learn. The protestor with the sign is not going to the local community center for the next inter-faith meeting. In fact, he told us where he learned--it was what he saw on 9/11. And what about the average American? If they have no real interest in Islam or religion generally, it will probably be a tough sell to get them to join in the educational process. | >
> | Education is one form of coalition building; the use of inter-faith panels, for example, can bring your allies together so that an organized support structure is in place. But what about the gentleman holding the sign in the streets? Education will not touch him. It's effectiveness hinges, in part, on one's willingness to learn. The protestor with the sign is not going to the local community center for the next inter-faith meeting. In fact, he told us where he learned--it was what he saw on 9/11. And what about the average American? If they have no real interest in Islam or religion generally, it will probably be a tough sell to get them to join in the educational process. | | | What about the second approach? A protest or a counter-protest can be a sign of strength. But again, there is a targeting issue. Typically, you aren't protesting with the expectation of persuading the opposition; your target is the independent and uncommitted. So here you lose the man with sign again. Similarly, it's unclear how we would convince an average American to be interested in the subject.
And litigation? We are entitled to practice our faith freely in the United States. A lawsuit to enjoin a local government from preventing the building of a place of worship could work at achieving the short-term objective: building a mosque. But a court order, for example, is unlikely to persuade naysayers that the result is the right one. | |
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< | Let's look at what hurts? For those who have negative perceptions of Muslims, what hurts is Islam. For them, Islam is abstract in some cases, and general in others. What it is not, is never specific, never a person. It's always an "ideology." For social control to succeed, it must be able to appeal to the non-rational, unconscious motives of humans. | >
> | For those who have negative perceptions of Muslims, Islam is an abstract ideology, to be discussed in generality. It is not specific, never a person. For social control to succeed, it must be able to appeal to the non-rational, unconscious motives of humans. | | | This is not to say that our existing approaches are not important (litigation can be necessary, especially in the scope of hate crimes or discrimination). The approach needs to be one that combines, not replaces existing approaches with other forms of social control. In fact, our need for the legal system may actually be indicative of the sparse use of other forms of social control by American Muslims. Donald Black proposes that there is an inverse relationship between law (government social control) and other forms of social control. With this model, if we increase our use of other forms of social control, it follows that we should have less of a need for litigation, as an example). | | | you're doing can interfere with getting it done.
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> | Eben,
I tried cutting what I thought I could. Could maybe chuck the last paragraph, but it seems important to have as a preemptive defense to an obvious criticism. |
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