This inactive tolerance is because factually, Muslim-OUGHT people (luckily in this case, not ought to be) are free to do and say so as this freedom is guaranteed (when applicable) by their countries’ secular constitutions.
I'm going to elaborate on this and go on a massive and unreasonably long tour. You have been warned.
Thus, to draw a linguistic analogy, it is this freedom for example that allows the past tense of <bring> to be ‘brung’ in the speech of some urban varieties and dialects of British English (such as Multicultural London English, the speech of Dead Jihadi John and New Jihadi John etc). Dialectal differences, informal, slang or colloquial words and non-standard register are specialised varieties. That is to say, only those within any particular social stratum habitually use and make fullest sense of them. As such, these specialised varieties of English are not incorrect. It is a mistake to use “incorrect” here because, in semantics, this is a category error; a variety word and register in this case belong to a different category from the standardised variety against which they are being judged “incorrect”.
This is the reason why in lived spoken English reality, it does not matter that the grammar of anything anyone says is not standard so long as what anything anyone says is fairly easily understood. You might find an Englishman wincing or even sniggering at another Englishman’s accent and grammar, but that doesn’t in social reality lead to anyone trying to correct or teach anyone anything. Nor does it make the one with non-standard variety less English in narrower linguistic or wider cultural terms.
Therefore, it is not unwise for the purpose of clear communication for an English user to stick to the standard variety (a variety or dialect is made of vocabulary and grammar PLUS pronunciation) and at the same time tolerate and allow other varieties the freedom they naturally enjoy. In fact, this is not a matter of ‘allowing’ others the freedom but this freedom cannot be denied for practical and in many cases, legal reasons; this is like trying to deny people the freedom to wishful think or hope i.e. faith when simplified.
But academia (which is serious organised thinking) has more rigid criteria for facts finding as well as repeatably discoverable, generalizable truths. This is directly related to the discussion above as telling people about your new way of identifying yourself is practically eliciting responses from them which you need to be incredibly naive to think will be unchallenged or that you wouldn’t be asked to share the mental processes through which you have arrived at this conclusion. Again, if you think you don’t owe anyone any explanation, then fine, ignore these questioning voices which by the way, three, are not silencing it for subjecting it to rational scrutiny.
Yes, for pedagogic purposes, every dictionary is necessarily prescriptive (i.e. an authority saying this or these are the meanings of these words, so things not mentioned are not officially words, or even “incorrect” according to some users) and some dictionaries TELL you not to use words in a particular way (for example, saying <something> as ‘sommink’ or the indiscriminate use of the question tag 'innit'). However, all this in academic terms is not scientific because this approach is one of English-OUGTH when in reality it was supposed to be English-IS as nobody can deny these items exist in synchronic (as opposed to diachronic) English. It is thus for largely practical reasons and not confusing the learner with vast amount of information (which what being academically thorough would mean) that every language teacher is going to pass on what they think the language-IS as well as their own preferences and language-OUGHT stuff in relation to each learner's level.
In the context of meaning and words, Luthiel said you "learn” your native language. This is not factually accurate because the process of learning a language is active, intentional and directed — in the same way, Muslim-OUGHT people are trying to redefine Muslim away from the two objective criteria above — when these things are absent in the case of anyone’s first language. In fact, a child knows the intonation of its first language in the womb according to intonation scholars such as David Crystal, Jane Setter and others. So more accurately, you
acquire your first language without any conscious, active or directed effort.
Therefore, whatever other language you currently have at your disposal is learnt and you speak it as a second language. Natural bilingualism (i.e. being born in a two-language household) doesn’t not weaken the case for acquisition here. An example to illustrate the material difference between learning and acquisition would be that if you are French (born and raised) and then you learnt and became fluent in Arabic and English, you still aren’t a native speaker of them. Thus, your intuitions aren’t admissible evidence in any linguistic inquiry into Arabic and English because you are neither valid nor representative a sample. That is of course if this academic inquiry seeks scientific thoroughness and uses things like methodological triangulation for fact checking the matter being rigorously investigated.
Now, what elevates a variety of language to become a standard in the first place are not objective, factual criteria. Rather, these are due to socio-economic factors and in historical terms, successful militarism.
For example, General British or what used to be known as ‘Received’ Pronunciation (<received> is a value judgement which in its Victorian sense means accepted) is not intrinsically better or more aesthetically pleasing to justify it being adopted as standard British English in all pronunciation dictionaries and for it being used as a model for learners of British English. (Scientifically speaking, there’s no such thing as “British English”, there are British Englishes including Standard Scottish English)
My argument thus is not concerned with challenging the established standardness of a variety of a language. And it is not concerned with trying to strip off a mainstream denomination from its status because of the dubious or unjustified means by which it acquired it or it is being reasonably thought to have done so. Of course these things became what they are today through circumstances most of which can never ever be logical, ethical or based on meritocracy.
No. My argument is against unilaterally redefining a concept and then deploying your heavy artillery in defence of its logical soundness as it is your past and current lived experience, and then you assert it is your freedom to call yourself whatever you want (= my interlocutors don’t seem to accept ‘live and let live’ for me in relation to Islam when they're likely to do in relation to Christianity). If it were a relaxed thought experiment as opposed to it being, at least in dear Hassan’s case, a declaration of change, it would not have given a cause for others like me to resist and question.
Indeed, it seems to me that those who think that by becoming Ex Muslim they have suddenly been removed from their personal histories and culture, I say, it is these Ex Muslims that are the ones that it would otherwise seem to be trying to reconnect with their personal pasts insisting, by degrees, on the whole package minus divinity and prophethood, on most of the lovely stuff as well as on experiential stuff without which they wouldn’t know what or who they have or might become.
Thus, I have sincerely argued against Ex Muslims indulging in what I called ‘extreme disassociation’ with Islam in my last topic in introduction section. Whether it is for personal and subjective reasons such as mental wellbeing in my particular case, or to not upset one’s Muslim parents anymore or to put a stop to what Durkheim in
Suicide deems to be egotisic (i.e. a breakdown of social integration and excessive individuation) and anomic (i.e. excessive moral deregulation, which the sudden rush of freedom leaving Islam made some of us at least feel initially) reasons for people’s self-slaughter. I say, it does not matter why anyone of us should yearn to his or her former world in which Islam preponderated.
I genuinely believe it would be unduly harsh of me to say this is like the freed trying to shackle themselves in servility because they had no recollection of prior to that identity and having being freed, do not have any developed way of thus just be; and, of living post the trauma of Islam because it's taken up decades of their lives. I personally do not think I have lived a life I have chosen myself for more than 5 years, and I'm reaching my third decade in a month's time.
It is so fucked up it makes me want to weep. In some ways, it is like finding out through a simple DNA test that your 11 year child isn’t biologically yours. You had always wanted a child of your blood, you never intended to raise somebody else’s child. Nobody can blame you for wanting this anymore than anybody could blame a woman for wanting to become a mother through giving birth. Is it unethical of you to stop caring and relating to this child as a father thereafter? Is it wrong to still want a child that is biologically yours on purely particularistic grounds? Suppose in this case, the mother of the child did honestly believe the child to be yours and you had known about her affairs and had 'forgiven her'. Thus, you are not a victim of willful deception on the mother’s part. What can you do to deal with the trauma of finding out this distressing truth given your natural preference?
The objective fact of this child being not yours does not cancel, or change the subjective truth of your lived history and experience in relation to this child. How do you deal with the trauma of finding out the facts?
I really wish I knew. I really do. What I don’t find as a proper or logical way of dealing with the facts is to simply don’t acknowledge their existence or, motivated by the experiential trauma, you question their legitimacy and start doubting the scientific-ness of DNA tests.
In relation to Ex Muslim, the method through which the falsity of Islam has been reached varies from one Ex Muslim to another and this process is not even in the league of DNA. I am oversimplifying and just drawing an analogy here to make a point about what anyone of us can do as we face these inescapable facts in relation to Islam lacking two things; Allah's divinity and Muhammad's prophethood.
I personally have never had any conscious desire to practise Islam again since I left it. I'm still in the process of finding out what I am without the religion of Islam, though. I never needed to open the Quran to read it again, maybe because I still remember it and can easily locate any verse I happen to be talking about (I use Almaktaba Alshamela for purposes of Islamic research in Arabic which I rarely undertake these days, the 6111 book library is freely available here
http://shamela.ws/index.php).
Somebody recently asked me this question "I want to be Ex Muslim, can you help?". Based on what I took the question to mean, I said I can't because I don't know that it means to be an Ex Muslim. Which made me think of the Moroccan philosophers Ibn Rushd or Averroes, and the Islamic reformist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri because their approach to finding out truths was not to add more stuff but, like a sculptor, to remove and subtract. To reduce things as much as possible to their indivisible whatness and then put them back together if you can.
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Updated and proofread.
Topic: Why must Maryam Namazie take on the left in her critiques of Islamic extremism?