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Well, the first thing that I'd point out is the Yale Islamic studies departments diversity and equal opportunity statements. This will fly heavily against much

by esyir 5y ago

Well, the first thing that I'd point out is the Yale Islamic studies departments diversity and equal opportunity statements. This will fly heavily against much of the Islamic world's views on homosexuality.

rayiner 5y ago
It’s not just what gets said it’s what doesn’t get said. Islam, more so than Protestant Christianity, views the teachings of the prophet as guidance and a model for how to live. One can imagine scholarly work that analyzes how Islamic beliefs—including traditional ones—provide social benefits. For example, there is a strong negative correlation between AIDs prevalence and percentage Muslim population in African countries, likely due to rigid Islamic sexual standards. Of course being a professor is different than being an imam. But the political climate in American universities—under which you have to take many of the beliefs of most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims as per se bigotry—means you get a lot of articles focused on how Americans are racist against Muslims and relatively little work delving into Islam itself on its own merits. In the context of racial minorities, you see a huge distortion as well. The religiosity and social conservatism of Black people tends to be totally excluded from academic conversations about structural racism. Raj Chetty (a British Indian economist) has been doing studies showing that the two factors that most strongly affect upward mobility for Black kids is rates of single parenthood in the community as a whole, and levels of white racism. The latter is covered at length in academic treatments, but the former is virtually ignored. These distortions exist with respect to other groups, but have less impact there because academia has far less impact. Harvard’s new lead chaplain is an atheist, but who care because academia has very little influence on the public discourse surrounding Christianity. Nobody looks to academia to explain what Irish Americans are thinking.

by esyir 5y ago

rayiner 5y ago

It’s not just what gets said it’s what doesn’t get said. Islam, more so than Protestant Christianity, views the teachings of the prophet as guidance and a model for how to live. One can imagine scholarly work that analyzes how Islamic beliefs—including traditional ones—provide social benefits. For example, there is a strong negative correlation between AIDs prevalence and percentage Muslim population in African countries, likely due to rigid Islamic sexual standards. Of course being a professor is different than being an imam. But the political climate in American universities—under which you have to take many of the beliefs of most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims as per se bigotry—means you get a lot of articles focused on how Americans are racist against Muslims and relatively little work delving into Islam itself on its own merits. In the context of racial minorities, you see a huge distortion as well. The religiosity and social conservatism of Black people tends to be totally excluded from academic conversations about structural racism. Raj Chetty (a British Indian economist) has been doing studies showing that the two factors that most strongly affect upward mobility for Black kids is rates of single parenthood in the community as a whole, and levels of white racism. The latter is covered at length in academic treatments, but the former is virtually ignored. These distortions exist with respect to other groups, but have less impact there because academia has far less impact. Harvard’s new lead chaplain is an atheist, but who care because academia has very little influence on the public discourse surrounding Christianity. Nobody looks to academia to explain what Irish Americans are thinking.