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I wrote a much better comment a few minutes ago, but one of the cats I'm fostering because my girlfriend foisted them upon me jumped on my keyboard and deleted it. So I apologize in advance if this is a low effort comment.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
I want to give an example of this guy I know who worked at Best Buy with me in college. He is a Muslim guy and the elusive moderate Muslim. He is more or less progressive on every topic. I saw him recently at a tech meetup in Austin and he more or less sounded like a straight up Jihadist. And I helped this guy get his job at a major networking company after he got his law degree as a project manager, so I can confirm I thought he was a rational and trustworthy person. Which he is, except on the Israel-Palestine issue. He literally can't be rational. I thin for "experts", this is the same thing. They literally can't be rational on a few issues and it causes them to act insane and make people lose trust in institutions.
I'll give a less controversial example. I have a CS degree and I worked for this company that sold software that helped people automate things. We'd get this guy on a call with potential customers after the sales people and sales engineers did their thing and he would just shit on Azure and AWS and how he could do this and that if they switched to Linux and open source and the customers hated it. I had to pull him aside I was like dude we make software that works with Azure wtf are you doing. He was incapable of putting that hammer and nail away. It was like who gives a shit if a company uses Microsoft but he literally couldn't be rational about it.
I think a lot of people default to something similar to Foucault's theories on knowledge and power where knowledge and power are so linked that they end up essentially being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create NPCs that don't think. But in the case of experts, I think it is their biases causing this top down gas lighting instead of anything from the regime. The simplest and most likely answer is these people just believe this stuff due to ideology and are incredibly biased on hot culture war issues. It's not a conspiracy, they literally just can't think about these issues rationally.
Every Muslim I have met in the US, and I have met a fair number, has been moderate. Though only one has been from the Middle East.
You're probably not hanging around with the women in beekeeper outfits though.
Consider also, taqiya. While I personally know Muslims that are quite evidently "moderate" based on the part where they don't seem to follow the actual religion and like drinking just fine, it's worth keeping in mind that lying about one's beliefs is explicitly covered as an acceptable thing to do in Islam.
I don’t think lying is the reason, I am led to understand taqiya is more of a shia thing, and I am reluctant to go straight for the bad faith accusation .
But it’s easy to miss the radicalism if you don’t ask specific questions. About apostates, jews, cartoons, palestine. I was taken aback more than once by the complete change in demeanor and attitude once I breached those subjects with educated , otherwise pleasant acquaintances. I realized then that not only were we not going to be friends, but peaceful coexistence with those who believe what they believe was going to be a tall order. Most were middle eastern though, and this was in europe (turks were generally ok).
I've rarely seen the word "taqiya" used in some other context than basically making the whole idea "all Muslims are fundamentalists" unfalsifiable; should some Muslim appear to be moderate, then they are just a fundamentalist who is lying, because taqiya exists.
Actually, I knew a palestinian relatively well at uni, and I asked him about taqiya, and he said ‘taqiya? Taqqiyyya? Oh, yes, it means small hat’. He could have been lying of course, but given that we had already discussed politics extensively, and he had candidly admitted to supporting death for apostates, cartoonists, jews, calling all western women whores , believing all kinds of conspiracy theories, mostly about jews, and so on, (nice guy otherwise) , I think he was being honest.
He's probably playing dumb; the words are near-homophones. Small hat, Lying to hide one's beliefs
Hold on, we got an arabophone right here : @ymeskhout , ever heard of taqiya, the thing that isn't a hat ?
No, the only time I ever see taqiya mentioned is within discussions in the US about how "all Muslims are fundamentalists and will pretend otherwise".
I've been an atheist for several decades, but I don't know if I'd be accused of taqiya. There are some things I can say here that might be sufficiently persuasive, but I also don't want Zorba to get Charlie Hebdo-ed because of me.
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I think the taqqiya as lying about your beliefs is a shia doctrine and most palestinians are sunni, anyways.
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I think it more likely he didn't know the other meaning, because it's archaic/obscure.
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This matches my experience perfectly in the States. My Turkish work buddy informed me on a couple occasions with questions I had about decidedly non-Islamic behavior that he's, "not that kind of Muslim". In stark contrast, I had an Egyptian colleague that was entirely serious and entirely literal about Islam in a disconcerting way. Good guy, good family man, good scientist, but damn, his view of the world is not reconcilable with mine and the only extent to which we can live together is the extent to which he has no political power.
Many American Turks are wealthy and secular (this is true in all Anglo countries including the UK and Canada). It’s German, Dutch and other European Turks who tend to be descended from poor, deeply religious Anatolian peasants. See this chart.
A similar situation exists between American Pakistanis (largely upper middle class, many doctors and engineers, some migrants from non-Sunni minority religious groups) and British Pakistanis (overwhelmingly descended from poor, highly religious peasants from around the city of Mirpur in Azad Kashmir).
Most ethnic Turks in the UK in my experience are actually Turkish Cypriots (Wikipedia confirms this), and are descended from people who took low-grade civilian jobs at the British military bases on Cyprus. So not wealthy, although in practice usually secular.
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