Mercy Not Sacrifice
I recently had the opportunity to interview a Muslim immigrant woman named Mona as part of the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast. It was convicting to realize as she talked that she loves my country more than I do. Mona shared that many immigrants like her come from parts of the world where government corruption is expected, where political demonstrations are always bloody, where the basic infrastructural stability that we take for granted in the US is entirely nonexistent. So as much as we complain about our political system, we’re operating from a baseline of expectations that are so much higher than many other countries have for their governments. At least until now.
One of the things I observed in our discussion is that many white folks on both the right and the left treat American politics as if it’s entirely a conversation between white people in which people of color serve as props that we use to score points against each other. Within white discourse, the goal of whichever side isn’t in the White House is to hyperbolize how awful the president is for the sake of maximally discrediting the other side. So when people of color speak about their own perspective, the assumption is that they have been manipulated by the other side of the white conversation. It never enters the realm of possibility that a non-white person could have her own agency and perspective.
This dynamic manifested itself when Mona wrote a guest post on my friend’s blog talking about her fears for our country’s future. There was a huge backlash from people who were only able to hear her words as a delegitimization of their side. In particular, there were a lot of people who sought to reassure her that she had nothing to be afraid of since it was all just liberal hysteria. But Mona explained that she wasn’t afraid for her own physical safety so much as concerned about how far our politics were going to erode as someone who has seen what government looks like when alternative facts are presume
Here is the audio from our conversation. We talked about a lot of other things related to Islam. One thing I didn’t realize is that asking Muslims if they believe in sharia law is analogous to asking Christians whether the Bible is the inspired word of God. Believing in sharia law simply means believing that the Koran is the foundation for one’s moral life. When this question is asked as part of a vetting process for immigration (as Donald Trump proposes), what you are asking is for Muslims to renounce their faith.
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