"Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me"

More on Dr. Wafa Sultan:

I was pointed to this (likely emended) transcript by a friend.

I think Sultan is saying what many people believe but fail to say, either because of worries about accusations of Islamophobia or because of worries about radical Islam itself. She is saying that Islam is in an enormous crisis, and to not point this out will have serious consequences.

Slavoj Zizek also emphasizes this in a brief essay that is more generally about religion: he says we cannot let our respect for another culture prevent us from demanding the observance of basic human rights. Violations of other human beings are not cultural values, but cultural obscenities, and a philosophy that does not distinguish between the two is itself obscene.

Back to Sultan, though: she emphasizes that this is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations, but a clash of eras, of the 21st century and the Middle Ages (I'm not too sure about that last—if we were really dealing with the Medieval Islam of al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, Avicenna, and Averroes, we'd be getting along swimmingly, but I understand what she means).

Sultan says, "Civilizations do not clash, but compete." I've written about the idea of the clash of civilizations before but I'd like to add that the idea of whole civilizations competing or clashing is, simply, the wrong emphasis. Seeing civilizations as more or less discrete entities with life cycles and unique and differentiable features has a long and spotty provenance, from Herodotos (when it was probably more true than false), to Giambattista Vico to Oswald Spengler (with many others in between). Spengler's Decline of the West was, in many ways, merely simplified by Huntington, a fact which should give anyone pause—Spengler's version supplied a great deal of the philosophy behind Nazism.

Like genes, ideas are the things actually competing, both within and among larger organisms (or civilizations). The competition among civilizations is simply an effect of the competition of ideas. Under this view, condemning things like the treatment of women under shari'a is not racist or imperialist or Orientalist or Islamophobic or anti-Muslim or anything of the sort because by doing so, you are not condemning an entire culture, but a bad idea and the fact that such an idea is held. Treating women like chattel is a bad idea, and saying so is, or at least does not need to be, a mark of cultural derision. And holding those who propagate that idea or who ignore or accept the propagation of it as responsible for its content is no sin. Unless, that is, we are willing to accept the idea as good not because it is in a specific culture, but because it is good for the people of a specific culture. I, for one, believe that many ideas currently hiding under the aegis of Islam do not meet this second requirement.