Religious Tolerance Shouldn't Mean Accepting Lower Moral Standards

The author and activist Maajid Nawaz explores the well-intentioned, yet harmful way members of the left prioritize tolerance over reform within Islam. Nawaz's latest book, co-written with Sam Harris, is "Islam and The Future of Tolerance" ().
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Transcript - There’s a section within the left. I refer to them as the regressive left and I want to clarify I don’t mean all of those on the left. I mean a section that have come to the view for the sake of political correctness, for the sake of tolerating what they believe is other cultures and respecting different lifestyles. They have an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities. I mean at the end of the day if we truly subscribe to liberal human rights values in their universality and the universal declaration of human rights they apply not just in favor of minority communities but in some instances upon minority communities too. And it’s what I call the racism of low expectations to lower those standards when looking at a brown person if a brown person happens to express a level of misogyny, chauvinism, bigotry or anti-Semitism and yet hold other white people to universal liberal standards. The real victim of that double standard are the minority communities themselves because by doing so we limit their horizons, we limit their own ceiling and expectations as what they aspire to be where judging them is somehow that their culture is inherently less civilized and of course that we are tolerating bigotry within communities and the first victims of that bigotry happen to be those who are weakest from among those communities. And that’s who I refer to as the minorities within the minority. The minorities within the minority are every feminist Muslim, every gay Muslim, lesbian Muslim, every liberal Muslim, every dissenting voice, ex-Muslims. And these are people who mainstream society will judge because they have Muslim names and brown skin invariably. So they have to suffer a lot of the discrimination that anyone else may suffer from mainstream society but even within their own community and then further discriminated against because of course it goes without saying that levels of tolerance towards to gays, and perhaps levels of anti-Semitism and liberal values there are still many, many challenges when it comes to those values within Muslim community. So they suffer from both ends and that’s why I say that if we truly as liberals care for the weakest among us as any liberalist society should be judged by. Then those who are the weakest among us I believe are the minorities within the minority communities. Read Full Transcript Here: