Patheos recently republished an article of mine from Religion Dispatches.
In the United States, a place I have argued is a new intellectual Mecca, rather than attacking a simplified version of Islam, an Islam-lite if you will, I find more and more American Muslims defining themselves by Orientalist constructions of what Islam means. I wish I could say that this is a type of double-consciousness, where we are aware of how others view us and we are struggling against it. It is, I fear, a radical internalization of an Islam-lite that debases our tradition and makes both Muslim and non-Muslims more ignorant and sheep-like.x