That Awful "World Without Muslims" Post You've Been Seeing Gets One Thing Very, Very Wrong
Expect to be schooled — hard — if you plan on being Islamophobic on Tumblr. In an epic clapback, one Tumblr user responded to another's objection to Islam by cataloging just how deprived the world would be without Muslims.
Given how pertinent Islamophobia is in today's political climate, an exchange from four years ago has been reblogged and recirculated on the interwebs of late.
It all started when an intensely Islamophobic meme was posted to Tumblr, Good reported. The meme featured a picture of the twin towers with the words "Imagine a world without Muslims" superimposed on it — suggesting the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are collectively responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The epic response: Another Tumblr user was waiting in the wings to teach the Islamophobic troll a thing or two about adherents of Islam over a number of centuries.
"Yes, lets imagine a world WITHOUT MUSLIMS, shall we?" the response began. The user proceeded to list dozens of inventions and discoveries for which the world has Muslims to thank. The user also listed Muslim inventors, thinkers, scientists and the like, all of whom are responsible for various cruces of so-called "Western civilization."
Among those staples are paper, coffee, universities, hospitals and plastic surgery — to name but a few.
The word "algebra," for example, was derived from the name of an algebraic book, Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala, published by a Persian mathematician, al-Khwarizmi. The book's title translates as the Book of Reasoning and Balancing, and introduced "a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes," according to CNN, which cites cultural heritage and science organization "1001 Inventions."
Anti-Muslim sentiment has been percolating in the face of increasing attacks the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, claims responsibility for. This sentiment is no better exemplified than by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslim immigrants attempting to enter the country.
New York University professor and political scientist Ian Bremmer pointed out with a pertinent tweet in March that ISIS fighters account for approximately 0.00625% of all Muslims, with Taliban and al-Qaida members accounting for even less.
Contributions to modern civilization notwithstanding, based on this information, there are more than a billion and a half Muslims who are not affiliated with terrorism or extremism in any way.
The Tumblr clapback concluded with a similar message:
Just imagine a world without Muslims. Now I think you probably meant just imagine a world without terrorists. And then I would agree, the world would definitely be a better place without those pieces of filth. But to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of a few is ignorant and racist. No one would ever expect Christians or white people to be held responsible for the acts of Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bombing) or [Anders Behring Breivik] (Norway killing) or the gunman that shot Congresswoman Giffords in [the] head, wounded 12 and killed six people, and rightly so because they had nothing to do with those incidents! Just like the rest of the 1.5 billion Muslims have nothing to do with this incident!
That just about says it all.
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