But... when he clarified that he wasn't racist (which you now concede to be true, I think), you told him he was wrong! Islamophobe doesn't 'have the same ring' because it's completely different. (Imagine the laughs you would get here if you accused someone of being a Catholophobe...) Of course, there are people out there who lump together Arabs, Muslims, and brown-skinned people and hate them all the same, but given that it is clearly possible to dislike a religion and not the people who practice it, it seems ridiculous to automatically hurl 'racist' at somebody without making the slightest attempt to understand their position.

Also, he never said 'unilateral', that's your own word. How can you not realize how much adding that word changes the meaning of the argument? Western culture doesn't 'unilaterally' oppress woman either. I could find some dumb pictures of smiling women on a beach in Orlando and post those, but that doesn't change the fact that there are cultural trends in the west that cause women to be treated as less than men. It reminds me an awful lot of that "racism? what are you talking about, we have a black president!" crap. To steal a word from the progressive vocabulary, it's insanely reductive. Why should this be any different with Islamic countries? . Even if Muslim countries treated women the same as the West does, it would be hypocritical not to critique them as we do western culture, no?. And I think it's quite clear that at the very least, they are not treated better than here, and in most cases quite obviously worse.

Where does critical theory go when the word Islam comes up? Why is it that an advertisement showing boys playing with tractors and girls with a doll would be picked apart and critiqued to exhaustion, but any time a 'problematic' verse from the Quran is mentioned, 100 different excuses pop up to defend it? Where is that level of respect for 'context' when we discuss manspreading, or some silly joke by a comedian? The theories and vocabulary that we used to talk about oppression are so vague and easily manipulated that somehow every time Islam comes up in any way we manage to explain it away with a half-convincing argument, and when it's western culture under the lens, somehow the worst case scenario is always true. But when you really step back and look at the big picture, it's damn near impossible to deny that anything associated with Islam is given MUCH more leniency than anything in Western Culture.

Look, I have my own complicated relationship with the word 'feminism', and I'm sure you probably know more about the academics of it than I ever will. But one thing I know is that if you want to see change in the world, you're going to have to upset people whose tradition conflicts with the change you want. We had to upset Christians to pass gay marriage bills. We had to upset transphobic people to advocate for gender neutral problems. These things seem so obvious to Western progressives that we don't give a second thought to the traditions we trample over. This is good on one hand, because I think many traditions should be disregarded, but it's bad in that it shields us from the harsh reality of change. If we were more in tune with it, we would recognize that Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc, are not compatible with the western liberal idea of a just world. Now, you're probably itching to jump in and point out all the examples of 'moderate' Christians and Muslims, but I think that's a red herring. It seems like our goal is to water down the world religions so that we have the best of both worlds: we get to feel like we didn't erase anybody's religion, but we get to make them behave how we want. I think that's just a cowardly way of conceding that these religions, in their 'true' form, do not harmonize with our worldviews. One's conception of a 'moderate Muslim feminist', to the ears of a dude in Saudi Arabia, may as well not be Muslim at all.

I just think it's unfortunate that when it comes to bringing about change, we so heavily weigh the 'oppression status' of the people whose traditions need to be addressed. I can understand why that gets factored in, but let's not forget that for a lot of women, feminism means not getting beat to death for getting raped. To me, this goal is worth the unsavory task of criticizing one of the 'untouchable' groups. If you educated somebody on the subtleties of feminism and critical theory but told them nothing about the current 'oppression landscape' as it pertains to Muslims, there is absolutely NO way they would find Islam in any way okay. Jeez, what a rant that was. Anyway I highly doubt we'll ever see eye to eye on this, but I just hope you can appreciate how somebody might develop a distaste for Islam that isn't just a thinly-veiled hatred of 'Brown' people.