The famous Canadian thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has returned to stir controversy, after a message on his YouTube channel (YouTube) addressed to Muslims around the world, in which he addressed issues of sectarianism and religious division, and his critics described it as condescending and full of orientalist stereotypes.

Peterson seemed happy to say that an audience of Muslims is following his activities and writings, and he said in his letter, "Shias and Sunnis..Shia: find a Sunni friend by correspondence. Sunnis: do the same."

Peterson praised the "Abraham Accords", calling in a high-pitched tone for Muslims in the Muslim world to stop fighting among themselves and consider Christians and Jews as their enemies. "The best place to find the devil is within you. If you think the real enemy is," Peterson said. someone else's heart, you didn't think long enough."

criticism

On social media, Peterson's comments drew sharp reactions from Muslim activists who criticized his "high and superficial" advice on how to solve problems in the Muslim world.

Addressing Peterson, Othman Badr, an academic at the University of Western Sydney, wrote, "Your supposedly sincere intention to find solutions to the world's problems is admirable, but you are looking in the wrong place. Your lack of awareness of the developments in Western civilization which you usually glorify is alarming." .

Badr added, "Something called secularism happened about two centuries ago. Religion was subjugated and relegated to the margins of everything that is important and influential in politics and public life. The Pope was forced to retire in the Vatican and became a footnote on the board of world politics. This enlightened lifestyle was generalized on the crater of Venice, in Asia and Africa. All the countries there are now also secular."

And he added, "Your implicit diagnosis of the prevailing conflicts and problems as a consequence of interfaith conflict is a naive ignorance of all this. Faith does not play such an important role in the global affairs of the secular age. Secular ideologies do that and manipulate faith when appropriate."

"Consider also the main examples of recent global conflicts: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the Israeli aggression on Gaza, the war on terror that gave us Guantanamo Bay and ISIS. What do any of these have to do with interfaith conflict? Is the United States a Christian religious state?" Or a secular liberal democracy (with some Christian discourse at times)? Is Russia an Orthodox religious state? Or a secular socialist regime? And so on."

“The fact of the matter is that liberal secular states are the most influential actors on the world stage, and they are in turn primarily responsible for the chaos we see on that stage. Interfaith harmony to be a solution. This is to take politics out of conflict and empty it of history to make it religious (or ethnic/cultural) fundamentalist. One has to be shallow to be convinced."

Commenting on Twitter, journalist Mahdi Hassan wrote that Peterson's message to Muslims was "fanatic, ignorant and sickening".

"It is time for those of you in the Muslim world to stop fighting among yourselves, you Shias and Sunnis… Shias, find a Sunni pen pal. Sunnis do the same."

A patronizing, ignorant, & nauseating "Message to Muslims" from the ridiculous Jordan Peterson.https://t.co/JFD0qEDle3

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 13, 2022

Commenting on Peterson's message, anti-Islamophobia activist CJ Werlman said in a YouTube video message that "Peterson wants to believe that Muslims are backward and barbaric, while white men like him are educated, enlightened and civilized."

Werlman added that Peterson is talking about sectarian reform without knowing that this phenomenon in the Islamic world "was harnessed and nurtured by European colonial powers, which sought to plunder Muslim lands by dividing and subjugating the indigenous Muslim population," as he put it.

Peterson had recently conducted deep intellectual meetings with Muslim intellectuals, including the British preacher Muhammad Hijab and the American preacher Hamza Yusef, and those visual meetings elicited great reactions.

Peterson has previously argued that he does not believe that Islam can be compatible with democracy, assuming that it has failed to "separate church and state."

Jordan Peterson is best known as a critic of Western identity politics, "political correctness" and the liberal left from a conservative position, and his critical and supportive views of the traditional family, as well as his ideas on the importance of personal accountability and the virtues of motherhood and other social issues, have earned him many supporters, including a Muslim audience, to the point of His invitation to speak at one of the Islamic conferences in Canada, before retracting it.

Haha, Jordan Peterson, a publisher of a message to his Muslim followers, lectures on them as if they were children and in a language full of supremacist, Zionist and orientalist, telling them:


- Do not slaughter each other.


Congratulations on the Abrahamic agreements with Israel.


O Shiites, love the Sunnis, and O Sunnis, love the Shiites.


Write letters to each other.


Let us unite against the satanic culture.

— Sultan Al-Amer (@sultaan_1) July 13, 2022

Peterson's critics say that Western right-wing currents sometimes use criticism of Islam, to gain legitimacy, build a ground for them, and distract themselves from themselves, by dismissing the accusations leveled against them by left-wing and liberal activists to the Islamic world as a "more extreme example."

Peterson had previously criticized Muslims' treatment of minorities, citing the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan, while critics said he had forgotten that these monuments (and other churches and temples) remained intact under Islamic rule for more than a thousand years.