It is with regret that I feel I must publicly object to a certain subset of jokes about Islam on the grounds that they are tasteless.
Where I’m coming from: ex-Muslim with a complicated relationship to the faith, but this means I’ve had real-world training in how to spot a problematic Islamophobia and how to differentiate between good-natured fun, fair criticisms, and just gross behavior. My opinion should be taken as my personal opinion on the matter and not speaking for anyone else.
The format of the joke and specific examples:
- “Alhamdulillah, Dick Cheney said the Shahada and embraced the Light of Islam on his deathbed!”
or as I just saw and which inspired me to write this,
- “[these Israelis whoremovedd Palestinian hostages] need to seek the light of Allah!”
BTW I’m definitely not saying “thou art cancelled” if you’ve made this joke, it’s just a little course correction and community education as we all teach each other things
The Problems With This Joke:
- Accepting the premise, the idea people who are responsible for torturing and murdering thousands to millions of Muslims get to suddenly escape punishment for all the misery they’ve wrought is disgusting. Celebrating that they would escape that is disgusting.
Now maybe some Muslims are so devout and peace-loving that they would celebrate such a converion and deathbed redemption. But I never was even when I was religious. My childhood prayers would be fedposts if I wrote them out. I don’t want to imagine Dick Cheney going to Heaven, I want him to suffer in Hell. The torment he inflicted upon his (surviving) victims will not end as long as they live. The scars of torture last a lifetime, as do the emotional scars of seeing your family and friends be murdered over some imperialist nonsense. If you want to dunk on Dick Cheney religiously, a simple 
and “burn in Hell” is way more solidaristic than pretending Dick Cheney got to co-opt the religion of most of his victims and escape justice for all the evil he did in life.
If you’re struggling with this concept, it may help to practice the reasoning in a different context. You may ask yourself this: would you find it funny to joke about and celebrate the idea of Hitler converting to Judaism and coming out as gay and discovering he was part Roma and deciding that actually he supported Communism right before ridding the world of himself?
- It’s treating Islam as a punchline, something that’s inherently silly and funny, rather than something that is important to a quarter of the world’s population and a source of solace and strength for people resisting an active genocide. A tool to be used to dunk on the conservatives, nothing more. It feels like a more clever version of the liberalism of democrats saying shit like “lololol, D®umpf is gay for Putler” where the joke is just that they’re gay, because being gay is bad and worthy of ridicule. What’s funny, that these bastards did something which their communities would view as heretical? No, then it wouldn’t be so specific. The joke here is just that being Muslim is embarrassing, and that encodes Islamophobic thought.
People often use humor to cope with the uncomfortable. I’ve done it too. But I think this particular format, in light of SO MUCH horrific bloodshed specifically of people in this religious group, sometimes (often) even using their religion as the excuse to target them, has problems and we should be more aware of how we approach the topic.
That’s all. There could be more to write, but I’ve got things to do and have covered everything that was easy to articulate. Basically all the other jokes and seriousness that I’ve seen here — alhamdulillahs, mashallahs, inshallahs, others I haven’t written down — all seem supportive and inclusive. There’s a bit of “trigger the War on Terror racists who freak out whenever they hear a bit of Arabic” coupled with “heartfelt solidarity with the victims of imperialism” to those that makes them wholesome in a way that the joke format I’m criticizing is not.
“Mini struggle session”: well-reasoned effortpost everyone agrees with
Pile of rocks: 600 comments and users quitting the site
The duality of
Nah, we’re waiting for the mod change that happens every night at exactly 00:00 AM EST where there’s a one to two minute gap until 00:01-00:02 where the site is unmoderated and we post all of our most extreme takes and because no moderator is actually present to witness the act we get off scott-free under the site’s “nullus testis, porcus testes” rule that got added in the last M7 summit of 2024.
Oh I was confused for a second because I thought you meant the other rule “porci testes, faeces testes”
The only person who is allowed to joke about Islam is LargePenis:
Mufti LargePenis issues a fatwa clarifying the artery’s status as a “virgin cuck”.
Good post, and I’d like to add something about one of those jokes: the “I’m hearing so-and-so said the Shahada and received the light of Islam on their deathbed” joke originally came from a twitter post that someone wrote when Billy Graham died, which successfully trolled a bunch of conservative Evangelicals. Whether you think the original post was right or wrong to make, there obviously aren’t any conservative Evangelicals on hexbear to troll, so the original point of the joke becomes lost and we’re all just repeating a tired reference at each other.
I mean we are a reddit offshoot
I think Dara O’Brien has the best take on this. I don’t know Islam well enough to joke about it and even if I put in the effort to make an actually good joke about Islam, my audience won’t know it well enough to get the joke. If you only know enough about it to make “attack helicopter” level jokes, just… Leave it. Clumsy jokes about things you don’t understand are iffy at the best of times. Clumsy jokes about a religion that you know very little about and whose followers are currently being persecuted by people you share a culture with are only ever going to be bad. Like, best case you’ll say something that’s dumb and unfunny. Much more likely it’ll be openly offensive.
Leave “jokes about Islam” to Muslims and ex-muslims. There’s plenty of other things to joke about. Including Christianity if you come from a Christian context.
Never heard of Dara O’Brian but that seems like a great approach to humor. A good comedian knows when and when not to throw that joke out. A good expert knows the limits of their expertise.
Obviously it’s part of a stand up routine so he’s being silly but I respect the approach.
lol. I also have no idea what this horse is.
I think it’s something he made up to make the point that his audience wouldn’t know either way.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Dara Ó Briain is a fun guy, frequent panelist on QI.
Live Allah Reaction to Dick Cheney:
God’s plan for Amerikkkan war criminals:
My childhood prayers would be fedposts if I wrote them out.
God’s plan for Amerikkkan war criminals: (the emotes)
BTW, if you want to copy emoji from a comment, you can click the “view source” button right next to the upbear button, which lets you select from the comment source text instead of the rendered comment. Unless you just left them out to make your reply smaller.
It was pure laziness (after which I went and wrote a long response to someone. The Effort Meter is poorly calibrated.
My childhood prayers would be fedposts if I wrote them out
this is one of the realest things I’ve read in a while
On a more related wavelength to your post though - I have seen someone point out here that it is offensive to use “inshallah” to wish for someone’s death. What’s your take on the ongoing prevalence of that being said here?
Well given that it’s generally directed against reactionaries and xenophobes, my take is I love it, it feels solidaristic. Even more so when it’s about people who’ve been murdering and oppressing colonized peoples. I say it too.
longer musings, collapsed for space
I can totally see someone finding it offensive. Islam is not a monolith and there are so many different interpretations I know nothing about, and on top of that I didn’t have an orthodox upbringing in the faith, (there are multiple different orthodoxies anyway). So I can’t give you an answer about how to deal with it if a practicing Muslim gets offended or expresses discomfort with that, you just need to take these things on a case by case contextual basis. I’d probably disagree and talk about it, maybe have a gentle argument, and I’d feel insecure and have imposter syndrome the whole time because I’ve probably set foot in a mosque under 5 times in my life
I don’t know who said it was offensive or what their perspective was. idk if it was some theological point they were making, a matter of cultural appropriation, or something else. I could easily see some more respectability-politics-minded Muslims I know being offended or upset because it clashes with their more peacable interpretations or stances. Traumatized by the mischaracterizations about how “Islam is a religion of peace” was a rallying cry by Islamophobes to juxtapose against “radical islamic terrorism”, and seeking acceptance and safety by playing up how not-scary the religion is. I’ve had some tussles about that in my family actually. To them I’ve said “There can be no peace while the warmongers still shed the blood of the innocent. There can be no peace without justice, and it is not just for mass murderers to enjoy their freedom and lavish lifestyles while their victims cannot.” Their objections are that who am I to say what is just and not, I’m not Allah, and I say I don’t need to be, any 4-year-old can tell right from wrong! With no resolution; they can’t emotionally stomach my position, because my position is one that acknowledges there is no safety in compliance and obsequity, while I can’t emotionally stomach their position because I burn with hatred for these butchers, hatred fueled by sorrow and horror about what they’ve done to people in the name of Empire.
And on Justice, anyway: I was talking with a Jewish friend and he said his read on the Torah is that many prophets protested against YHWH for not adhering to Justice, and were tested in turn about whether they would comply with his unjust orders or refuse. To him, the story of Abraham is one of failing such a test, because Abraham was going to kill his son just because he was ordered to, and what followed in his life after was his punishment for following orders instead of refusing and standing by what he knew must be right. That’s not a very orthodox interpretation, but I love it. Because at the end of the day, what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong, and not even the creator of the universe can make it otherwise.
And on Justice, anyway: I was talking with a Jewish friend and he said his read on the Torah is that many prophets protested against YHWH for not adhering to Justice, and were tested in turn about whether they would comply with his unjust orders or refuse.
This isn’t the exact same thing, but I am contractually obligated to share this video whenever the opportunity arises.
Not going to pretend I understand the specifics but I get the gist. :chef-kiss: beautiful.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
i think there’s an element of this that originates from a combination of the christian euro trope “X horrible monster accepted Christ on his deathbed, he’s in heaven now” with viewing Islam as positive is good, and thus in the mind of the privileged euro, this is a play on the christian deathbed conversion trope.
i agree that this is not good, just speculating a bit on what might have originated this in the minds of the chauvinist.
i do like the occasional inshallah or mashallah, but that’s to some degree using common Arabic phrases in solidarity, and i think that’s part of what keeps it in better taste than joking about a genocidaire doing deathbed conversion to the religion of the genocided.
do like the occasional inshallah or mashallah, but that’s to some degree using common Arabic phrases in solidarity, and i think that’s part of what keeps it in better taste than joking about a genocidaire doing deathbed conversion to the religion of the genocided.
Exactly!
i think there’s an element of this that originates from a combination of the christian euro trope “X horrible monster accepted Christ on his deathbed, he’s in heaven now” with viewing Islam as positive is good, and thus in the mind of the privileged euro, this is a play on the christian deathbed conversion trope.
Right, and there’s a flaw to just doing a find and replace Christianity with Islamic Charaacteristics anyway.
i do like the occasional inshallah or mashallah
“Ya Allah!” is another good one, definitely in my top 5 favorite ways to express exasperation. I also made up a sort of “secular” version by clipping the end off and modifying the result into “yea awe!”
Yeah that type of joke or thought process is really odd. And I’m also ex Muslim but in Islam there is no equivalent to confess your sins and be absolved like in Christianity so the joke doesn’t even make sense. Like even if you convert you still go to hell for the crimes you did. Or in the case
“[these Israelis whoremovedd Palestinian hostages] need to seek the light of Allah!”
Maybe it’s not even a joke but sort of a desperate plea into the void for something to stop the genocidal Zionazis, which I dunno, is a bit unrealistic.
Part 1: Right that’s the other thing. The religion as I understand it is not about having the correct label, it’s about doing the right things and being a good person. I think Christianity had some major schisms about that, “faith vs works”.
Part 2: In the context, which I didn’t want to link because I didn’t want to risk brigading some hexbearian, it was definitely a joke.
I just realized why the first joke even works. It’s directed at Christians or ex Christians. Doesn’t do anything for me though lol
hexbearian
Most would just say “a hexbear” in this context; some might prefer a “Hexbéarnaise person” though that label is usually only used for the language. Another alternative is a “hexbearrière” but this is often taken as derogatory.
(Tone description: This comment is a joke.)
Good joke :)
It appears we have no laugh emotes that are just genuinely good-hearted laughing. They’ve all got thorns in them
It appears we have no laugh emotes that are just genuinely good-hearted laughing.
Iirc, the original instance of the “X has accepted Islam on his deathbed” was a Twitter troll who said it after Billy Graham died because it made a lot of Billy Graham fans/islamaphobes very mad.
Sure. That’s funny. Graham wasn’t going around torturing and murdering Muslims. There’s a contextual difference.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and viewpoint comrade
Accepting the premise, the idea people who are responsible for torturing and murdering thousands to millions of Muslims get to suddenly escape punishment for all the misery they’ve wrought is disgusting. Celebrating that they would escape that is disgusting.
Isn’t the whole joke that they wouldn’t escape punishment/they would still be liable for their crimes? I’m not a religious scholar or anything, but that’s always the way I read this joke and the “mirrored” Bin Laden accepts Jesus jokes. I think if anything, the problem with these jokes is trivializing peoples religion, which should be a reason not to use them.
