Here’s an interesting game to play, If a Muslim.... Read some story in the press about this or that all-American committing some heinous act and then ask yourself, what if he or she were a Muslim? What would the press say then? Would they treat it as an aberration in an otherwise decent society, or would they imply that it is the logical conclusion of a violent/sexist faith, Islam, and then bring in some self-defined “expert” to “explain” the behavior along “Islamic” and “Arabesque” line?

Here are some cases:

A man stabbed and bludgeoned his sister and her husband to death in El Cerrito in 2006 because he thought the couple were too liberal, were raising their children wrong and because they hadn’t invited him over for Christmas, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

What would the press say if a Muslim man did this for not being invited over for Eid? They’d, as usual, have some theolocentric “explanation” about how it offended his honor to not be invited for an Islamic holiday. And how violence is accepted in the faith and culture.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has given his backing to his embattled culture minister Frederic Mitterrand who traveled to Thailand to have sex with ‘young boys’.

Imagine if this were in a Muslim country. The press would have a field day. And imagine if the head of state then defended the action. Unbelievable. There would be writing about tolerance of such sexually deviance. But no one is writing this about France (of whom the majority public concur with the president).

Why does the Western press have one standard for non-Muslim and another for Muslims? One word: Theolocentrism.

There isn’t a more dogmatic, more persistent, more stubborn, and more hateful metarecite in Western discourse than the belief that Islam explains all matters when one is dealing with Muslims.

This metanarrative was properly addressed and critiqued in the exceptionally text by French orientalist Maxime Rodinson in “The Fascination with Islam.” In the text Rodinson coined the term “theolocentrism,” which he defined as the practice of attributing all observable phenomenas amongst Muslims to Islam. It is the belief that Muslims do as they do simply because of Islam.

The doctrine is incredibly fallacious. Those who advocate it are more obsessed with Islam than most Muslims. They seek to also find an Islamic motive when no actually exists. Instead of treating Muslims akin to all other people who compromise a diverse community and are actuated by myriad motives, the proponents of theolocentrism would instead prefer to reduce Muslims to a few characteristics and exclusively use Islam as the paradigm.

They is an absurd and racist paradigm whose time has long come to be thrown in the dustbin with other discredited ideologies and ideologies of hostilities.