You Ain't No True Scotsman, Bruv!

Maybe I've missed it, or blocked it out, but we seem to have been spared the regular pieties in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks - the ones trotted out by all mainstream politicians about how the true Islam is tolerant and peaceful, and terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  That line doesn't seem to have had much of an airing.

For this, I am grateful.

Let's be honest: it's not true that jihadi or Islamist* terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  It plainly does have something to do with it.  This in no way means that Islam is, or has to be, a violent religion; and I do believe that most Muslims are horrified by what's being done in the name of their religion.  There's a #notinmyname hashtag that testifies to this.  I don't think that people using it are liars, and I think also that the overwhelming majority of Muslims who haven't used it are likely to be in agreement with it.  But, howsoever tenuously, it is something to do with Islam.

In just the same way, witch-burnings have something to do with Christianity.  The Westboro Baptist Church has something to do with Christianity.  Neither is not the whole of Christianity, by any means.  Not even most, or a significant part of it.  But it is there.

It does noone any good in the long term to pretend otherwise, and denying this seems to be a version of the No-True-Scotsman fallacy:

N claims to be a Muslim
N commits some crime in the name of Islam
N turns out not to have been a true Muslim after all.

So when a witness shouted at the attacker in Leytonstone that "You ain't no Muslim, bruv", and it became a slogan for showing opposition to religiously-informed violence: well, it's an admirable sentiment, but... behaving violently in the name of a religion doesn't disqualify one from membership thereof.  A bad Muslim is still a Muslim, and its disingenuous to insist that Islam can be separated from reprehensible acts as a matter of principle in something like the way that being a Scot can be separated from taking sugar on your porridge in principle.

Actually, it's more than that.  It's empty dogmatism to insist that Islam as a matter of principle must be beyond criticism, and therefore anything that is liable to criticism must have nothing to do with Islam.

But I don't want this to be a post about Islam; my concern is more general, and it has to do with the rhetoric of being a "true" adherent to whatever the creed under consideration is.  Let's talk about it in terms of Pastafarianism, just to be as neutral as possible.

What is it to be a "true" Pastafarian?