In the dark days following 9/11, I heard numerous voices of condemnation raised from within the Muslim community: That isn't real Islam.

As a non-Muslim outsider looking in, I have to say that personally, I found (and find, since they continue to be raised after every subsequent atrocity) such responses disingenuous at best, self-serving at worst, but ultimately unsatisfying, and possibly even dishonest. Worst of all, such a response doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Who, after all, gets to decide just what is, and what isn't, real Islam?

As a outsider looking in, it sure looks to me as if the Islams of the world constitute a continuum. Some are inherently violent, some aren't. As a pagan outsider looking in, it seems to me that the most honest statement that, under the circumstances, one can make is: This is not my Islam.

I find that I respond similarly to discussions of racism in contemporary Heathendom. Who decides just what is and what isn't real heathenry?

(As to whether or not I can claim either insider or outsider status here, you'll have to decide for yourself. Of the Tribe of Witches, we're wont to say: We're too witchy for the heathens, too heathen for the witches. Straddling the hedge, of course, is fine old Witch tradition.)

Who owns the past? As pagans, I think that we often feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to the past: that, because of our love for it, the past somehow belongs to us in ways that it doesn't belong to others. In this, of course, we deceive ourselves. The past belongs equally to us all.

Looked at impartially, it seems to me that discussions of whether or not “Heathenry”—as if there were such a monolith—is or is not racist ultimately beg the question and, viewed from without, present as both disingenuous and dishonest.

Perhaps the truest thing to say would be that, among contemporary Heathenries, some are racist, some aren't. While we can dispute among ourselves what is, and what isn't, truest to ancestral precedent, it seems to me that our most honest—and, in the end, most satisfying—response to those which whom we disagree needs to be:

Well, that's not my Heathenry.

 

Above: Ship-settings at Lindholm Høje (Denmark)