Somehow, the conversation about American Muslims and assimilation has come up again. These conversations always exhaust and frustrate me. With the notable exception of great interventions like Shadi Hamid’s recent essay, most of these interventions are entirely bizzare, really incoherent, often offensive, and the kind of ignorant that isn’t just embarrassing, but actively harmful.

Read to the end and you’ll understand also why gas is so expensive.

First off, most of the people demanding American Muslims “assimilate” have clearly never spent any significant amount of time with American Muslims, would not want to, and don’t even know how to. They have actually zero sense of the communities they’re talking about, don’t want to engage them, and still opine on our existential worth. A long time ago, I labeled this ‘Islamsplaining,’ echoing mansplaining.

People who don’t know you telling you who you really are. I’m serious: When I used to do CNN, MSNBC, even once in a while FOX News, I’d get people explaining to me, a Muslim, who studies Islam, and lives Islam, descended from a family of religious scholars, what Islam “actually is.” Remember Graeme Wood’s awful Atlantic essay on what ISIS really was? He cited three sources, in the course of a lengthy essay, concluding from these three (!!!) that ISIS was in fact concordant with Islam.

Imagine the level of gall and gumption required to so pronounce on an entire civilization, the faith of hundreds of millions, most of whose victims were Muslim, which in the end was put down mostly by Muslim fighters of various and different ideologies, ethnicities and sects. It would be like me telling the Pope what Catholicism really is.

Yeah, exactly. In other words, there’s a very short line from that ignorance to today. A lot of hubris goes a long way in a condensed time.

Second, the debate assumes there is a single America to assimilate to, which also makes no sense. Anyone who’s traveled around America knows New York is not like California is not like Michigan is not like Alabama. Maybe before meeting American Muslims, just meet any Americans. Which America exactly should Muslims be assimilating to? And, in that case, should all Americans assimilate to this single American standard? Who gets to pick what it is?

Third, the debate assumes American Muslims are a kind of fifth column, incipiently if not actually, though last time I checked, the greater threats to American democracy, checks and balances and institutional norms do not come from American Muslims. On January 6th, every Muslim I know was sitting at home, glued to their TV, despondent.

Fourth, the debate assumes America is static. America is not. A few weeks ago, in the Sunday school I teach, the topic of marriage came up. We talked about same-sex marriage. One of the students was genuinely shocked to learn that same-sex marriage wasn’t always legal, and that it wasn’t legal during the Obama administration.

He had no idea America had recently been so different. (To be clear, he was born in 2012.)

Now, most Muslims I know do not accept same-sex marriage from a religious point of view. However, exactly zero of them have ever proposed it should be banned, forbidden, proscribed or what have you. Their attitude is rather that, while they don’t want to be made to endorse positions at odds with their faith, they don’t in turn believe others need to live by their faith, either. But, of course, if that’s the measure of American democracy (which I believe it is), then American Muslims are just fine.

In fact, some of these folks could learn from us.

Fifth, the assimilation narrative is absurd because America is not an ethno-state but an aspirational, moral project (rooted, yes, in a historic people that has changed over time, but I don’t know anyone who’d seriously argue America is not animated by universal, even cosmic ideals, no matter how poorly we’ve done at reaching them sometimes.) We were born in revolution, against monarchy and for democracy, seeking always to balance inalienable rights with popular preferences, inching towards “a more perfect union,” and you cannot assimilate to a process, except that you play by the rules of the process, by which metric, American Muslims are doing solidly overall, and at no point did we launch insurrections.

In fact, the greatest attempt to undo America came over slavery and it’s worth noting that between ten to thirty percent of the enslaved Africans kidnapped and brought here were Muslim, were punished for practicing Islam, were forcibly converted to a twisted form of Christianity used to justify their ownership and oppression, and maybe we can ask what the debate about assimilation has to say here, since there were mass forced conversions in American history—of Muslims. Out of Islam. The first revolt of enslaved Africans in the Americas featured many prominent Muslims among them, taking place on Christmas Day in the 1520s at Diego Columbus’ Caribbean plantation. So, on that metric too, there have been Muslims in the US longer than there has been a US.

How then can a population whose history precedes the country in question be expected to forcibly assimilate to a country? (To participate in its development, on the other hand, is another matter entirely; just consider the role of great Muslims like Malcolm X, Ella Collins and Muhammad Ali in the development of our democracy.)

Sixth, the inability to actually sit and understand, appreciate and engage those different from us is a persistent feature of many American elites and their fellow travelers, which explains why these frequently endorse or fall into such horrific crimes and policies, make such epic foreign policy mistakes, and find themselves booted unceremoniosuly out of power, alienated from the people they claimed to champion. Because they treat people around them as means towards their own selfish ends, whether that’s taking advantage of the people around them, or turning entire countries into collateral damage.