@Gilliosa@actuallyautistic I always used to question myself re: cultural appropriation if I bought, say, a bracelet from a Muslim from subSaharan Africa. Often I simply wouldn't buy anything or would buy it for someone else.
Yesterday I bought such a bracelet from a brother from Touba, Senegal. We exchanged salaams, and I put that bracelet on right away. Given that my Hajj was somewhat hard-won (Alhamdulillah), I now feel like I'm truly part of the global ummah. Got my Hajj stripes!
Doesn’t mean that I shouldn't still examine myself for motives. But Hajj means I'll likely cut myself a bit more slack, Insha Allah.
@rabia_elizabeth@actuallyautistic@islam I get ya and I'm thinking Islam with Chinese characteristics with in a framework of 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' as cultural adaption rather than appropriation.
What autistic and allistic means is a enormous topic, difficult to summarise in a few sentences.
Autism is a spectrum of neurological differences that tends to present in broadly similar ways (the autistic traits). A person who is not autistic, is called "allistic".
Autism is diagnosed if a person has a lot of autistic traits, has them intensely, and there's no clear explanation for the traits other than autism.
None of the autistic traits occur only in autistic people. None of the autistic traits occur in all autistic people.
For example, difficulty in making eye contact is an autistic trait. But some allistic people have difficulties making eye contact, and some autistic people have no such difficulties, or have trained themselves to manage eye contact.
It's possible that that's accurate, but at the moment we don't know enough about autism to say that with confidence.
At the moment, we don't really know what those neurological conditions are, and how they relate, or differ from one another.
To permit myself an analogy, we're seeing the leaves rustling, but we don't know what's moving them. The wind? Birds? An earthquake?
It's only recently that research is starting to turn to identifying sub types of autism, rather than trying to find a single underlying biological explanation like "the autism gene".