It’s extremely unfortunate, and what particularly annoys me is how it betrays the very intellectualism they so proudly profess. There is something profoundly contradictory about claiming intellectual independence while uncritically treating liberalism and secularism as superior moral frameworks through which Islam must be evaluated. Even by the standards of critical thinking they claim to hold in such high esteem, this is intellectually regressive. They’ve elevated the philosophical assumptions of liberalism and secularism into supposedly universal moral truths, without subjecting those assumptions to the same scrutiny they so eagerly apply to Islam. True intellectualism requires the willingness to interrogate one’s own premises, examine the foundations of competing moral frameworks, and distinguish between what is demonstrably true and what one has merely been conditioned to regard as self-evident. And somehow, they mistake this intellectual deference for independent thought.