The spelling of “Muslim” and “Islam”

A commenter informed me:

I never capitalize muslim or islam.

I replied:

A proper name, such as Muslim, must be capitalized. It doesn’t matter whether we don’t like Muslims. We can’t treat the rules of capitalization as a partisan enterprise in which we capitalize the names of the parties we like, and don’t capitalize the names of the parties we don’t like. In such a game, Islam critics write “muslim” but capitalize “Christian”; anti-Semites write “jew” but capitalize “White”; black nationalists spell “white” lowercase but capitalize “Black.” This is just too stupid. It is not something worthy of intelligent men.

In any case, at VFR, normal rules of spelling are observed.

The reader replied:

Point taken; you are correct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 14, 2012 04:37 PM | Send