Finding the Voices of Moderate Islam
John McCain recently reminded Americans that the great strategic challenge facing the West—and, indeed, the civilized world—is extremist Islam. And more important than any martial aspect of that threat, he said, is the ideological struggle between moderate and extremist understandings of Islam.
Yet going on seven years after the attacks that brought America's attention to the problem, it is hard to say that we as a nation—a government and a people—have gotten any closer to identifying, much less aiding, those voices of Islamic moderation that we hope will ultimately triumph.
In addition to the widely acknowledged failures of leadership within those U.S. agencies most responsible for public diplomacy and the war of ideas, Americans are far from arriving at any clear or secure sense of what "moderate Islam" or "moderate Muslim" means. And the reason is hardly surprising: Definitions of moderation—itself a hugely problematic word—usually reflect the ideological and political commitments of the definers. In this case, as it turns out, conservatives (or neoconservatives) tend to hold stricter, narrower views of moderation, while liberals often see more shades of acceptability. But nothing is ever quite that simple. Not when there are many on the left (including militant secularists and atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) who see Islam as essentially inimical to moderation or tolerance. To them, the only moderate Muslim is an ex-Muslim.
This range of opinions on what defines moderate Islam is not all bad. By sparking debates, it has sometimes focused public attention on an issue that most Americans would rather simply ignore. If the historian Daniel Pipes and author Robert Spencer tend the boundaries of moderation with Rottweiler ferocity, they often provide a valuable counterpoint to the more flexible (and even squishy) interpretations of scholars like University of Michigan historian Juan Cole or Georgetown University's John Esposito. But the opposing sides often go overboard, the hard-liners seeing nothing but evil intent and the softies seeing nothing but sweetness and light.
The charges and countercharges grow particularly ferocious when it comes to controversial figures like Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Muslim reformist scholar who now lives and teaches in England. The watchdogs say that Ramadan preaches a moderate line while secretly supporting an extremist agenda. More shamefully, they point to a recycled set of unproved charges against the man to make the case that he is a wolf in sheep's clothing. While it is easy to find fault with certain things Ramadan has said or written (and I have done so), it is hard to see how, in the balance, he hasn't had a significantly benign effect in arguing for the compatibility of Islam and liberal values. Yet several years ago, for the most specious of reasons, the U.S. government refused to allow Ramadan to enter the country to teach at Notre Dame—a decision for which the steady tirades of the watchdogs deserve at least some credit.
For their part, the softies tend to give dubious Muslims and Muslim organizations a free pass when scrutiny is called for. When spokespeople for the Council on American Islamic Relations speak harshly of Muslim reformists like Wafa Sultan or Zudhi Jasser, even going so far as to say that these outspoken critics of extremist Islam are not legitimate Muslims, we hear no criticism of CAIR from the likes of the Espositos or the Coles.
The fact is, there is a range of moderates, and it is hardly surprisingly that many Muslim moderates disagree even among themselves about who the moderates are. Furthermore, those moderates who are most likely to have any influence among Muslims in the predominantly Muslim world are also the least likely to pass the litmus test of the watchdogs or of those moderate Muslim who live in the West.
While these disagreements are often understandable, many lead to a kind of intellectual dishonesty that is ultimately hurtful to American efforts to identify and support the voices of moderate Islam. Let me give one example. I recently wrote an article about Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt and one of the most widely respected jurists in the Sunni Muslim world. His religious legal opinions, or fatwas, have a huge influence on the popular understanding of the meaning and applications of sharia —the religious principles that underwrite Islamic law. In his teaching, writing, and jurisprudence, Gomaa has made the case that the rich and varied traditions of Islamic law are the best antidote to Islamic extremism, which typically insists upon the most puritanical interpretations of sharia and its meaning. Gomaa, a Sufi Muslim himself, also rejects the efforts of the Islamist to make their religion into an all-encompassing political program and even denounces Islamic political parties on the grounds that they create divisions among Muslims.
After my article appeared, a number of bloggers assailed me for not looking into some of the more dubious fatwas and statements attributed to the grand mufti. One of those was his alleged approval of the killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian fighters. In fact, as I determined before writing the article, the mufti issued a fatwa saying just the opposite: that Islam offers no justification for the killing of civilians for any reason. But one blogger who bothered to quote sources cited an article from an Egyptian newspaper that had Gomaa approving of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians before he became the grand mufti in 2003. I passed on this charge to the mufti's office, and he replied categorically that the contents of the article were a fabrication. Of course, this may not satisfy all doubters, but anyone who knows about the journalistic standards of Egyptian newspapers—papers that similarly slandered the American-Egyptian Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou el Fadl—will probably conclude that Gomaa is the more credible source.
Other bloggers charged that I did not look into his fatwa allegedly calling for the destruction of statues (including, one might infer, many of the great Egyptian antiquities). The fact is that I did look into this. And while Gomaa did say that it was un-Islamic for Muslims to own statues or to display them in their homes, he made it very clear that the destruction of antiquities and other statues in the public sphere was unacceptable and indeed criminal. He is also on record deploring the Taliban's destruction of the great Buddhist statuary in Afghanistan. But the watchdogs tend to read selectively and to rely on those sources that support their judgments.
Look hard enough, and an American reader will doubtless be able to find things in the grand mufti's rulings that don't conform to current standards of enlightened moderation. For example, he issued a long and complicated fatwa on the issue of wife-beating—a fatwa that acknowledges certain pre-modern cultural and historical contexts in which sharia was used to justify the odious practice. But he also said that since those cultural and historical conditions are not the conditions of modern societies, Muslims today cannot invoke sharia to justify any form of spousal violence. If the reasoning sounds tortured, well, it is. And it would be much more appealing to American ears to hear him simply say that Islamic law has never sanctioned such practices. But we must recall that Christianity and Judaism have been used—in ways that seemed legitimate at the time—to justify practices and institutions that we now find morally repugnant, including slavery. The mufti was guilty of being honest about the historically determined interactions between customary practices and religious principles. So how does the watchdog Spencer characterize the man? As the "wife-beatin,' statue-hatin' Mufti Ali Gomaa." Is that accuracy in labeling?
The effect of such smear tactics is cumulative and insidious. Particularly in the day of the Internet, where every opinion appears equally authoritative, careless swipes at figures like Egypt's grand mufti create the impression that there are no moderate Muslims with standing in the predominantly Muslim world. Writer Hitchens is no friend of Islam, but what he once wrote about Pipes's dour interpretation of a promising development in Iran accurately describes the default position of many reflexive watchdogs: "To put it bluntly," Hitchens wrote, "I suspect that Pipes is so consumed by dislike that he will not recognize good news from the Islamic world even when it arrives. And this makes him dangerous and unreliable."
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Finding the Voices of Moderate Islam
It has been said that there are moderate Moslems but no such thing as moderate Islam. There is a reason for this. We must first be careful to distinguish between Moslems as people, and Islam as a belief system. Islam, in the sense of a belief system based mainly on the Koran and the Hadith is not and cannot be moderate. This is so because of the bedrock principle of Islam, namely, that the Koran is the literal word of Allah -- perfect, complete, immutable and valid for all of eternity. If we can say one things about ALL Moslems, it is that they all believe this fundamental principle -- even if they have never read the Koran and the Hadiths. From that assumption, it follows that whatever is in the Koran and in the accepted Hadith is permanent; and all Moslems are stuck with it. For example, if Muhammad said: "Anyone who changes his religion, kill him", no human being has a right to change this or to decide, officially and openly, to reject it or overlook it. And there are many more verses from the Koran and Hadith which cannot be interpreted in any other way than what they so obviously say. There are no differing schools of Islmic thought about those verses.
The best we can hope for is that many Moslems, perhaps most of them, will simply go about their lives in silent disobedience to the dictates of the Koran and the Hadith. However, to say that most Moslems are moderate, is as relevant as telling a person with inoperable cancer that most of the cells in his body are not cancerous.
A handful of moderate Moslems, like Zuhdi Jasser and others, speak out against the "Islamists" and against "political Islam", including the imams and other Islamic religious authorities, but neither Jasser nor the others never refute those religious authorities on theological grounds. They can't.
The fact is that the Koran and the Hadith, and the Sharia sacred law which is based on them, will always serve as a source of inspiration for Moslem jihadists, and that includes, not only the terrorists and potential terrorists and their helpers, of whom there are millions, but also the non-terrorist supremacists-imperialists who are pursuing Islamic domination of the world through more peaceful means: demography, litigation, infiltration into Western political and social structures, economics, etc., and, of course, implied threats of violence in order to inhibit our freedom of speech regarding any discussion of Islam as a belief system. We saw one example of this just last week with regard to the websites hosting the movie Fitna. Moderate Moslems never hold public demonstrations condemning their religious brethren who threaten the lives of Islam's critics. Why not? With very frew exceptions, the moderate Moslems (and neither Ramadan nor Gomaa are among them!) are content to allow the Islamists to get off unscathed.
As for Hitchens and Pipes, it is not Pipes who is dangerous and ureliable, it is Hitchens who wants to lull us into believing that there is good news from the Islamic world when there is none, at least none compared to the threats from Hezbullah, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and, especially, Iran with its nuclear weapons potention. Now, that is really dangerous.
Carl Goldberg
ideologyofislam@cox.net
We're all around you
It's not that moderate Muslims <i>can't</i> be found; in fact, we're all around you. But until you can throw off your blinders and accept us Muslims <i>as we are</i> (and not as you want us to be), you'll always complain that there aren't any "moderate" Muslims around.
dunner99.blogspot.com
The Voice of Moderate Islam
There is no moderate Islam, or any other organized belief. It is the nature of belief that the individual surrender to a conviction based on convenience, safety, and membership in a social body. Religion is an organized belief system led by politicians for personal gain over social behavior and customs.
Conviction is an emotional attachment of the individual to a social group. All beliefs require segregation and fierce defense, even to paranoia, against any presumed threat to the superiority of that belief.
Belief is a form of enslavement. It demands complete and unquestioning obedience. It requires intolerance and prejudice. It is bane of free will, self expression and self responsibility. God didn't make you do it. Your fear of the social group made you do it.
A moderate human is on who takes responsibility for his actions, something universally understood by those not suspended between fear and illusion.
The same is true for beliefs in race, gender, nationality, or cultural equality. That is utter nonsense. A belief sets boundries and value judgments. Only those who do not judge can be free of prejudice.
There was no problem until recent decades
If it is a fact that the Quran and Hadith will always be an inspiration for terrorism then where was Muslim terrorism before this century? How come we only started noticing and discussing it after 9/11?
It is true that all Muslims believe the Quran is the explicit word of God, but it is also true that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the masses and the scholars, do not interpret a single verse to incite violence. On the contrary the Quran urges Muslims to be kind and just to those who do not initiate hostility (Quran 60:8).
The problem IS extremist Islam that has no authentic authority (which 1400 years of scholars have gone to great lengths to measure and verify) over its interpretations of the Quran and Sunna. It is a wave of extremist violent thought and practice that feeds on injustice, poverty, and ignorance. Correct authentic traditionalist Islam IS moderate Islam.
The Quran commands it adherents to follow all the Prophets and believe in them; from Noah running through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and ending with Muhammad, peace be upon them all. By just that virtue of being an Abrahamic faith, Islam cannot be inherently violent or immoderate.
There is little documentation of what would be called 'terror' attacks because there was so little mingling of Muslims and non-Muslims. However, there are many instances of Islamic terror within their own countries, for instance, the Ottoman's genocide of the Armenians.
In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. Their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations. Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution.
There Is No Allah, Never Was.
Read your Quran, all of it, from the beginning. See the life of Mohammed unfold. Allah is a figment of Mohammed's imagination, conjured solely for his pursuit of power. It's easy to see where this mere man was coming from and going to. Real peace loving people need to open their eyes and speak openly about the nonsense being fed them about how Islam is about peace. "Moderate Muslims" are Trojan Horses.
in response to "finding the voices of moderation in Islam"
heres the thing though the Quran and hadith are indeed permenant but the interpretation differs ! how u(or the schools of thought) interpret it defines whether ull be a moderate muslim or an extremist. so in response to the comment that said for example that muhammad once said : "Anyone who changes his religion, kill him" this can be interpreted in different ways ! indeed schools of thought differ on that subject, with some saying that it is literal, others saying that it was for a specific case and a specific period of time. you have to understand the reasons behind the hadith and when and why it was said by the prophet before you go on assuming what it might mean. my point here is clear althought the sayings (hadiths) and qur2an do not change and are permenant the interpretation changes depending on the time period and the circumstances this is indeed the diversity and flexibility in islam. The problem is that those voices of moderation are lost ! and the extremists veiws are the ones beign followed why is that and how do we change that is the correct question to ask. but to put forth a postulate that islam as a religion can not be moderate is simply not true !
Moderate Islam Does Exist
Having personally met with the senior-most Shiite clerics in Iraq, and facilitated their first meeting with the US Embassy, IMHO most of these comments of mindless obedience are way off the mark. As descendents of the same God of Abraham, all were interested in seeking the common ground and opposed to the violence that detracts from our concerted efforts to impove the human condition.
Ayatollahs were very pleased that President Bush had been re-elected, principally because of his views in opposition to the violence of abortion and in support of the sanctity of human life, which they firmly believe begins at conception!
Those positions and his strong support for traditional family values appearled to clearly transcend the preoccupation with more temporal events, including war, which is accepted as part of the Will of God.
Many of the thousands of Iraqis I've met have lost an immediate family member to some tragic circumstance: the Iran-Iraq War; Sadaam Hussein; the quashing of the Shia uprising of the early 90s, promoted by Pres Bush; and the current conflct. They want a sense of normalcy and a chance to send their children to school, where they will be exposed to something other than the Taliban-esque form of education. Spend a couple years in Iraq, and perhaps one will have a wider perspective. And stay away from TV!! Read more press from other countries.
If you want a dose of what's coming, check out Navarro's "The Coming China Wars."
Moderate Islam is an oxymoron.
Kind of like a Vegetarian Cannibal, or Gentle Ax-Murderer.
That awful book - "The Koran" - and the vile 'prophet' whose delirious ravings fill it have spawned more violence and oppression than any single evil tome to date. To follow the ravings of a hallucinating epileptic mass murderer, brigand, serial rapist and pedophile is to follow madness.
Mohamed was a singularly evil man who began as a penniless worker, eventually murdering his employer Kaddiyah, and marrying, raping and enslaving scores of women, most disgustingly 6 year old Aisha - his favorite. He married Aisha when she was only 6 years old, and raped her when she was 9 and he was 50.
Some prophet! Some religion!
Islam is for the criminally insane, and daily their actions and interactions with followers of other faiths proves this.
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Tolson can't see the forest for the trees
Is this the best that US News & World Report can do? The UN just voted to limit free speech by policing it, and you give us an article like this? Let's talk about the BIG issues - like losing our human rights.
Apr 02, 2008 16:24:43 PM [permalink] [report comment]