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

Cark Goldberg of AZ 6:48PM April 02, 2008