Nearly everyone who discusses the issue of extremist Islam (or “Islamism,” the wedding of Islam to state government) suggests that the solution lies in the community of moderate Muslims: those who have the ability to recast the faith in a way that can tame its outliers. People who have suggested this include, for instance, Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
This sounds like a good solution, but it depends on the existence of a community of Muslims who don’t just reject terrorism, but reject fundamentalism and certain widespread tenets of Islam (homophobia, hatred of apostates, oppression of women) inimical to Enlightenment values.
The only Muslims I know are ex-Muslims, so I have no idea whether such “moderate” Muslims are ubiquitous. I hope so, but others think not. One of them is Suraiya Simi Rahman, an ex-Muslim and pediatrician who lives in Los Angeles. She previously lived in Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, and for many years was a pious Muslim in the Midwestern U.S., even donning the hijab for a while.
Rahman is now an atheist, and has written a strong claim about the rarity of moderate Muslims, even in the U.S., on Dan Fincke’s blog Camels with Hammers. Her piece was originally posted on her Facebook page, but was removed for “violating community standards”, no doubt because of complaints from Muslims. If you read it, though, it’s not offensive at all; but does argue that there are far fewer moderates than we think.
I have no experience of immersion in Muslim communities, but Rahman has, and so you should read her piece, “Moderate Muslims have hit their ‘wall,’” even if you disagree with it. She claims, for instance, that the female shooter in California, who had no obvious history of violent extremism, may be a fairly common type:
. . . and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can’t.
You really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.
And that’s the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They’re like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.
The “wall” that Rahman mentions in her title refers to a self-imposed limit beyond which even moderate Muslims don’t venture: it represents abrogation of the literality of the Qur’an, as well as abandoning critical tenets like punishment of apostates and blasphemers, and the notion of hell.
Rahman further claims that it is the isolation that these beliefs impose on young Muslims in America that makes them susceptible to the blandishments of terrorist groups:
The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they’re looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can’t date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh.
Rahman’s solution is, like many before her, to call for a more humanistic Islam that rejects Qur’anic literalism. But at the end of the piece, I think she realizes how problematic this is—after all, most Muslims throughout the world are Qur’anic literalists—and just calls for Muslims to abandon their faith completely.
At this juncture in history, when so many people are calling on the community of moderate Muslims to help deal with their extremist coreligionists, it behooves us to see if such a community even exists. Certainly there are many Muslims who are moderates, but when we say “moderate”, we must realize that what Westerners mean is not just Muslims who abjure terrorism, but those who embrace the values of democracy and Enlightenment, rejecting the demonization of nonbelievers, gays, apostates, and blasphemers, and embracing a religious pluralism—including those who don’t believe at all.
I don’t have experience to know whether such a community exists. The 2013 Pew Survey of worldwide Muslim belief suggests that it’s sparser than we think.
h/t: Grania
