Islam: A "Moderate" Doesn't Get It

This dovetails nicely with a UK article I was reading earlier - see below for that. Via Jeb Koogler at The Moderate Voice.

Robert Spencer, following the publication of my Brown Daily Herald article that criticized his comments during Islamofascism Week, has responded in a post over at his blog. Interestingly, a lot of the criticisms that I’ve gotten at Jihad Watch have to do with my alleged ‘misreading’ of the Quran. The Muslim holy book is much more violent than the Bible, many are suggesting, and therefore Islam is inherently based on violence and oppression.

The problem with this line of reasoning, however, is that it fails to take into account the evolution of Islamic thought over the past 1400 years.

Wrong. That problem exists, but it actually stems from Islamists with a lot of money behind them trying to do that very thing. And they are increasingly effective at it. And unfortunately, that applies to a well-funded Salafi effort, as well as what's commonly termed Wahhabism.

Salafism comes from a way of looking at Muslim texts which date back to no later than that third generation after Mohamed. It disregards the four main traditions of Islamic law and practice which developed over the centuries since then. Rather like the Protestant reformers in Christianity it speaks of going back to the roots. Abdal Hakim Murad, who lectures in Islamic Studies at Cambridge explains: "Just as the Protestants wanted to get rid of the saints and shrines, the Aristotle and Aquinas of medieval theology, so the salafis declare as 'unbelief' most of the practices which are normative to Islam in the Indian subcontinent." Salafism is known for its scriptural rigidity, intense literalism, deep intolerance and rejection of traditional Muslim scholarship.

So why is this attractive to modern British Muslims? Because they are searching for an identity but rejecting the factional ethnic Indian subcontinental politics of their parents, says Mehmood Naqshbandi, the author of the City of London's guide to Islam for non-Muslims. "They are having an identity crisis." They have no patience with the old tribal rivalries of their parents' generation. They have weak links with the Indian subcontinent. They are unhappy with rural imams imported from Pakistan who do not understand the culture of sex, drugs, rock'*'roll, and politics that surrounds them. And they have been educated in a system that trains them to challenge and to research on their own.

Comments

[rwilymz]

There are any number of islamic sects that wish to "reinterpret" the Koran in their ideological mold. With very few exceptions [Wahhabism being the most notorious] they are all reasonably more "moderate" than either of the traditional divisions of islam; to wit: Sunni and Shi'a.

With almost no exception, these more moderate islamics are ***not*** in islam-dominated countries. Traditional islam considers them heretics, and the punishment for heresy can be death.

This group of more moderate islamic thought is in India. The North American continent is crawling with moderate muslims as well. And this leads many of the soft-skulled dinks in our country to go on binges of wild extrapolation...: "these people are muslim, ... and they don't want to cut my head off ... in fact, they're very peaceful and charming ... so therefore ... the muslims in the middle east are just like this..."

Yeah? Go tell *them* that. We'll give you a nice funeral, though it may be in two parts.

And then the moderate muslims are really no better themselves. Hey, everyone believes the world revolves around them and their point of view, right? They're no different. To these little bands of moderate muslims, which may be individually 0.005% of the totality of Greater Islamia, they alone know the key to "true" islamicness.

This means that all the moderate muslims in the US are themselves claiming that their middle eastern cousins share their ideals and out look and worldview. Which makes it easy for our soft-skulled dinks to say "I know muslims! and they tell me that they don't believe in"... 'X', whatever 'X' happens to be in that discussion. Jihad, or forcible conversion, or whatever.

So because a dozen different sects of non-traditional islam which comprise maybe 2, 3% of worldwide muslims doesn't believe in the "convert of kill" philosophy, that means the other 97, 98% of muslims which obviously preach it and practice it *also* don't believe in it?

Someone's not making sense here, and it ain't me.

Moderate islam does exist, but it's largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. They believe they are the tail that wags the dog, just like every other marginal group in the history of the human race. Extrapolate from them at your own peril.