Just how moderate is "moderate" Islam?

That's the question that Lawrence Wright raises, no doubt inadvertently, in yet another piece on the variously named Ground Zero Mosque/Park51/Cordoba House, titled, with bludgeoning simplicity, "Intolerance". After a dubious comparison with the Danish cartoon uproar -- how many people opposed to the project have called for beheading the Imam and his followers so far? -- Wright goes on to to argue not for tolerance as a virtue in itself, but rather for "tolerance" lest we alienate the great masses of "moderate" Muslims, who apparently are always just on the edge of regarding America as their enemy, and hence turning into those extremist Muslims (who aren't supposed to be real or true Muslims at all, but apparently that doesn't cut much ice with these unstable "moderates"):

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. Until recently, America had been largely immune to the extremism that has placed some European nations in peril. America’s Muslim community is more ethnically diverse than that of any other major religion in the country. Its members hold more college and graduate degrees than the national average. They also have a higher employment rate and more jobs in the professional sector. (Compare that with England and France, where education and employment rates among Muslims fall below the national averages.) These factors have allowed American Muslims and non-Muslims to live together with a degree of harmony that any other Western nation would envy.

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists’ misshapen effigy of that religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.

Of course, if we're talking about the interpretation of signs, many ordinary people would point out that flying planes into buildings, blowing up trains, subways, nightclubs, sawing off the heads of Westerners on video, and mass demonstrations of screaming hordes calling for the death of Western writers, cartoonists, or film-makers -- these little things might actually give substance to the argument that Islam is waging a war against the U.S. and the Western world generally.

But I'm not one of them. Yet. No, I'm one who still believes that moderate Muslims really are moderate and are, at worst, intimidated by the violent extremists among them who are a real enough threat that outspoken critics need armed guards. Not Wright, though, who exudes a nervous apprehension that the mass of Muslims are merely quiescent for now, but are always looking for some passing excuse to launch into anti-West jihad. Unlike Wright, in other words, I think truly moderate Muslims have the same sort of awareness of possible sources and causes of conflict that everyone else does, and have no more wish to give unnecessary offense than most non-Muslims. Here, for example, is Irshad Manji, a Muslim reformist, making better use of the same comparison with the Danish cartoons that Wright did:

Let me be blunt about my own emotions: I am offended by its proximity to the site of 9/11. I am also disappointed that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf—who is not an Islamist—has nonetheless played crass politics unbecoming of a man of dialogue.

So far, the imam has rebuffed accusations of insensitivity. Yet he made those very accusations about the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. In a February 2006 press release, Imam Rauf announced that he was "appalled" by the drawings. He called it "willful fomentation" and "gratuitous" to republish them throughout Europe. In the following weeks, almost no U.S. newspaper printed the caricatures.

So the question comes back to just how moderate so-called "moderate Islam" actually is. If we actually believe, contrary to Wright, that the extremists are alien to Islam, then how is it supporting the likes of Manji to cave in on this issue, as we caved on the cartoons or on other cultural issues? (As far as I know, by the way, Manji still requires bodyguards to move about.)  But even if you're as frightened concerned as Wright and fellow liberals about the violence lurking in the "moderate" Islamic masses, what would make you believe that appeasement is an effective response?

Thanks to Itzik at BasmanRoseLaw for the link to the Wright article

Islam and fear

Robert Fulford: Lessons of 9/11

Note that the title of this post says "Islam and fear", not Islamism. Fulford, in the link above, finally makes an excellent point exposing how some so-called "moderate" Muslims make use of the murderous violence of their more extreme co-believers:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is responsible for the building [the Ground Zero mosque], moved the issue to a more ominous level when he said on television on Wednesday night the results will be dire if the controversy causes the centre to be located elsewhere.

“The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack,” Rauf predicted.

He said it would threaten U.S. troops and otherwise undermine U.S. security.

“This crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis,” he warned.

About two-thirds of Americans, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll, oppose building a mosque near Ground Zero. Rauf believes fear of violence should change the public’s attitude.

No one argues he is an Islamist, but he’s clearly playing Islamist violence as a political card.

It feels like a test case. If that threat silences opposition this time, the number of future uses of the same strategy is infinite. Rauf says his goal is to build a bridge among faiths but in this case his strategy sounds more like coercion:

“National security now hinges on how we negotiate this,” he said.

Burning books in Gainesville is ugly and mean-spirited but no more than that; Rauf is trying something more serious, eliminating free discussion by threatening violence.

Fulford is exactly right, and if before people had viewed the issue as a test of their tolerance and open-mindedness, they should now view it as a test of their courage and resolve not to be cowed by the rage-boys and worse of Islam. It's not just national security that "now hinges on how we negotiate this" -- national character does as well.

And to his great credit and courage, Fulford goes on to raise questions about the very nature of Islam in the modern world:

In the climate that was created by 9/11 the fear of Islamophobia has created another threat, more serious in the long run: It inhibits the serious discussion of Islam.

Of all the great religions, Islam is unique in believing it should not be analyzed or criticized. The key point is the divine nature of the Koran. Because Muslims believe it is unalterably holy, any discussion of it is an affront.

In this sense Islam remains medieval. In 15th-century Europe, before Martin Luther, criticism of the Gospels and the Christian church was forbidden. In the year 2010 Islam still maintains that principle.

The Koran has never been scrutinized in the way the Bible has been studied since the 17th century. Ibn Warraq, a brilliant, Muslim-raised scholar whose books bring standard scholarly principles to the Koran, finds it necessary to travel with security guards.

Why should both practitioners and scholars not argue about Islam with the same frankness we bring to other world religions? Islamist violence subverts free speech and threatens to eliminate it altogether.

For the same reason, the possibility of separating religion from politics rarely gets even cursory discussion in the Islamic world.

Much in our life has changed since 9/11, as a visit to any airport in the world will demonstrate. But in the timorous way we think about Islam, far too much remains just as it was when we saw planes fly into the Twin Towers.

 Note that this is not denying the reality, nor the great preponderance, of genuinely moderate Muslims -- as opposed to the opportunistically so, like Rauf. It does, however, point out that such moderates live with much greater fear of extremist violence than do even so-called infidels, so much so that the very brave few who dare to raise their voice in criticism must have armed guards to protect their lives. We owe it to these people not just to protect them and help them spread their critique, but also to summon our own nerve and resist our own impulse to stifle and censor ourselves. We owe Islam tolerance and respect, certainly, as we do any widespread belief system -- but we owe it to both ourselves and the brave critics within Islam not to let  "tolerance" and "respect" be simply a mask for our fear.

So we're nine years on --

-- and much has changed. A war in Afghanistan, begun to catch the perpetrators of the terror, quickly toppled the medieval barbarians who were in power, but couldn't find the perps themselves, and now still grinds on, interminably. A war in Iraq, on the other hand, begun to oust an evil regime (which may have had Weapons of Mass Destruction), and to send a message to all such terrorist-supporting regimes in the region, has more or less ended, its mission accomplished.

For a few years after 9/11, organized terror plots succeeded elsewhere in the West, but none have for some time now. It seems clear that terrorist organizations have been damaged at least, and are largely on the defensive, for the time. Native, isolated terrorist wannabes have occasionally managed to murder a number of people, but it's small scale and sporadic, and they're often caught before they can act. There is still the spectacle, both amusing and alarming, of mobs of Islamist rage-boys in various parts of the world screaming to behead those who do something or other they find offensive, but their numbers too seem to be dwindling, whether through discouragement or boredom -- or, of course, through success, as they intimidate the West into self-censorship.

Because, on the other hand, much remains that is of serious concern. Perhaps the greatest at the moment is Iran, which still has the potential to inflame the world. But of course there's still Pakistan, the most populated Muslim country by far -- ostensibly an ally of the West, but the only Islamic country known to have nuclear weapons, with intelligence services at least suspected of having Islamist sympathies and ties, and large tribal regions uncontrolled/uncontrollable by the central government where terrorist leaders are suspected of hiding. There's Saudi Arabia and its vast oil wealth -- another ostensible ally, but one of the most backward, feudal regimes on the planet, that uses its wealth to fund and spread a fundamentalist version of Islam that underlies much of the anti-West, anti-modern world terrorist sentiment. And there are a number of other tyrannies and failed states in the Islamic world that have the potential to hide and support the terrorist organizations currently on the run, allowing them to rebuild.

More than that, there's that self-censorship phenomenon within the West mentioned above. Terrorism cannot topple regimes in the way that open warfare can, but that's never its aim or purpose. Instead, it aims to sow a kind of lurking fear and anxiety that spreads through the interstices of a society and a culture, weakening its self-confidence, leveraging its openness, undermining its own institutions, and leaving it prey to a kind of internal decay. Now, we're a long way from that, despite the hopes and fantasies of the Islamists themselves. But the exaggerated respect given to their particular belief system as compared to that given to all others is an indication that terror has had an effect on us, and only the foolish would deny it. We need to think about that every time we find ourselves, explicitly or implicitly, worrying about the reaction of the Muslim world to whatever the latest tempest in a teapot may be.

The mosque and the question of tolerance, redux

Ross Douthat:

Imam Rauf and Moderate Islam

Finally, some moral clarity amid the howls. After making a thoughtful distinction between devout, non-Enlightenment-embracing Muslims and terrorist-backing extremists, Douthat goes on:

But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package. (This is particularly true because Westerners have a long record of seeing what they want to see in self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, from the Ayatollah Khomeini down to Anwar Al Awlaki, and failing to recognize extremism when it’s staring them in the face.) And what’s troubling about some of the liberal reaction to the Cordoba Initiative controversy is that it seems to regard this kind of pressure as illegitimate and dangerous in and of itself — as though the First Amendment protects the right of Rauf and Co. to build their mosque and cultural center, but not the right of critics to scrutinize Rauf’s moderate bona fides, parse some of his more disturbing comments, and raise doubts about the benefits (to American Islam as well as to America) of having him set up shop as an arbiter of Muslim-Western dialogue in what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center.

On the mosque, tolerance, and war

This issue is one of the few where I'll admit I tend to vacillate. On the one hand, I certainly understand that most muslims are as non-violent and peaceful as most other people of whatever faith or non-faith. Moreover, I also understand that a relatively small number of very brave Muslims have taken strong public stands against the violence that's been perpetrated in their name, very many of whom are women. I would want to extend the same kind of tolerance toward the first group that I would to any other modes of belief, and I have great respect and admiration toward the second group. But on the other hand, I understand very clearly that what requires such bravery on the part of those who stand against Islamist violence is precisely the extraordinary willingness of a significant minority of Muslims to resort to the most brutal slaughter; I understand how that willingness creates a fear that permeates the culture of the modern world, as we've seen in numerous instances of self-censorship in anything to do with Islam, skewing the treatment of that one belief system alone; and I understand that the minority of Muslims willing to engage in actual violence is supplemented by much larger numbers around the world who sympathize with them in whole or in part. I understand, in other words -- as many simple-minded and self-deluding liberals do not -- that we really are at war with a global ideology, however unusual that war may be by historical standards.

So, given that, here are some tentative generalizations: first, wartime conditions justify -- and often enough require -- restrictions or actions that wouldn't be justifiable at all otherwise. And second, the ideological component of this struggle needs to be recognized and managed -- but we shouldn't be complacent that, in the fight with this particular enemy, our notion of civil rights and religious tolerance will be seen as a strength rather than a sign of decadent weakness. In the end, then, I come down on the side of those who say we should recognize the constitutional right of the mosque proponents to go ahead, but that we should make every effort to persuade/pressure them not to do so. This is a position shared by at least some moderate Muslims too, as this article indicates: "Ground Zero Mosque Splits Muslims", and they'll need the support of non-Muslims so they're not further isolated.

What's the alternative to "nation building"?

Pretty much everyone, left and right, agrees that so-called "nation building" is a foolish and impossible aim of any armed conflict, with the possible exception of a global convulsion like the Second World War. There's no need to list any such critics on the left -- they're against armed conflict anyway, unless it be conflict directed against the West. But on the right, it's not just Ron Paul -- Bush himself campaigned against "nation building" in the 2000 election, after all, and in the past few months George Will and the National Post's George Jonas have urged a quick exit from Afghanistan on the grounds of the hopelessness of "nation building" in that forlorn land. Says Will:

Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

 And says Jonas:

Surely, it’s better to help people build friendly, democratic nations, than letting them congregate in hostile tyrannies and engage them in periodic warfare.

Yes. Sure. If it could be done, it would be better. But if it can’t be done, it isn’t. It’s worse.

These two pieces are especially well-reasoned and -stated -- they should be read in full. What makes them all the more substantial and sobering, particularly compared to the usual leftist anti-war rhetoric, is that they proceed from no general hostility toward the US and the West in the first place, and they're not simply trying to score partisan political points, as the left so often did during the Bush years (recent comments by RNC chair Michael Steele notwithstanding).

But it raises the question posed in the title -- if "nation building" doesn't work, what does? For Jonas, apparently, nothing does, in the sense of avoiding a humiliating defeat: "Not having quit while we were ahead, we’ll now have to quit while we’re behind. Not having gone while the going was good, we’ll now have to go when the going is bad." For Will, it's the old magic of counter-terrorism that worked so well pre 9/11: "America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters." There is, as Jonas himself points out, the empire-like (empire-lite?) alternative of long-term occupation and administration, but that seems no longer really feasible either politically or financially.

So these are depressing assessments, no doubt. But then what is to be done in the face of what still remains a global threat of asymmetric warfare waged by a dispersed but fanatically motivated enemy in the name of a theocratic totalitarian ideology, and in the face of the world's multitude of failed states, semi-feudal despotisms, and porous borders? I've always been quite convinced that, in this type of warfare, military moves alone won't suffice. But is it impossible to find more vigorous means of carrying the ideological and cultural war to the enemy?