Stephen Schwartz On Moderate Moslems

[Meta Blog]

Originally from Gus Van Horn,

Quite awhile back, I blogged some cogent remarks by Thomas Friedman on the problem that terrorism poses for Moslems who do not sympathize with terrorism. Quoting him again:

[E]ither the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

Today, I ran across a thoughtful, moderate Moslem commentator, Stephen Schwartz, who discusses such matters. In his archives at TCS Daily, for example, he explains some of the pressures on American Moslems against standing up to terrorism.

What happens when ordinary Muslims rebel against radical domination in America? They are ostracized, thrown out of mosques, and subjected to extraordinary public insults and threats. I myself was harassed in a Long Island mosque in 2003, as noted in this article. Shia mosques are excluded from "Sunni," i.e. Wahhabi-controlled bodies, and numerous incidents of expulsions of individual Shias from Sunni mosques in the U.S. have been reported to the Center for Islamic Pluralism, which I have established.

The "Wahhabi Lobby" -- an assemblage of groupings, headed by the Hamas- and Saudi-backed Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) -- controls the public life of many American Sunnis. It demands certification as moderate, but not in recognition of real moderation or loyalty to the American constitutional tradition. Instead, their demand for recognition and respect is a preemptive strike to shield them from a proper understanding and appreciation of their tactics and aims.

And how does the CAIR gang react when a moderate Muslim activist raises a dissenting voice? It betrays its guilt: accused of extremism, CAIR reacts by the extremist methods of menace and hate-mongering. [links omitted]

While this does not excuse silence in the face of terrorism, it helps explain it, and it shows us why it is imperative that we stop giving groups like CAIR the benefit of the doubt. If the social/religious climate for American Moslems resembles that in a full-blown theocracy, our government and media could help matters by no longer granting CAIR moral sanction.

But the reason I'm blogging Stephen Schwartz is because today he speaks to another issue. Recall that Friedman said, "[E]ither the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists ... or the West is going to do it for them ... in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out." A huge problem for moderate Moslems is this: how can Westerners, almost wholly ignorant of that religion, differentiate moderates from terrorists? Stephen Schwartz explains how. He starts with an executive summary, which is, ironically enough, the main thing I have an issue with.

Moderate Sunni Muslims may be recognized in person by asking a simple question: "what do you think of Wahhabism, the state Islamic sect of Saudi Arabia?" Every Muslim in the world knows about Wahhabism, and knows that it is embodied in al-Qaida. If a Sunni Muslim is asked about Wahhabism and states that it is a controversial, extreme doctrine that causes many problems because of Saudi money, the respondent is probably moderate. Denouncing the Saudis alone is not enough; radicals criticize the Saudi monarchy for insufficiently enforcing Wahhabi beliefs. The root cause of Sunni terror is Wahhabism, not the monarchy.

Schwartz goes on to explain why he thinks a terrorist would not lie in answer to such a question (now that Schwartz has supplied him with the "right answer"), but I am unconvinced. Indeed, since Islamists are trained to "blend in", the more sophisticated among them might dissemble about many things over a long period of time, making even the long, deliberate version of Schwartz's advice moot. This is where we would need the help of the (real) moderates, in the form of telling us of any suspicions of solidarity with terrorists.

Nevertheless, despite the ill-advisability of simply posing a question, the rest of Schwartz's advice is pretty good: He advises that one consider the whole of a person's attitudes and actions. So his whole column is still worth a read.

Muslim moderation is defined by attitudes and conduct, not by abstractions or historical precedents, which, as with all religions, may be interpreted to support any ideological position. Observing and analyzing Sunni Muslims by such positive, practical criteria is extremely easy. There are more than a billion Sunnis in the world, and they are not all jihadists or fundamentalists, so telling them apart should not be difficult with a little effort. Identifying moderate Shia Muslims is harder, but one thing may be said immediately: those who follow Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq prove their moderation daily, by their silent but effective support to the U.S.-led liberation coalition.

He then goes on to outline a fairly large constellation of factors to look for.

PS: For those who wonder about the incident in which the Former Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens was denied entry into the United States, Schwartz also writes about that, saying that, "[A] look at the career and associations of Yusuf Islam since he became a Muslim in 1977 shows that the decision was correct."