Bolstering Moderate Muslims
April 17, 2007, 8:01 am |
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by Daniel Pipes*
When I suggest that radical Muslims are the problem and that moderate Muslims are the solution, the nearly inevitable retort from most people is: “What moderate Muslims?”
“Where are the anti-Islamists’ demonstrations against terror?” they ask me. “What are they doing to combat Islamists? What have they done to reassess Islamic law?”
My response: Moderate Muslims do exist. But, of course, they constitute a very small movement when compared to the Islamist onslaught. This means that the American government and other powerful institutions should give priority to locating, meeting with, funding, forwarding, empowering, and celebrating those brave Muslims who, at personal risk, stand up and confront the totalitarians.
A just-published study from the RAND Corporation, Building Moderate Muslim Networks
They start with the argument that “structural reasons play a large part” in the rise of radical and dogmatic interpretations of Islam in recent years. One of those reasons is that over the last three decades, the Saudi government has generously funded the export of the Wahhabi version of Islam. Saudi efforts have promoted “the growth of religious extremism throughout the Muslim world,” permitting the Islamists to develop powerful intellectual, political, and other networks. “This asymmetry in organization and resources explains why radicals, a small minority in almost all Muslim countries, have influence disproportionate to their numbers.”
The study posits a key role for Western countries here: “Moderates will not be able to successfully challenge radicals until the playing field is leveled, which the West can help accomplish by promoting the creation of moderate Muslim networks.”
If this sounds familiar, perhaps it is because of a similar scenario in the late 1940s, when Soviet-backed organizations threatened Europe. The four authors provide a helpful potted history of American network-building in the early Cold War years — in part to show that such an effort can succeed against a totalitarian enemy, in part to suggest ideas for tackling contemporary problems. (One example — “a left hook to the Kremlin is the best blow” — implies that Muslims can most effectively overcome Islamism.)
The authors review American efforts to fight Islamism and find these lacking, especially with regard to strengthening moderates. Washington, they write, “does not have a consistent view on who the moderates are, where the opportunities for building networks among them lie, and how best to build the networks.”
 NED chief Carl Gershman |
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Instead, the RAND study promotes four partners: secularists, liberal Muslims, moderate traditionalists, and some Sufis. It particularly emphasizes the “emerging transnational network of laicist and secularist individuals, groups, and movements,” and correctly urges cooperation with these neglected friends.
In contrast, the study proposes de-emphasizing the Middle East, and particularly the Arab world. Because this area “offers less fertile ground for moderate network and institution building than other regions of the Muslim world,” it urges Western governments to focus on Muslims in Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and in the Western diaspora, and to help make their ideas available in Arabic. This novel stratagem defies a centuries-old pattern of influence emanating from the Middle East, but it is well worth a try.
Even the generally hardheaded RAND study sometimes lets down its guard. Dismayingly, the quartet refrains from condemning Washington for holding talks with lawful Islamists even as it cautiously endorses European governments treating some Islamists as partners. It mistakenly characterizes the American-based Progressive Muslim Union as promoting secular Islam, when it was really another Islamist organization - but with a hip tone. (No other Islamists dared host a feature called “Sex and the Umma.”)
Although Building Moderate Muslim Networks is not the final word on the subject, it marks a major step toward the systematic reconfiguration of Washington’s policy for combating Islamism. The study’s meaty contents, clear analysis, and bold recommendations usefully move the debate forward, offering precisely the in-depth strategizing that Westerners urgently need.
*New York Sun
April 17, 2007
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4426
Cross-posted with permission
Related: Islam, Philosophy / Ideology
April 17th, 2007 at 8:15 am
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April 17th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Once again Dr. Pipes writes of moderate Muslims, but fails to define what he means by the phrase “moderate Muslims” and what such Muslims believe that would qualify them to be called moderate Muslims.
Why has no one coined the phrase, “peaceful Muslims”? Are there such kinds of Muslims as distinct from moderate or radical Muslims and if so, what makes them peace loving Muslims?
Have moderate Muslims and peace loving Muslims (if they are distinct from moderate Muslims) managed to successfully adopt Western cultural values, morals, ethics, principals, perceptions and attitudes and reconcile any incompatibilities with their own Islamic culture and beliefs?
Is that what makes them moderate or peace loving? Is it something else or are there a number of other factors?
Further, citing with approval the Rand Corporation’s study, “Building Moderate Muslim Networks”, Dr. Pipes subscribes to the view of that Corporation that:
“structural reasons play a large part” in the rise of radical and dogmatic interpretations of Islam in recent years. One of those reasons is that over the last three decades, the Saudi government has generously funded the export of the Wahhabi version of Islam. Saudi efforts have promoted “the growth of religious extremism throughout the Muslim world,” permitting the Islamists to develop powerful intellectual, political, and other networks. “This asymmetry in organization and resources explains why radicals, a small minority in almost all Muslim countries, have influence disproportionate to their numbers.”
The study posits a key role for Western countries here: “Moderates will not be able to successfully challenge radicals until the playing field is levelled, which the West can help accomplish by promoting the creation of moderate Muslim networks.”
Unless Dr. Pipes, the Rand Corporation and others of like mind can settle on a definition of who constitutes a moderate Muslim or better yet, a peace loving Muslim, if distinct from a moderate Muslim and why, they will be unable to accurately target who they are going to support to enable such Muslims to successfully challenge Muslim radicals and the whole ideology of radical Islam.
The first step in this process of supporting and growing the ranks, voices and influence of moderate Muslims is to know who they are and who they are not.
Dr. Pipes has previously expressed the view that radical Muslims constitute a small minority in almost all Muslim countries, as well as within the West, but he cites no studies to support such view. So just what does he base that statement on?
What kind of Muslims fit the definition of the phrase “radical Muslims”?
I would imagine that if one limits the definition of “radical Muslim” to a gun toting hate filled Muslim terrorist who stands ready, willing and able to carry out a terrorist mission against any non-Muslim , the statement that radical Muslims constitute a relatively small number of individuals, is probably true.
What of those Muslims who are filled with hatred of the West, of Jews, of all non-Muslims but are too poor and too consumed with just eking out a living day by day to actively participate in the terrorism of radical Islam?
What of those Muslims who are a bit too squeamish about joining a Muslim killing spree, but who give financial and moral support to radical Islamists, who count Bin Laden as their hero or in the case of Palestinians, who count their suicide bombers as their hero martyrs?
What of those who spread, support and nurture radical Islamic ideology, not only throughout the Muslim world, but throughout the West as well, such as the Saudis?
I submit that when you include all those Muslims aforementioned within the ambit of the phrase “radical Islamists” or “radical Muslims”, the numbers of radical Muslims within Muslim nations and the West, swell to become anything but a small minority, if they are a minority at all.
Again, in order to bring clarity and meaning to views such as those expressed by Dr. Pipes and the Rand Corporation, they must give attention to defining their terms and their phrases such as “moderate Muslims”, moderate Islam, radical Muslims and radical Islam.
Further, if they are to make statements such as radical Islamists constitute a small minority in Muslim or Western nations, they ought to cite reasons for making those statements as opposed to putting them out there as if they are known, proven and accepted fact.
Bill Narvey
Cross posted at Israpundit
April 17th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
I’ve searched a long time with my Diogenes’s lamp to find moderate Muslims. They’re out there. Some you may know of: Fareed Zakaria, Fouad Ajami, Ayaan Hirsi Al, Irshad Manji, and Mansoor Ijaz. I personally work with several, and have met some in Israel and the West Bank. Since Pipes didn’t define “moderate,” I will: Regular, decent people who can think independently and bare no hatred against anyone.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Your definition is that of a good person, irrespective of religious belief.
It does not assist in understanding what pundits and experts mean when they refer without more, to moderate Muslims and moderate Islam.
If the advice and opinions of these experts and pundits are to be of value, they must define and explain their terms and phrases in the context in which they use them.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Agreed. But I would apply my definition as a criteria for a Muslim to be defined as “moderate.”