The Search for Moderate Islam

Not in our Name: British Muslims Condemn the Barbarity of ISIS
20 August 2014The Muslim Council of Britain once again condemned the actions of the so called Islamic State in Syria and the Levant, ISIS. Today we express once again our rebuke of this reprehensible organisation. We are horrified at the abhorrent murder of James Foley, a reporter who initially went to the region to expose the human rights abuses of the Syrian regime. ISIS has murdered this man for no reason at all.Each day ISIS seeks to carry out an act more barbarous than the day before, craving the oxygen of publicity to give credibility to their heinous acts. We condemn unreservedly their psychopathic violence, whether it is on minorities, on civilians, or on fellow Muslims.

Catholic writes:So, if someone where to claim that "Islam teaches moderation", what would they use to support that claim?

Coyote writes:"Muslim" is not a race.

Faith writes: Besides being "fanatically" aware of the dangers of Islam, I'm also anti-Marxist, anti-Satan, anti-PC etc. Don't forget to put those on your list of my sins.

Most liberals think that religion is never the true source of a person’s bad behavior. Even when jihadists explicitly state their religious motivationsthey believe that they have an obligation to kill apostates and blasphemers, and they want to get into Paradiseliberal academics, journalists, and politicians insist on looking for deeper reasons for their actions. However, when people give economic, political, or psychological reasons for doing whatever it is they do, everyone accepts those reasons at face value.
If a man murders his neighbor because he wants to steal his property and doesn’t want to leave a witness, everyone accepts the killer’s account of his actions. But when he says, as every jihadist does, that he was driven by a sense of religious obligation and a yearning for Paradise, liberals insist that the search for an underlying motive must continue. So the game is rigged. If you’re always going to look beneath a person’s religious convictions for something else, of course you’ll never see that religion is an important driver of human behavior.

Harris: It certainly should be. That’s what is so crazy about this Islamophobia charge. The people who commit the worse offensesthe honor killers, the suicide bombers, the Taliban gunman who attempted to murder Malala Yousafzaiare absolutely clear about their motives and articulate them at every opportunity. They are motivated by Islam. Yes, other religions have problematic doctrines. We can even concede that the Old Testament is the most barbaric scripture of them all. But Christians and Jews don’t tend to take the worst of its passages seriously, for reasons that can be explained both by the centuries during which these Western faiths have been weathered by science and secularism and by crucial elements of their own theology. Most important, in my view, is the fact that Christianity and Judaism do not have clear doctrines of jihad, nor do they promise, ad nauseam, that martyrs go straight to Paradise. Islam is truly unique in this respect, which helps explain the fanaticism and violence we see throughout the Muslim world. Of course, your focus has been on the plight of women and girls under Islam, many millions of whom live in conditions that are antithetical to the most basic human happiness, as you know all too well. And the rationale for their oppression is drawn directly from scripture.

Harris: You’ve just exposed another painful irony here. When our critics insist on cultural or religious sensitivity, imagining that they are protecting a vulnerable population, they are really protecting thuggish men who are oppressing women, spreading hate, and stifling freedom of thought within their own communities and freedom of expression everywhere else. Anyone who likens the criticism of Islam as a doctrine to a hatred of Muslims as peopleor to anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of bigotryhas made it more difficult for Muslims who are truly suffering to speak about their problems. It never ceases to amaze me that when one complains about Muslim theocrats abusing Muslim women and freethinkers, one inevitably gets accused of anti-Muslim bigotry.
It will probably seem tendentious to many readers for me to put it this way, but our critics are just dishonest. Which reminds me of something you said at the end of one of your public lectures: Someone was challenging you and insisting that Islam is no different from every other religion, and I think you said something like If it’s the same as every other religion, why do I have to walk around with armed bodyguards?

The Myth of the Moderate Muslim
Everyone seems to know that the moderate Muslim exists, but nobody seems to really agree on what he or she looks like, how he or she acts, behaves, what she believes in, how he or she practises.