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The permanent plight of moderate Muslims
Daniel Pipes speaks of the plight of moderate Muslims in the West who are critical of Islam and as a result have faced threats to their life from Islamist militants:
And non-Muslims wonder why anti-Islamist Muslims in western Europe and North America are so quiet?Pipes nevertheless finds ground for hope. Moderate Muslim writers are starting to challenge the Islamists’ totalitarian vision. There are anti-Islamist organizations coming up, and a handful anti-Islamist Muslims have acquired public office in Western countries. Nevertheles, the anti-Islamist Muslims remain a beseiged minority. Pipes concludes that their weak standing has two major implications:
- For them to be heard over the Islamist din requires help from the outside—celebration by governments, grants from foundations, recognition by the media and attention from the academy.While Pipes tries to find grounds for hope, the full implications of his article seem anything but hopeful. If, as he writes, violent Islamists always intimidate non-Islamists, and if, as he continues, the only thing that can help the non-Islamists find a voice and gain influence is outside institutions, i.e., Western institutions, then the inescapable conclusion is that the Islamic community, left to its own devices, is destined always to be controlled by Islamists. It is obviously beyond the power of non-Muslims to take the responsibility for permanently managing the Muslim community for the Muslims and assimilating it into the larger society. The only way Pipes’s approach could work is if the moderate Muslims, once empowered, were able to continue leading the Muslim community without the help of outside institutions. But the very nature of Islam, with its deeply embedded extremism which Pipes points to, would seem to make such a permanent ascendency of moderate forces within Islam a doubtful prospect. Furthermore, Islamism in the West represents a threat not just to moderate Muslims but to the Western societies in which Muslims now reside in great numbers thanks to the mass immigration of recent decades. Given all these facts, there would seem to be but one logical option: the permanent separation of Islamic and Western peoples. All mass immigration from Muslim countries to the West must cease, and the Muslims already in the West must be encouraged to return to their ancestral lands, where the Islamism which is an intrinsic feature of Islam will pose no direct danger to non-Muslim countries. Normal diplomatic and commercial relationships between the West and the Islamic world could continue, along with the effort to encourage the growth of moderate Muslim regimes. But the key point is that, under the conditions of disengagement which I have described, the safety and freedom of our own society would not be immediately put at risk by the failure of such attempts.
Good fences make good neighbors. I see no other plausible and sustainable way to remove the Islamist threat. Does Daniel Pipes? Comments
All mass immigration to the West must cease, period. Especially at a time when the West’s regnant secular liberalism leaves it supine in the face of the cultural and religious challenges immigrants pose. The last thing the Western institutions Pipes asks to support moderate Islam should be doing is supporting Islam - or any non-Western creed - of any kind. Western institutions should be defending the West’s heritage, starting with the Christian religion. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on September 24, 2003 1:55 PM“The last thing the Western institutions Pipes asks to support moderate Islam should be doing is supporting Islam - or any non-Western creed - of any kind. Western institutions should be defending the West’s heritage, starting with the Christian religion.” Mr. Sutherland makes a key point. At present, one of our highest national priorities is to tame and civilize Islam. Given the real dangers that radical Islam poses, nothing could seem more rational and necessary than this attempt. But in fact, trying to civilize Islam gets us intimidately involved with Islam in a way that can only be harmful to ourselves. First, we’re trying to make Islam into something other than what it is, a typical progressive, utopian project that will drain our energies. Second, this endeavor forces us to find some common essence between ourselves and Muslims in order to communicate better with them and be of more help to them. But this only advances the universalizing project whereby we lose our own ethos and particularity; the more we get involved with Muslims, the more we lose ourselves. The answer is that, instead of trying to build them up, we should be building ourselves up. Then we deal with them from the position of our own particularity as Western Christians, not from the position of people seeking to universalize themselves so as to be able to appeal equally to everyone in the world. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 24, 2003 2:24 PM“This only advances the universalizing project whereby we lose our own ethos and particularity; the more we get involved with Muslims, the more we lose ourselves.” I just wrote a web log entry that referenced Jared Taylor’s Vdare article on why the British system of Empire worked to civilize other cultures: http://www.vdare.com/misc/taylor_burden.htm Taylor made the case that the British system was founded on an explicit racism that ultimately led to a failure of British will for Empire. And though some are advocating for an “American Empire” to tackle the problems of failed Islamic states, America is incapable of tolerating the inequalities that would be necessary for those sorts of projects. Posted by: Thrasymachus on September 24, 2003 2:51 PMWell, the Jared Taylor article is certainly relevant. However, I think Thrasymachus mischaracterizes the point of the article. It’s not that British people’s explicit racism (I would say racialism or race pride or national pride) led to a failure of will for Empire, but rather that the loss of the racialism led to the loss of will for Empire. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 24, 2003 3:23 PMMr. Auster is quite correct. I suppose that I meant to have written that it was racism (or racialism) that could not be sustained as liberalism increased, and that led to the failure of will. And really, the best word for it is racialism. There are a number of expressions from the time—of which Kipling is the best example—of great love for other cultures combined with a special love for one’s own. Posted by: Thrasymachus on September 24, 2003 3:37 PMHere’s something that could further lessen the distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical.’ A portion of the Southern Wall of the Temple Mount has finally collapsed: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34776 Posted by: Joel on September 25, 2003 2:02 AMThe moderates in Australia are also a silenced minority. See for instance I see (hear?) a hopeful note in the column by Andrew Bolt linked by Mr. Richardson: “It’s time more Muslim leaders realised that they owe it to the moderate Muslims they say they represent — and to the country they call home — to drive out the extremists who hide in their mosques. “If they seem too scared or unwilling to do this, what must the rest of us conclude?” Why do I say this is hopeful? Because the usual thing is for Western moderates or conservatives to say, “Moderate Muslims must reject the extremists.” But there’s never any follow through like “If they DON’T reject the extremists, then we will cease regarding them as moderates.” But there’s a hint in Bolt’s statement that if the moderates don’t start living up to their “moderate” billing, he will indeed stop viewing them as moderates, and his views of how to deal with Muslims will change accordingly. To the extent that this mental change occurs in Westerners, there is hope that we may yet save ourselves. And let me clarify that it doesn’t matter whether the “moderates” fail to oppose the extremists because they agree with them or because they fear them. Either way, it means that extremists set the tone for the Muslim community. And since there is no practical way to separate the extremists from the Muslim community, the only path to safety is to separate the Muslim community from us. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 25, 2003 2:48 AM |