On the promotion of moderate Islam

(Note: the below exchange has also been posted by Miss Asrat at her blog.)

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

I spent a few days mulling over your debate with Supna Zaidi.

The conclusion I came up with, which I have posted at my blog “Let’s get on with the business of defending ourselves against Islam” is that like nominal Christians and reform/nominal Jews (maybe I should call them all cultural—add in the religion here), moderate/nominal/cultural Muslims are dangerous to society. All these groups almost always seem to be liberal, so besides promoting incorrect versions of their religions, they also push for liberal agendas.

I don’t think Supna, despite her best intentions and pleasant personality, is able to bring anything forward in terms of moderate Muslims: no concrete and feasible ideas and no authoritative moderate group. As you say, most of her statements are wishful thinking, leading us down dangerous paths.

It is time to forfeit this group which has been called moderate, because even if it does exist, it is of no use to us, and is in fact dangerous in the long run in the fight against Islam.

I think this was the important insight I obtained from your debate.

LA replies:

Thanks for your thoughts on this. It’s a tough issue. It’s tough to say that the Supnas of the world are dangerous. Though I think it would be better to say that it is her message, not she personally, that is leading society down dangerous paths.

And let’s add two further qualifications. First, Supna is doing something positive in constantly bringing forward the true, negative aspects of Islam. For many people, hearing this message under the rubric that Islam itself is not bad may be the only way they can receive it at present. Also, for observant listeners, her constant wishful thinking about the “good” Islam will not cancel out the negative things she says about Islam.

Second, we should understand there’s nothing new or invidious in saying that well-meaning people have a dangerous message about Islam. For example, Daniel Pipes, as I wrote at FrontPage in ‘05, is, at least half the time, an Islam apologist, meaning he’s trying to make people believe that Islam is not the problem and threat that it really is. Supna works for Pipes and shares his basic outlook about Islam, so naturally she also is an Islam apologist, notwithstanding everything critical she says about it.

Here, by the way, is the section of my article, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” (part one, second web page of four) in which I describe Pipes as an Islam apologist:

Pipes’s ambivalence

Given Pipes’s admission, in some articles, that moderate Islam has never existed as a concrete social and religious reality, and that “radical” Islam is therefore the historic norm of the faith after all, what explains his continuing insistence, in other articles, that radical Islam is only an extremist offshoot of the true, moderate Islam?

An opening into Pipes’s contradictory thoughts on the subject can be found in remarks he wrote for an Islamic American magazine, The Minaret, in September 2000 (and which he repeated in the introduction of his 2002 book, Militant Islam Reaches America[2]). After praising Islam for the “extraordinary inner strength” it imbues in its followers and the great cultural achievements of its classical period, he said:

I approach the religion of Islam in a neutral fashion, neither praising it nor attacking it but in a spirit of inquiry. Neither apologist nor booster, neither spokesman nor critic, I consider myself a student of this subject.

This is an odd comment for an intellectual to make. Since when does studying a subject preclude one from criticizing it? Since when does scholarship require non-judgmentalism? If Pipes were a student of, say, Soviet Communism, like his father the historian Richard Pipes, would he say that his scholarly approach to Marxism-Leninism prevented him from criticizing the Soviet Gulag, the millions of political murders, the enslavement of entire nations? Also, how can Pipes as a scholar expect his evaluations of Islam to be considered reliable if he announces up front that he will not render a negative judgment about it?

In any case, Pipes’s personal motivations, whether for not wanting to be seen as a critic of Islam (which would be an understandable tactic of self-preservation given his exposed position), or for actually not wanting to be a critic of Islam (which would be harder to excuse), are not our concern. Pipes has already given us a meaningful and satisfactory explanation of his political motivations for avoiding a too searching critique of Islam: his fear that if we come to the conclusion that Islam is not and cannot be moderate, we will lose any basis for a constructive policy toward it and will be doomed to regard all Muslims as our eternal enemies. This is not a concern that can be lightly dismissed, and is probably shared by millions of Westerners. We will return to it in the second part of this essay.

What matters to us here is not Pipes’s motivations, but the truth of his statements about the nature of Islam and about his role as a student of it. For a scholar in a field so filled with bloody controversy, there can be no such thing as the non-judgmental neutrality that Pipes attributes to himself. For example, Communist regimes, according to the most authoritative book on the subject, The Black Book of Communism, killed upwards of 100 million unarmed civilians in the course of the 20th century. If I speak this true fact about Communism, I am, perforce, a critic of Communism. If, conversely, I choose not to be critic of Communism, I can only do that by ignoring or minimizing its crimes, in which case I have ceased to be its student and have become its apologist. Therefore Pipes’s claim that he is neither a critic nor an apologist is not true. As we have seen, sometimes he is one, sometimes the other. When he tells us that militant Islam is a fearsomely dangerous movement that threatens us all, and when he tells us that reformist Muslims falsely imagine the historical existence of a moderate and liberal Islam, he is being a critic. But when he tells us that only modern Islamism—not historic Islam—is dangerous, and that moderate Islam is the solution to radical Islam, he is being an apologist.

The false distinction between Islamism and Islam

Insofar as Pipes is a protector of Islam, the chief way he protects it is through his distinction between modern Islamism, with which he associates everything bad about Islam, and traditional Islam, which he describes, not neutrally, but in respectful, glowing tones.

[end of excerpt]

Note: in the last few days, all my articles at FrontPage Magazine have been taken off line. We don’t know yet if this was a deliberate act by FP’s editors or if FP is doing some reorganization of their site and the articles are only temporarily unavailable. Never fear. All my FP articles have been saved and can be re-posted by me if necessary in their original form. Also, they are availavble at the amazing website archive.org at which, as I just found out, all web pages that have ever been online are available in all their iterations. Here is the archive.org page that contains the passage from the article that I’ve quoted.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 06, 2009 12:09 AM | Send