Lawrence Auster's article, "The Search For Moderate Islam" argues not only that moderate Islam does not exist as an identifiable political movement, but also that it cannot exist. He goes about this in the context of refuting what he calls the "ecumenist" view of a benign, moderate Islamic majority, as articulated by Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes:
Daniel Pipes is perhaps best known for his idea that "radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution." As Pipes argues, radical Islam, though currently the dominant political force in the Muslim world, is supported by only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, while moderate Islam represents the great, though so far mostly silent, majority of Muslims. He further points out that radical Islam, also known as militant Islam or Islamism, is a very recent phenomenon, having more in common with modern totalitarian ideologies than with true, historic Islam. While he warns that militant Islam aims to overthrow the West and regain lost Islamic glory, he insists with equal conviction that traditional, moderate Islam is fully capable of living at peace with the rest of the world......If we subscribe to the promise of a moderate Islam, we will make its cultivation the central focus and goal in the war against militant Islam. If this moderate Islam in fact exists, our efforts may help Muslims transform their civilization for the better and relieve the world of the curse of Muslim extremism. But if moderate Islam does not exist, yet we delude ourselves into thinking that it exists, we would inevitably find ourselves trapped in a cultural equivalent of the Oslo "peace process," forever negotiating with and empowering our mortal enemies in the pathetic hope that they will turn out to be friends.
Failing to find any real evidence of a moderate Islamic majority that can and will renounce jihadism and radical Islamism and act in opposition to it, Auster concludes that Pipes' support for its existence is based more in a fear of the alternative:
(In Pipes' view) we are obligated to believe that Islam can change, because disbelief in that possibility would lead to unacceptable results. Pipes is no longer basing his promotion of moderate Islam on any claim of factual or historical truth. He is basing it on hope and fear—the hope that Islam may someday become something inconceivably better than that which it has always been, and the fear of the intolerable things that would happen if we abandoned that hope.
Part 2 discusses the implications for the U.S. if we base our policies on the assumption of the existence of moderate Islam, and then turn out to be wrong. The whole piece is a bit long, but well worth reading in full.
UPDATE 2/4: Daniel Pipes responds to Lawernce Auster.
Posted by dan at January 29, 2005 03:39 PM | TrackBack