Since 9/11 the term “moderate Muslim” has been a catchall for Muslims-who-aren’t-bad in the everyday parlance of the USA. But the term is only marginally useful. First, there is a huge range in the term “moderate Muslim”. Some non-violent moderate Muslims still espouse a separationist ideology and are explicit proponents of future Islamic dominionism through proselytization and procreation. Other moderate Muslims are relatively assimilationist and don’t give much conscious thought to the idea of a universally Muslim world. These moderate Muslims though need to be distinguished from liberal Muslims, who are often dissenters who are trying to change Western Islam from within. These liberal Muslims are totally intelligible to Western religious sensibilities, especially of the universalism of the cultural elites. In contrast, many moderate Muslims don’t exchange intellectual “cash” in the same currency as the Western elites, rather, they work with the same currency as conservative Western Christians. Though a moderate Muslim and a conservative Protestant naturally have strongly disagreements on the details of their religion and its implications, they both accept a broad framework where their own views are clearly the Right views, and that there is One Truth View, and that there are the saved and the unsaved, of which the former consists of those who properly adhere to the One True View which they espouse.
The terms “conservative” and “moderate” and “liberal” as catchalls can be problematic, especially for “outside-the-box” religions. The Mormons for example arguably espouse conventional liberal Protestant and post-Protestant theology of the early 19th century, especially in their quasi-universalism, but socially and culturally are conservative Christians. But in broad strokes we know what we mean here when we use terms like “conservative Christian” or “liberal Christian.”
The major second issue is that the distribution of outlooks differs between Christians and Muslims. To my statistically oriented friends I argue in terms of several modes rank ordered. To those less statistically oriented, I give the distribution below:
The above is a very stylized representation. But, it shows my big point: “moderate Muslims” are really equivalent to “conservative Christians!” Liberal Muslims do exist, but they are much further on the “long tail” of the distribution. It is conventional to equate Radical Islamists with Christian influenced terrorists like Eric Rudolph, but on a quantitative level the number of Christian-inspired terrorists today is orders of magnitude smaller than Islamic-inspired terrorists.
Moderation in Islam may also mean a different thing than moderation in Christianity. Sometimes you grade on a curve. The prime minister of Pakistan rightly points out that Pakistanis have never voted for the Islamist party at more than a 1 in 10 clip in the history of that nation. But Christians in Pakistan live in fear of religiously motivated persecution, while partisans of the moderate Barelvi sect praise the killing of anti-blasphemy law politican Salman Taseer by one of their own. And yet the nation as a whole is moderate in relation to the radicals who want to convert the Shia and impose Islamic law in all its barbaric totality.
Religious categories are always problematic – the view from inside is very different from the view from outside.
Religious categories are always problematic – the view from inside is very different from the view from outside.
right. but for the purposes of this discussion all that matters is the outside. whatever details the superstition folk jump around the idol too is triviality, and how they ascertain liberality and conservatism based on their fetish object the same.
This is a very interesting approach to this issue. I’d be interested to see you explore it in more detail, hopefully with some poll data to break down more detail. e.g. I’d like to see respondents answer a list of belief questions like “do you belief your revealed scripture is (a) the literal word of god (b) divinely inspired (c) allegorically true”, etc.
I could be persuaded of your claim “Moderate Muslims = Conservative Christians”. My intuition is that the most significant difference between Muslims and Christians lays in how groups within each religion view their fellow believers. i.e. Most Christians seem to acknowledge the “Christianhood” of those who are more conservative or more liberal – the threshold simply being the “John 3:16 test”. On the other hand, I’ve heard many Muslims disavow the Muslimhood of any fellow believers who are perceived as less conservative as they. This may be attributed to the Muslim emphasis on accepting the Qur’an as the literal word of god. i.e. each Muslim knows he is a true believer, so his beliefs must sync with the Qur’an. Anyone who is less conservative is therefore not adhering to the Qur’an (post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy). Thoughts?
the poll data for american muslims is here:
http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons#
(they’re as a whole somewhat less conservative than evangelical white protestants in religion, though one of the more conservative groups)
as to your second point, i’m moderately skeptical. there are two issues:
1) many evangelical protestants refer to themselves as “christians,” and often implicitly diminish the christian character of mainline protestants and catholics. when pushed, yes, they’ll accept anyone who adheres to the nice creed as notionally a christian, though usually they will flesh our their particularly individualist position in regards to salvation.
2) what muslims are doing is usually the same. if you push them they will usually not engage in takfir, though they may deny the operational muslimness of ‘bad muslims.’ also, re: literality of the koran, do remember though that you are speaking of the orthodox sunni position. groups like ismailis have way different views of that.
And here’s where I end my RSS feed. Life is too short to follow blogs that publish un-labeled axes.
Moderate Muslims = Conservative Christians rings pretty true to me. That’s pretty much the equivalence I used to explain Egyptian Muslims to American and European friends when they came to Cairo: “Almost all of them are moderates, but their moderates are our mormons.”
Which is to say, Egyptian Muslims are very family-oriented, extremely generous, strong communities, and shameless about trying to convert you to their faith.