A big issue that we have in the “public discourse” today is that we allow Muslims to talk about their religion in a way that we (“we” here meaning the mainstream) would not tolerate from white evangelical Christians (though we do tolerate this sort of talk from black Christians). Yesterday the Christian minority minister in Pakistan was assassinated. Today, in The Washington Post, Eboo Patel responds:
This morning, Shahbaz Bhatti, minister of minorities and the sole Christian in the Pakistani government, was shot to death. Mr. Bhatti had recently campaigned to reform a blasphemy law in Pakistan which calls for the death of those who speak against the Prophet Muhammad.
Undoubtedly, some will say this is Islam. It’s not. It’s murder. Plain and simple.
The Prophet Muhammad made it a clear priority that people of other faiths and traditions would feel safe around him and his companions.
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Through history, Muslims have followed this tradition of protecting those from other faiths and backgrounds.
Ali, the 4th Caliph of Islam and the first Shia Imam, famously wrote a letter to his governor in Egypt reminding him that the population there was made up of those who were his brothers in faith or his equals in creation, and they should all be treated accordingly.
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The Prophet made it clear that people of other faiths and traditions ought to feel safe around Muslims, and that it was a Muslim duty to protect others as they would one another.
It is staggering to see extremists who call themselves Muslims brazenly defy this very clear tradition of the Prophet they claim to follow.
Let’s ignore the blatant whitewashing of what being dhimmi under Muslim “protection” entailed. The teachings of Muhammad are irrelevant. Many of us think that the Muslim religion, like all religions, is a human fiction. Those of us who are not Muslim, the majority of his audience, think that the religion is false in most of its premises. Islam is what most Muslims believe, say, and do. Eboo Patel is not the Muslim pope who can adjudicate this. The fact is that the majority of Pakistani Muslims seem to support, or do not object to, these actions against dissenters from the theocratic consensus. Are they all then not Muslims? The word “Muslim” loses all meaning if that is so.
I don’t care about the “real Islam,” or what “Islam teaches.” All I care is that Muslims stop engaging in active persecution of non-Muslims. All I care is that Muslims march out into the streets and take back their public spaces in nations where they are the majority from the thugs. I’m not holding my breath. Though I’ll take notice when Eboo Patel and his acolytes of the true tolerant Islam go to Muslim majority nations and make clear to them the error of their ways….
it´s an “is-ought” issue. very humean indeed.
I’m not holding my breath, either. But we sure do need to convince the majority of Muslims that their religion is/ought to be about peace. So, speaking strategically, it seems worthwhile to try and talk up the distinction between the extremists and the moderates. I know, plenty of people will say, there are no moderate Muslims. That’s manifestly untrue because we still face action from a small minority (in percentages) of the total Muslim population. We should vaporize the extremists and give food and blankets to the moderates, even if they are inactive sympathizers. There are simply too many Muslims for any other strategy.
Something like this thinking may be behind the reluctance of at least some on the Left to call a terrorist a terrorist. But that’s where they go wrong. It’s one thing to encourage tolerance for and among the larger Muslim population. It’s another thing entirely to coddle terrorists.
I’m a regular reader and commenter at On Faith (using a different screen name) and about half of all comments to Eboo Patel say essentially “Tell this to the Muslims.”
The most blatant example of this was when the Egypt Air pilot directed his plane into the ocean. “Oh no, he couldn’t have done that,” said several people, “because suicide is not allowed in Islam.” That newspaper articles quoted that straight said that Islam has quite a way to go in the Western world before it is viewed with the cynicism we direct to Christianity.
I think a huge problem is the perception of “moderate Muslims”.
A big chunk of what people in the West think are “moderate Muslims” are actually lapsed Muslims. There’s a rather important distinction. Lapsed Muslims are people who, removed from the strict social controls typically found in Islamic communities either by the liberating effects of educated, free-spirited parents, wealth and social status or simply living in a Western environment, lapse in their adherence to the religion. That does not mean they believe strictly speaking in a really nice, friendly version of Islam, it means they are just people rather apathetic about Islam.
Another misidentification is “Muslims who don’t want to kill infidels at random” = “Moderate Muslims”. A lot of Muslims, including people I personally know, may oppose Al Qaeda and their specific goals but nevertheless hold views and values that would make them, when it comes down to it, enemies of Western civilization. Most people, regardless of beliefs, don’t hold genocidal or aggressively murderous thoughts and just go about their lives, but nevertheless if given an appropriate scenario would still condone or support murderous acts that are in line with their ideological beliefs. Such a scenario can easily be created through misinformation and myth creation, e.g. in the Middle East commonly “The Jews did…” Something like that can turn such a moderate into quite the angry fellow. Ask the “moderates” who all but wanted to see the guys who did the Mohammed cartoons beheaded.
What people *wish* Muslims were is really only represented by a small minority of intellectuals who do not represent a majority or even big minority of the population in any Islamic country. It’s mostly the brainchild of academics who wish to give Islam the same treatment that Christianity has gotten from left-leaning theologians the last 100 years i.e. a transformation into a vaguely spiritual, sort of leftist social ideology which has very little to do with the key principles or key texts at the foundation of the actual religion. That’s just about the only way you can make Islam compatible with (post-)modern Western societies, but it’s incredibly far removed from both what the religion actually entails and from the lived reality of the religion.
I can see how someone might say it makes sense to promote it, but it feels strangely immoral to impose that particular construct on Islam. Maybe because that construct hasn’t really been that positive an influence in the West itself. Why not promote moving beyond religion instead?
Great post. I realize your general point concerns journalistic double standards, but let me speak to a side issue, the claim that a person is or is not a true member of a particular religion if their behavior conflicts with its moral dictates.
Personally, I hear quite a bit of this sort of equivocation from “white evangelical Christians.” Uber-Christian Ted Haggard (not only a pastor, but president of the National Association of Evangelicals) was claimed by some never to have been a “true” Christian once the homosexuality and drugs came out. The misdeeds of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, George Alan Rekers, et al., elicited the same response.
So much the more when the “misdeed” is switching from Christianity to Atheism. Dan Barker, former minister/Christian song writer and now co-head of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is regularly accused of never having been a true Christian. My parents think I’m an atheist today because I must have been too young for my “sinner’s prayer” to have taken proper effect.
Still, I wonder if this particular delusion is not preferable to the alternative, “death to apostates.” If you believe that a person never truly belonged to your religion, you might be less likely to react violently to the disappointment of their disbelief. But if a true believer becomes an apostate, that’s a greater insult. Perhaps we should actively encourage the fiction that people who convert from a religion never really believed it. It might cut down on the stonings.
By the way, Jamie Whyte’s excellent book “Crimes Against Logic” contains a humorous discussion of this subject.
“But we sure do need to convince the majority of Muslims that their religion is/ought to be about peace.”
Good luck…