{"id":5842,"date":"2011-05-03T20:23:42","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T20:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5842"},"modified":"2011-05-03T20:23:42","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T20:23:42","slug":"western-vs-moderate-muslims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/western-vs-moderate-muslims\/","title":{"rendered":"Western vs. Moderate Muslims"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> Muslims, who are often dissenters who are trying to change Western Islam from within.<\/strong> 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<\/em> Western Christians.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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\"\"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<\/em> 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.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The major second issue is that the distribution of outlooks differs between Christians and Muslims.<\/strong> To my statistically oriented friends I argue in terms of several modes rank ordered. To those less statistically oriented, I give the distribution below:
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The above is a very stylized representation. But, it shows my big point: “moderate Muslims” are really equivalent to “conservative Christians!”<\/strong> Liberal Muslims<\/a> 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<\/a>, but on a quantitative level the number of Christian-inspired terrorists today is orders of magnitude smaller than Islamic-inspired terrorists.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a>, while partisans of the moderate <\/em>Barelvi sect praise the killing of anti-blasphemy law politican<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5842"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5847,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842\/revisions\/5847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}