The Washington Institute:The West and the Necessity of Supporting Muslim Moderates

Extremism is most effectively combated with moderation: namely moderate Muslim religious leaders, scholars, and community ‘influencers.’ Such moderates have the comparative edge to explain to their fellow Muslim believers and any misguided youth that Islam is a religion of mercy and peace, that the term jihad refers mainly to the individual’s inner personal struggle against evil temptation and towards moral betterment, and that freedom of religion, tolerance, and interfaith cooperation should prevail. Muslim luminaries must help teach communities, and proclaim that the violence carried out by extremist Muslims bears no relation to true Islam, just as violence carried out by extremist Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and other followers of religion bears no relation to their true faith.
I am a strong proponent of this approach for several reasons. The Islamic education that Muslims receive in many Muslim schools and universities borders on radicalism and anti-Semitism and tends to lack the human spirit of Islam and the Quran. And because of a dearth of open-minded education options and gifted educators, many Muslims have developed an incomplete or incorrect understanding of their own religion as well as of other religions. Because of the overflow of politics into religion, the tendency among Muslims is to think of religion in terms of politics and to deal with the political conflict with the West through a religious perspective. And since the extremists have much louder platforms and backing from various maleficent sources, as well as the tendency to use violence and label tags to silence and gag moderates, these views have been able to gain more ground and more followers. But extremists and moderates in the West are often misrepresented as progenitors of violence in the United States far out of proportion with the facts. According to the FBI annual report Crime in the United States, 2014 there were an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes, including murder and non-negligent homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults reported by law enforcement. A very low percentage of these crimes were committed by Muslims. In 2015, 50,740 incidents of gun violence took place in the United States, in which 13,000 people were killed. Only three incidents were committed by Muslims.
Yet because of several tragic attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, claims have surfaced that Da’esh has branches springing up in nearly every part of the world. Others are convinced that tens of thousands of radical recruits have streamed into Syria from Europe and the United States, or that there are sleeping cells and moles spread throughout the West ready to kill people and explode buildings. These are gross exaggerations that disempower the moderate voices within Muslim as well as Western communities.
Moderate Muslims are not to be blamed if the Western or American definition of Muslim moderates had basically only one red line: the disavowal of violence and terrorism. As Cheryl Bernard rightly notes in her recent article on the subject, Muslims, “Can eschew terrorism while still harboring deep attitudes of enmity, hostility and alienation that in turn become the breeding ground for extremism and the safe harbor for extremists.” It is not the fault of Muslim moderates if Westerners lump together as moderates those who might better be termed backward Salafi traditionalists. These are people who believe that Muslims living in the West must reserve their own traditions in a vacuum and remain external to Western values and lifestyles, and should owe little or no loyalty to Western institutions and culture. They may be against terrorism and violence, but they are also against assimilation and integration. They might be against dictatorship and authoritarianism, but they are also against democracy and pluralism. While legal citizens, these traditionalists may reject secular laws and want to impose Sharia laws on the community. Herein lies the knot.
A grave blunder is committed in lumping in ‘moderate Islam’ with this ‘traditionalist’ group. Being a true Muslim moderate requires engagement with the West rather than the traditionalist persistence in maintaining emotional, social, and intellectual separation within their communities. Extremists such as Farook and Tashfeen of the San Bernardino massacre, who went to great pains to harden their hearts against their neighbors in whose midst they lived, highlight the danger of the latter, but this separation should in no way be seen as a representation of the former moderate group.
An anti-assimilation mindset only leads to further radicalization and violence. Breeding a culture of self-alienation clearly has undesirable results, preventing the individuals who suffer from it from enjoying the American dream. Their choice to live segregated on the periphery and their self-imposed marginalization excludes them from support by their broader communities. That exclusion, in turn, eventually leads to a separatist mentality of self-pity, victimization, discrimination, anger, envy, hatred, disappointment, and frustration.
In her recent article, Benard presented a series of online rulings by a Saudi cleric based on American Muslim queries as evidence of the degree to which American Muslims can self-segregate. Yet it is clear that moderate Muslims would scoff at these rulings. Yes, a Muslim moderate would applaud after his children’s school performance; yes, a moderate Muslim engineer working for an airline would service in-flight entertainment systems with “un-Islamic content” – there is no ban on this in the Quran. A waitress or flight hostess may serve wine and drinks, and should not lose or change her job over the matter. The Quran has no restriction forbidding a female graduate at a job interview from offering the interviewer her hand for a handshake or for a male applicant to look the female interviewer in the eye and to try to impress her to get the job. Muslim moderates have no need to find gender-segregated workplaces or schooling for their children. In performing these acts, moderate Muslims are not in any danger of offending Islam, but instead sloughing off backwards tribal traditions that traditionalists have attempted to enfold into the religion.
Western governments need not remain complacent in this conflict of perspectives between extremists and moderates. Those outside the community who wish to help with these efforts can focus on empowering moderate Muslims so that they may become more visible. Yet very little effort and meagre funds have been devoted to the support of moderates in order to promote the credo of moderation and develop civil society programs that fund religious instruction, radio and television shows, interfaith dialogue, community outreach efforts, and other means to support Muslim communities in the United States and the West.
Western governments and communities can do quite a lot for the newest wave of immigrants and refugees, in particular embracing the new refugee immigrants rather than exhibiting outright hostility to them or to their culture. They can encourage the new immigrants to integrate by having the community adopt them, demonstrating Western values as they do so, without trying to impose those values by force. Governments can encourage the selection of potential leaders from among the new refugee immigrants and help prepare them to serve as moderate clerics and teachers of their own community. Formal and non-traditional education can help familiarize the new refugee immigrants with the American way of life and teach them to respect it and to tolerate that which is different from their former ways of life.
But most significantly, these immigrant refugees must be taught the laws and customs of the host countries. Coming from poor and challenging backgrounds, they may be lured to crime and so refugees must be made aware that by committing any crime they risk having their asylum residency permit revoked. Coming from sexually repressed societies, some refugees may be under the impression that soliciting sex in the West is permissible and thus they need to be aware that sexual harassment or prostitution is against the law, ‘honor killing’ is a crime, and any physical abuse within the family is absolutely intolerabe.
Teach the new refugee immigrant the language, history, and culture of their new host country. Encourage American Muslim moderates to share with their new fellow residents their expertise, knowledge and experiences. Help the gifted from among the new refugee immigrants develop their artistic gifts and exhibit their talents. If Muslim moderates are supported and American institutions help the admittedly difficult integration process, America will benefit from its immigrants, as it has so many times in the past.