A 20 minute post on Islam

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 11:20 pm by Jane the Actuary

A 20 minute post on Islam 2015-02-24T23:20:48-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Because then I have to pick my son up from German School.

Here’s the reality:

Let’s take it as a given that there exists such a thing as Moderate Islam.

Not Pragmatic Islam, in which all the icky stuff (calls for conquest of nonbelievers, polygamy, death for apostates, etc.) is ignored because it’s just not practical to advocate for it, but whose adherents may indeed believe that these commands are still valid for some time in the future, whether or not they admit such to outsiders.

Not Unsophisticated Islam, in which adherents do whatever they’re told based on a minimal education in the faith.

Not Cafeteria Islam, in which individual believers growing up in that faith tradition observe what “feels right” to them.

But an Islam in which peaceful coexistence with others, acceptance of a secular ruling authority based on equal treatment, equal rights for women, etc., is grounded in a coherent theology with the Koran as its religious text and with religious communities coming together to practice Moderate Islam together — much in the same way as Reform Judaism has such a coherent theology even though it discards the dictates of historic Judaism as practiced in prior millennia.

Even taking that as a given, that doesn’t negate the existance of what, for the sake of a better term, I’ll call “Non-Moderate Islam.” Maybe it’s Orthodox Islam. Or Traditional Islam. It doesn’t even feel right to say, “Extremist Islam” — when multiple polls show that large numbers of Muslims in various countries do believe that women should be covered head to toe, that apostates should be executed, and so on. Maybe they don’t believe that their coreligionists should be attacking targets in the West, or executing fellow Muslims, but they do believe in a number of things that we would label as, to say the last, non-moderate.

Which means that what needs to happen, for the world to be A Better Place, is evangelization. Not necessarily an attempt to convert Traditional Muslims to Christianity, but for Moderate Muslims to preach their own variant of Islam, rather than saying, “this has nothing to do with us.” These Moderate Muslims have to stop saying, “their Islam isn’t real” and start trying to convert to their own.

Yeah, I know, not gonna happen. But still. . .

(A postscript: no, I’m not saying that Moderate Muslims share in the guilt of their extremist brethren. But, because they, and only they, are in a position to actually reach out to others, they do have a duty and obligation to do so. And perhaps that even means something like the American concept of a “missionary trip” in which Westernized Muslims travel overseas, and provide education for children to compete with the Saudi-funded Koran schools.

And — by the way — Moderate Islam really has to mean more than just lip service to peace and tolerance. Believing in all manner of “immoderate” things like penalties for apostasy, or criminalizing whatever you perceive as insults to your religion, or polygamy, or restrictions on Christianity in your home country, or anywhere, pretty much disqualifies you, even if you disavow violent attacks on Western targets. You just can’t play this game of, “sure he believed in X, Y, and Z fundamentalist Islamic positions, but he wasn’t radicalized until the West/Israel/the US did some bad thing or another.” And the media shouldn’t be allowing these folks to bear the label “moderate” just because they claim to be so, or aren’t as extreme as they could be.

But, that being said — I have to believe that the nice, perky, headscarfed (but you can see her hair) young woman at the pharmacy who dilligently checks for discounts for me is most probably a true Moderate Muslim.)

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