Posted on 09/02/2010 6:50:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As past statements of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf continue to surface, many Americans have concluded that the would-be builder of a mosque at Ground Zero is lying when he calls himself a “moderate” representative of his faith. The more disturbing possibility, however, is that he’s telling the truth — that Rauf is indeed the voice of mainstream Islam.
One indication is the resounding silence from the rest of the Islamic community. If that community were truly moderate — as we in the West understand the term — one might expect it to distance itself from a man who blames the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks, says we have more innocent blood on our hands than al-Qaeda, and refuses to disown the genocidal agenda of Hamas.
A few brave Muslim individuals have indeed come out against the mosque, but they are exceptions. Where are the large numbers of Muslims who find Rauf’s statements offensive? Where are their organizations and institutions? Why aren’t they weighing in to repudiate Rauf and his apparent aims?
It’s a common problem. Each time some new offense is perpetrated in the name of Islam — whether it’s the latest suicide bombing in a public square or a woman’s being beaten and mutilated by her own family — it is mostly Western leaders and the press who voice their disapproval. The more one looks for the larger Muslim community to denounce the violence, the more “moderate Islam” seems to vanish like a mirage in the desert.
Why this is so — what happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future — is the subject of Robert Reilly’s brilliant and groundbreaking new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. Reilly is a veteran of the Reagan White House, director of the Voice of America under George W. Bush, a board member of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and a frequent contributor to numerous national publications. He has made a deep dive into Muslim thought and history to discover the sources of the present Islamic condition.
The result is anything but dry. Closing is a page-turner that reads almost like an intellectual detective novel. It is among those few brave books on Islam — others would include Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Andrew McCarthy’s recent The Grand Jihad — that should be read by anyone who wants to understand one of the most fundamental causes of conflict in the 21st century.
Reilly does in fact locate the elusive moderate Islam — back in the 8th and 9th centuries, when the rationalist Mu’tazilites dominated Islamic thought under Caliph al-Ma’mun. The period is often referred to as the “golden age of Islam,” when that civilization produced some of its highest achievements in philosophy and science. It didn’t last. In 849, the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawakkil, the Mu’tazilites were overthrown. Holding Mu’tazilite beliefs became a crime punishable by death, and the decidedly anti-rationalist Ash’arites soon came to dominate the faith, as they would continue to do, in one form or another, through the modern era.
What makes Closing so compelling is Reilly’s ability to tie seemingly arcane questions of Islamic theology to many of the characteristics of Islamic civilization that we in the West find so hard to fathom. Fundamentally, Ash’arism was a rejection of “natural law” and reason in favor of an all-powerful God of pure will and power. The idea of an ordered universe that behaves according to certain ordained laws — whether moral or physical — would have been understood by the Mu’tazilites. For the Ash’arites, this was blasphemy, an outrage against God’s omnipotence.
In the language of philosophy, this way of looking at the world is known, somewhat confusingly, as “voluntarism.” To quote Reilly, it “holds that God is the primary cause of everything and there are no secondary causes. There is no causal mediation. Therefore, what may seem to be ‘natural laws,’ such as the laws of gravity, physics, etc. are really nothing more than God’s customs or habits, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment.”
While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act. Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God. There is no “truth that is written in our hearts,” only the truths that are written in the Koran, which could just as well be otherwise if such were the whim of God. As Ibn Hazm pronounced in the 11th century, “He judges as He pleases, and whatever He judges is just. . . . If God the Exalted had informed us that He would punish us for the acts of others . . . all that would have been right and just.”
The problem, one might say, is obvious. In science, the repudiation of natural law meant the explicit denial of cause and effect. No wonder that the rise of the Ash'arites coincided with the decline of a once-vibrant Islamic intellectual culture after the 13th century. And no wonder that societies that exalt the power and arbitrary will of God to the exclusion of reason can hardly understand, let alone embrace, modern democratic institutions, which are founded, as our Declaration of Independence makes clear, in the self-evident and enduring truths of natural law.
Nor can we be surprised that such cultures endorse institutionalized domestic violence or rampant terrorism and the murder of innocents. As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres. We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.
Is there a possibility that Islam can find its way back to the root philosophies of its golden age? There are those within Islam who want to, but — like the voices raised in opposition to the mosque — they are lonely, even threatened, outposts within their faith. One thing Reilly’s account makes clear: Only when we move beyond the common platitudes of our contemporary political discussion and begin to deal with Islam as it really is — rather than the fiction that it is the equivalent of our Western culture dressed up in a burqa — will we be able to help make progress in that direction.
— Josh Gilder is one of the founding directors of the White House Writers Group.
PING
Bingo!
bttt
I think the key here is the phrase...’as we here in the West understand’...they are not from the West, they are from the ME. Why would, or should, someone expect people from different cultures to understand some ideas the same?
‘Islamic moderate’ is just an oxymoron. There never has been one and never will.
Islam, as a faith, is so bankrupt that it can’t compete with other religions unless it holds the threat of death over apostates. If people were free to accept or reject without immediate consequences their numbers would plummet. Therefore moderation was rejected in order to control their people.
But the problem is really with the left's pervasive moral relativism that they espouse. Their belief that a different culture is just as "good" or no worse as ours and that people should be tolerant of their depravities because they are "different".
I liken it to one who would not call an exterminator to rid his house of cockroaches and rats because they believe "All life is sacred". Who accepts the dangers of disease and must wallow in filth so as to tolerate another creature's right to live.
I care not that one culture is different than another, but I refuse to slit my own throat or to bow down to another's sensibilities because their culture demands it. Leave it to the left and they will have our women in burkas to prove how "tolerant" we are.
It is among those few brave books on Islam ...
Read mine book on Islam - it’s a personal explaination of what we all came to understand from our direct involvement in Iraq and what surrounded us on a daily and unrelent scale...of course i would say the ones mentioned cut out or left out what I did not - even my agent has fallen off - and walked away due to FEAR and intimidation...
From Cline’s article:
Below two percent of population, Muslims are MOSTLY well-behaved citizens and cause little apparent trouble for the host society ( this is what we have in the USA and Australia)
At two percent and three percent Muslims begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs (UK, Canada, Greece, Belgium)
From five percent on Muslims exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They push for the introduction of halal (”clean” by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves—along with threats for failure to comply (Switzerland, Philippines). At this point, Muslims work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, or Islamic law. (Netherlands, Philippines).
When Muslims reach 10 percent of the population, they increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions (Paris—car burning). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats (Amsterdam, Denmark—Mohammed cartoons, murder of Theo van Gogh).
After reaching 20 percent of a population expect hair-trigger rioting, Jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning (Indonesia, Ethiopia).
After 40 percent you find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare (Bosnia, Chad).
From 60 percent you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and jizya, the tax placed on [conquered] infidels (Sudan, Albania).
After 80 percent, expect to find state-run ethnic cleansing and genocide (Sudan, Mauritania).
IMO, they may very well be “moderate” Muslims. However there is NO such thing as moderate Islam. And that is the problem. The more devote Muslim can point to various Sura and hadith that support his position. Our supposed moderate Muslim can’t do the same.
As the Muzzies say...’inshallah’.
Keep in mind that Christianity and Judaism are also from the Middle East.
Islam is a religion not just of the ME, but of nomadic Bedouins, who had a different world view than of settled, agricultural Jews and Christians.
Rather than talk about "moderate" Muslims, instead refer to them as "non practicing" Muslims.
Excellent article!!
TWB
I’m just offering a response to the thread. You should quote the whole thing that I wrote, not just the last sentence.
I’m thinking there are far more moderate Muslims then there are devoted ones.
Yes, they have different views and we are in the West.
I was trying to add my own thoughts and it was in no way intended as a critique of your post.
I would imagine that people from other cultures actually do consider theirs to be equal, if not better than ours.
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