. He wanted my opinion of it since Schwartz had made a ridiculous statement about the use of the word 'Salafism', and I often use that word to describe the foundational Islamist theology of terrorist organizations. In it, Schwartz makes a lot of claims about a moderate form of Islam which has been hijacked by a more severe form of Wahhabism.
Instead of replying directly to James, I punted and sent the article off to our good friend Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. Robert has delivered the promise he made to me to rebutt Schwartz's article. Here is a bit of it:
Schwartz then turns back to the Sunnis, asserting that “moderate Sunni Muslims may be recognized in person by asking a simple question: ‘what do you think of Wahhabism, the state Islamic sect of Saudi Arabia?’…If a Sunni Muslim is asked about Wahhabism and states that it is a controversial, extreme doctrine that causes many problems because of Saudi money, the respondent is probably moderate.” In contrast, “If a Sunni denies that Wahhabism exists by saying ‘there is only Islam,’ or tries to cover Wahhabism with an ameliorative term like ‘Salafism’ -- a fraudulent effort to equate Wahhabism with the pioneers of the Islamic faith -- the individual is an extremist.”
But is opposing Wahhabism enough to make one a moderate? After all, the Deobandis in Afghanistan are Hanafi Muslims, not Hanbalis like the Wahhabis — but they had no trouble making common cause in jihad with the Wahhabis. What’s more, the passages of the Qur’an and Hadith that jihadists invoke to justify their actions weren’t invented by the Wahhabis; they have always been there and were exploited by Muslims fighting violent jihads long before Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born.
After all, the primary difference between Wahhabi Islam and more traditional variants of the religion is not jihad warfare against unbelievers, but the Wahhabis’ practice of takfir, or the classification of Muslims of other sects as among those unbelievers. Schwartz accordingly eschews takfir: “Moderate Muslims may also be identified by what they do not do, to contrast them with radicals. And at the top of that list comes the practice of takfir, or declaring Muslims unbelievers over differences of opinion. Takfir also includes describing the ordinary, traditional Muslim majority in the world as having fallen into unbelief.” Very well, but what of jihad against non-Muslims? Schwartz says: “Islam is not, and never was, a radical or fundamentalist religion in its mainstream practice, regardless of the fantasies of Islamist fanatics and Islamophobes alike.” Maybe not, but I’d like to see him define “radical” and “fundamentalist.” Even the Ottoman Empire, of which he is fond, waged aggressive jihad against Christian Europe over a period of centuries. Not radical or fundamentalist? Pardon me if I am not reassured.
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Moderate is a meaningless term which can only be understood as relative to the society we are talking about. For instance, could a historian distinguish between moderate and extremist Nazis? A moderate Nazi might be said to be one who is thoroughly antisemetic, but who insists that the 'Jewish question' ought to be solved through forced segregation and laws against intermarriage. The word moderate, then, can be used to describe ideologies which only seem moderate when compared to a much more extremist alternative. If that moderate ideology were examined on its own terms it might very well seem extreme.
I have a very simple way to determine if the form of Islam is acceptable to me: does it reject Sharia. That is it.
As a political observe I have no theological interest whatsoever in Islam and could care less if Muhammed was a prophet or not or about Islam's stance on Trinitarian doctrine. I really don't care. What I do care about is whether or not a Muslim believes that law and government ought to be strictly secular in orientation or not.
In all three cases a form of religious fascism exists. Whether or not we choose to call these varying religious forms moderate or not is really inconsequential. One may be worse than the other, but all three are bad.
As long as Islam embraces Sharia, I will reject Islam as a fascist ideology. Any form of Islam that rejects it is okay in my book.
Indeed. I would add that some slaves had very nice masters who treated them well. Having a nice master, though, still makes one a slave.
1
Spain was Franco, Yugoslavia was Tito.
Posted by: Venom at January 17, 2006 12:33 PM (dbxVM)
2
I didn't say Tito, I said Franco. If you don't believe me check the post. Only an
idiot would say that...............
*cough*
Posted by: Rusty at January 17, 2006 12:39 PM (JQjhA)
3
Spending time thinking about what form of islam is what, is like wondering what species of rat transported what species of flea that transmitted what strain of plague that almost wiped out Europe. Islam is the black death of our time, and the onlys solution is to eradicate the rats and fleas that carry it.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at January 17, 2006 12:49 PM (0yYS2)
4
Please forgive me, Rusty.
Posted by: Venom at January 17, 2006 12:58 PM (dbxVM)
5
IM,
Seriously, your rhetoric is becoming disgustingly genocidal. We successfully fought against Communism without having to wage war against Communists. This is a battle of ideas. If we only had a society willing to wage the ideological battle we could win.
Posted by: Rusty at January 17, 2006 01:03 PM (JQjhA)
6
But Rusty, you can't make an omelete, etc.
Posted by: youngbourbonprofessional at January 17, 2006 02:44 PM (tdhAh)
7
I expect that there are differences in what Muslims mean when they want 'establishment of Sharia.' I would imagine that many Muslims, like anyone, believe that morality should inform the law. There is a vast difference between that and a theocratic state.
Part of the difficulty with Islam is that it established a political, as well as a religious system. This is unlike Christianity although similar to Judaism. The difference with Judaism, is that their political systems were destroyed centuries ago, and they have adapted to other customs and government systems, seperating their Religion from politics.
This is not an easy transition to make. Christianity even without a direct political system handed down by its founder shed rivers of blood to make this transition, and it still is far from complete. Islam will have to make this transition as well, but it will be more helpful if we aplaud progress in that direction rather than writing off attempts because they fail to achieve a standard of perfection that we regard highly.
Posted by: Dave Justus at January 17, 2006 02:48 PM (Ttn36)
8
It seems to me that the only difference among extreme, moderate and liberal Muslims is how harshly they would/do treat non-Muslims living under their authority.
Your Sharia question comes as close as any question I've heard to identifying a moderate... but, as you infer... does it even matter?
Posted by: Oceanguy at January 17, 2006 03:21 PM (fA7Rx)
9
Rusty, I love the Sharia Test, and I can't imagine a better question. But I doubt you will find many Muslims who don't believe in sharia.
Posted by: jesusland joe at January 17, 2006 05:20 PM (rUyw4)
10
Yeah, you're right Rusty, I'm the bad guy, and I'm overreacting. I mean, they're only cutting off a few heads and building nuclear bombs, right? I should just close my eyes and pretend it isn't happening, since that's what pretty much everyone else wants to do.
The fact that most Westerners don't even want to hear the truth is proof enough that civilization won't last another hundred years, and the fact that only a small percentage of us are willing and able to fight tells me that it may not take twenty. I'm just glad I'm old enough to not have to worry about living to see the end of civilization, though it would be nice to be around to see all the liberals get their throats cut by their heroes.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at January 17, 2006 05:23 PM (0yYS2)
11
I'd like to stick around too, Maxi, just to see how it turns out. I'm hopeful, but I believe most of Europe is lost already, lost to pleasure seekers who have no children but want to live like kings off the state. Selfishness and apathy are the two great enemies of the West, and really, it reminds me of Constantinople, the great city that is and can never be Muslim.
Posted by: jesusland joe at January 17, 2006 06:44 PM (rUyw4)
12
After having read Sam Harris' The End of Faith, I realized that it is not the fanatics of a religion that are the truly dangerous, it is the moderates that claim the faith is being hijacked. It appears that it is the fanatics that are the true believers, the moderates neither true to their religion nor their society/culture. The vast majority of 'secularized' Moslems continue to enable the fanatics in their pursuit of purity.
Posted by: Tracy Coyle at January 17, 2006 10:03 PM (19JEa)
13
Tracy, you nailed it. I'm less worried about al Qaeda than I am about CAIR and the ACLU.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at January 18, 2006 11:17 AM (0yYS2)
14
The comments at the top of this blog were about the dumbest I have read yet. First of all, the Taliban were not a group that entered into some kind of equal partnership with the Saudi Wahhabis. They were Hanafi Deobandis who had adopted a fundamentalist outlook. There were already Wahhabis in Afghanistan but they were pure parasites living off Saudi money and were incompetent to rule the country. The Saudis and Pakistanis then picked up the group of Talibs (students) in a Deobandi seminary and Wahhabized them. For example, Hanafi jurisprudence supports visiting graves and praying over the dead but the Taliban forbade it.
The proper comparison would be with the Cuban Castroites and the Russians. The Cubans did not start out as Soviet-lining Communists. Castro disliked the Cuban Communists because they were mere Soviet agents. But when the Soviets and Castro got together the Russians realized the Cuban Communists could not rule the country and so they Sovietized the Castroites just as Saudi and Pakistan Wahhabized the Taliban.
Deobandis flourish in India where they are fundamentalist but not violent. Of course, Spencer who is not an intellectual any more than he is a serious historian, would never mention such things.
As for the claim that one would not have wanted to live under Franco, I wonder how much that chowderhead ever spent in Spain or how much he knows about Francoism? Franco's government saved Jews in the eastern Mediterranean countries like Greece from the Nazis. They also allowed Jews fleeing France to cross Spain to get to the U.S. This isn't a difference? I spent a lot of time in Spain, speak Castilian and Catalan perfectly, and nobody today would compare the Franco regime with the Nazi regime. Not even the Communists make such claims. The Franco regime gave way to a democratic order in a peaceful transition.
So: how many places in the world are Muslims waging so-called jihad? Iraq, some Saudi agents in Chechnya, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and...? Where is there a mass jihad against Christians anywhere? Most of the victims in Sudan are Muslim. Spencer is too dense to even perceive that a jihad can't be a serious war like the Ottomans waged at the same time as it is a terror campaign waged by a small group, any more than the Zapata revolution of 1913 was the same as the Zapatista nonsense of the last few years. A jihad of 100,000 in an organized army is not the same as a so-called jihad of 1,000 extremists, and the fact that he doesn't perceive such things shows that Spencer does not know how to think about history and politics, much less Islam.
How many Muslim countries have exclusive sharia at the national level? Only two: Saudi and Iran, although even Iran has kept some civil law from the imperial regime, borrowed from Western law. Sudan tried an exclusive sharia regime but it is pretty well recognized as a failure.
How many Muslims are jihadist? Can Spencer answer honestly? I don't think so. If it were more than 15 percent we would all be living in shelters over here. And how many call for the establishment of exclusive sharia, and the suppression of Western law? Nobody serious in French West Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, the Emirates, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Central Asia, the Balkans, India, or Indonesia. Hmmm. That must be a small isolated section of the Muslim world. Most Muslims in the world want the same system Israel has -- religious law alongside civil law, with an option to choose on a non-compulsory basis. Oh,
I forgot, most Muslim countries have the same system. You won't find reading the Spencer incitement literature.
Hey, how many of you brave crusaders are ready to go to Iraq and spout your Islamophobia in the vicinity of our troops? Do you think Spencer's books should be distributed by our troops in Iraq? Wouldn't that be helpful? I just sent several packets of my books into Iraq and other Muslim countries and am preparing another tour of medresas, where I lecture.
Oh yes, which of you bigots can explain why churches and aynagogues survived in Islamic countries except Saudi, but mosques were not permitted in Europe for 500 years, and synagogues were banned in Spain and Portugal for 400 years? Spain lifted restrictions on Jews in the late 19th century, which is why Franco saved them from the Germans.
Don't worry, I won't waste my time reading your answers.
One of the bigots asked me in another blog what happened to "the idiot" who told Bush Islam is based on peace... Hmmmm, again. Last time I heard he was running the World Bank. Wolfowitz agrees with me about Islam, although he did not become a Muslim. But what does he know? He isn't a coward hiding behind a screen name.
Posted by: Stephen Schwartz at January 26, 2006 01:56 AM (aG4kk)
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