After the 9/11 attacks, Americans put out a call for moderate Islam. Many Muslims answered that call, but few Americans heard them. Early this month, I traveled to Asia to see what Islam looks like on the ground there, and to listen to what Muslims themselves have to say about their religion, terrorism and the United States. What I found surprised me.
I went to Asia because Islam is by no means a Middle Eastern phenomenon. In fact, Asia is home to most of the world’s Muslims. I focused on Indonesia because there are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country ”” roughly three times as many as in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
But what makes Indonesia strategically important to the United States is not simply its huge Muslim population (roughly 200 million) but the fact that Indonesian Muslims are by no means anti-Western.
There are fundamentalists in Indonesia, to be sure, but they account for roughly one in every 10 citizens there. The overwhelming majority of Indonesia’s Muslims are moderates, and about one in five are progressives.
Stephen is quite right, of course. But on the other hand, if one in ten Muslims in [i]Indonesia[/i] is an Islamist, then one can imagine the percentage in Pakistan, or Egypt, or Iraq. The difficulties with this thesis, from an American (or, increasingly, European) point of view are that a) ten percent of 1.2 billion is 120 million more or less radical Islamists; and b) because of the wretched Saudi/Wahhabi funding of madrassas throughout the third world (and even in England and America), that particularly virulent strain of Islam is growing more rapidly than any sort of moderation.
Moreover, as for example Daniel Pipes points out in his excellent [i]Militant Islam Reaches America[/i], the radical jihadists tend to control the dialog, if necessary by intimidation (think Salman Rushdie, cartoons of Mohammed, the assassination of Sadat, and so on endlessly).
In the same book, Pipes says that only by strengthening moderate Muslims can the jihadists be beaten in the long run. He’s quite right, and basically everywhere the ordinary Muslim, like the ordinary Hindu, the ordinary Catholic, the ordinary Chinese, whoever, really just wants activists of all sorts to leave him alone to make a living and raise his family as best he can.
(I worked in the political campaign of Dean Ahmad for Senate in Maryland in 1986; he is now one of the minds behind [i]The Minaret of Freedom[/i], a fine web site promoting the idea that liberty is an Islamic tradition. I wish him well; but as soon as his site really started to become influential, he would either be assassinated or have to go underground — in America!)
So I sincerely hope that what Stephen is implying here is right, that moderate Muslims will eventually get their radical homicidal nutcases under control. But I can see little reason for optimism.
Our parish in New Zealand has a diverse collection of asian christians in it. The single largest group by far is Indonesians — there are at least 20 in a congregation that averages 200 on a Sunday. All the Indonesians talk of having escaped Indonesia because of being persecuted — their homes were burnt, their lives were threatened, and their children were attacked at school. They have family left behind who are still suffering, in some cases seriously.
I doubt any of them would describe the majority of the population as “moderate” let alone “liberal”. In the cases of converts from Islam to Christianity (and we have a number who are) they have lost all contact with their families and with their past life, and in many cases been very lucky to escape with their lives and the clothes on their backs, and know of converts who have not been as fortunate as them.
I think the reporter should have looked behind the propaganda.
It does not matter if 99% are non-violent. The 1% who are violent are bent on a suicidal path of destruction and are backed by renegade governments and billionaires. They are on auto-pilot and answer to no one. Any one of them if they could get their hands on a nuke would use it in a Manhattan minute. What burns me up is how the so-called moderates and peace-loving ones will not take care of the violent element of their so-called religion of peace. I think they are all closet terrorists and quietly chuckle every time somebody inflicts another death on a decadent Westerner or Israeli.