Some Advice for Moderate Muslims

by Mark Shea - October 31, 2007

Reprinted with permission.

I'm one of those people who roots for the moderate Muslim. And yes, they do exist. After the big flap a few years ago following Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam, the mainstream media never got around to informing you that his invitation to dialogue was answered by a number of imams and Islamic scholars, and the conversation has been ongoing. Likewise, you probably never heard about a beautiful and wrenching letter by Adnam Mokrani, Professor of Islamic Studies in the Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture and the Pontifical Gregorian University, lamenting the murder of his dear friend, Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni, at the hands of Bronze Age thugs in Iraq. Such people need to be encouraged and given as much exposure as possible, both here and in the Islamosphere.

That said, there remains a rather glaring problem with the way in which many Islamic moderates address the problem of Radical Islamism in the public square. It is best summed up in a little ad I once received from Beliefnet, inviting me to check out the work of "nine prominent American Muslims giving definitive statements, once and for all, about why Islam has nothing to do with terrorism and violence."

Because charity believeth all things, one can – with effort – put a charitable construction on that. You can, for instance, insert unspoken qualifiers like, "'True' Islam has nothing to do with terrorism." With some effort, you can take it to mean, "The particular Islamic family that raised me has nothing to do with terrorism and violence." With a little elbow grease, you can work "has nothing to do with terrorism and violence" into meaning "wishes to have nothing to do with terrorism and violence." A stubbornly charitable mind can find ways to put the best possible (not to say pollyanna) construction on such words.

But the vast majority of people are not going to do that sort of charitable heavy lifting for Islam when images of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Cartoon Rioters, beheading thugs, ululating crybabies, murderous fanatics, honor-killers, mobs stoning helpless women, dunces blathering Quran-laced manifestos for Jihad on YouTube and various other thin-skinned buffoons and bullies are in your face 24/7, all crying "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet!"

Here's the deal: Speaking as a Catholic who deeply believes the Catholic faith, it would (rightly) not pass the Laugh Test if I were to declare the Church has nothing to do with violence, or anti-semitism, or terrorism or abusive priests or [insert sin here]. To be sure, there is a distinction between the eschatological vision of the spotless Bride of Christ and her extremely spotty members. And so we can and do speak of One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. There is a sense in which the Church remains holy even when all her members are not, because its soul is not a fallen man but the Holy Spirit himself.

But get real. You'd have to be nuts to demand that non-Catholics just accept that Catholics have "nothing to do" with sins which everybody knows Catholics have committed. We're talking Mafiosi, Crusaders who sacked Constantinople, Borgia Popes, Richelieu, weird Latin American cults, citizens of Northern Ireland blowing each other up, pedophile priests and their guardian bishops, kooky anti-Semites who think Hitler was on to something, most of the citizens of Dante's Inferno, concentration camp guards, that Opus Dei guy who spied on the United States and entertained himself with porn, Spanish Inquisitors, slave traders, and a wide assortment of other people who did what they did (and will do what they do till the Parousia), often with the express claim that they were upholding the Faith.

The Catholic motto is, "You can pick your friends, but you are stuck with your family." What's sauce for the Catholic goose is sauce for the Muslim gander. The sooner they address themselves to that fact, the better.

Reality Check

My suggestion to Muslims who wish to a) win the trust of good-willed outsiders in the fight with Radical Islamist nuts and b) really succeed in marginalizing the crazies within Islam is this: Stop using language that not only does not pass the Laugh Test, but that leaves the reader with the strong suggestion that if we do laugh, it is because we are bigots, and not because of the plain-as-nose-on-face fact that Islam has plenty to do with violence and terrorism.

Muslims who want to make the "You Can Trust Me: I Want to Get Rid of the Muslim Crazies Too" case to the world have to start with the virtue of Prudence: the clear-eyed acknowledgement of what is, not of what they wish everybody would think. Only by acknowledging that the Muslim crazies are Muslim crazies can reformers begin to move toward the goal of seeing to it that the crazies need not be the expression of their tradition.

It's fine to articulate a distinction between the highest aspirations of your tradition and the sinful members who betray those aspirations. Just don't talk as though we outsiders have to pretend they aren't members of the Islamic faith at all.

It's fine to seek a way of developing your tradition so that its toxic elements are defanged. Just don't ask us outsiders to believe that those toxic elements were never there and aren't there still both in the teaching of the Quran itself and in the way in which that teaching is sometimes applied by Muslims acting in the name of (and usually quoting) Mohammed himself.

It's fine to say that terrorists represent the worst in Islam and, say, Averroes the best. Just don't ask us outsiders to believe that Muslim terrorists represent "nothing" in Islam. Because that sounds, to us outsiders, uncommonly like, "Who are you gonna believe: me or your own two eyes?"

By all means, be a voice for change within the Umma. Network with sane people within your tradition and reach out to sane people outside it. But don't demand of us outsiders that we cease and desist noticing the thousands and thousands and thousands of Muslims behaving like thugs and bullies and doing it all with the serene certitude that this is the most Islamic thing in the world

All this is the task of every single Muslim in the world who wants to purify Islam of the nutcases, because Islam has no hierarchy. As Catholics are wont to forget, we are the anomaly in the world religious scene in that we have a Magisterium which really can say, "This is Catholic. That is not." There is no such animal in Islam – nor in most other religious traditions. Consequently, all Muslims are stuck with the same problem as sola scriptura Protestantism or the various schools of Judaism, Hinduism, or various paganisms. With no Magisterium, "Islam" is easily subject to being whatever the loudest voices in the Islamosphere say it is. At present, a great many loud voices say it is and ought to be a juggernaut of violence and terrorism.

Everyone's Business

Some Muslims don't like it when non-Muslims make suggestions about how to order their internal affairs. I can relate. As a Catholic, I'm not much interested when an Episcopalian demands women priests or a Baptist insists we baptize only adults. But when our internal affairs spill over into matters of the common good, they are no longer our internal affairs and those outside the Church (or the Umma) have every right to voice an opinion. When a priest starts raping kids or an imam begins preaching the glories of suicide bombing, it becomes everybody's business.

So here's what this Catholic brings to the table out of the experience of his own tradition. Since moderate Muslims have no Magisterium of their own, take a tip from ours and make a careful note of how John Paul II dealt with our own history of sin and violence. As the Church approached the Third Millennium, the pope took a clear look at the sins of Catholics over the past thousand years and did not say, "The Crusades had nothing to do with Catholicism. The persecution of Jews had nothing to do with Catholicism. The oppression of women did not involve Catholics. The Church has never had anything to do with racism." Instead, he made an unvarnished assessment of the sins of the Church's members (including those members called "popes and bishops") and said, on behalf of the Catholic community, "Mea Culpa."

Muslims serious about healing their people of the cancer of radical violence should do likewise: They might even try reading Tertio Millennio Adveniente and mining it for tips on how to forthrightly discuss the sins of their own tradition. Don't give us a song and dance that the Islamic conquest of large portions of what was once Christian Africa and Asia has "nothing to do with Islam." Don't try to tell us that the citizens of Constantinople held a referendum and peacefully opted to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque one fine summer day in 1453. Don't suggest that the massive hordes repelled at Vienna and Lepanto had nothing to do with Islam. Don't tell us that the kidnap of Christian children and their indoctrination as Islamic Janissaries was the work of Buddhists or Swedenborgians. It's as persuasive as a song and dance that the murder of Rhenish Jews by Crusaders, or the rape of children by priests had nothing to do with Catholics. Instead, face the fact that these people are your people. The first order of business is not, "Tell outsiders to stop seeing what they see" but, "Tell insiders that we must deal with the violence in our tradition, or it will destroy us."

Mark P. Shea is a senior editor at www.CatholicExchange.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic. Visit his blog at www.markshea.blogspot.com.