Re: The Battle for Islam

I just watched the latest installment of Peter’s intriguing interview of Fouad Ajami. I’m sure Mark will have his own take on it, but, despite my admiration for Mr. Ajami, I was unimpressed. He seems to make Mark’s point that there are moderate Muslims but not a moderate Islam. In purporting to refute this notion, Mr. Ajami basically says that he was brought up as a moderate Muslim in a family that was similarly “secular” and moderate. OK, but Islam is certainly not secular — that’s a contradiction. If Ajami is saying that his family chose to live in a secular fashion that did not incorporate many Muslim traditions (he mentions that women in his family did not wear the veil), that means they were resistant to various tenets, not that those tenets are not part of Islam.

Mr. Ajami elaborates that his family “interpreted the faith in a moderate way.” OK, what was that interpretation? Is he saying there is a legitimate construction of Islam which holds that sharia needn’t be followed? Or is he just saying that his family chose not to adhere to all of sharia’s particulars? He doesn’t say, nor does he identify a single place where the Muslims he calls “extremists” have gotten the doctrine wrong. He says the practice of Islam is very different in different parts of the Muslim world. True enough, but that implies that the “extremists” are following an authentic version of Islam, not that they are perverting the doctrine or engaged in heterodoxy.

Then there is the matter of “radicalism.” Mr. Ajami says for a long time the Saudis supported it, but now even they see the “drift toward radicalism is a threat to the Kingdom.” But that’s only true if you equate radicalism with violence. The Saudis may have changed their view of al Qaeda over the years (though Wahhabism, which is very close to al Qaeda ideology, remains the official Islam of the Kingdom); but the Saudis remain closely allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, an alliance that is over a half-century old and that is dedicated to spreading Islamist ideology. Their disagreement with al Qaeda is mainly over methodology. Indeed, the Saudis still exclude non-Muslims from the cities of Mecca and Medina, and the Saudi regime was among the few governments in the world that recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. All of them — al Qaeda, the Brotherhood, the Taliban, and the Saudis — believe in the establishment of sharia law as the first step toward Islamicizing all societies, a mission they regard as a divine command.

Mr. Ajami speaks movingly of meeting with Ayatollah Ali Sistani, portraying him as a great friend of democracy who has a “dread of anything radical.” Again, Ajami is equating “radical” with “al Qaeda.” He conveniently omits the fact that meeting with Sistani is easier for him because he (Ajami) is a Muslim. The Ayatollah frowns on contacts with non-Muslims (Juan Cole disputes the claim that Sistani will not meet with any non-Muslims, citing a meeting with a non-Muslim U.N. official). In fact, Sistani instructs Muslims to consider non-Muslims as in the same category “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things]”; and for someone with a dread of anything radical, Sistani certainly had no difficulty teaching that homosexuals must be “punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

I discuss a lot of this in my new book (The Grand Jihad), which comes out on May 25. For now, I just want to reaffirm that, as an admirer of the courage of moderate Muslims, it is my most fervent wish that they are successful in reforming Islam. We need to be honest, however, that they are trying to achieve reform precisely because there are problems with Islam as is. The most frustrating thing about “moderate Islam” is that no one seems to be able to say what it entails. The so called “radicals” tell us exactly what they believe and (accurately) cite chapter and verse in the scriptures. The moderates never persuasively refute the radicals — they just say the radicals are too “extreme.” This doesn’t come close to making the case that the radicals have Islam wrong. If your goal is to persuade other Muslims — and everyone seems to agree that only Islam can settle its internal divisions – that’s the case that has to be made.