I personally am sick and tired of the term "moderate." I am not moderate. I am trying very hard to be a fervent Muslim, inshallah. Which means that I support a vision of world where there is no compulsion in religion, as the Quran teaches (along with teaching that good Christians, good Jews, and others as well will see Paradise-- do other faiths teach such an ecumenical view?); where a vision of different communities living in harmony and acceptance of diverse approaches to various isuses is accepted, as the Quran teaches,and on and on. A vision of peace, not war.

Maybe what we need are more "moderate" Christians and Jews. To stop shoving themselves into others' faces. To stop creating and supporting dictators and absolute monarchs in countries that were doing just fine creating their own versions of democracy (remember Iran before 1953?) To stop terror bombing innoncent people (or, to put it the other way, the car bomb is just the poor man's air force-- and the air force is much worse). To stop creating mass prisons and bantustans, like Gaza and the checkerboard insanity of the West Bank. To stop stealing land and resources with the connivance of local elites.

But instead, we like to talk about getting those poor benighted Muslims straighened out. They are only "terrorists" because they have a twisted religion, or that is the easy story line to comfort ourselves with.

When that man bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, no one called him a Christian terrorist, though he explicitly connected himself to some sort of supposedly Christian church movement.

Not too long ago, if a thriller writer wanted a stock terrorist, he did not choose an "Islamic" terrorist but someone from the IRA. But that was not nearly as much fun as condemning the "Islamic terrorists" because while you denounced IRA tactics you also had to discuss legitimate grievances that the Catholic community of Ulster had. (Yet they were never called "Catholic" terrorists, were they?) But now we don't have to do that. We can just call them a bunch of crazy Muslims and ignore the actual source of the anger and alienation that leads to violence.

We talk about "Islamic" terrorists so we can pretend it is about religion in some way. We can say, oh, it is not the religion, but an extremist perversion of it that is the problem,so we are no haters of all 1.6 billion. But still, the label provides an excuse not to confront the real causes of the movements that we label terrorist.

Posted at February 14, 2008 12:04 PM in response to Who Are Moderate Muslims?