The moderate Muslim

The last decade has been a particularly compelling one for many self-conscious Muslims with regard to the moderate vs radical Islam debate. Through the process, in varying degrees and capacities, a body of self-acclaimed ‘moderate’ scholars, students and vague academics have gained relevance and even, international fame. There are those with iconic status, such as Talal Asad and Mahmood Mamdani, who lend legitimacy to western critical reasoning since they defend Islam against western attacks while located in the West. Then there are small-time careerists such as Irshad Manji and a spectrum of rainbow Muslims who have been well-received by Europe and the US from Muslim countries and are speckled all over new-founded Islamic departments within Western academia and media. Several of these experts and scholars are often rejected (if they’re lucky, persecuted) by their countries of origin - often not by their governments but by obscure political opportunist forces. This tends to make them subversive and academically sexy to western academia.

Often, such scholars have been largely irrelevant and ignored within their societies of origin. This is because in Muslim-majority countries the audiences tend to be less interested in academic debates and more interested in piety, ritual and political delivery of religion. Also, in Muslim societies there is such tremendous competition between religious discourses that unless it’s a sensationalist blasphemous case purported by some opportunist, it is unlikely to deserve monopolistic attention. In other words, as in all disciplines and with all other persuasions of faith, the higher academic debates elude the common people while the political ones gain attention. It is due to the political relevance of Islamic scholars that conflict erupts in Muslim-majority countries, not their academic differences.

On the other hand, the scholarship that Muslim academics produce in the West often attempts to disown radical Islamists or militant expressions of Islamic belief and seeks recognition, even romanticisation, of the subjectivity of the Moderate Muslim. This serves the political purpose of western governments because the current globalised economy and spurts of terrorism demand that politics stay more centrist, blunted, accommodative and ‘safe’ - for capital, not necessarily for people. In this environment, the rhetoric of moderation and tolerance requires that we must purge ourselves of every shade of non-moderate Muslim, ie, both the radical and the secular. This has served as a popular political ploy for leaders, both in Western countries but also in Muslim-majority ones.

What is the relevance of such projects? On the one hand, there is no denying the importance of research, analysis, debate and disagreement on any topic that lends itself to enhancing knowledge and ideas. However, it is when academia begins to engage with the political, that the application of such research comes up for discussion.

In an effort to buffer radical Islamic sentiment, moderate scholarship attempts to build an alternative body of Islamic history and social norms derived through an academic rather than political process. The trouble with sapping out the politics from history is that it becomes rather dull, pedantic and does not lend itself to the current (modern) political context. So moderate scholars are split on this point; some suggest aligning Islamic history to the current context and projected future, while the revivalists tend to reject modernity and western universalism and are drawn to a newly constructed, “culturally appropriate” alternative body of norms and laws for Muslims. This latter proposal preoccupies western governments and societies, where war has become unpopular and economically draining.

It also finds resonance in a new generation of young Muslims who have witnessed the surge of anti-Muslim sentiment expressed by way of irreverent cartoons, banning of veils and minarets in Europe. The careerist Muslim scholars all around the world gained most in this period by using this as evidence of the racism, Islamophobia and anti-liberal humanism that preoccupies western politics and inflicts ‘moral injury’ to Muslims globally. This made it opportune for troubled leaders to construct the idea of an alternative, soft, Sufi Islam. It didn’t matter that this makes absolutely no policy sense and is simply a re-packaged way of suggesting the state remain secular without actually saying so. Politically it has more serious repercussions.

The trouble with such theory is that it gives a cover for intervention under a more subtle guise. Republican-sponsored Islamophobia has given way in the US to a liberal Democrat sentiment, seemingly prone to giving up on defeating radical Islam by aggression. Instead, the current administration seeks to pursue a policy that concedes to appeasing Muslim (male) sentiments by funding projects that enable Muslims to develop themselves through ‘Islamically appropriate’ rights. This would mean not confronting, disrupting or challenging existing patriarchal cultures or social practices or getting into the troubling debate of whether they are religious or cultural or both. What was earlier the hypocritical, sudden feminist concern for Muslim women by the Bush administration has now become an equally self-serving political approach by the Obama regime that wishes to graft a presumed (moderate) Muslim identity on people in Muslim-majority countries. This would suggest that development and relief should be carried out, to use an example, by Islamic Relief rather than Red Cross; or projects should assist Muslim women who can stay at home in veils and do home-based work rather than changing the nature of the market to allow women equal and free access; or, to form ‘peace jirgas’ to resolve intra-Muslim conflict; or fund and arm ‘culturally relevant’ lashkar forces to defend real Muslims against the spurious ones.

It’s one thing to respect religious sentiment but another to disregard the multiplicity of internal cultural dynamics and struggles between competing political identities within Muslim societies. Such a recognition would mean no intervention, including not funding ‘culturally appropriate’ projects nor patronizing any religious persuasion (moderate or not). Instead, maybe the only criteria for foreign assistance should be towards supporting democratic civilian efforts rather than dictatorial and/or military ones.

Interestingly, those who admire western-based Muslim scholars who make careers of promoting moderate Islam, do not accuse such intellectuals of being influenced by western rationality or modernity. Ironically, however, feminists and human rights activists who have spent their lives in their home countries struggling for specific political rights, including equality for women and secular rights in Muslim majority countries, are often dismissed as ‘un-authentic’, ‘westernised’, misguided agents of secularism, even liberal fundamentalists.

In the final analysis, the only purpose moderate Islamists (those who make a career of promoting moderate Islam) have served is to have created a wider wedge between the problematic and often, false binaries of the traditional and modern, appropriate and inappropriate cultural and/or Islamic practices. They serve the political purpose of a feel-good strategic use of religion that accommodates some merger of what are considered, western rationality and eastern conservatism. But ultimately, they are the fence-sitters who have enabled the strategic use of Islam to further pragmatic political goals without substantively making any deep, meaningful change. If anything, moderate Islamists serve as buffers that may seem more acceptable than radical ones but in the process they maintain the worst kind of patriarchal and social conservatism because they endorse slow, gradual and limited progress that does not contest the broader, entrenched and unequal status quo.

The writer is an independent researcher based in Karachi. Email: afiyaszia@yahoo.com