Where Are All the Moslem Methodists?
Big Lazards blog
By Dafydd on Global War on Terrorism
Way, way, way back when I first began this blog -- by which I mean yesterday -- one of the earliest commenters, pbswatcher, posed a very fair and hard-to-answer question:
The phrase "militant islamist" immediately raises the question of how to define a "non-militant islamist."
Actually, there are two questions here: first, what would a non-militant Islamist look like; and second, how many of them are there?
The first one is easier to answer. Centuries ago, Christianity used to be as aggressively militant as militant Islamists are today, attacking not only Jews and other infidels but also apostates, heretics, blasphemers, and witches -- all real or imagined. The crusades; Torquemada; Kramer and Sprenger.
But the Church, after bifurcating, underwent a transformation across all of Christendom that is collectively lumped together as "the Reformation," though it occurred at different times and paces in different places. By the time it ended, we had a Christianity spread across many different sects and churches more or less living in harmony with each other: I don't mean a complete, worldwide lack of religious violence among Christian sects and religions; I mean that there are no two Christian sects or religions that are at war nearly everywhere, nor is there any sect or religion that still wants to massacre everyone who isn't of their particular faith -- not even the Phalangists in Lebanon, to the extent they're even still there in any strength.
Today, it's commonplace to see a Catholic church, a Baptist church, and a Russian Orthodox church on the same block, with the pastors visiting each other and setting up combined charity drives. There are still billions of Christians (if we combine Catholic and Protestant religions); but the average guy or gal just doesn't live and die by the faith the way he used to do, in the days of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, for example.
Christians today are by and large domesticated. Some may sigh for the "old days;" but they imagine days that never really existed like that. In any event, real-life counterparts of those "good old days" are five hundred years in the past, and nobody alive today actually experienced them. The reality is that whatever most Christians (and Jews) may say about the depth of their faith -- in real-life encounters, faith is secondary to comity, commerce, employment, and secular-civic involvement (the PTA, for example).
And this is good. It means that I can live next door to Catholics and have no fear of an auto-da-fé. Also, a typical American Jew doesn't have to stubbornly refuse to eat at his gentile neighbor's house because it's not kosher; most Jews who claim to keep kosher really just mean they avoid the really obvious traif, like pork... and often not even that, if it's inconvenient. Heck, the rabbi who married my wife and I ate an Egg McMuffin just before one of the rehearsals! (Wait -- wasn't Egg McMuffin the sidekick of Johnny Carson? Or am I hallucinating again?)
This is exactly what I want to see happen to Islam: what the world needs are more Moslem Methodists.
I know there are some, because one works with Sachi: he's a Moslem, he claims to be kosher (he avoids pork; that's about it), and he prays at least once a month or so, when he remembers. I think it pretty obvious we're not at war with him.
Such a person could still think of himself as an Islamist, if he sees it as more of an internal thing: the mere fact that he tells himself that sharia is the goal may liberate him from having to live by it in practice. The trick is to divorce Islam (or at least Islamism) from the here and now and transplant it to the afterlife. Specific inconvenient rituals can be largely abandoned, even while the Moslem bemoans their abandonment in a general sense -- in the same way that even the great majority of orthodox Jews who keep strictly kosher don't treat their wives as "unclean" and refuse to touch them during the wives' menstrual periods (Leviticus 15:19).
I think we can envision a moderate Moslem, or even a non-militant (if not actually moderate) Islamist: for the latter, even if a person obeyed sharia in his home, it's not a foregone conclusion that he wants to kill everyone who doesn't. The real question is how many of these moderate and non-millitant Moslems and Islamists are there?
I don't have data on this; but my gut feeling is that the majority of Moslems are moderate as I have described it... but nearly all national or international Moslem organizations, whether overtly religious (like a mosque) or more secular in purpose (like CAIR), are strongly inclined towards militant Islamism and therefore dangerously tolerant of Islamic terrorism. If all that a moderate Moslem sees around him as the public face of Islam are groups that call for jihad, either overtly or slyly, he may well feel that there must be something wrong with him not to feel that same rage and hate. He'll probably fall silent, afraid to object, both because of physical threat, and more important, fear of social shunning.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Maybe if moderate Moslems would concentrate on creating Islamic organizations that give a sense of solidarity to "Moslem Methodists," showing them they're not alone, the natural tendency toward laziness would take over: hating is hot, hard work.
I wonder; how many secularized Moslems "live lives of quiet desperation?" There must be some way to persuade them "not to do desperate things." |
