I recently received an email tagged as “A German’s View on Islam” which essentially advanced the proposition that complacency of the “silent majorities” in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, or Tojo’s Japan is responsible for the fanatics accession to power. The email is taken from a dated article by Paul E. Marek and is currently applied to Islam. It reads in part:
“The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history; it is
the fanatics who march…it is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting
wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian
or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire
continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder,
or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It
is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims
and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to
become suicide bombers..” In other words, peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence!
With this historical logic difficult to refute, it was heartening to see today’s WSJ article, “A Symposium: What Is Moderate Islam?” This is a collection of six answers given by Islamic scholars and commentators. I commend a full reading to the piece, but I was particularly drawn to the last two essays, “Don’t Gloss Over The Violent Texts” and “Mystics, Modernists and Literalists.”
From the first, “Radical Islam is not limited to the act of terrorism; it also includes the embrace of teachings within the religion that promote hatred and ultimately breed terrorism. Those who limit the definition of radical Islam to terrorism are ignoring—and indirectly approving of—the Shariah teachings that permit killing apostates, violence against women and gays, and anti-Semitism.”
“Moderate Islam must not be passive. It needs to actively reinterpret the violent parts of the religious text rather than simply cherry-picking the peaceful ones. Ignoring, rather than confronting or contextualizing, the violent texts leaves young Muslims vulnerable to such teachings at a later stage in their lives.”
And, from the second: “The literalists believe that Muslim behavior must approximate that of the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia. Their belief that Islam is under attack forces many of them to adopt a defensive posture. And while not all literalists advocate violence, many do. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Taliban belong to this category.”
Islam has a foundational text problem which gives rise to the terrorists. It is difficult to see how that will be solved even if the silent majorities rise up in force in their totalitarian societies.
By modern analogy, silent majorities are responsible for the ills of great democratic nations. We have witnessed as much here over the last half century with our gradual descent on the road to serfdom, our slip into socialism. Hopefully we wake up soon!