[NOTE: This is Part I of a two-part series.]
A short while ago I wrote this about the so-called “moderate Muslims”:
Islam may not have moderate branches, but there are moderate Muslims who are good citizens of this country and believe in its ideals.
Do you not know nominal Christians and nominal Jews who don’t follow all the precepts (or even most of the precepts) of their religions? Islam is no different. I know quite a few people born as Muslims who are not religious. Some are even atheists. I know these people quite well. They would be classified by Islam as Muslims, and they would be Muslims by birth, but they are very moderate and no threat at all. They constitute more than 10% but probably less than 50% of the Moslems in this country. Some of them, for example, are expat Iranians who came (or their parents came) to this country after the 1979 revolution. They no more want that sort of life for themselves or for other people than you do, and they are against terrorism. Nor do they want other people to become Muslim.
When I wrote that, I had not yet read this piece by my friend Richard Landes. He makes a somewhat similar argument about “moderate” Muslims—although he makes it far more elegantly and clearly than I ever did, and he then goes on to expand on it greatly. I recommend that you read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
…I suggest we look at a matter not so much of theology, or even exegesis, as of “religiosity”””a particular “style” of living one’s religion, the way one’s religious convictions affect the way one treats others, both co-religionists and outsiders. Religiosity goes a long way toward understanding how any given believer reads his or her sacred and legal texts, and to what theological principles they will find themselves drawn.
Not all people who follow a religion follow it in the same way. Typically, the stricter ones consider the others as having left the religion or as practicing a bastardized and/or inauthentic form of the religion, but the rest continue to believe themselves members of that religion in good standing.
Landes goes on:
If “religiosity” designates a religious style, a way of “living” one’s religious beliefs, then “triumphalist religiosity” designates believers who need to assert their own dominance as a visible sign of their superiority, as a proof of God(s) “favor.” Put somewhat differently, “because we rule, our god is the true god.” In monotheism: “We are God’s chosen because we rule.”
So, what are triumphalists out to do?:
Triumphalist religiosity places great importance on a visible deference paid to true believers. It both demands that others pay it respect and, to varying degrees depending on circumstances, disrespects others as a matter of principle. Triumphalists find public criticism unacceptably disrespectful, and interpret blasphemy laws aggressively in order to silence dissent. Intolerance, disdain, violence, repression, intimidation””all of these deeds and attitudes, reflect triumphalist religiosity in its crudest forms. Historically, then, triumphalists exercise power in an authoritarian manner, and, when insecure, tend, domestically, toward inquisitorial persecution of dissent (heretics, apostates) and humiliation of non-believers, and internationally, towards holy wars (Jihads, Crusades) and the massacre of those who resist.
There is a close correlation between triumphalist religiosity and tribal warrior, honor-shame culture: When he found out about the [salvific] crucifixion, the triumphalist tribal war chief, Clovis, exclaimed: “If me and my men had been there, we would have avenged this wrong.” When the Parisian clergy demanded redress for the Chevalier de la Barre’s refusal to doff his cap at their Corpus Christi procession, they were asserting their rights to public deference, and the state made good on their outrage by torturing and beheading the insulter.
Note that the examples from Christianity are ancient. And in America, hundreds of years ago, a further and even more definitive break was made with that tradition by the Constitution:
When the U.S. Constitution separated Church and State, it formally renounced triumphalist religiosity. Every citizen of the democracy, and all the religious groups therein, have full freedom to believe that they are special, the one and only true faith, the exclusively chosen of God””in their own minds and hearts, in their own community of conviction. But they cannot use the state (i.e. coercive power) to impose that perception on others. This involves a collective deed of renunciation so rare, that the U.S. Constitution (1789) represents the first time in the 1750-year history of Christianity that tolerance of dissenting faith became a “winner’s creed.”
Landes is a retired history professor who is an expert on the millennium of 1000, and this background positions him very well to understand the phenomenon:
In Paris in 2015, jihadis began with attacks on blasphemers and Jews and ended with attacks on the nightlife scene. Some puzzled about why. Whence this hostility? It seems less incomprehensible when one realizes that triumphalists find any independent infidel, especially those who are enjoying their (immoral) freedom, intolerable. While different believers have different thresholds at which they will become violent, all triumphalists are susceptible to the Jihadi temptation. When people warn of the negative impact of insults on moderate Muslims’, they refer, often without acknowledging it, to this tipping point at which triumphalists find the behavior of insufficiently deferential infidels unbearable.
Culturally, triumphalism is at the intersection of two powerful social forces: a tribal warrior ethos that appeals especially to the youth, and an imperial, millennial ethos that mobilizes the drive for world conquest. Together they constitute a powerful recruiting device urging hormone-riddled young people to join the apocalyptic global battle to implement Allah’s plan for a global Caliphate. And as victorious warriors, to them go the spoils of holy war.
So there are two dimensions about religion that matter in this discussion. One is whether a religion is “truimphalist” or not. If it is not, then it doesn’t much matter how deeply religious a person is; he or she will very much tend to be a live-and-let-live type. It the religion is triumphalist, then “religiosity” is a dimension that matters very much.
Islam is a religion that in its classic form is triumphalist (there are heterodox forms that are not, but they are minority sects of the religion). There are many Muslims in this country who display no more “religiosity” than the secular Jew or the reform Jew who doesn’t keep kosher and hasn’t read the Tanakh, or those nominal Christians who don’t go to church regularly and even have some trouble with the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. Many of those Muslims are citizens who are as dedicated to the principles of the Constitution as the average Christian or Jew. Those who suggest that all Muslims must be deported need to take them into account without just stating that all Muslims are secret jihadis or that these “moderate” people aren’t really Muslims.
They exist. They are Muslims of one kind or other. They are citizens. You may think they are the eggs that must be broken to make some palatable omelets, but I don’t.
[Part II, to come tomorrow, will deal with some suggestions of mine on what should be done.]
[ADDENDUM: Part II can be found here.]
