AUGUST 27, 2010, 9:19 AM
More on Rauf and Moderate Islam
Daniel Larison has written two posts responding to my remarks on the Cordoba Initiative controversy. Here are a couple of related passages rebutting my recent comments regarding what non-Muslim Americans should expect from moderate Muslim leaders:
"Of course, critics have the right to scrutinize Rauf’s qualifications as a moderate and parse any of his comments … [But] what we’re talking about here isn’t a question of assimilation to the norms of American culture or an acceptance of the principles of constitutional government, but a question of conforming to the limits of approved political discourse. Of course, there is no way for Rauf to satisfy his critics in a way that will not destroy his credibility with most other Muslims, which I have to assume is the point. Anti-jihadists are always lamenting that moderate Muslims are too quiescent, passive and silent, but the moment that one of them says anything that they don’t like they dismiss him entirely."
"… As far as I can tell, what Rauf’s critics want is not merely someone who is a moderate Muslim, which presumably means someone moderate in his interpretation of Islam as a religion. What they would apparently also like is someone who has no sympathy for the political causes or grievances of any other Muslims in the world. If moderation is defined in that unreasonable way, there probably aren’t very many moderate Muslims after all."
I think that to some extent, conforming yourself to the limits of American political discourse is part of assimilation to the norms of American culture. Sometimes these limits are overly-constraining, certainly. But sometimes they’re entirely reasonable. As an example of the latter, for instance, I think it’s fair to say that any American Muslim leader who espoused frank anti-Semitism, called for the death penalty for apostates (or gays, or adulterers, or whomever …), advocated terrorism in the name of Islam, or praised theocracy as a model for America would be considered to have fallen somewhat short of what a reasonable observer would describe as a “moderate Islam.”
The harder question, and the one that’s on the table in the case of Feisal Abdul Rauf, is how we should judge American Muslim leaders when they talk about regimes and movements in the Islamic world that are anti-Semitic, terrorism-sponsoring, theocratic and so on down the line. And it’s both telling and appropriate, I think, that nearly that nearly all of the criticism of Rauf that’s found traction outside of the Pamela Geller vortex (where everything the imam says is proof of a vast Islamist conspiracy) has focused on exactly these kind of issues — on his comments during Iran’s election crisis, on his non-responsive response to a question about terrorism and Hamas, and on his remarks, at different times, about America being “an accessory to 9/11? with “more Muslim blood on its hands” than al Qaeda has non-Muslim blood.
Yes, he’s also been attacked from the Andy McCarthy/David Horowitz wing of conservatism on other fronts, and for other comments — for his views on Israel’s future, for his criticisms of the PATRIOT Act, for his loose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, for his general critique of American policy toward Muslim dictators, and so on. But these criticisms have attracted much less attention, and appropriately so. Right or wrong, those are exactly the kind of views and ties that you’d expect from any bridge-builder between Islam and the West. And Larison is correct that it’s unreasonable and counterproductive to demand that moderate Muslims suddenly adopt the editorial line of Commentary, as some conservatives seem to expect.
But would Rauf really “destroy his credibility” with the world’s Muslims if, say, he didn’t bend over backward to avoid saying a negative word about Iran’s regime when it was in the midst of a brutal crackdown on dissent? Or if he hadn’t offered an inflammatory analogy — using the kind of rhetoric that fuels the poisonous “America’s at war with Muslims” narrative — between al Qaeda’s campaign of terror and the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime? Or if he’d found a way to say something critical about Hamas when an interviewer put him on the spot — not about the Palestinian cause in general, but just about Hamas?
Reasonable people can disagree on these questions. Maybe, as Larison claims, Rauf’s remarks on Iran should be read as a bland do-gooder call for dialogue, rather than a contortionist’s attempt to avoid reckoning with the realities of the clerical regime. Maybe his non-comments about Hamas were just an attempt to a duck a “gotcha” question. Certainly I don’t see the imam as a deeply sinister figure, or a brilliant machiavel with vast and dark designs. But he does seem like the kind of person who makes excuses for sinister figures, and curries favor with them, and bobs and weaves where their crimes are concerned, all in the name of dialogue and evenhandedness. And that seems like sufficient grounds for criticism and mistrust.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/more-on-rauf-and-moderate-islam/?pagemode=print