The whole difficulty with moderate Islam

Well, not the whole difficulty, I suppose. But here's the basic deal: the majority of the Muslims I know are very nice and generous and peaceful people, who detest the Islamofascists and don't want to be like them. But if you're going to see "moderate Islam" have any real influence in the Arab Middle East, then you have to overcome two huge problems.

1. If a moderate Muslim speaks out in most places in the Arab world, he stands a decent chance of being promptly killed, because his enemies the Islamofascists like killing people. If an Islamofascists speaks out, he can do so with impunity, because moderate Muslims don't like killing people -- if they liked killing people, they'd be Islamofascists. That last part is true because of the second problem, which I can't state more pithily than does Brian Micklethwait (HT: Isty, I think, but I don't remember for sure), in response to Lord Carey's question of "why Islam today ha[s] become associated with violence." This is, of course, a stupid question with a false implied premise, namely that there has ever been a time at which Islam was not associated with violence; and Micklethwait does not mince words in stating Problem #2:

2. "Simple, I'd say. The founder of Islam believed strongly in violence, was himself very good at it, and recommended it enthusiastically to his followers. They have obliged, century after century after century."

And the reason this is a problem with moderate Islam is simply that a moderate Muslim who wishes to argue that religiously motivated, deadly violence is incompatible with Islam -- that Islam is, in any remotely meaningful sense, a "religion of peace" -- puts himself in the highly awkward position of trying to explain why what was good for the Prophet then, is bad for Muslims now.

If you try to reconcile the Crusades and the Inquisition with the example and teachings of Jesus, you find yourself facing a formidable challenge. The burden of apparent proof lies very heavily upon the person who would justify the use of the sword in the service of the Church; indeed it lies heavily upon someone who simply wants to say that the Church should enlist the State's power of violence in any capacity whatsoever intended to advance Her particular ends. But with Islam all the weight of the apparent evidence runs the other way. If you do nothing but follow the example of Jesus, then even should absolute political power be offered to you upon a platter you will spurn it. If you do nothing but follow the example of Mohammed, then even should others rise up to deny you absolute political power, you will demand that power and attempt to butcher those who stand in your way.

Now it doesn't at all follow that moderate Muslims are wrong and that murderous, infidel-butchering Islamofascism is "the true Islam." Context really does make a tremendous difference in matters moral, and the obvious answer in human affairs very often turns out to be the wrong answer. Christianity itself is, if it comes to that, a very non-obvious and unexpected culmination of the revelation of God to the Jews; but we don't think it is therefore false, anymore than the fact that the conclusions of relativity make an extremely surprising denouement to the path on which Newton's Three Laws set modern physics, makes us insist that Einstein must have been deluded. Truth and reality are often very surprising things. Therefore I see no particular reason to say that moderate Muslims are wrong to say that what they believe is the True Islam and that Islamofascism is a perversion.

But let us grant that Islam is true, that Mohammed was indeed the last and greatest of God's prophets, that the violence in which he engaged was divinely authorized, and yet that all apparently similar violence is now morally and religiously out of bounds. Let us, in other words, grant the truth of what Westerners like to think of as "moderate Islam." Is it not clear that this truth must be very far from obvious both to infidels (who don't think Mohammed was speaking for God in the first place) and also to ordinary uneducated Muslims (who are naturally likely to conclude that what was good enough for Mohammed should be good enough for everybody and who are unlikely to have the patience or intellectual training to follow a complex and delicate chain of reasoning leading to a counter-intuitive conclusion)?

Furthermore, every society has people in it who like killing others, and in the especially seething and violent and dysfunctional Arab world, the percentage of young men who are attracted to violence, while still definitely a minority, is yet greater that it is in most other societies (though not greater than it is in grossly dysfunctional societies such as the American black inner city or le Zone). And if you come to Islam already wanting an excuse to kill people -- well, try naming me the founder of any major religion whose example lends itself better to the rationalization of bloodthirstiness than does the career of the Prophet. Christ? Absurd. The Buddha? Ridiculous. Moses and Joshua and David? Equally convenient, perhaps, but hardly more so. Mary Baker Eddy? Zoroaster? Louis Farrakhan?....hey, ding ding ding ding ding, I think we may actually have a winner. Still, I think the basic point is clear: the Qu'ran and the career of Mohammed lend themselves to the rationalization of violence in a way that is highly inconvenient for the evangelists of moderate Islam, and the Arab Middle East (as distinct from, say, the Kazakh Muslim community) has a disproportionate number of bloodthirsty young bastards eager to have their murderous urges rationalized -- and bloodthirsty old imams eager to provide the rhetoric.

I myself have very severe difficulty imagining how moderate Islam can ever hope to gain ascendancy in the Muslim world as a whole and the Arab portion of the Muslim world in particular, given these two very serious problems, unless the non-Muslim world first obliterates the power of Islamofascism. As long as throughout wide swaths of the Middle East the Muslims of Blood can kill the Muslims of Peace whenever the Muslims of Peace dare speak, it must be primarily the message of blood that will dominate open public discourse in the cesspool that is the Middle East; and as long as the average Muslim is not a philosophically minded rationalist with an emotional bent towards cooperation and cooexistence, the message of blood against infidels must always be more obviously consonant with the example and precepts of the Prophet and the sacred texts than can appear the message of peace.

Thus I do not have much hope that the Arab Muslim world can be persuaded. I fear it will have to be devastatingly defeated. Only after Western arms has crushed and broken Islamofascism, is there likely to be any space in the Arab Middle East within which moderate Islam can both safely and effectively make itself heard.

Such is my fear. If anyone can offer me solid evidence that my fears are ungrounded, I will hear it willingly. Otherwise, I will continue to believe that we must proceed on the assumption that moderate Islam cannot save the West, and indeed that moderate Islam may well have difficulty surviving unless the West saves moderate Islam.