If someone is Islamic and describes himself as moderate, it goes without saying that he is immediately required to condemn each and every bad thing that any Muslim person has ever done. But even that is not enough in a way that I’ve had a hard describing. Larison nails it:
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.
And the truth is that having no sympathy for the political causes of any other Muslims in the world probably wouldn’t be enough either. Rauf is being subjected to a conservative show trial. The charges can be made up as the trial goes along.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
This always makes me think of the way that Israelis often talk about “moderate” Palestinians — we essentially want them to be committed Zionists. Otherwise, they’ll never be moderate enough.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Also, too, you force my hand again and I must once again post a link to my wee compendium of statements made by Muslims (MODERATE, I’M SURE) categorically rejecting terrorism:
http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/muslim-responses-to-extremism/
GregB
What I find confounding is how many American’s never extend what they consider to be their rights to others.
The want Palestinians to surrender all of their weapons and renounce all violence.
Right, coming from the ‘let’s settle our political differences with second amendment remedies’ crowd.
blondie
You mean the only moderate Muslims are the ones who secretly wish they were Christians?
Brachiator
Two words: Loyalty oaths.
This stuff is getting more ridiculous every day.
ricky
There are many Southern Baptists who would welcome a bridge to moderate Muslims if they had time for such trivial concerns. First they have to rid their own denomination of its own treacherous moderates.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Speaking of moderate Muslims and your whatnot:
If anyone’s interested, here’s a rabbinical student that my own Rabbi vouches for (you’ll have to decide if you can trust me on that!) who is organizing a small fund-raising drive to help the Iman mosque pay its cleaning bills when it gets those peed-on prayer rugs back from the cleaners:
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2010/08/passing-the-virtual-hat-for-prayer-rug-cleaning.html
aimai
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Ah, I love the velveteen Rabbi, I have forgotten to bookmark that site! Thanks for the link, ellaesther.
aimai
Tsulagi
There also wouldn’t be any moderate Jesus loving Republicans. How many times have you heard something to the effect of “Well, I wouldn’t, and I’m not advocating shooting abortion doctors, but I sympathize and understand the motivation of those that do.”
Omnes Omnibus
I think you are misunderstanding what these people mean when they say moderate Muslim. You are assume they meaning moderate and Muslim. That is where you make your error. What they actually mean by moderate Muslim is white, Evangelical Christian. So you see, Rauf definitely does not qualify. Now do you understand?
evinfuilt
I’m pretty sure they want him to be such a Moderate Muslim to renounce Islam and take up praising Jesus.
asiangrrlMN
@Omnes Omnibus: You said exactly what I wanted to say. Get out of my head!
Yes, ‘moderate Muslim’ is dogwhistle for ‘no fucking way I am going to accept any Muslim!’. The goal posts will keep moving so matter what the Muslim in question does, he will never meet the definition.
Cat Lady
Too bad imams worship Allah instead of fucking little boys with impunity, cuz it’s all good when your pedophile-abetting hypocritical ringleader is down with Jesus. I’m looking at you Douthat.
Suffern Ace
Based on a reading of Dick Morris’ wishes, moderate Islam includes renouncing something called “Sharia”, which is violent, unlike Talmudic law, which is and always has been benign. According to Bryan Fischer, a moderate Islam in which verses of his chosing have been edited out of the Koran or renounced. Basically, what Muslims need to do is accept those interpretations of their religion as hostile to human kind and renounce it. They would like you to share that interpretation and would like the government to share that interpretation. And nothing Rauf will be able to say is probably going to change their minds unless he publicly renounces a whole bunch of things and appears then to be Moderate, when that would appear to be a radical thing for him to do (actually a rather surprising thing for him to do.)
GambitRF
Remember all the way back to a few weeks ago when the controversy was merely that the mosque/community center/whatever was just a bit too close to ground zero and infringed upon some sort of vaguely defined 9/11 sensitivity zone and not that Imam Rauf is going to kill us all from his terrorist command center?
FlipYrWhig
“Moderate Muslim” only exists for the right as a concept to lament the nonexistence of. If only there were moderate Muslims, you see, we all could sit down and work something out. But, alas, they’re all radicals, so, oh well.
Punchy
I’d like to moderate moderate Muslims in a debate with an apostate state.
Chris
In all fairness, it’s just like their view of feminism, by which Sarah Palin proves that the left isn’t feminist, because they don’t support her ambitions, or their view of race, by which Glenn Beck proves that the left isn’t racially fair, because they don’t support his upcoming speech.
akak
I’ve always hated that term, because it implies the default status for Muslims is crazy fundies. Then what’s the point of calling some Muslim extremists?
The Moar You Know
Michael Jackson knew how to do it; bleach yourself white. A conversion to Jesusism would help too.
DougJ
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
How are peed-on prayer rugs different from the “Piss Christ” installation that the NEA funded? Why is that when libruls pee on religious objects, it’s art, but when conservatives do it, it’s sacrilege?
Libtards have double standards.
peach flavored shampoo
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Is it going to clean out all the traces of C4, TNT, and ammonium nitrate, too?
beltane
In the middle ages, the leaders of the Jewish community in Rome were required to publicly apologize for the murder of Christ every Good Friday. I think this is along the lines of what conservatives want from Islamic leaders now.
Snarki, child of Loki
But of course, it follows the well-trodden movement-conservative/Bircher pathway:
Verdict first, then trial, then charges.
Ever noticed how Glenn Beck looks like the Red Queen without makeup? There’s a reason for that.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: It depends on the pH of the urine. Obviously.
cleek
(i appreciate the link. but why on this thread, and not the one above ?)
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The Republicans want a Muslim who is to Muslims what Clarence Thomas is to African-Americans, Ken Mehlman is to gays and Sarah Palin is to women.
They want a pit bull with a hijab.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: They want Muslims to apologize for the Jews apologizing for killing Christ? Kinky.
NonyNony
@Snarki, child of Loki:
No.
But fuck-you-very-much for that image that is now burned in my fucking brain.
And I’ve been reading “Alice” to my son at bedtime too. Jeebus I hope I can make it through the next chapter without my brain seizing up at that imagery.
maus
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, it is a hierarchy of “lessers”. They want the Muslims to apologize and be subservient to the Jews, and the Jews to apologize and be subservient to the Protestants.
DougJ
@cleek:
Sorry, I fixed it.
Brachiator
@GambitRF:
Conservatives like Newt Gingrich very quickly upped the ante on anti-Muslim sentiment. This is from Newt’s own web site
And Newt’s hateful screed also twists logic into rationalizing why situating the center even near the World Trade Center site is still unacceptable (emphasis added):
And so, Rauf is not, cannot be, a moderate Muslim. Instead he is transformed into an Islamic stealth fighter, planting a war banner on a sacred battlefield.
mcd410x
As Token once said on South Park: Jesse Jackson is not the emperor of black people!
wilfred
I’m preparing a book chapter on American Muslims even as I write this – the Cordoba House controversy actually wrote my intro.
Edward Said once observed that in the original European conception of Islam the religion was treated as a unified whole for polemical reasons “Islam was considered a threat to Christian Europe and had to be fixed ideologically”. This same process is at work today, of course; it basically defines the right wing approach to things Islamic. What has changed is that now there is a an effort to dissociate Western Muslims, whether European or North American, from the whole of Islam, and from political Islam in particular, at the same time the effort to ‘massify’ Islam continues. There is thus a simultaneous treatment of one meta-Islam, the description of which Ibrahim Kalin summarizes as “the religion of the sword, the Prophet as a violent person, Muslim societies as monolithic, violent and power-driven collectivities”, while Islamic cultural and political praxis is “a code of belief and action that is obstinately irrational, anti-modern, aberrant, rigid, religious, and traditional”.
I go on like that for 12,000 words. American Muslims have nothing to do with any of this, naturally, but the onus is on them to assert themselves politically.
aimai
From the way the right wing talks about Obama’s Cairo speech *having the slightest recognition of the humanity of your muslim interlocutors* is exactly the same as being a hard line Muslim terrorist. That would mean that merely being a “moderate muslim” theologically without also renouncing any and all historical knowledge or personal sympathy for Muslims anywhere and anytime is probably a similar offense. The biggest crime of all in the right wing lexicon is saying “I think X may have a point…” when X is described as anyone other than the right wing speaker himself.
aimai
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: No, they just want to make Muslims apologize for everything all the time. The bullying of minorities has not changed much over the centuries.
Sentient Puddle
If you asked me at any point along the lines of this, I’d’ve said that it’s just the right playing one long game of Calvinball.
Svensker
What has also happened — by design — is that moderate Muslims and/or secular or Christian Arabs have been driven out of Palestinian territories (we’ve done the same thing in Iraq). And almost any form of Muslim association, charity or political party is suspect, certainly in the Middle East, but also in the U.S. CAIR is just barely tolerated here, many Islamic charities are not allowed or are considered pariahs. So outlets for political/social action in the Muslim community are limited — which has the effect of getting rid of moderation and encouraging extremism.
But as the Israelis have proven so effectively, if you get rid of your moderates, you can’t possibly be expected to deal with those wacky extremists! So you get to do whatever the fuck you want! Yay! Then when the extremists get pissed off and retaliate, you get to be the victim. Yay! Heads we win, tails you lose.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@DougJ:
That’s the old DougJ!
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@DougJ: Uhh…. You have stymied me. I have no rejoinder for that.
Curses! You win this round, DougJ!
The Other Ian
Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated
As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer”…
I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists, others are entitled to assume that every white male Baptist is fully in agreement with the actions of Patrick Gray Sharp and to therefore deny white male Baptists the rights others enjoy…
I fully appreciate that as a justifiable consequence of yesterday’s extremist violence, it will be decades before any Baptists ought to consider gathering for worship in McKinney, Texas or anywhere else in Collin County. I humbly request that local Baptists be permitted to worship in neighboring Grayson County, but if anyone anywhere feels that is still too close — too much in the shadow of Collin County — then of course I don’t think it would be unreasonable for Baptists during the next few decades to travel across the state line into Oklahoma for Sunday worship. That would be the least we could do to demonstrate our vicarious contrition and our deep respect for the tender sensibilities of the television pundits and ambitious politicians to whom we must all defer as the authorities in these matters.
morzer
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I thought they wanted a pit bull with a nutjob?
Kryptik
I will note that thankfully, on the days that I’ve actually been there to demonstrate, the folks that do come by to make their positions known have generally been very pro.
I’m personally waiting for the weekend to see how things quite end up, though. But I DID end up interviewed by a Mexican news station and a visiting prof. from Meiji University.
asiangrrlMN
@Kryptik: Thanks for the on-the-ground reporting, but please be careful, OK?
elm
@DougJ:
Christ never tied the room together, the rug did. Q.E.D.
ckelly
Clearly, Imam Rauf needs to “refudiate” any and all aspects of being Muslim and the Islamic faith in order to be a good, obedient, moderate Muslim. Oh, and it would help if he could be white and Christian too.
Kryptik
@asiangrrlMN:
Will do, but the times I’ve been there so far have been fairly sedate.
I expect tomorrow and Sunday will likely be rowdier, but we’ll see.
Origuy
Newt has pretensions of being a historian. The Great Mosque of Cordoba did replace the Visigothic church of St. Vincent. However, Emir Abd ar-Rahman I bought the church. This is attested to by documents on display there today. However, after the Christians reconquered Cordoba, successive Spanish kings had Christian features added, most notably the cathedral in the middle of the building added by Carlos V.
The Umayyad conquest in the 8th century probably started out as a raid; one of many that had been going on for years. The Visigothic kingdoms were weak and unstable. When their armies fled, the Berbers found themselves the new rulers.
justcorbly
What they want in a “moderate” Muslim is someone who goes to mosque on Friday, plays golf on Saturday, and votes Republican.
Ken Pidcock
As far as I can tell, some of Rauf’s critics are as Larison describes. Others (Hitchens, Manji) just don’t want us deceiving ourselves about how religiously moderate Rauf really is. Since most Americans are Christians and therefore, by definition, quite adept at deceiving themselves, that seems a fair concern.
sherifffruitfly
It’s the same game white folks always play. Black folks have to “renounce and reject” any and all black folks that white folks don’t like, or else they’re “radical reverse-racists” or something.
As long as white folks allow white folks to keep playing the same old bigotry-enabling games, white folks will continue to do so. The upside is just too big to pass up.
mclaren
Essentially Rauf has to become a Christian in order to satisfy the critics. He can call himself a Moslem, but as a practical matter he has to hold exactly the same positions Christians hold and believe exactly the same things Christians believe in order to pass muster.
It’s exactly like the people who are considered “reasonable liberals” by the far right. You can call yourself a liberal, but to be considered “reasonable” you must say that the Laffer Curve is factually accurate and Obama wasn’t born a U.S. citizen and tax cuts for the rich are the only way to get the economy back on track.