Can the Bankruptcy of Moderates Create Extremism?

By Dr. Robert D. Crane - TAM The American Muslim - U.S.A.
Saturday, July 8, 2006

In the July 8th, 2006, issue of The Guardian, Karen Armstrong introduces the concept that efforts by moderates to correct extremists merely make them more extreme. We have probably all observed this fact, but Karen has turned it into an intellectual insight.

She observes that extremism often arises in reaction to the failures of moderates to offer solutions for the growing problems of the world. Her conclusion is that it is unrealistic, and even counter-productive, therefore to rely on mainstream majorities to prevent their religions from being hi-jacked. To put the burden on the moderates is merely to compound the problem

One could conclude the exact opposite, namely, that it is the intellectual bankruptcy and often the spiritual bankruptcy of moderates that leave a vacuum for extremists to fill, and that for this reason the moderates have contributed to the hijacking of their own religion.

Karen Armstrong contrasts the traditionalists, who by her definition, have no answer to the problems of modernity, with the moderates who are trying to survive by compromising with secular fundamentalists. As always, definitions must precede conclusions. Cicero, perhaps the most ancient of the Founding Fathers of America, once said, “Before one begins the discussion of anything whatsoever, once must first define terms. For example, some “moderates” often are not compromising with modernity, as she implies, but are trying to revive the spiritual essence of their religion, which is always modern. The modernists among the moderates reject these spiritual traditionalists even more than do the violent Al Qa’ida types, because the modernists consider them to be rivals for authority, whereas the so-called jihadists consider the real traditionalists to be irrelevant and not a rival for power.

Sister Karen, despite possible definitional obscurities, makes the central point that the primary heresy in the modern world is the innovation involved in combining Church and State, i.e. organized religion and organized politics. Ironically, perhaps the most profound warner against such innovation was the patron saint of the Wahhabis, Ibn Taymiya. He was an enlightened Sufi who combated the superstition of populist Sufism and ranks with the most sophisticated of the real traditionalists. He insisted, as did later scholars, such as Shah Wali Allah of India, that the caliphate was a moral community based on the ijma of the learned and the wise, not a political regime.

The source of most of the extremism among Muslims, indeed, as Sister Karen emphasizes, can be traced back to the indignities heaped upon them by a more powerful secular civilization. The most dangerous development in modern history, however, is not Western globalization but the reaction to it by those who seek to impose religion by political usurpation of the Western invention of the state, By definition, the state holds the only legitimate monopoly of power and was invented almost four hundred years ago in Europe to substitute for God.

The Islamist extremists, both those who justify violence and those who do not, invoke religion but resort to ideological justification by invoking this Western secular heresy which ascribes all power to man. This concept of political supremacy then justifies ascribing all power to themselves through the imposition of a new totalitarian religion.

At the end of her article, Sister Karen makes the point that I have been making for more than a quarter century, namely, that the ideological Godfathers of both Sunni and Shi’a Islam made the fatal error of considering spiritual and political power to be inseparable. This inevitably results in the elimination of spiritual power and the essence of all religion from public life. This is why the Jews have tried to invent and impose a religious state and why the Armageddonite Evangelicals in America would like to do the same thing in alliance with the Neo-Conservatives. Syed Qutb did the same thing for Sunni Islam, which has always been receptive to such extremism, but so did Ali Shari’ati who came from a tradition that emphasized the role of Ali, alayhi al salam, as a spiritual successor to the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alahi wa salam, as distinct from the caliphs who were solely political leaders.

Qutb and Shari’ati, who were deeply influenced by Western secular thought and at the same time were grossly repelled by it, met the psychological needs of the day. Unfortunately, in so doing they made their own religion vulnerable to a covert secularization that created a clash of civilizations.

We should consider well Karen’s conclusion, as follows:

“In making the assertion that a cleric should be head of state, Ayatollah Khomeini flouted centuries of Shia orthodoxy, which separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle. The same is true of the new emphasis on violent jihad. Until recently, no Muslim thinker had ever claimed it was the central tenet of Islam.

The first to make this controversial, even heretical, claim was the Pakistani ideologue Abu Ala Mawdudi in 1939. Like Qutb, he was well aware that this innovation could only be justified by the godless cruelty of modernity. Informed extremists today do not need to be told that their holy war is unorthodox; they already know. The extremists believe that mainstream Muslims have failed to respond to the current crisis and [these extremists] are proud of their own deviance.”

Rather than exempting the moderates from responsibility for the rise of extremism, as both Karen and others have been attempting to do, perhaps one should admit that the threat from within the Muslim community both to Islam as a religion and to the world comes not from the violent radicals but more from the moderate leaders, many of whom are spiritually dead and most of whom are intellectually bankrupt and have been for many centuries.