In "Do Radicals Dominate Islam?" at Commentary's Contentions blog (thanks to all who sent this in), Max Boot says it doesn't, and discusses a debate held in New York recently. The debate thesis was "Islam is dominated by radicals."
Boot begins by saying he came into the debate on the fence: I am seldom accused of being wishy-washy or noncommittal when it comes to major issues of foreign policy. But I was decidedly undecided when I showed up last night for the Intelligence Squared debate in Manhattan on the resolution “Islam is dominated by radicals.”
The pro side was argued by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a former Islamic fundamentalist turned Christian evangelical who is now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Paul Marshall, formerly of Freedom House, now at the Hudson Institute; and Asra Normani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter (and good friend of the late Daniel Pearl) who has chronicled her own battles against Muslim hardliners at her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia.
On the con side were Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside; Richard Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia; and Edina Lekovic, a Muslim of Bosnian descent who is director of communications at the Muslim Public Affairs Council (and who was wearing a head scarf).
Both sides threw out a lot of good arguments. Gartenstein-Ross and Aslan, in particular, engaged in some heated exchanges that entertained the audience. The problem is that neither side could really define the crucial terms in the debate—“dominated” and “radicals.”
Both agreed that radicals were certainly a big problem within Islam. The pro side pointed repeatedly to the Saudi and Iranian regimes as emblematic of the problem, and said that the Saudis are spreading their hateful Wahhabi doctrines. All true. But does Wahhabism dominate global Islam? The con side could point to convincing Pew opinion surveys showing that most Muslims reject Al Qaeda and its ideology of violence. They could also point to surveys (and election results in countries like Pakistan) that show most Muslims don’t want to be governed by hard-line Islamic parties.
The pro side replied that the views of the majority were irrelevant: the radicals were able to dominate the institutions of Islam and intimidate the moderate majority into acquiescence. There seemed to be some truth to this. But the pro debaters were, I thought, confused: were they complaining about the dominance of theological conservatism or of violent radicalism?
Normani, in particular, complained that a “patriarchy” dominated Islam: she cannot become an imam preaching to men; in more and more mosques women and men have to sit separately. That may be true, but that’s very different—and much less alarming from my infidel perspective—than saying that more and more Muslims are lining up to practice terrorism in the name of jihad. In fact, most conservative Muslims (e.g., Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq) oppose radical calls for a religious war even while preaching a version of sharia that would be intolerable to Western liberals.
In the end, I concluded that the pro side had not proven their case. They had certainly demonstrated that radicalism is a large and growing problem. But dominant? Not on the evidence presented last night. So I voted with the con side, notwithstanding my occasional annoyance at their leftist rhetorical tics. But I was in the decided minority. 46% of the audience voted “pro” before the debate, a figure that swelled to 73% after the debate.
While the debate was fascinating, the issue is not one that we should lose too much sleep over. Whether radicals actually dominate Islam or are simply trying to dominate it doesn’t really matter from a practical perspective. Either way, we need to do what we can do aid the forces of moderation if we are to prevail in the Long War.
ttp://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/3381
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