Ross Douhat-- A Voice of Reason

Imam Rauf and Moderate Islam

To some extent, the controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative’s Lower Manhattan venture is really a controversy about how non-Muslim Westerners should relate to the would-be spokesmen for a moderate (or “moderate,” depending on your point of view) Islam. One school of thought, prominent among conservatives but associated with liberal thinkers like Paul Berman as well, holds that anything short of an absolute commitment to Enlightenment values is unacceptable from such figures, and that moderate Muslims must demonstrate this commitment, and prove their secular bona fides, by making a frontal assault on Islamic culture as it currently exists. To this school, explicitly-liberal figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji represent the beau ideal of moderate Islam, because they’re forthright in their critiques of Muslim societies’ failings, and unstinting in their insistence that the Western way of faith and politics is ultimately superior. A high-profile bridge-builder like the ubiquitous Tariq Ramadan, on the other hand, is much more suspect, and possibly beyond the pale — because he tends to use different language and strike different notes depending on his audience, because he often seems to be making excuses for illiberalism in the Islamic world, because he’s less-than-forthright in his condemnations of certain kinds of extremism, and so on down the line. To his critics, such bobbing and weaving is proof enough that his “moderate Islam” project is really just a flowery fraud and a Trojan Horse for Wahhabism, with no redeeming value whatsoever. And this critique is easily extended to many other self-described moderates as well — including, lately, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who arguably has a stronger claim to moderation than Ramadan, but who seems to share some of his more evasive qualities when the conversation turns to, say, Hamas or the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This school of thought strikes me as misguided. Manji and Hirsi Ali are brave and admirable, but what they’re offering (Hirsi Ali especially) is ultimately a straightforward critique of Muslim traditions and belief, not a bridge between Islam and the liberal West that devout Muslims can cross with their religious faith intact. If such bridges are going to be built, much of the work will necessarily be done by figures who sometimes seem ambiguous and even two-faced, who have illiberal conversation partners and influences, and whose ideas are tailored to audiences in Cairo or Beirut or Baghdad as well as audiences in Europe and America. That’s how change — religious, ideological, whatever — nearly always works. I hold no particular brief for Tariq Ramadan, and his critics have provided ample evidence of his slipperiness over the years. But we have to be able to draw intellectual distinctions on these matters, and if we just lump a figure like Ramadan — or any Muslim leader who has one foot solidly in the Western mainstream but a few toes in more dangerous waters — into the same camp as Islam’s theocrats and jihadists, then we’re placing an impossible burden on Muslim believers, and setting ourselves up for an unwinnable conflict with more or less the entirety of the Muslim world. The Andy McCarthy conceit, which holds that anyone (like Ramadan, and like Rauf) who cites or engages with illiberal interpreters of Islam automatically forfeits the title “moderate,” seems out of touch with the complexities of religious history; moreover, it’s a little like insisting circa 1864 that Pope Pius IX’s critique of religious liberty and church-state separation requires American Catholics to immediately sever all ties to the pope. It’s both dubious in theory and self-defeating in practice.

But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package. (This is particularly true because Westerners have a long record of seeing what they want to see in self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, from the Ayatollah Khomeini down to Anwar Al Awlaki, and failing to recognize extremism when it’s staring them in the face.) And what’s troubling about some of the liberal reaction to the Cordoba Initiative controversy is that it seems to regard this kind of pressure as illegitimate and dangerous in and of itself — as though the First Amendment protects the right of Rauf and Co. to build their mosque and cultural center, but not the right of critics to scrutinize Rauf’s moderate bona fides, parse some of his more disturbing comments, and raise doubts about the benefits (to American Islam as well as to America) of having him set up shop as an arbiter of Muslim-Western dialogue in what used to be the shadow of the World Trade Center.

So Jonathan Chait, in a representative post, suggests that what’s at stake in the Cordoba debate is whether American Muslims “should be presumed to be terrorists unless proven otherwise … or whether they should be afforded the same general presumption of innocence enjoyed by other religions.” But surely these two options don’t exhaust the ways that non-Muslim Westerners can react to a figure like Rauf, and a project like the Cordoba mosque. Surely respecting Muslim Americans doesn’t require pretending that all religious cultures are identical, or that the intellectual climate in contemporary Islam is no different from the intellectual climate in Judaism or Christianity, or that the West doesn’t have a particular reason to worry about what’s said and done by high-profile clerics in high-profile mosques. Surely in an age of Islamist terror, there’s a particular kind of scrutiny that’s appropriate to religious entrepreneurs who insist that they can represent the Islamic world to the West, and the West to the Islamic world. And surely, when it comes to a seemingly complicated and now extremely high-profile figure like Feisal Abdul Rauf, we can trust but also verify.