What is a moderate Muslim?

DamianWarS

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I just watched a video by Hussein Aboubakr asking the question Where Are the Moderate Muslims? Mr. Aboubakr contents that much of the Islamic world is not moderate despite claims of the opposite. He is quoted defining moderation saying "If moderation means freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, women's rights, & gay rights, moderate Muslims are a distant minority" He goes on and says "The values of the west and the values of Islam as practiced in the Muslim world ... are not compatible"

It seems clear to me he defines moderation through western values but I'm not so sure I can accept this. I believe in all those rights but I also accept that there are many parts of the world that view these differently. I'm a Canadian that lives outside of North America and my neighbours happen to be all Muslim. They are the best neighbours I have ever had and disagree with terror or war as a means of spreading Islam. However I'm not so sure they would track with Mr. Aboubakr definition of what moderation is.

Google defines moderation as "the avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in one's behavior or political opinions" Is this fair? Does this fit with Mr. Aboubakr definition? it seems to be there is a measure that should be locally defined based on it's own culture not an abstract culture far removed.
 

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I once dated a Muslim girl who most certainly was moderate on the issues you listed, as were the members of her family. However, they had fled to the US from Iran; I don't think their views would be in any way indicative of the country from which they came. Turkey was once said to be a moderate Muslim nation; I don't think that could be said today given the current leadership of Turkey.

Of course, some fundamentalist Christians would not fall in the moderate camp on some of the issues you listed such as Women's rights and gay rifgts.
 
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usexpat97

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I will say these two things:

1) the Bible does not tell us to be moderate Christians. If a Muslim is committed to his actual faith, then I would say Jesus would tell him he is not as far from the Kingdom of God as we might think.

2) When he sneaks in "gay rights", that sounds like a Congressman who's trying to trying to sneak something in to an otherwise-good-sounding bill that's about to pass the floor. As a Christian, I don't recall ever supporting gay "rights". Human rights I support. I don't recall supporting anything making gays somehow special.


Sounds like someone's idea of "moderate" is fitting in. Fitting in to society. And if that's the case, then no thank you. GOD is in charge--not society. Society's going to have to fit in with God--not the other way around. Watering down Muslims' religion is not the answer. A full-on introduction to our Savior is the only way.
 
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DamianWarS

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I will say these two things:

1) the Bible does not tell us to be moderate Christians. If a Muslim is committed to his actual faith, then I would say Jesus would tell him he is not as far from the Kingdom of God as we might think.

2) When he sneaks in "gay rights", that sounds like a Congressman who's trying to trying to sneak something in to an otherwise-good-sounding bill that's about to pass the floor. As a Christian, I don't recall ever supporting gay "rights". Human rights I support. I don't recall supporting anything making gays somehow special.


Sounds like someone's idea of "moderate" is fitting in. Fitting in to society. And if that's the case, then no thank you. GOD is in charge--not society. Society's going to have to fit in with God--not the other way around. Watering down Muslims' religion is not the answer. A full-on introduction to our Savior is the only way.

I look at rights and belief as different things. Christians don't make the rights, laws do, we don't need to view them as explicit attacks. Gay rights would be things like the right to marry, adopt or things like having power of attorney if your partner can't speak for themself. Although I do believe homosexuality is against the design of God and is sinful I can accept gay rights as a response to felt needs from a minority group and it doesn't need to be directly against me as a Christian or my faith. It's like freedom of religion, there are laws in place that allow Hindus, Christian, Jewish, Buddhists, Muslims, Bahai and a whole pile of others to practice their faith without discrimination and this is a good thing for the cause of rights even if they are not a good thing for the cause of Christ. The law is not about spreading the gospel (neither are republicans) and we shouldn't turn it into something that it is not.

my idea of "moderate" is not "fitting in" but I don't think it's responsible to superimpose western values over other nations and then wag the finger at them when it doesn't work. Why would it work? Moderation is more complicated than that and we need look at the whole picture rather than just our western position on this which to me feels a little ethnocentric.

Islam actually teaches a lot of morally good things and Muslims I've met are often kinder than many Christians I know. These are from cultural values as I understand that many Muslim nations have more group and family oriented values where many Christians have western and individualistic oriented values even at the expense of family. The individual tends to blur their cultural and faith values together so they are one so a Muslim may say a good Muslim will invite a stranger into their home where a Christians may say Christians shouldn't need to feel like they endanger themselves to help out a stranger. Which one of these reflects Christ's commandment to love your neighbor as yourself? Certainly these ubiquitous values I have experience within Muslim communities help define moderate identity.
 
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dzheremi

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Here's why an answer like that doesn't work, though:

That's your experience with Muslims, and other people obviously may have different experiences, since Muslims, like any other people, may be as good or as bad as anyone.

My experience with Muslims from my place within the Coptic community is that even the very "moderate" ones can suddenly become very not moderate if you do not respect what they say as the right and natural social hierarchy wherein you are forever a lesser being than they are, by virtue of your non-Muslimness.

For example, we (the Coptic community of Albuquerque, NM, which I am no longer a part of as I moved away several years ago) used to go to a local grocery store run by a Palestinian Muslim family who my Coptic friend assured me were very moderate and kind. And so they seemed during the many times I accompanied my friend there to get lunch, to pick up bulk orders of Egyptian beans and Arab bread ahead of the Great Fast, etc. But then Mohamed Morsi was removed from the presidency in Egypt, following protests that included something on the order of ~ 30 million Egyptians. The Coptic population of Egypt, though disputed, probably does not realistically exceed 8-10 million (the government surely under-counts at ~ 6 million, but overseas Coptic advocacy groups surely over-count at 12-15 million or more; unbiased sources such as the CIA Factbook put them at approximately 10% of the Egyptian population, which would be around 10 million). Even with this wide gulf between the number of Copts total in the entire country and the number of protesters, the Muslim Brotherhood supporters blamed the ouster of Morsi on a supposed "Coptic plot" together with the Army, and set loose on Coptic establishments, burning or otherwise destroying something like 50+ churches and monasteries killing clergy, and so on during the immediate aftermath of Morsi's dethronement.

In this atmosphere, my friend from Church went to the Palestinian grocery store to buy something (I did not accompany him at the time; he told me about this later), and while in line to pay he talked with the owner/father of the family, jokingly saying something like "You have not congratulated me yet on Egypt's change in government." The father, who was normally very jovial with my friend and indeed all the Middle Eastern customers, since they share a language and many other cultural elements apart from religion, suddenly turned very serious and began screaming "What YOU PEOPLE did to President Morsi is a despicable crime! You are criminals! Get out of my store! You people are not welcome here anymore!"

I was shocked to hear this. It was not entirely clear to me if he meant by "You people" that Copts in particular were not welcome, or that anyone who had opposed Morsi (Coptic or not) would not be welcome, but either way it was clear that this man, who had been so nice when everything was "in order" and the Muslim Brotherhood was in power (over a country he doesn't even come from...) was actually a Salafi extremist. It just took a little digging, even accidentally, to reveal it. We never returned to the Palestinian grocery, and when I asked if we could go there (since after all, I wasn't there when all this happened, so why couldn't I still go? I'm not even ethnically Coptic), I was told very sternly no, because we are no longer welcome there anymore.

I have told this story to some people who reacted by saying my friend should never have said anything, because you cannot assume that people will disagree with you politically or not (implying that this was a case of political, but not religious discrimination), but that's the problem with Islam in particular that makes it so hard to be truly moderate: when the political and the religious are intertwined, as they naturally are in the Shari'a (Islamic law, which is taken by those who believe in it to God-ordained), any opposition to Islam or even just being non-Muslim and refusing to be in submission to Islam and/or Muslims is taken as a religious as well as political threat, and so people react to things with religious fervor (e.g., Charlie Hebdo gunmen killing people and screaming that they have done so to "avenge the Prophet Muhammad" or whatever; this is a very out-of-proportion reaction to the slight of having their prophet depicted negatively in a cartoon, I think most non-Muslim people would agree). This is why it is smart to remain on your toes when a Muslim assures you that Islamic jihad is defensive warfare only, because they -- not you, the non-Muslim -- are the ones who will determine whether or not they or their religion are being "attacked" or "oppressed", and their standards are likely to be very different than yours.

So who is a moderate Muslim? The one who is not following the Shari'a, and does not desire that it be implemented (because they may actually want to live in a pluralistic, secular society, as plenty of Muslims do). This is also, by some Muslims' definition, an apostate.
 
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