Who Speaks for Islam?, written by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, is one of the most important books on the War on Terror. In the seven years since 9/11, we have been subjected to all kinds of ignorant pontification--much of it from the left, but some also from the right--on "why they hate us." This book, written by a leading scholar of Islam and the head of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, brings a wealth of real data to bear on this important subject.
The book is full of fascinating data on Islamic radicalism, on Muslim support for democracy, on the role of women, and on the values of Western popular culture. At first glance the results seem confusing: An overwhelming majority of Muslims rejects 9/11 style terrorism but a significant number of Muslims support the Palestine suicide bombers. Huge majorities of Muslims support democracy but reject the Western understanding of rights and liberty. In fact, a substantial majority of Muslims--including Muslim women--support some form of sharia or Islamic holy law. Most Muslim women want equal rights but even champions of those rights emphatically reject Western-style feminism.
What's going on here? Esposito and Mogahed argue that traditional Muslims, who make up the bulk of Muslims in every Muslim country, strongly identify with the Western principles of rule of law, self-government, and religious toleration. In fact, their main critique of America is that, as they see it, America backs secular dictators in the Muslim world who deny to Muslims the rights that are taken for granted by Americans. Many Muslims who back Hamas do so because they see the group as fighting for Muslim self-rule.
On the other hand, Muslims reject what may be termed 1960s liberalism. They reject the shamelessness and frequent depravity of American popular culture. They reject the type of feminism that relinquishes the home in favor of careers. They are resolutely anti-abortion. They consider homosexual marriage to be an abomination. Rather than import these "alternative lifestyles" into their society, Muslims want to live according to their own traditional values and elect their own governments that will defend Muslim interests.
Esposito and Mogahed shrewdly note that the values of traditional Muslims worldwide are very similar to the values of traditional Jews and Christians in the West. For instance, only around 15 percent of Muslims in Europe consider homosexuality "morally acceptable." That's way below the figures for the general public in Britain, France and Germany. But when conservative and religious Europeans and Americans are polled, it turns out that the percentage of people who are fine with homosexuality is about the same as that of the traditional Muslims.
Yes, I could say that I predicted all this in my book The Enemy at Home. But the great contribution of Esposito and Mogahed is to put a mountain of data behind these conclusions. Over six years their group has conducted tens of thousands of face-to-face surveys of Muslims in more than 35 countries making what they rightly call "the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done."
This book is a huge embarassment to conservatives like Victor Davis Hanson who, based on no data and very little familiarity with the Muslim world, have been portraying Muslims as violent theocrats who reject modern science, modern democracy and modern capitalism and spend most of their day performing honor killings and genital mutilations. This portrait of the Muslim world is about as accurate as that of a Muslim who believes that typical Americans live their daily lives according to the values of "Natural Born Killers" and "Brokeback Mountain."
What can we conclude from this book? First, that the values of the cultural left are an important source in alienating Muslims worldwide. Second, that Muslims don't reject modernity or the West: rather, they embrace what may be termed "1950s America" while rejecting the libertine values of the 1960s. Third, America can build alliances with traditional Muslims by showing them the face of traditional America, so that they see that Hollywood values aren't necessarily American values. Finally, left-wing groups like International Planned Parenthod and Amnesty International should stop pushing feminism, gay marriage and libertine values in the Muslim world.
Pundits like Chalmers Johnson love to say that American intervention in Iraq and elsewhere has produced a "blowback" of terrorism from the House of Islam. Wrong! It is in Iraq that America is allowing an elected Muslim government to rule according to Muslim interests and Muslim values. Iraq is the only country in the Middle East where the Muslim population actually chose its own rulers. Iraq is not the problem. Rather, it is the values of the cultural left, and the cultural imperialism that seeks to impose those values on reluctant Muslims, that is the real source of Muslim rage, and the best recruiting tool of the radical Muslims.
Reader Comments ( Page 5 of 13)
61. Clif,
You can't challenge the pro-life movement with compromise, they'll just wedge their agenda in. We have to be bold. Forget asking to make abortion legal...demand to make it mandatory!
Mokele Mbembe at 5:27PM on Sep 12th 2008
62. "Finally, left-wing groups like International Planned Parenthod and Amnesty International should stop pushing feminism, gay marriage and libertine values in the Muslim world."
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OK Troy, when was the last time planned parenthood set up shop in any predominantly Moslem country? When was the last time PFLAG promoted Gay Pride Day in Tehran or pushed for gay marriage in Saudi Arabia? That would be, oh let me think...never, never, and never. Stop propping up Dinesshes strawman.
Muslim countries have hated the secular west for hundreds of years. They thought our women to be whores centuries before the advent of the feminist movement. This has nothing to do with modern day liberals exporting their decadence to an unwilling and unreceptive muslim world. This is primarily an economic and political struggle. They wish to control the resources in the Middle East as do we. Somethings got to give. It ain't about the morning after pill or condoms.
BTW. Saying that Amnesty International is a libertine agency paints you as quite the asshole. I'm guessing your all for the torture and murder of rape victims in muslim countries? Are you people even human?
Tim at 6:00PM on Sep 12th 2008
63. 35. I've got a little question, as I just recieved a very angry phone call from a parent who was just disgusted with me, and would like to know how many of you are over 9/11? How many of you woke up yesterday with it being just another thursday? How many of you were irritated that half the news was co-opted with footage from seven years ago and the other half was commentary about the footage seven years ago? I'd like to know just how much I'm in the minority here.
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Not to go into it but, enough said that my brother worked in the Pentagon then, and I was on deck that afternoon to go to NYC. Another colleague worked the recovery at the WTC site as well. Unfortunately in my old line of work I was no stranger to violent death but that was a pretty extreme example.
That said, I think I am in even a smaller minority. Though I have great empathy for the victims and survivors, I didn't then, and don't now, think that should have been such a defining moment in our history, though it's hard to explain in a short post. Basically I was just pissed off. I wasn't scared or cowered by the notion that some murderous bastards had got a good lick in on us. So, my thought was build it all back ASAP and hunt the criminals down and move on. Learn what we needed to learn about reducing the threat of such things but also to realize that life does go on. I'm not one much into hand wringing. I'm frankly more worried that 36,000 people die in drunk driving accidents each year than I am of having a terrorist kill me (and in the last 7 years far more than 200,000 Americans have died on the highway but we haven't felt compelled to shred the Constitution in response). And we're not turning the interstates into parking lots in deference to the victims either. We have converted a number of personal (and admitted highly visible) tragedies into a national one. And I don't think that is a very good way to remember the dead. Having worn a uniform, I would hate to imagine a scenario where my death would have been used to threaten the very Constitution that I had sworn to protect. That would be a perversion to my way of thinking and one of the worst epithets I could imagine.
Frankly I was a bit embarrassed by our national response and probably more so by our morbid obsession with it. I have been to Nanjing, London, Koln, Hamburg, Hiroshima, etc. It was hard imagining the citizens of those cities arguing over memorials for 7 years and I wondered what their old timers thought of our response. The people of those cities rebuilt great cities from the ashes (yes, we helped). And those cities took a lot more of a beating than we did. I had hoped that part of our response and healing would have been bigger and better skyscrapers to replace those lost but that didn't happen.
To my mind, the best response to that tunnel rat hiding over in Pakistan is to do just what you said - wake up on Thursday and it just be another day. No doubt some will blast me for being uncaring and un-American but we really need to let go. Just my opinion but no, you aren't alone.
Pliny-the-in-Between at 6:10PM on Sep 12th 2008
64. PS - I have been back to NYC and DC a number of times since and do as often as I can. Those are 2 of the great cities in the known universe!
Pliny-the-in-Between at 6:15PM on Sep 12th 2008
65. "Iraq is the only country in the Middle East where the Mulsim population actually chose its own rulers."
Uh, they have elections in Lebanon and Iran also, nitwit.. And in the Palestinian Authority. Of course, in the case of Iran and the PA, the people elected leaders that the US government dislikes and, so, as in the case of Venezuela, the US government tries to pretend that these states or entities are "dictatorships" despite the reality of free elections.
emelpe at 6:35PM on Sep 12th 2008
66. Dinesh, if you only had a clue what being a Christian means. If you did, you would abandon the people you whore for, abandon this damaged political ideology you follow, and in the end you would realize how you wasted your life on dividing America.
>>>
Yeah, half this nation is stupidly wrong ... botts says so.
Thanks DD. You have shown me that I too, like most americans, have something in common with radical Islam ... we both see the threat of this godless, hateful ideology known as liberalism.
Question: Why would the majority of americans vote for a political party that clearly can't stand them? Oh, that's right ... they don't.
And when Liberals lose again they will call us stupid. LMAO Nothing really changes.
thomas J gassett at 6:38PM on Sep 12th 2008
67. Right now, 40% of Americans think humans were created in their current form and evolution is wrong.>>>
We have the fossile record for many early hominids ranging to over a million years before they became extinct. IN the entire fossile record of early hominids there is NO evidence of evolution NONE at all. These ape men walked the Earth for a million years, and their brains remained the size of a grapefruit. Suddenly, and I mean suddenly we have modern man. We know through genetics that modern man came from a population of no more than ten thousand indivduals.
It is true that we think there are precursors to modern man, but no two people agree on what those precursors
might be.
Evolution as far as humans go is a leap of faith ... kind of like creation theory. Evolution is the be all and end all only if you are rather stupid, unread, and tend to mouth the popular line. Evolution is not proof of anything other than the origins of speices. It says nothing about the original body type, only how it can become several speices.
Evolution tells us nothing about the origins of life, man or just about every issues that separates athiest and Christians, despite what these haters want you to believe.
thomas J gassett at 6:49PM on Sep 12th 2008
68. To my mind, the best response to that tunnel rat hiding over in Pakistan is to do just what you said - wake up on Thursday and it just be another day.>>>
Idiot! clue: That's what we did BEFORE 911.
thomas J gassett at 6:57PM on Sep 12th 2008
69. ATHEIST
Reply to: 44. Hello, Somber,
In answer to post 35, I spent time in prayer yesterday over concerns of 911. My prayers and kind thoughts were with all involved.
_____________
Did your prayers accomplish anything?
No, don't answer.
I have an Imaginary Friend who will... oh, wait. Imaginary Friends don't actually DO anything.
______________________
Reply to: when I signed in and saw Ada's article on So Long, News Bloggers,
___________
Can it be?
After hundreds and hundreds of complaints, are they going to fire Dinesh?
William Hays at 7:08PM on Sep 12th 2008
70. Idiot! clue: That's what we did BEFORE 911.
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My dear Thomas - your posts are such a proof of what m' old pappy used to tell me - "Son you can lead a horses' ass to water but you can't make them drink".
Pliny-the-in-Between at 7:10PM on Sep 12th 2008
71. I think what DD is trying to say is that 9/11 type of terrorism in the USA was brought about by the American liberal life style. He blames one or several aspects of our life style or people that is counter to Islamic teachings for the ultimate justfication of the horrendous terroristic attack.
DD is nuts. It is same as saying AIDs and other STDs are Gods punishment of the fornicator knowing fully well that viruses and bacteria do not distinguish the different people it infects. Viruses and bacteria are only trying to survve and multiply like all other organisms in this world.
R Shanker at 7:25PM on Sep 12th 2008
72. ATHEIST
reply to: We have the fossile record for many early hominids ranging to over a million years before they became extinct. IN the entire fossile record of early hominids there is NO evidence of evolution NONE at all.
_____________
I've explained this to you.
Quit LYING.
evolutionary theory explains what we see.
One million years.... but look at the SIZE of the genome.
If you go back to the Cambrian explosion, you will see what HOX genes did.
After that, it was pretty much getting larger and larger.
you need to take a better course in evolutionary theory. All you're doing is repeating the Fundie Nonsense.
_________________
Reply to: Evolution is the be all and end all only if you are rather stupid, unread, and tend to mouth the popular line. Evolution is not proof of anything other than the origins of speices. It says nothing about the original body type, only how it can become several speices.
_________________
Absolutely WRONG.
http://www.plantbio.uga.edu/~chris/explosion.jpg
The Intelligent Design community is quite enthused about the publication in 2004 of an article in a peer-reviewed, mainstream journal, The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, by Dr. Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. In this article, Meyer attempts to establish that conventional evolutionary mechanisms would not have been able to produce the sudden diversity of organisms and body forms that burst on the scene in the Cambrian 'explosion'. The diagram below, from a publication by Meyer in 2003, illustrates that the majority of known animal phyla had their origin in the Cambrian period, and that very few phyla had their first appearance before or since. On the face of it, this appears to be a problem for mainstream evolutionary biology, since such a variety of phyla appear in a geologically brief period of 10-15 million years.
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/battson/images/J.gif
At least the Creationists get the EVIDENCE right.
You're just posting NONSENSE
William Hays at 7:16PM on Sep 12th 2008
73. Thanks DD. You have shown me that I too, like most americans, have something in common with radical Islam ... we both see the threat of this godless, hateful ideology known as liberalism. -gassgett
Where do you get your numbers when you claim liberalism is a godless ideology?
Certainly the founding fathers who pursued liberalism when establishing this country were not godless, nor were those who fought for human rights against equality, slavery, women oppression, religious freedoms and the rights of our own children who where at first treated like slaves and forced into working in our early factories.
These deists fought to change ancient treatment of men based on the idea that god is not patented by any of the current religious fads. Rather that the true god would not embrace these ideologies created by religious institutions.
To assume liberalism is equated with atheism truly shows how much in common you do have with radical Islam as you claim. Do you prefer this country embrace those ancient conservative hateful ideologies that separate people into classes of less value?
Then you should move there and scream alongside those radicals on how much you hate liberalism, the ideology America was founded on. You'll be shocked to know they hate American aggressive foreign policy more so than our liberal values, something I'm sure you don't agree with them on so where does that leave you?
If you got out more you might have known this.
goddess1prevail at 7:17PM on Sep 12th 2008
74. think what DD is trying to say is that 9/11 type of terrorism in the USA was brought about by the American liberal life style. He blames one or several aspects of our life style or people that is counter to Islamic teachings for the ultimate justfication of the horrendous terroristic attack.
DD is nuts. It is same as saying AIDs and other STDs are Gods punishment of the fornicator knowing fully well that viruses and bacteria do not distinguish the different people it infects. Viruses and bacteria are only trying to survive and multiply like all other organisms in this world
R Shanker at 7:27PM on Sep 12th 2008
75. Yeah, blame all those non-believing heathens who just want people to be able to choose their own beliefs. How could we have not seen this before! Muslims arent mad at America for starting wars over oil and killing civilian women and children, and even babies! Its those crazy leftists! Gosh, if we could just encourage muslims to kill more gay people and regress back to the same lifestyle they had 400 years ago, everything would be great! Who needs civil advancement anyway? I'm sure these Muslims would have loves to live in America in the 1950s when people were good and families stayed together, and black people sat in the squalor of the slums without chances for eduaction. why dont we go back to the way things were? I'm sure you would have liked when America still had morals, Dinesh- until you were kicked out of a church for being colored. And by the way, you can thank those crazy leftists for the freedom you have to sit in the front of the bus today.
Mary at 9:11PM on Sep 12th 2008