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What
Antidote to Radical Islam?
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"Radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the
solution" has been my watchword since
2002, meaning that Islam's many problems will only be solved when
Muslims leave Islamism, an attempt to regress to a medieval model, and
favor a modern, moderate, and good-neighborly version of their faith.
Plenty of people disagree
with this analysis, but no one offered an alternate solution. Now, Murat
Yetkin editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet Daily News in Turkey
has done so in a recent column, "Antithesis of radical Islam is not
moderate Islam, it is secularism."
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Murat Yetkin,
editor-in-chief of Turkey's Hürriyet Daily News.
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He finds my solution old and discredited: "As radical Islamist
movements started to emerge, politicians in the West … tried to recruit
'moderates'," building them up "without realizing or bothering
to understand that they would become the new radicals." Yetkin
locates this pattern variously in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt,
Iraq, and Syria.
The real antithesis of radical Islam, he posits, is not moderate
Islam, but rather "separating state affairs from religion."
Secularists, the West can rest assured, won't turn against it. Calling
for a revival of Atatürk's secularism, Yetkin approves of a recent speech
by Turkish opposition leader Kemal
Kılıçdaroğlu urging Muslims to adopt secularism as"the antidote
to terror."
In reply, I start by noting that secularism has two quite different
meanings:
(1) Separation of church and state: This kind of secularism, which
Yetkin alludes to, is not "the antidote to terror" (think
Communists) but it does offer a previous method to avoid religious
conflicts. Indeed, secularism evolved out of the ferocity of religious
wars in seventeenth-century Europe, providing a live-and-let-live haven
from faith-inspired violence. What worked in Europe four centuries ago
will work again in Muslim-majority countries today.
Yetkin is right to promote a secular order. I also do so by calling on
Western governments always to work against Islamists, to cooperate warily
with tyrants, and exuberantly to support liberals and secularists.
(2) Irreligiosity: Secularism also means rejecting faith –
similar to agnosticism or atheism. Quietly, irreligiosity is spreading
among Muslims; organizations
of ex-Muslims, an unprecedented phenomenon, have appeared in twelve
countries. One analysis finds that 25 percent of Arabic-speakers have become atheists.
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A publication of one
of the organizations of ex-Muslims that recently came into existence.
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But even if this (high) number is accurate, 75 percent of the
population remains believing. Moderate Islam applies to them, offering
sound ideas to replace the repugnant ones of Islamism. In this sense,
Yetkin is wrong, for irreligiosity cannot fulfill the spiritual longings
of most Muslims. Moderate Islam can. It therefore offers the main
solution to radical Islam.
But I partially concede Yetkin's point: Together, moderate Islam and
secularism are the answer to radical Islam; so too is conversion to other
religions. Nearly anything works that takes Muslims away from the
Islamist mentality.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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