What Is Moderate Islam

Radical Islam is a major affliction of the contemporary world. Each year, radical Islamists carry out terrorist attacks that result in a massive death toll, almost all involving noncombatants and innocents. Estimates of how many Muslims could be considered followers of radical Islam vary widely, and there are few guides to help determine moderates versus radicals. Observers often sit at the extremes, either seeing all Muslims as open or closeted jihadis or recoiling from any attempt to link Islam with international terror. Both positions are overly simplistic, and the lack of rational principles to absolve the innocent and identify the accomplices of terror has led to governments and individuals mistakenly accepting jihadis as moderate. What is Moderate Islam? brings together an array of scholars—Muslims and non-Muslims—to provide this missing insight. This wide-ranging collection examines the relationship among Islam, civil society, and the state. The contributors—including both Muslims and non-Muslims—investigate how radical Islamists can be distinguished from moderate Muslims, analyze the potential for moderate Islamic governance, and challenge monolithic conceptions of Islam.

It is difficult, sometimes even painful, to be a Muslim. In 1826, Rifaa el Tahtawi, a theologian in Cairo, arrived in Paris. His mission was to discover the secret of the scientific prowess of the West and find out if it was possible to reconcile the tenets of Islam with a modern and progressive outlook. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1831, after a thorough study of Western science, military power and jurisprudence, he had come to the conclusion that nothing in the Koran opposed the modernization of the Muslim world. His enlightened analysis led to what is known as the Arab Renaissance , a discernible shift towards modernity and democracy in the Muslim world, which lasted till the 1950s.

Radical Islamists spread their message using extensive networks spanning the Muslim world, but moderates have not created similar networks. This book evaluates US programs of engagement with the Muslim world, and develops a road map to foster the construction of moderate Muslim networks.

Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government's lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan's contested project for an Islamic community center.

Brings together prominent Muslim voices to debate the nature of moderate, as opposed to fundamentalist, Islam and what moderation means in both a theological and a geopolitical sense.

Why do they hate us, and can it happen here? All good questions, and if you want the answers, this book will help you find them. Recently, ISIS has taken parts of Syria and Iraq for the new Caliphate, and people in the non-Muslim world struggle to understand. This book explains the background history to so much of what is happening and surveys the possibilities for the future. Islam is exposed as a religion very different from any other religion, especially Christianity, throughout history, as well as its manifestation in our present. All through history and even today, the West has been looking for moderate Muslims to stand up against the radicalism of the Islamic Fundamentalists. Here finally, the simple truth is revealed that "Islam is Islam." The distinction between radical and moderate is usually more imagined than real. This new Third Edition contains updated information not found in the previous editions plus new chapters that cover the European invasion and ideas on solutions. The authors' unique qualifications as students of history and the residency in Cyprus of one of the authors provide a unique perspective not likely to be found elsewhere