Sasse: "this whole load of hand-wringing mush."
That's about how I feel about the wet liberal conversation about Islam. Fearful of offending people (especially those they deem non-white, regardless of the fact that a religion isn't a race) rather than thinking about our own values. Or where they do, being ashamed of them, assuming a burden of guilt and responsibility for the problems of the Islamic crescent that is preposterously egocentric. The issue of instability within the Islamic community even precedes Mahomet: Arab tribal battles are the setting for the foundation of Islam and Islam was partly an attempt at a solution to them. As soon as Ali (Mahomet's son-in-law) and the Shia split from the Sunnis, those battles resumed and they have continued until today (think Iran versus Saudi Arabia). We didn't make that bellicose environment. We aren't the origin of its lack of peace. It belongs to Moslems and seems to operate wherever Islam is in situ.
I liked the speech although it missed a few things.
First, the issue of Islamism, which is the pond in which Jihadists swim. Islamists are the folks who have a fundamentalist view of Islam and want to impose sharia on the rest of us. These people don't want what we call freedom and don't want the secular state society that actually works. They want their model of political Islam to replace secular society and they work relentlessly and artfully to succeed by incremental steps.
Here's the credo of the Moslem Brotherhood which represents this view: “Allah is our objective, the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.” Alongside those folks, we have Saudi fundamentalism. The Saudis promulgate Islamism in the West by financing mosques and paying for Wahhabi/Salafi preachers to spread their doctrines. Al-Wahhab was a conservative. He hated change and living interpretations of the Koran. Religiously-speaking, he was a strict constructionist, in constitutional parlance. Go Sharia! Hence beheadings, crucifiction of apostates, segregation of the sexes etc.
These are some of the people defined as moderates in the debate over Islam.
For me, folks such as these are not moderate. They don't belong in the West. We don't want them getting a hold on Moslem immigrants and spreading their toxins. Islamism generates jihadism. It is the gateway form of teaching that leads to violence. It builds the sense of certainty and of victimhood. It generates outrage and defines those who oppose such teachings as Islamophobes.
Second, this isn't a fight between America and Jihad. It is between Western secular values (of which America represents an important expression) and politicised Islam (of which violent/militant/Jihadist Islam is an important expression). Our model provides a space for individual choices about religion. But government plays no role in those choices beyond protecting the right to make them.
Western secular values. We are all in this together. The development of a secular state began with political disagreements between Northern European monarchies and the Papacy (eg over land ownership and taxation) in the late Medieval period. It then moved towards the unshackling of philosophical and scientific ideas from religious ones during the Renaissance and Reformation period. It was, specifically, an argument with the Catholic Church. It became an argument over freedom of conscience after hundreds of years. America occurred during this argument and the founders took a side. In some places the argument still continues.
We are defending Western secular spaces, including America. Islamists are defending the Islamic view of religion as politics and law and everyday ritual and faith etc.
Islam is now facing the same challenge and providing equivalent arguments to those the Catholic church employed many moons ago. Many Moslems are perfectly decent, friendly, reasonable people. Many think of their religion as a private matter and want to live like Westerners. Those sorts of people could use a peaceful, law-abiding option. Reform Islam provides it, although it is at a very early stage.
Islamists want to extend their dominion over everyone, and particularly all Moslems. The jihadists are the angry expression of the Islamist view.
Since Sasse is a historian of America, he doesn't quite have the full perspective. But he uses what he has to derive an argument and it is most of the story. Rather that than complacency. And mush.
| 
