Reuel Marc Gerecht: Moderate Muslims Are Not the Answer

[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.]

...Are religious moderates really the key to our battle against jihadists and their sympathizers?...Are our actions—at least the “cultivation” of Muslim moderates—so pivotal in this struggle? I’m not so sure.

Islamic radicalism isn’t a new phenomenon, although the militancy that we’ve seen grow in the Muslim world since World War II has a different cause—modernity’s relentless and merciless advance—than the irruptions in the past. But the galvanizing sentiments of militants today probably aren’t that different from what drove their predecessors to rebellion. The Franco-Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb, who wrote an insightful and sympathetic book about the Muslim world’s travails, La Maladie de l’Islam (“The Sickness within Islam”), put it succinctly: Le monde islamique n’a cessé d’être l’inconsolé de sa destitution (“The Islamic world has remained inconsolable about its fall”).

Whether we go back to Islam’s first rebels, the Khawarij, whose most extreme foot-soldiers, the Azariqa, murdered Muslim women and children without compunction since Muslims who imperfectly practiced the faith could be lawfully killed, or to the numerous Shiite rebellions that punctuate Islamic history like volcanoes on fault lines, or to the Christian-crushing, Islamic-high-culture-pulverizing Almoravid and Almohad fundamentalist explosions in North Africa and Spain between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, or to the Saudi-Wahhabi irruptions between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, or to the Mahdist revolt in Sudan in the nineteenth century, or to Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1978-79 and its Sunni aftershocks, of which Al Qaeda is the most lethal, we see devout Muslims who believe their world is in an ethical free fall.

What was once pure and powerful has become dissolute and subservient. A community that was once led by the Prophet Muhammad—the best of all men—is now led by despots who neither preach nor practice virtue (or most abominably in modern times, ape infidels). The most basic question for a believer in heaven and hell—salvation—has often been behind all the violence....