New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Warriors drown out the voices of reason in Islam

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Warriors drown out the voices of reason in IslamWarriors drown out the voices of reason in Islam

During the 1960s a white Southerner made me aware of a problem that now seems to be common to the complexity faced by modern people of many different societies and religions: The loose screws among them have come to represent the entire group.

Forty years ago, the white Southerner said to me that all of the televised redneck violence in reaction to the civil rights movement had made his Southern accent a social liability. Northern white people tended to assume, once they heard his accent, that he supported the Ku Klux Klan, had probably brutalized a black man and could easily have taken advantage of a black woman, who might be the mother of his unacknowledged child!

It took them a while to discover that he was a supporter of the civil rights movement who had to leave the South because his opinions endangered the safety of his wife and children.

I am sure that this problem is now felt in what one Muslim scholar calls "liberal Islam." I encountered the term while reading material written by Radman Masmoudi, founder and president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, a nonprofit think tank. Masmoudi, from Tunisia, has a degree from MIT in robotics and automation, and is an advanced control engineer. He is also the editor in chief of his think tank's publication, Muslim Democrat, and president of the Tunisian Scientific Society.

So he's been around. But there is much to be learned from reading his 2003 piece "The Silenced Majority," from the Journal of Democracy, about the battle between secular and religious extremists. "Between these two extremes," he writes, "we find the majority of the people, who want to practice their religion faithfully, but who also want to live in the modern age - i.e., they want a modern, moderate and appropriate interpretation of Islam."

Masmoudi does not see this happening overnight but is sure that the first thing that must come about is the freedom to debate issues and to criticize Islamic governments and policies, a basic tenet of democracy. This sort of freedom exists under neither secular nor religious Islamic governments, both of which tend to take the position that it will be their way or "the highway."

"The reformation of Islam," writes Masmoudi, "will require freedom and democracy, and right now the only place where we have them is in the West."

We should not be naive about a reformation taking place within the Islamic world next week, next month, or next year, even in the next decade. But neither should we be prematurely cynical about liberal Islam. All we are actually talking about are things we take for granted, such as free speech, freedom of the press and a diversity of freely expressed opinion.

When we look at the most conservative versions of Islam, we can easily understand why all of those freedoms were hard to come by at certain points in Western democratic history.

But when we realize that the conception of liberal Islam is being championed by an award-winning scientist who observes his religion in ways he considers rational, we can have faith in what Masmoudi represents and set aside some of our most hysterical reactions to the massive stereotyping that always arrives in times of war.

Warriors are only interested in, understandably, the nuances of command and performance in battle. But recognition that humanity always means endless nuance is a foundation of democracy. Masmoudi says the majority of those in the Muslim world want what we know as freedom, and do not believe their religion is threatened by it.

Let us hope that he is right, so that some of us may live to see that old saying become true in the Islamic world: it is always darkest before dawn.

Originally published on February 12, 2006