Identifying Moderate Muslims

Laura has a short post over at Pursuing Holiness on Pakistan and a move toward moderation legislatively. The particular form of moderation involved is preventing women who are raped from being charged with adultery. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of a moderate stoning, so that I could get some idea what that would be like (no, not actuallly!).

MSNBC has an article on this titled Pakistan lawmakers OK changes to rape law, and it’s subtitle, Death penalty for extramarital sex dropped; Islamic fundamentalists angry is also of interest.

I think our response to this sort of thing, including both the original problem, the reform, and the response of some other Muslims can be problematic.

1. We might become hostile to Islam as such. This is an unacceptable option to me, simply because I know from personal experience that there are Muslims who are good people, who make good neighbors, and who would abhor the mistreatment of women (a severe understatement for charging a rape victim with adultery) as much as I do.
2. We can put our heads in the sand because we don’t want to seem intolerant, so we don’t want to these Muslims, lest we seem to be intolerant of all Muslims. This, in my view, would morally reprehensible. We must, I believe, combat evil, and this is undoubtedly evil.
3. We can do our best to identify specific people and policies and oppose those. This is what I try, not always successfully, to do.

This is one of the problems with our “friends” in the Middle East. In many cases it’s a “with friends like these” situation. In order to fight one form of evil, we get tangled with another. When I was in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in that part of the world during the first gulf war, I really thought about this. Who was it that I was defending? In general, my response had to be that they were not people I would want to defend, if I had the choice. This is not about them being Muslims. It’s about them being tyrants and enforcing sadistic laws and policies.

I’m going to continue to try to distinguish Islam itself from many of its adherents. But I’m not going to let that stop me from making it clear that certain policies are simply evil. The treatment of women in many countries of the Middle East is one of those policies.