Time to throw away the term “moderate Muslim”

The term “moderate” poses a problem, for it assumes too much.

The term “moderate Muslim” connotes at the very least the role of a conscious, relatively intelligent awareness, if not a decision sustained more or less day after day (with of course plenty of times to relax from the duty of thinking about the meaning of life—a form of relaxation that has become second nature to the typical modern Westerner, but which remains perversely difficult for the modern Muslim, due to their ingrained cultural obsession with religio-legal puritanism and eschatology).

To affirm that the majority of Muslims in the world are “moderate” in this more active, conscious sense would be counter-indicative. It is far more likely that the majority of Muslims are simply “not immoderate”—whether out of passivity, sloth, ignorance, fear, or lucky opportunity.

And when Muslims are in a state of being “not immoderate”, we must not be so quick to superimpose upon them the Western model of modern society: most Muslims function not as individuals cut adrift from larger social webs and ties—as do most modern Westerners—but rather exist and find their self-identity as part of a larger “Family” (the Umma) of fellow Muslims who are felt to be better than the rest of Mankind because, at the very least, God has entrusted them uniquely with the Absolute Truth About The Meaning of Life, and with the solemn mission to uphold, defend and propagate that Truth. (And we Infidels—at least a small growing number of us, know what chilling and terrifying tenets and precepts are entailed in that Absolute Truth of Islam.) Hence their ongoing immoderation, even if more or less passive, is ensconced within a sociocultural milieu that has powerful pressures, and potentials, for that passive immoderation to flare up into a more active zeal to support Islam and its militant supremacism.

I therefore recommend a new term to replace the hackneyed, misleading and even reckless term “moderate Muslim”: My new term is the Apparently Harmless Muslim.

The advantage of this new term is that it can bridge the gap between anti-Islam critics like Robert Spencer (who tries to remain ever so slightly aloof from condemning Islam directly) and more vigorous anti-Islamists, who might feel Spencer and others are being a bit too soft on Muslims.

That is to say, even most of the most passionate anti-Islamists among us can feel comfortable conceding that the majority of Muslims in the world are apparently harmless. This does not mean they will remain so; nor does it necessarily mean they are really so, deep down. All it does is formally register their ostensible appearance of being harmless—the minimum quality of the much richer, and therefore excessively generous, adjective, “moderate”.

And the new term has the advantage of underscoring the fact that the vast majority of passionate anti-Islamists are not knuckle-dragging rednecks who feel compelled to assume that all Muslims have horns, a tail and breathe fire: for, you see, we anti-Islamists can concede that, as far as we can tell, for now, on the surface at least, most Muslims are indeed apparently harmless.

The perfect ambiguity of the new term—the Apparently Harmless Muslim—allows us to show that we recognize that most Muslims are, as far as we can tell, not doing anything bad at all; for, unfortunately, that is what the statistics show, and if we too carelessly ignore that statistical fact and ride rhetorically roughshod over it in our discussions and debates with those more affected by PC MC, we run the risk of too soon alienating them with blatantly counter-factual positions.

At the same time, the new term gives us plenty of leverage to maintain suspicion about any and all Muslims, should an indeterminable number of them be either lying to us, or be sincerely harmless today, but succumb tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or next week, or a couple of years from now, to some form of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” if not to a slower devolution back to their roots: the original supremacism of classical Islam.