Mini Dissenters

The battle for the soul of Islam is still in its early stages. But make no mistake about it: The modernizers are winning.

Do you know what most struck me in the comments on the previous post?
It is not the strength of the anti-terrorism feelings in a lot of Moslems, it is not the fact that a lot of Moslems are publicly disavowing Islam and confessing a newfound atheism. It is not the fact that Moslems from all over the world are racing to disown the London attacks. It is not the research people have done to prove Thomas Friedman wrong and point out that clerics have actually condemned bin Laden.

What struck me most is that everytime a Moslem makes a somewhat daring statement about Islam he/she does it anonymously.

Franklly, I think that we all either have a very inflated sense of self-importance or we are all delusional about the real influence and power of the suicide-type hardliners.
Do we really believe that the Al-Quaeda sympathizers are so powerful that they monitor blogs and comments from all over the world in all languages, and just add up names to a “to-kill” list in some sinister sort of database?
Well, if that’s the case, then they DON’T NEED TO CONDUCT TERRORIST SCARE TACTICS, we might as well all surrender and grow beards.

The Arab layman’s case for being afraid is this: If the American Army, the CIA, The FBI, The M5, The M6, all combined are not being able to thwart terrorist attacks, then I’m sure that Bin Laden has the ability to track me and hunt me down. But that logic is flawed. In fact, Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, desperate and dying, not that of the strong, confident and growing. The sole purpose of random acts of mass murder is to scare people into thinking that you’re stronger than you actually are.

Now, I concede by saying that some ill-conceived and terribly executed confrontational geo-strategic policies by the Bush-administration are pushing a lot of people into more extremism, but that’s not the main argument of this post. The main issue here is the soul and reputation of Islam.

We, 21st century Moslems, have a lot of Ideas about reforming Islam, about deciding to minimize its role in politics, about denouncing it all together. We greatly outnumber the extremists; our collective worldwide efforts can contribute greatly to giving Islam a new face. But if we are all too afraid from some fictional executioner, our voices will never get out of anonymous land.

(by the way, I’m not expecting too many comments on this post ;) )