Tag: Rumı

  • The Güzel but Zor Turkish Language

    The Güzel but Zor Turkish Language

    Editor’s Note: Happy to post the following travelogue from our well-traveled Senior Lutheran Correspondent Jon Pahl, whose book Empires of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, recently published by NYU Press, was the subject of discussion and an interview on our blog.

    Over the past several months Jon has been spanning the globe from Indonesia to Turkey, perhaps still licking his wounds from the suffering I administered to him on the basketball courts of Valparaiso, Indiana back in the early 90s. He sends along the following reflections on his experiences in Istanbul. This is a little bit off the usual topics for our blog, but consider this some lazy summer blog reading, like a Calvin Trillin essay in the New Yorker.

    by Jon Pahl, in Istanbul

    SAM 1511

    In 1880, Mark Twain published an essay destined to be famous. “The Awful German Language,” in A Tramp Abroad, lampooned the difficulty Twain experienced learning German. It is very funny. I remember laughing out loud to the point of tears the first time I read it, at Regenstein Library of The University of Chicago.

    Twain’s essay comes to mind because I have been living in Istanbul for two weeks trying to learn some Turkish. In Turkish, as in German, verbs come at the end of sentences, and word order is generally reversed from English. This makes Turkish difficult (zor). But the language is also beautiful (güzel). Twain hit more than a few ethnocentric notes in his piece, and it clearly reflects, in retrospect, the stereotype that eventually became “the ugly American.” The essay’s humor mutes its xenophobia, but “The Awful German Language” also reveals a moment in time when America’s empire began to swing into power.

    My own take on Turkish, as a twenty-first century American, is quite different from Twain’s take on German in the nineteenth century—and not only because I lack his satirical gifts. I am studying the language as I begin research for an English language biography of the influential but controversial Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen. My experience of the language invariably is filtered through my reading of Gülen’s Sufi-inspired thought.

    Contemporary Turkish is a modern creation. It emerged along with the Republic in the early twentieth-century, and it was a cornerstone in Ataturk’s attempt to unify (and imagine) a new nation as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. I have argued elsewhere (in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence—see that Turkey’s post-imperial reality offers many lessons for Americans. Some of the most profound of the things we might learn from Turkey may be revealed in the structure and harmonies of the language. I make no claim that these structures are unique to Turkish, but they can help me articulate six insights I have noted in the course of living here in Istanbul for a brief stretch.

    First, in Turkish, relationships trump subjective assertions. Subjects and objects are juxtaposed in most sentences. This makes the relationship between subject and object primary, and the action of an individual secondary. The subject of a sentence, such as “I,” is often dropped completely and embedded within a verb. For instance, take the verb sevmek, “to love.” To say “I love you” one can say “Ben seni seviyorum” (literally, “I you love”). But more frequently one would hear simply: “Seni Seviyorum.” Here, the “I” doing the loving is not the primary thing; the “I” is embedded within the love (as the ending, “um.”) Despite Atatürk’s attempt to extinguish Sufism in Turkey, I am willing to wager that this linguistic structure reveals the deep influence of Sufi Islam—historically important across Turkey. For Sufis, the ego is illusion. There is no “you and me,” but there are moments in time marked by relationships, and, ideally, by love.

    Secondly, there is a poetic rhythm to Turkish that reflects what I have taken to calling “oral mimesis,” and in which I find a sign of the famous Turkish hospitality that I have experienced on all four of my visits here. The most evident form of this feature of Turkish is called “vowel harmony.” Endings to adjectives and verbs that convey the nature of a relationship (like that “um” in seviyor) vary depending upon the last vowel in a word. Thus, to add an “I” to a transitive verb might mean adding um, im (eem), üm (yewm), or ım (uhm), depending on the last verb preceding the ending. I’m barely beginning to figure this out after two weeks of study, but what it produces is a rhyming quality to the language that means sounds mirror each other. Thus, for example, the adjective “güzel” takes “i” (pronounced like the long English “-e”) for its endings. This means that if I wanted to say “You are beautiful” (something I’ve often thought here in Istanbul!) I might say: “Sen güzelsin” (phonetically—“sen gew-sel-seen”). I think that has a very nice ring to it. Such oral (and aural) mimesis is common throughout the language, in manifold everyday exchanges and encounters. It’s like a smile returning a smile, linguistically, and builds into ordinary language a verbal form of hospitality.

    Thirdly, assigning of gender is not primary in Turkish. Unlike in German, nouns don’t take genders, and the third person singular pronoun “o” can mean either “he, she, or it.” I know that for some Turkish feminists there is a sense that masculine is the default gender. For instance, Mustafa Kemal is honored with the name “Atatürk” (“Father of the Turks”). There is not, so far as I know, a similar equivalent for women (the “Mother of the Turks?”) But in the structure of the language, identity is grounded in something other than in gender. This lack of gender differentiation was clearly part of Atatürk’s modernization project—which might explain in part why issues such as veiling continue to be so contested in contemporary Turkish society, as Pamuk’s novel Snow vividly explores. One of my American Muslim students explained to me that she wore the hijab because “I want people to see me as a Muslim before they see me as a woman.” But in Turkey, wearing the veil has actually become an assertion of gender differentiation—and hence, a counter-cultural statement. The language, at least as I understand it so far, however, implies structural equality.

    Fourthly, Turkish operates by what one of my teachers (a Ukrainian named Tarkan) called “mathematical logic,” but in which I see a military precision that produces a guarded (if not conspiratorial) mentalité that competes with the hospitality I alluded to earlier. My brain hurts after three hours of Turkish class, not only because I have little skill at mathematics, but also because the calculus is so complex that my efforts to intuit “the answers” are frustrated by the intensity of the process. Such intensity, and a less-than-transparent set of rules to govern it, marks one of the challenges contemporary Turkey faces in its efforts to “democratize.” The military is often described as the “guardian” of modern Turkey. Some people here are worried about how religion (notoriously NOT mathematically precise) might undermine this custodial responsibility. Whether a balance can be struck between the poetic intuitions and revelations of, say, The Holy Qur’an, and the guarded, militarily precise structures that are embedded in modern Turkish may hold the key to the most hotly debated questions in the country today. The optimistic answer is that the debates are underway. But recent imprisonments of military leaders and journalists, and recurrent brutal (and covert) military coups over the course of the twentieth-century, suggest that a balance between poetic trust and military security will not be easy to achieve. If, however, Turkey effectively forges a new Constitution (as is proposed under the current government), and if a way is found to welcome Turkey into the European Union as its first majority Muslim nation, then the case for Turkey as a model for the kind of societies that might emerge from “the Muslim Spring” will surely be strengthened.

    Fifth, as the tension between hospitable and conspiratorial mentalities might suggest, Turkish seems to me to embrace opposites in often paradoxical ways. As someone who has written a book with the word paradox in its title (Paradox Lost), I might rightly be accused on this point of reading something into the language that’s not there. But I don’t think this is merely a projection. In a review session with another one of our beloved teachers, named Musa, we spent nearly an hour tracing the various opposites we had learned together over two weeks: burada-şurada, “here-there;” sıcak-soğuk, “hot-cold;” sol-sağ, “left-right,” and so forth.

    As it happens, in my spare time I’m reading a novel by the Turkish feminist author Elif Shafak. The book is entitled The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi. It’s a fabulous read. The evening after our review of opposites in the classroom, I came across the following passage, which Shafak places in the mouth of Rumi, the 13th century Sufi: “’God created suffering so that joy might appear through its opposite,’ Rumi said. ‘Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden.’” Here, the “natural” human tendency to frame opposites (joy-suffering, friend-enemy, Christian-Muslim) gives way to a Turkish Sufi tendency to transcend them.

    For one last way to clarify this point, consider the poem Bedava, by the early twentieth-century Istanbul poet Orhan Veli. I was taught the poem by a group of Polish students who were studying with me (our class is a veritable United Nations—with students from Italy, Spain, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Syria, Singapore, Serbia, and Poland—among others). Everyone I’ve asked in Istanbul knows Bedava, including the cleaning ladies in my hotel. I’ll include the Turkish first, then offer a translation:

    Bedava yaşıyoruz, bedava;

    Hava bedava, bulut bedava;
    Dere tepe bedava;
    Yağmur çamur bedava;
    Otomobillerin dışı,
    Sinamaların kapısı,
    Camekânlar bedava;
    Peynir ekmek değil ama
    Acı su bedava;
    Kelle fiyatına hürriyet,
    Esirlik bedava;
    Bedava yaşıyoruz, bedava.

    For free we live, for free;
    The air is for free, the clouds are for free;
    Valleys and hills for free;
    The rain, the mud, for free;
    The outside of cars,
    The doors of the cinemas
    The shop windows for free;
    Bread and butter aren’t free but still water is for free;
    Freedom can cost your head,
    Imprisoned for free;
    For free we live, for free.

    The lines just before the end are the paradoxical kicker. What seems to be a nice, romantic ode to the cliché that “the best things in life are free” in fact embraces a somber warning. Freedom might cost us our “heads.” We could be imprisoned, “for free.” The affirmations of the opening lines gradually give way, as modern consumerism and (implicitly) the State takeover, to a fatalistic prospect that is only redeemed with hope in the last line.

    Bedava, then, does not simply mean “freedom” in a political sense (the Turkish word for that is Hürriyet). And, in the context of the poem, I am tempted to translate Bedava as something like “bound free,” “captive free,” or a similar paradox. It is this conjunction of hope and fatalism that I find intriguing and promising both in the structure of the language, and in Turkish culture.

    Finally, then, what I have learned so far is that Turkey might be a budding model of the post-modern reconciliation of secularity and religion. It is too simple to call this simply “Sufism;” Turkey’s economic growth of 11% in the last quarter depended on some quite secular practices. Yet the practices of hizmet (service) among those inspired by Fethullah Gülen bridge secular and sacred modes of life. For example, Turks inspired by Gülen have built schools in more than eighty countries, including in some of the poorest places on earth. These schools follow the secular curricula of their host countries and embrace both scientific education and interreligious dialogue (I have visited such schools in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America). What we’re dealing with here is Greg Mortensen’s Thirty Cups of Tea without the administrative incompetence (and without the publisher’s marketing budget). Such a capacity to juxtapose secularity and spirituality—perhaps woven into the very fabric of contemporary Turkish language and culture—is an important if not vital lesson for Americans, and probably for many others around the world.

    One last set of experiences might clarify the possibilities. Not far from the hotel where I am staying in the borough of Şişli is the local shopping mall—Istanbul Cevahir. Naturally, given my earlier work on malls as modern “sacred places,” I had to visit. When I did, I found what I expected: a fountain out front; trees, a bright skylight, and neon inside; and a six-story labyrinthine design with two levels of food courts that quickly got me lost. My disorientation triggered the desire to acquire that malls exist to inspire wherever they are built. I spent way more than I expected in the bookstore.

    And yet, barely a block away from the Cevahir is the Şişli Cami (mosque). It’s a lovely, serene place—in stark contrast to the mall. When I attended early afternoon prayer last Sunday (since my plans to attend a local church fell through), well over a hundred brothers participated. As is customary, we washed at the ablution fountain just outside the mosque, and removed our shoes to go inside. After the prayer ended, I walked out into the mosque courtyard where as I wandered about I noticed a casket shrouded in black cloth laying on a table under a canopy. I had stumbled onto a funeral. Gradually men gathered in lines under the canopy; women stood behind. We were still; silent in respect for one who had died. After a few minutes, and a few prayers, people began to drift away, and I joined them.

    The coexistence of these two places—of bumptious commerce that invites unlimited desire and quiet prayer that acknowledges the limit of death—signals a juxtaposition of the secular and sacred that all humans struggle to negotiate. How these two places co-exist in Istanbul became somewhat clearer to me one day last week. After our three hour morning class, with my brain still throbbing, I set out for Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia). As I walked through the massive gates, onto the ancient stone floors, under the stunning dome, I imagined the prayers of my ancestors in the Christian faith rising like incense for well over a millennium in this very spot.

    Then, that night I attended a concert at Istanbul Open Air Theater. This performance space is built like a Roman amphitheater into the side of a hill, with a lovely view over the Bosphorus. It was a beautiful night with almost a full moon. The concert was sold out, and I couldn’t afford tickets anyway, so I stood on a terrace with a great view overlooking the theater, for free. I could hear fine. I was joined by the four Polish students from my class, and there we met a fascinating architect and Istanbul resident who described himself as a pagan Communist Muslim environmentalist.

    The evening’s concert—part of the 2011 Istanbul Jazz Festival–culminated in a 90 minute set by Natalie Cole, who sang one of my favorite songs: “This Will Be.” By then, I was in the theater—having walked in, for free, and under the guidance of my new friend, to a seat about 20 rows from the front. I sang along with Natalie Cole, as did many of the three thousand who were in attendance, perhaps in a language they understood no more than I understand Turkish: “This will be, an everlasting love. . . .” It was, in the words of another song Cole performed, unforgettable.

    Somehow, between the mall and the mosque and Ayasofya and “This Will Be” in a Roman-like amphitheater in the ancient city of Istanbul, it all seemed to come together. Maybe it was just the nearly full moon, and the great music, and the beer a friendly vendor sold to us while standing on the terrace. But I couldn’t help but think that somehow in this fascinating conjunction of experiences lay the possibilities for much of the rest of the world, even as I continue to struggle to learn the güzel, but zor, Turkish language.

    Posted by Paul Harvey

    http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2011/07/guzel-but-zor-turkish-language.html

  • Be Muslim for a month in Istanbul: pray five times a day and fast

    Be Muslim for a month in Istanbul: pray five times a day and fast

    A chance to be immersed in Islam, particularly Sufi traditions and the mystic Rumi – without having to convert

    * guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 April 2011 20.53 BST

    Blue Mosque in Istanbul A reflection extends the minarets on the Blue Mosque, one of Istanbul's Muslim sights. Photograph: Richard Hamilton Smith/Corbis

    Blue Mosque in Istanbul

    A reflection extends the minarets on the Blue Mosque, one of Istanbul’s Muslim sights. Photograph: Richard Hamilton Smith/Corbis

    It has the ingredients of a conventional holiday – experiencing the culture and hospitality of one of the most exciting cities in the world. But few getaways encourage its participants to pray five times a day or try their hand at fasting, especially when those people are not Muslim.

    A social enterprise is offering individuals the opportunity to immerse themselves in Islam, without having to convert, through a trip to Istanbul that takes in the regular sights and sounds but also includes prayers at dawn and midnight and lessons on Islam and its basic practices.

    It draws heavily on the country’s Sufi traditions – with a particular emphasis on the poet and mystic Rumi. Ben Bowler, from the Blood Foundation, which runs the project, said: “We wanted to focus on Rumi because he is a unifying figure. Turkey has a relatively open brand of Islam and Istanbul is an existing tourist destination.

    “There is a willingness to engage with the west. We might not have found it in the Middle East or parts of south Asia. If we were in Saudi Arabia it would have been harder.”

    The foundation has called the initiative Muslim for a Month, despite it lasting nine days, and wants to offer a 21-day programme in the future. Bowler said most people would find it difficult to take a month off and admitted even the nine-day programme, which offers bed, board, instruction and sightseeing for £600, could have limited appeal.

    “We currently offer Monk for a Month, where people spend time in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. That is successful. The difference is that there’s a curiosity about Buddhism in the west. People are attracted to it, people who do meditation for example.”

    In addition to praying and fasting, participants will forsake alcohol and pork. Smoking is, however, permitted. They will also be expected to carry out pre-prayer ablutions, mastering the art of hoiking their feet into a washbasin as part of the process.

    Bowler described the clash between “Muslims and the rest of the world” as one of the most “contentious issues around” and said Muslim for a Month will appeal to “open-minded” individuals who want something educational and cultural.

    “Our hosts don’t want to make the prayers obligatory but I think if you’re going to do something you should dive in. They might work up to five prayers a day – including the early morning one”. In mid-May, when the programme is due to start, the dawn prayer in Istanbul is around 3.30am.

    An inaugural programme in February involving participants connected to Monk for a Month attracted Catholics, an agnostic, some Jews and a Hindu from around the world. Although nobody converted – and there is no obligation to do so – Bowler said there were changed attitudes and a deeper understanding of Islam.

    “If we attract people who are predisposed to like Islam, that’s fine. I would like to think people aren’t so duplicitous that they will see Muslims for a Month as a cheap holiday to Istanbul.

    “There is no illusion that bowing down to Mecca five times a day makes you a Muslim. It’s what the rituals and practices represent – a constant consciousness of the divine.”

    Outreach programmes about Islam are nothing new. The Living Library, which operates in 12 countries and “loans” people out to challenge prejudice and stereotypes, features Muslims in its lending scheme. Deepening ties with Muslim communities is also a central plank of Barack Obama’s presidency. Last year he hosted an entrepreneurship summit.

    Television has also tried to play a part in improving people’s understanding of Islam. Make Me a Muslim, shown on Channel 4 in 2007, featured a gay hairdresser, an atheist taxi driver with a porn habit and a glamour model. Their Muslim mentors guided them in the dos and don’ts of the religion. The BBC’s offering – The Retreat – was shown that same year.

    via Be Muslim for a month in Istanbul: pray five times a day and fast | Travel | The Guardian.

  • Turkey continues to progress towards becoming a regional super power, WSJ says

    Turkey continues to progress towards becoming a regional super power, WSJ says

    Yunus Emre05 December 2010, Sunday / THE ANATOLIA NEWS AGENCY, NEW YORK

    In a full page news story on Turkish province of İstanbul, one of the US’s most prominent business dailies Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said that Turkey continued to progress towards becoming a regional super power.

    The news story was published under the heading  ‘Empire Returning Back’ and included photographs from must-see locations of İstanbul.

    Written by Suzy Hansen, the WSJ article said that Turkey continued to move forward towards becoming a regional super power with a strong economy and a brave Prime Minister.

    The 2010 European Capital of Culture İstanbul is full of confidence that Turkey achieved in recent times, the news story said.

    The WSJ article also gave the names of various cites to be visited while in İstanbul.

    AA

  • A Symposium: What Is Moderate Islam?

    A Symposium: What Is Moderate Islam?

    Ottoman Era
    The Ottoman-era Sultan Ahmed or Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

    The controversy over a proposed mosque in lower Manhattan has spurred a wider debate about the nature of Islam. We asked six leading thinkers—Anwar Ibrahim, Bernard Lewis, Ed Husain, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Tawfik Hamid and Akbar Ahmed—to weigh in.

    Editor’s Note: The controversy over a proposed mosque in lower Manhattan has spurred a wider debate about the nature of Islam. We asked six leading thinkers to answer the question: What is moderate Islam?

    •Anwar Ibrahim: The Ball Is in Our Court

    •Bernard Lewis: A History of Tolerance

    •Ed Husain: Don’t Call Me Moderate, Call Me Normal

    •Reuel Marc Gerecht: Putting Up With Infidels Like Me

    •Tawfik Hamid: Don’t Gloss Over The Violent Texts

    •Akbar Ahmed: Mystics, Modernists and Literalists

    The Ball Is in Our Court

    By Anwar Ibrahim

    Skeptics and cynics alike have said that the quest for the moderate Muslim in the 21st century is akin to the search for the Holy Grail. It’s not hard to understand why. Terrorist attacks, suicide bombings and the jihadist call for Muslims “to rise up against the oppression of the West” are widespread.

    The radical fringe carrying out such actions has sought to dominate the discourse between Islam and the West. In order to do so, they’ve set out to foment anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. They’ve also advocated indiscriminate violence as a political strategy. To cap their victory, this abysmal lot uses the cataclysm of 9/11 as a lesson for the so-called enemies of Islam.

    These dastardly acts have not only been tragedies of untold proportions for those who have suffered or perished. They have also delivered a calamitous blow to followers of the Muslim faith.

    These are the Muslims who go about their lives like ordinary people—earning their livings, raising their families, celebrating reunions and praying for security and peace. These are the Muslims who have never carried a pocketknife, let alone explosives intended to destroy buildings. These Muslims are there for us to see, if only we can lift the veil cast on them by the shadowy figures in bomb-laden jackets hell-bent on destruction.

    These are mainstream Muslims—no different from the moderate Christians, Jews and those of other faiths—whose identities have been drowned by events beyond their control. The upshot is a composite picture of Muslims as inherently intolerant, antidemocratic, inward-looking and simply unable to coexist with other communities in the modern world. Some say there is only one solution: Discard your beliefs and your tradition, and embrace pluralism and modernity.

    This prescription is deeply flawed. The vast majority of Muslims already see themselves as part of a civilization that is heir to a noble tradition of science, philosophy and spirituality that places paramount importance on the sanctity of human life. Holding fast to the principles of democracy, freedom and human rights, these hundreds of millions of Muslims fervently reject fanaticism in all its varied guises.

    Yet Muslims must do more than just talk about their great intellectual and cultural heritage. We must be at the forefront of those who reject violence and terrorism. And our activism must not end there. The tyrants and oppressive regimes that have been the real impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world must hear our unanimous condemnation. The ball is in our court.

    Mr. Ibrahim is Malaysia’s opposition leader.

    A History of Tolerance

    By Bernard Lewis

    A form of moderation has been a central part of Islam from the very beginning. True, Muslims are nowhere commanded to love their neighbors, as in the Old Testament, still less their enemies, as in the New Testament. But they are commanded to accept diversity, and this commandment was usually obeyed. The Prophet Muhammad’s statement that “difference within my community is part of God’s mercy” expressed one of Islam’s central ideas, and it is enshrined both in law and usage from the earliest times.

    This principle created a level of tolerance among Muslims and coexistence between Muslims and others that was unknown in Christendom until after the triumph of secularism. Diversity was legitimate and accepted. Different juristic schools coexisted, often with significant divergences.

    Sectarian differences arose, and sometimes led to conflicts, but these were minor compared with the ferocious wars and persecutions of Christendom. Some events that were commonplace in medieval Europe— like the massacre and expulsion of Jews—were almost unknown in the Muslim world. That is, until modern times.

    Occasionally more radical, more violent versions of Islam arose, but their impact was mostly limited. They did not become really important until the modern period when, thanks to a combination of circumstances, such versions of Islamic teachings obtained a massive following among both governments and peoples.

    From the start, Muslims have always had a strong sense of their identity and history. Thanks to modern communication, they have become painfully aware of their present state. Some speak of defeat, some of failure. It is the latter who offer the best hope for change.

    For the moment, there does not seem to be much prospect of a moderate Islam in the Muslim world. This is partly because in the prevailing atmosphere the expression of moderate ideas can be dangerous—even life-threatening. Radical groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the likes of which in earlier times were at most minor and marginal, have acquired a powerful and even a dominant position.

    But for Muslims who seek it, the roots are there, both in the theory and practice of their faith and in their early sacred history.

    Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author of “From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East” (Oxford University Press, 2004).

    Don’t Call Me Moderate, Call Me Normal

    By Ed Husain

    I am a moderate Muslim, yet I don’t like being termed a “moderate”—it somehow implies that I am less of a Muslim.

    We use the designation “moderate Islam” to differentiate it from “radical Islam.” But in so doing, we insinuate that while Islam in moderation is tolerable, real Islam—often perceived as radical Islam—is intolerable. This simplistic, flawed thinking hands our extremist enemies a propaganda victory: They are genuine Muslims. In this rubric, the majority, non-radical Muslim populace has somehow compromised Islam to become moderate.

    What is moderate Christianity? Or moderate Judaism? Is Pastor Terry Jones’s commitment to burning the Quran authentic Christianity, by virtue of the fanaticism of his action? Or, is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas Party in Israel, more Jewish because he calls on Jews to rain missiles on the Arabs and “annihilate them”?

    The pastor and the rabbi can, no doubt, find abstruse scriptural justifications for their angry actions. And so it is with Islam’s fringe: Our radicals find religious excuses for their political anger. But Muslim fanatics cannot be allowed to define Islam.

    The Prophet Muhammad warned us against ghuluw, or extremism, in religion. The Quran reinforces the need for qist, or balance. For me, Islam at its essence is the middle way in all matters. This is normative Islam, adhered to by a billion normal Muslims across the globe.

    Normative Islam is inherently pluralist. It is supported by 1,000 years of Muslim history in which religious freedom was cherished. The claim, made today by the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, that they represent God’s will expressed through their version of oppressive Shariah law is a modern innovation.

    The classical thinking within Islam was to let a thousand flowers bloom. Ours is not a centralized tradition, and Islam’s rich diversity is a legacy of our pluralist past.

    Normative Islam, from its early history to the present, is defined by its commitment to protecting religion, life, progeny, wealth and the human mind. In the religious language of Muslim scholars, this is known as maqasid, or aims. This is the heart of Islam.

    I am fully Muslim and fully Western. Don’t call me moderate—call me a normal Muslim.

    Mr. Husain is author of “The Islamist” (Penguin, 2007) and co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, a counterextremist think tank.

    Putting Up With Infidels Like Me

    By Reuel Marc Gerecht

    Moderate Islam is the faith practiced by the parents of my Pakistani British roommate at the University of Edinburgh—and, no doubt, by the great majority of Muslim immigrants to Europe and the United States.

    Khalid’s mother and father were devout Muslims. His dad prayed five times a day and his mom, who hadn’t yet learned decent English after almost 20 years in the industrial towns of West Yorkshire, gladly gave me the impression that the only book she’d ever read was the Quran.

    I was always welcome in their home. Khalid’s mother regularly stuffed me with curry, peppering me with questions about how a non-Muslim who’d crossed the Atlantic to study Islam could resist the pull of the one true faith.

    Determined to keep their children Muslim in a sea of aggressive, alcohol-laden, sex-soaked disbelief, they happily practiced and preached peaceful coexistence—even with an infidel who was obviously leading their son down an unrighteous path.

    That is the essence of moderation in any faith: the willingness to exist peacefully, if not exuberantly, alongside nonbelievers who hold repellant views on many sacred subjects.

    It is a dispensation that comes fairly easily to ordinary Muslims who have left their homelands to live among nonbelievers in Western democracies. It is harder for Muslims surrounded by their own kind, unaccustomed by politics and culture to giving up too much ground.

    Tolerance among traditional Muslims is defined as Christian Europe first defined the idea: A superior creed agrees not to harass an inferior creed, so long as the practitioners of the latter don’t become too uppity. Tolerance emphatically does not mean equality of belief, as it now does in the West.

    Even in Turkey, where authoritarian secularism has changed the Muslim identity more profoundly than anywhere else in the Old World, a totally secularized Muslim would never call a non-Muslim citizen of the state a Turk. There is a certain pride of place that cannot be shared with a nonbeliever. Wounded pride also does the Devil’s work on ecumenicalism. Adjusting to modernity, with its intellectually open borders and inevitable moral chaos, is brutally hard for monotheisms, especially for those accustomed to rule. But it happens.

    When I told Khalid’s father that his children—especially his daughters—would not worship the faith as he and his wife had done, he told me: “They are living a better life than we have lived. That is enough.”

    Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA operative, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

    Don’t Gloss Over The Violent Texts

    By Tawfik Hamid

    In regards to Islam, the words “moderate’” and “radical” are relative terms. Without defining them it is virtually impossible to defeat the latter or support the former.

    Radical Islam is not limited to the act of terrorism; it also includes the embrace of teachings within the religion that promote hatred and ultimately breed terrorism. Those who limit the definition of radical Islam to terrorism are ignoring—and indirectly approving of—the Shariah teachings that permit killing apostates, violence against women and gays, and anti-Semitism.

    Moderate Islam should be defined as a form of Islam that rejects these violent and discriminatory edicts. Furthermore, it must provide a strong theological refutation for the mainstream Islamic teaching that the Muslim umma (nation) must declare wars against non-Muslim nations, spreading the religion and giving non-Muslims the following options: convert, pay a humiliating tax, or be killed. This violent concept fuels jihadists, who take the teaching literally and accept responsibility for applying it to the modern world.

    Moderate Islam must not be passive. It needs to actively reinterpret the violent parts of the religious text rather than simply cherry-picking the peaceful ones. Ignoring, rather than confronting or contextualizing, the violent texts leaves young Muslims vulnerable to such teachings at a later stage in their lives.

    Finally, moderate Islam must powerfully reject the barbaric practices of jihadists. Ideally, this would mean Muslims demonstrating en masse all over the world against the violence carried out in the name of their religion.

    Moderate Islam must be honest enough to admit that Islam has been used in a violent manner at several stages in history to seek domination over others. Insisting that all acts in Islamic history and all current Shariah teachings are peaceful is a form of deception that makes things worse by failing to acknowledge the existence of the problem.

    Mr. Hamid, a former member of the Islamic radical group Jamma Islamiya, is an Islamic reformer and a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

    Mystics, Modernists and Literalists

    By Akbar Ahmed

    In the intense discussion about Muslims today, non-Muslims often say to me: “You are a moderate, but are there others like you?”

    Clearly, the use of the term moderate here is meant as a compliment. But the application of the term creates more problems than it solves. The term is heavy with value judgment, smacking of “good guy” versus “bad guy” categories. And it implies that while a minority of Muslims are moderate, the rest are not.

    Having studied the practices of Muslims around the world today, I’ve come up with three broad categories: mystic, modernist and literalist. Of course, I must add the caveat that these are analytic models and aren’t watertight.

    Muslims in the mystic category reflect universal humanism, believing in “peace with all.” The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi exemplifies this category. In his verses, he glorifies worshipping the same God in the synagogue, the church and the mosque.

    The second category is the modernist Muslim who believes in trying to balance tradition and modernity. The modernist is proud of Islam and yet able to live comfortably in, and contribute to, Western society.

    Most Muslim leaders who led nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century were modernists—from Sultan Mohammed V, the first king of independent Morocco, to M.A. Jinnah, who founded Pakistan in 1947. But as modernists failed over time, becoming increasingly incompetent and corrupt, the literalists stepped into the breach.

    The literalists believe that Muslim behavior must approximate that of the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia. Their belief that Islam is under attack forces many of them to adopt a defensive posture. And while not all literalists advocate violence, many do. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Taliban belong to this category.

    In the Muslim world the divisions between the three categories I have delineated are real. The outcome of their struggle will define Islam’s fate.

    The West can help by understanding Muslim society in a more nuanced and sophisticated way in order to interact with it wisely and for mutual benefit. The first step is to categorize Muslims accurately.

    Mr. Ahmed, the former Pakistani ambassador to Britain, is the chair of Islamic studies at American University and author of “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam” (Brookings, 2010).

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703369704575461503431290986, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010