On Sunday evening, President Obama broke into the big football game to announce that he had finally discovered that Islam can be perverted. He finally admitted that “an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities” and called on Muslim leaders to “speak out against not just acts of violence, but also against those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.”
Then his newfound revelation faded, and he told Americans to stop worrying about Islam. “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country,” Obama explained. “It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose.”
Meanwhile, in London, a man with a machete stabbed three people at a London subway station. As the police wrestled the man to the ground, a bystander shouted, “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv, you ain’t no Muslim.”
Any religion is capable of perversion. But that isn’t the question. The question is how deep the perversion runs.
That phrase was soon trending across Twitter. The Prime Minister of Britain came out and praised the passerby, as though he’d done anything other than yell a politically correct slogan: “Let me also pay credit to the person – you can’t quite see who it is from that film – who made that brilliant statement about, er, ‘you ain’t no Muslim.’ Some of us have dedicated speeches and media appearances and soundbites and everything to this subject. But ‘you ain’t no Muslim bruv’ said it all much better than I ever could. Thank you because that will be applauded around the country.”
Herein lies the problem.
Obama is exactly right that a perverse interpretation of Islam – whether a perversion of Islam or not, the interpretation itself is morally perverse – now runs through parts of the Muslim world. But by “othering” that interpretation, by pretending that it exists only for a tiny share of the world’s Muslims, by suggesting that Americans ought not worry about unvetted people of Islamic background entering the country, Obama undercuts his own call for change in the Muslim world. The same is true of the Twitterers and David Cameron, who latched onto the words of the London bystander: it’s not their job to change Islam. In fact, they’re incapable of doing it. It’s the job of Muslims to change Islam, or at least to moderate other Muslims.
The fact is that the Muslim terrorist on the ground in London is Muslim, just as Jewish terrorists who kill Palestinians are Jewish and Christian terrorists who kill abortion doctors are Christian. Any religion is capable of perversion. But that isn’t the question. The question is how deep the perversion runs. The reason people around the world don’t have stereotypical views of violent Christianity is because that stereotype would be founded in falsity – only a minute percentage of Christians engage in terroristic violence. The same is true for Judaism.
But with Islam, it isn’t. The stereotype can be exaggerated, utilized in negative ways. But the stereotype exists because a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s Muslims believe extreme things, and a wildly disproportionate share engage in horrific acts of violence based on those beliefs. It’s not the job of the West to downplay that, although we shouldn’t exaggerate the threat. It’s the job of Muslims to fight that tendency.
Pretending that the tendency doesn’t exist, or that it’s at best a fringe issue, provides cover for the true radicals. We can encourage other Muslims to speak up against radical Islam, but it is the purest form of paternalism to pretend that non-Muslims can convince Muslims as to what form of their religion they practice. Yes, brother, that man on the ground is a Muslim, by any measure; yes, President Obama, the San Bernardino terrorists were Muslim. Denying those facts takes the burden from where it belongs – on those who can actually achieve change, namely other Muslims – and shifts it to those who can’t do anything about the radicalization of those within Islam. In the end, radical Islam won’t be defeated by Westerners fighting Islamophobia any more than violent Christianity of the Middle Ages was defeated by kindness from Jews. Radical Islam will be defeated only when other Muslims quash it.