Why do moderate Muslim not speak up against extremists?
It is not enough to say Islamists are a minority when those who oppose them refuse to confront them in public.
Buckle up. It is time to address the indelicate question of why moderate Muslims rarely speak up against their more extremist co-religionists. Some of the answers are not going to make people happy, and for that I am not sorry.
We all know the routine. Some provocateur burns a Quran or draws a picture of the Prophet and then there are riots across the world, fatwas issued, and violence spilling into the streets. Where are all these supposed moderate Muslims condemning these extremists as they run amok?
Against these violent protests we are offered the lazy consolation that most Muslims are moderate and that it is merely extremists behind the unrest. Those making this claim often carry the preternatural glow of people who cannot quite conceal that they are using evasion to obscure the truth.
Yes, the claim is not false, strictly speaking. Most Muslims are not violent. Yet the answer is morally evasive. It is a sleight of hand in which a different question is answered from the one being asked. The question here is not whether most Muslims are extremists; it is why moderate Muslims so rarely confront those who are.
This is not a question asked with malice, but with urgency. Islamism is the world’s most durable, lethal, and adaptive political ideology. It survives military defeat, thrives in exile, metastasizes online, and radicalizes in prisons, mosques, and universities. As it does so, vast numbers of self-described “moderate Muslims” remain silent, defensive, or evasive.
The reasons are manifold and often contradictory, because many things can be true at once—lest we descend into postmodern lunacy and conclude that nothing is true at all.
Fear of violence is the most obvious reason many moderates remain quiet. Those fortunate enough never to have encountered violence often fail to appreciate how life-altering it can be. Some physical wounds never heal, and even when they do, psychological scars can remain permanent. Wanting to avoid such a fate may not satisfy romantic notions of heroism, but it is understandable—especially when family members are at risk. Violence is an extraordinarily effective deterrent.
Violence also produces a secondary effect: silence. When people do not speak out, a corrosive normalization of appeasement sets in. Communities learn to self-censor, to avoid naming problems, and to retreat into euphemism. Over time, language itself decays. Jihad becomes “militancy,” Sharia enforcement becomes “conservatism,” and pogroms become “cycles of violence.” Fear has already imposed a de facto blasphemy regime across much of Europe. When fear governs speech, truth becomes optional.
Then there is the matter of theological ambiguity, which is a polite way of saying that many moderate Muslims do not know how to address the fact that much of their religion contains violence. That claim will cause offence, but it must be addressed directly, along with the considerable nuance it requires.
