Comments on: Are “moderate” Muslims mum when they should speak out?

By: fern

fern — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:49:16 +0000

Have they been speaking out - of course they have. Has the media given them sufficient coverage - there’s the problem. There’s no sensationalism in moderates making reasonable statements. There’s a natural incentive to highlight the extremes because that is what people pay attention to and thus raise ratings.

Just compare the ratings of shows on PBS where reasonable people sit around and talk even disagree in measured ways against shows that highlight people shouting, interrupting and castigating someone on the other side of a question.

By: Tom Heneghan

Tom Heneghan — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:05:52 +0000

Rahma, I agree with your hesitation, which is why I put the word moderate in quotation marks. This is a term borrowed from political reporting and it just doesn’t fit some religious situations. But lacking better terms, journalists sometimes end up using it anyway. “Moderate” can be used in another context, too, where the writer is setting up the litmus tests you mention. That’s something different from the linguistic problem I’m talking about here.

This is not just a problem when we write about Islam. Describing the various shades of Christians can also be a challenge, but Islam’s different cultural background does make it more complicated. Western languages don’t seem to have enough suitable terms to express what we’re trying to say. Does anyone out there know if Arabic, Urdu or Farsi fare better here?

By: rahma

rahma — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:24:13 +0000

Several prominent muslims have spoken on these issues lately, not least among them Sheikh Hamza Yusuf - http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfai th/guestvoices/2007/12/the_real_teddy_be ar_tragedy.html - and Imam Zaid Shakir- http://www.newislamicdirections.com/nid/ notes/the_teddy_bear_crisis/.

I hesitate to use the word moderate because it’s not well defined. Moderation in what sense, that one ignores aspects of the religion that may be distasteful to westerners? That one drinks alcohol? That one rejects hijab? That one agrees with “the west” in terms of politics and policy? That one dresses oneself in ashen sack clothes and goes out into the street, tearing out their hair every time a muslim somewhere does something stupid? Reading the news these last few years, all of these have been used as the litmus test for determining who is a moderate and who is not.

By: ReligionWriter

ReligionWriter — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:19:55 +0000

I think as journalists we have to decide when to pull the plug on reporting on old standbys. Have moderate Muslims spoken out against terrorism? Yes. Did the Armenian genocide happen? Yes. Do vaccines cause autism? No.

The glaring fact in this case, of course, is that British Muslims took a lead in securing the teachers release.

So you make an excellent point: Maybe it’s time to start distinguishing among Muslims– be they from Australia or Saudi or Britian — rather than ask the false question, “Where are all the moderate Muslims?” For one thing, just look on Facebook…