Islam's Silent Majority

Opinion Journal ^ | 08/09/2002 | ROBERT ASGHAR

[Pokey78]

Innocents are killed in Murree, Pakistan, at a school that I visited from time to time as a teenager. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl loses his life in Karachi, a town that was once my home. And an Islamabad church is attacked, just a few miles away from another previous home. In each incident, the name of Allah is invoked. The question is then asked once again: Is Islam a religion of peace?

[stalin]

kick out those who preach a more violent version of the faith

that would be great but how ? anyone that as much as speaks against them in their community is murdered.

[PoisedWoman]

But let the graceful image of Prophet Mohammed, depicted by scholars such as Huston Smith, become the normative one for Muslims and Westerners alike

Huston Smith's writings on pink-cloud Islam is responsible for much liberal mushy thinking on the topic. He's incapable of seeing the dark coulds gathering, but he is revered by the leftie New Age "lightseekers."

[bjcintennessee]

We heard too many tales of American Islamists cheering on 9-11 for us to consider them as "moderate" or cowardly in their faith. If extremist Catholics or Protestants had performed such a horrific act in the name of their religion, none of us would have hestitated to step forward and loudly denounce such extremists. Too many Islamists either cheered, or remained silent for us not to question where their loyalties lie.

Islamists who were born here, or have lived here any length of time, know that they would not be murdered in the U.S. for speaking out against, or even changing, their faith.

As for the graceful prophet Mohammed, he was a pedophile and a false prophet! I wonder how any rational adult could justify a man taking as one of his wives a six-year-old, yet graciously waiting until she was nine before he bedded her. In no society throughout history has such an atrocity been acceptable.

[fire_eye]

This wonderful peace-loving "silent majority" had better start ponying up the vipers who live among them, or the rest of us have no reason to assume that their "silence" means anything but tacit approval of said vipers.

[truth_seeker]

Most Muslims are in fact both moderate and cowardly, but perhaps understandably so; they are buffeted by bullying forces unlike anything we know.

I give the writer credit for taking his position. As perhaps a newer American, he probably doesn't recognize the risks taken by whites, for many decades, to eventually stop slavery, and later to bring full rights to blacks.

More than a few gave their lives. Abolitionists were murdered for their views. So it isn't "unlike anything we know." It is "unlike" anything muslims apparently know, not "unlike" what Americans have known.

He is right about muslims being cowardly, however. Suicide-homicide bombings are cowardly. I doubt the faith has the correct moral and cultural basis, for self-examination, and reformation. Too busy blaming others, eg. Jews and Americans.