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Constancio Asumen, Jr.
The Myth of Moderate Islam
November 6, 2009

This piece was originally written as a series of email messages to Ziba, a non-Moslem Iranian colleague in Graduate School who was then living in Houston but has now moved back to Iran.(Farid who is referred to in the text was her husband and my classmate and closest friend and collaborator in most ventures.) It was initially triggered by my rejoinder to a Thomas Friedman Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on Moslem Moderates in Iran.

I have endeavored in vain to reformat it as an essay for general publication. I now realize that the difficulty stems from my inability to recapture my intensely passionate emotional makeup when the piece was originally written.

With Iran being in the crosshairs of international concerns and the preponderance of what I dub the Repugnant Obama Paradigm, which includes, inter alia, the recent groveling and pandering of this White House towards the Moslem world, I deem it essential to share the sentiments herein with as wide a public as I can possibly reach.  

I therefore solicit your indulgence and present the original piece in its entirety, neurotic trappings included.

*******

By now I gathered from your messages that you are pretty much disappointed with the websites I routinely visit and the tendencies I’m inclined to read and indulge my fancy at. I know that you know that you are not alone in that regard. Since quite a few of my messages were left unanswered, I don’t know where to begin. 

Let’s start with the question of moderate Moslems: where are they, what are they doing a propos of the Jihad that is unleashed at the West, what is the most likely influence they will have in the direction and outcome of conflict resolution.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument that they exist. I submit to you that to the extent that they are silent on the issues, they render themselves irrelevant to the process, let alone to its outcome. The silent majority become de facto collaborators to the factions that drive the events that set the agenda.

I have to concede: my over all knowledge of Islam is limited to a one-semester course on the Cultural History of Islam in the Philippines. This is supplemented, perhaps by three semesters of working as a Research Assistant to a professor doing her doctoral desertion on the subject. I therefore would not presume to give an analysis of the various sects of and tendencies in Islam to probe into and prove or disprove were moderation lies.

Rather, I’d propose to speak from real life experience with our version of Islam in the Philippines. Admittedly, this experience is not as extensive as yours. Garnered between the ages of 18 and 29, I submit to you however, that it is equally instructive and diverse: as a student, an office worker, a manual laborer, and a faculty member in a prestigious university. I had classmates, professors and students who were Moslems.

I have shared working and lodging quarters with both the politically active and the completely apolitical. I had argued with them, fought with them, played with them, joked with them, negotiated with them, lobbied with them. At one point I even fancied romantically courting one of them. I had my life and limb threatened on more than one occasion resulting from differences in opinion on rules of procedures in Student Government elections.

The conclusion gleaned from this experience, as obtains in the Philippines, at least: there are no radical and moderate doctrines of Islam.  There are only varying degrees of adherence to the same doctrine. This distinction is by no means academic.

It is one thing to have an institutionalized deliberation of what the doctrine entails, teaches and promotes or prohibits, i.e., an institutionally conscious architecting of a belief structure and its societal and sociological implications. It is quite a different story to have individuals decide to adopt or discard certain parts of the doctrine as a matter of practical convenience.

The former is wont to produce religious/ideological enlightenment. The latter, more often than not, results in political and/or commercial opportunism and cultural relativism of the worst kind. In effect, the typical Moslem intellectual assumes a split identity: one when he is conscious of his adherence to Islam, (his “Islamhood” so to speak), and the other when he discards, wittingly or unwittingly, the religious affiliation and constraints.

To state it mildly and kindly, it is extremely difficult and problematic to make long-term programmatic political allies out of people with lukewarm convictions. They can reach out and deal with the outside world in a less than antagonistic manner only to the extent that they are able to transcend their identities as Moslems.

This translates into always having an ulterior motive in their dealings with the outside world, i.e., with the infidels such as you and me. Whatever alliance you made with them should be understood to be in the context of a specific set of circumstances.  Any bonding that ensues from such alliance is non-transferable to the next set of conditions.  In other words, you cannot expect any form of loyalty from them because you cannot expect that they will shed off, even temporarily, their Islamic identities for your sake.

When you are in conflict with any one of them the notion of who is at fault is decided by the fact that you are not one of them. You should not expect that any one of them would voluntarily look after your interest and intercede on behalf of objective facts of the conflict. When an atrocity is committed on someone who is not one of them, nobody protests, and nobody bears witness for the victim so the perpetrator is tolerated.

Incidentally, I should mention that the university where I studied and later worked in was established for the express purpose of promoting integration between the Moslems and the rest of the nation. When five Iranian students were robbed, murdered and mutilated in a nearby town, it was the non-Moslem constituents of the university who demanded that the local and provincial (roughly comparable to State here in the U.S.) authorities at the very least condemned the atrocious deed. The rest remained silent. Presumably those Iranians were not Moslems. Or if they were, not the version of Islam preached and practiced in the locality. Of course nobody got arrested or answered for what happened.

 It is entirely possible, indeed, I think it is most likely that the Islam practiced amongst the Iranians and the one practiced in the Philippines are different. I am not going to venture into the difference between the Sunni and the Shiite sects. That is completely beyond my domain.

I can say this for certain: of the different nationalities of Islamic cultural backgrounds I have been exposed to in Japan and here in the U.S., Filipinos (in general, and I in particular) seemed to have gotten along rather more easily with people from Iran and/or Turkey.  The fact that, by a confluence of circumstances, I got along well with Farid has very little influence in this observation. IF anything, it probably is an indirect result, or at least an illustration of its verity.

Conversely, we seemed to experience more difficulty with people from Pakistan. In fact at the Chiba Foreign Students College, there was open enmity between the Pakistanis and the Filipinos. Granted, this might have been caused by specific incidents. So let us put this aspect of the issue aside and refocus on the treatise of the article, which triggered all this.

Maybe it is true that Iran has all the socio-political institutions conducive to the emergence of an Islamic moderate as a political force. Indeed, there were reports of Candle Light vigils on the streets of Tehran in reaction to 9/11 as compared with celebratory dancing on the streets in the rest of the Middle East. More recent reports of anti-Taliban demonstrations in Tehran also reinforce this encouraging tendency.

Unfortunately, however, political ferment of the sort that can reverse the tide of ideology takes at least a generation to take hold. The terrorist network is actively waging a war on Western civilization now, ironically using some of the tools only Western civilization could conceivably produce.

Are we then to wait around for another generation of enlightened intellectuals to decide whether or not it is a war worth fighting and another generation to actually fight this war? Or shall we deny that there is a war being fought!   The events of 9/11 changed a lot of things. The principle of self-preservation was not one of them.

When somebody comes to my house to cut my throat, my first order of business is to prevent it from happening.  I’m not going to debate on the merits and causes and motives of the mission.  I can take care of that after the mission has been successfully foiled.  It is too late to prevent 9/11 from happening.  It is imperative that we deter the perpetrators from making a habit of it.

And here lies my quarrel with Islam. A crime has been committed in its name. Where is the rest of Islam to at least condemn the deed? Where is the outrage? It is not forthcoming. The rest of Islam, as a doctrine, is simply incapable of condemning it because it does not see it as a crime. It sees it as an achievement in the name of Islam, something worthy of a jubilant celebration.   I definitely am not one of those who would argue that there is the slightest possibility to justify or explain away 9/11.

The role of American Moslems needs to be looked into in this connection. The only protest I have come across from that community is about its being victimized, resultant to, or as a “fallout” of 9/11.  In a way this is understandable if pathetically pathological in its absurdity.  It stresses the fact that this would be the last place to look for Islamic moderates.

At this juncture, I contend, assert and maintain that to convert into Islam from religions associated with the Judeo-Christian cultural traditions is a definite act of intellectual regression. The fact that geographically and historically Islamic cultures have been associated with repressive governments is no accident of history. It is rooted on the proscription of the notion of Free Will from the tenets of Islam that makes its adherents exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to fear and repression.

Conversely, the assimilation of the concept of Free Will into the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity has undeniably made these religions hospitable and conducive to the flourishing of liberty and kindred values associated with democratic cultures and institutions. This in and of itself makes the latter religions decisively superior to Islam.

It was the liberation of the power of the mind from the clutches of ignorance and religious dogma that propelled Western Civilization, as we know it. Converting into Islam is tantamount to renouncing the benefits of the ages of reformation, renaissance and enlightenment.  One must have been utterly and completely disenfranchised from such traditions to be an Islamic convert.

I think I have spoken my peace or have beaten this horse dead many times over.


About Constancio Asumen, Jr.

Mr. Asumen has most recently assumed the responsibilities of Chairman-of-the-Board for ACE LILACS, a budding startup venture in the marketplace of ideas.  The list of previous vocations he had engaged in before this, includes being a farmer, fisherman, stevedore, national scholar, college professor, journeyman laborer, freelance scribe, typesetter, proofreader, systems analyst, software developer, cab driver, etc. He holds a masters degree in Mineral Science & Technology (1973, Kyoto University) with a major in Exploration Geophysics. Somewhat of the quintessential Ivy League under-achiever, he is an embodiment of the can-do attitude so prevalent amongst most first generation Americans. He is an ardent adherent to the tenet that anything worth doing is worth doing well. Mr. Asumen maintains a website here.