Not long ago I wrote a brief article for the Huffington Post entitled “What’s in a Name: What’s Wrong With “Radical Islamic Extremism” (Huff Post Religion, December 11, 2015) in which I argued that we should avoid the terms “radical Islam” and “Muslim extremism” as a shorthand for the violent actions of intolerant and exclusivist Muslim bad actors like the murderers responsible for the killings in San Bernardino and the Pulse night club. I argued that using the term “radical Islam” to describe such heinous acts implies that Islam is at its root violent and intolerant. Similarly, to call someone a “Muslim extremist” implies someone who has taken the religion of Islam to its final end. Therefore, using “Muslim extremism” to refer to violent organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIL, implies that they are the inevitable result of tendencies encoded within Islam’s DNA. I argued that this terminology thereby defames the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are peaceful, tolerant, and decent human beings. Given the current climate in which the fear of Muslims and Islam has become a staple of political discourse, so much so that attempts are underway to ban Muslims from particular countries from entering the United States, I feel obligated to return to that topic once again and argue that we fundamentally re-examine the question of “religious extremism.”
I write this having just returned from the weekly peaceful political rally protesting the Trump administration at the town square of my hometown of Mt. Vernon. Ohio—a town that, by the way, voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Our small band of about 100 protestors, which included people who identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists, was taunted the entire time by a handful of counter-demonstrators with a huge placard proclaiming “Jesus is the Standard.” One held a sign proclaiming “Jesus is the Way and the Light—Not Allah.” Another stood on a platform atop a minivan with a bull-horn spewing hate speech about Muslims. He warned of a coming Islamic takeover of America and the imposition of “shari’a law,” going so far as to identify and verbally intimidate an individual Muslim among the protesters. These persons’ actions were indeed hateful. I would never think of calling them “radical Christians” or “Christian extremists.” If I was to use such terms I would rather apply them to those “radical Christians” who have instead shown up weekly at our town square to protest the banning of refugees, the denial of climate change, and the general scapegoating of “the Other.” And in that same sense, I might also point out the presence of “radical” Jews, Muslims and humanists among us as well.
Unfortunately, the term “religious extremist” is generally used not to celebrate those who take their faith to the extreme by standing up for the powerless and downtrodden and proclaiming love and hope over fear and division. It is instead used to refer to the most puritanical, misogynist, homophobic, violent and intolerant expressions of religious piety. That does a disservice to the great majority of people of faith who have discovered at their root of their religious traditions the simple affirmation that we must love and serve humanity.
In my experience, the problem with “religious extremism,” in the negative way it which it is commonly used, is not an excess of religion, but rather a lack of humanity. The Christians who taunted us at the town square did not do so because of something essential and undeniable in the Christian faith. They did so because they refused to recognize the humanity of those with whom they disagreed. When Serbian militias slaughtered Muslims in the former Yugoslavia it was not because of something cancerous at the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy. They did so because they no longer saw their Muslim neighbors as equally human. When Buddhist nationalists attack Rohingya Muslims or Hindu mobs burn the shops of Muslim merchants their extreme actions are not rooted in their Buddhist or Hindu religions. The same is true for Islam. The problem with those Muslims who understand their faith as being primarily about exclusion, rather than inclusion; who commit acts of violence against those with whom they disagree; who proclaim themselves as the sole purveyors of religious truth is that they have willing ignored the calls within their own tradition to recognize the humanity of “the Other”—the stranger, the gharib— and treat them with love and respect.
Too many of the people who demand that we use the term “radical Muslims” to describe intolerant, violent adherents to Islam do so because they wish to locate the roots of that intolerance and violence within the religion itself. In so doing they hope to spread the idea that Islam is something to fear. If Islam itself is the problem it might somehow make sense to ban entire Muslim populations, including refugees, from entry into the United States. If Islam, itself, is dangerous it might somehow be morally acceptable to detain children and the elderly in our airports, or deny visa holders the ability to travel and visit family members in their countries of origin, or prevent students, teachers and researchers from coming to our colleges and universities As a Muslim I find this personally insulting, deeply unfair and more than little frightening. It feels like an attack on me, my family and my Muslim friends and co-workers. As a social scientist who studies Islam, I see no particularly good reason to use the terms “radical Muslim” and “Muslim extremist” because they cover more than they reveal. In the wrong hands these terms are too often used to invoke fear of the larger Muslim community. Of course, all of us—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—should wholeheartedly and unequivocally condemn acts of violence and terror committed by Muslim bad actors. In fact, such condemnations by Muslims happen all the time but are seldom reported in the press. The Muslims I know are, for the most part, kind, loving, humane people who are too often rendered invisible by the minority, who have become violently extreme in their behavior not because they are somehow more faithful to Islam but are instead lacking in humanity. We should be careful to use language that does not further hide them from our view.