Moderate Muslims Abound

I have found the moderate Muslims!

According to a variety of Western politicians, bloggers, and experts, the “moderate Muslim” either does not exist, is endangered, is gutless, or is some combination of the three.

Peter King, a Representative of New York, has said he is disappointed that more Muslims didn’t express their outrage at 9/11. Geert Wilders, a vocal and – given his party’s small size – absurdly influential Dutch parliamentarian, has said there’s no such thing as a moderate Muslim. Blogs like Jihad Watch and Gates of Vienna attract a truly disturbing number of views and references (Breivik, anyone?), and, in the interest of timeliness, I saw this comment on The American Thinker posted just hours ago.

“…post 9/11 very few Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of searching for unicorns.”

I just realized – not only have I found moderate Muslims, I’ve also found unicorns. Call Ripley’s!

Ramsy Youssef is one of the moderate Muslims I found while researching a story on the New York Arab American Comedy Festival, which is in and of itself a hotbed of moderation. I asked him about jihad, a troubling word for New Yorkers.

“I think jihad has been translated through the media to mean terrorist attack. Jihad has been translated to mean holy war. When actually, Islamically, jihad means struggle. Trying to keep a relationship with God, trying to keep on time with your work schedule, trying to keep on time with your family and balancing all these things at once to a Muslim is jihad.”

(He's right, incidentally. Jihad is a permutation of the three letter radical jim ha daal (j,h,d) - one of its other permutations, ijtihad, refers to individual intellectual exertion in an effort to reconcile Islamic scripture with the world around us.)

Dean Obeidallah, the founder of the festival, is another moderate Muslim. Abbas Noori Abood, one of the participants, another. And so on and so forth.

The kicker? All these people live in the NY metropolitan area. They’ve been here the whole time, speaking out, making jokes, using comedy to try to bridge the gap between the real Islam, the Islam practiced by them as opposed to Al Qaida, and we, the viewers of the US media.

There are others like them…my friend Imran Battla, who was in the army, Salah A-Din (Saladin), who protected Jews and Christians from reprisals during the Crusades, the Yemeni soldier who greeted me at Sana’a’s airport two years ago and, upon hearing that I was Jewish, simply offered me a cup of coffee and said, “It takes all kinds,” my Arabic professors…my list of moderate Muslims is probably longer than the no-fly list.

Cat Stevens!

People like the commenter I quoted above are like a man searching for the glasses he's already wearing – the moderate Muslims they think don’t exist are right in front of them, all around them, their moderation rendering them almost invisible to an American public conditioned to look for a gun or a bomb whenever it hears an Arab name.

But people like Peter King and Geert Wilders, blogs like Jihad Watch and Gates of Vienna…they are deliberately spreading misinformation and hate. They are cherry-picking history, theology, and linguistics.

If anyone is really interested in seeing moderate Muslims, go to the festival.

Or better yet, just talk to a neighbor.

You might be surprised.