Is there a Moderate Form of Political Islam?

[Leonardo17]

It appears it is not true that there is no moderate Islam.   There certainly was,  but its moderation did it no good against European colonialism and as a result it fell out of grace against more vigorously grass root anti-colonial fundamentalist revival movements of the 19th century. 

Islam actually did mellow out in good parts of the Islamic world from 13-18th century, for example in the modern Indonesian peninsular,   Where arrival of Islam not only didn’t lead to women having to go about about wearing face covering, but they in fact customarily went about topless, and foreign traders from Europe, India, China, etc. commented on the forgiving social moral and very friendly local women.

Modern conservative fundamentalist Islam arose partly out of ulema of Ahl-i Hadith anti-colonial movement against the Dutch in the East Indies in the late 18th and 19th century.     The author Simon Winchester also posited a strong Dutch East Indies link to the near simultaneous rise of anti-colonial Islamic revivalist movements such as Salaffya movement in Arabia.

The rise and strengthening of Islamic fundamentalist movements as a anti-colonial response in the 18-19 century will find a replay in the 20th century, as a seemingly more vigorous and grass route response to the failure of modernist secularist pan-Arab movements failure to deal with what is perceived as symbol of continued modern European colonial domination of the Islamic world symbolized by the imposition of the state of Israel.

I think I agree with that. Nicole Kidman has a very nice movie called “Queen of the Desert” on the life of Gerthrude Bell (traveler, Writer and Archaeologist) and the movie reminds me of the life of Lawrence of Arabia. Both the movie and the writings of Lawrence of Arabia give us a good snapshot of the middle-east at the beginning or before European colonialism.
 

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   These were at that time (the beginning of the 20th century) rather noble people with their own set of belief systems who might have been very conservative in relationships to their cultural values, but still very tolerant with regards to the culture and beliefs of others.
 
   There was no religious tensions in any part of the entire middle-East in that era or in any era after the conquering of these regions by Muslim caliphs in the middle-ages. Just one example of that: When the Muslim Kingdom of Granada fell in 1492, the Sephardic Jews who were expulsed from the Iberian Peninsula were welcomed by the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II to simply come and settle in Constantinople (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_an...guese_Jews). Before him, his father Mehmed II who conquered Constantinople went to the Church of Hagia Sophia were Byzantine citizens had gathered hoping for some sort of miracle and told them they had become his subjects now and that he would guarantee and protect the lives and property of his new subjects.
 
   So that’s our “moderate” or classical Islamic rulers of the past.
 
   What happened than was perhaps the expansion of Western rationalism and modernism to the rest of the world. And this did have some impact on other typical Muslim scholars. Like the father of the IRI Mr. Ruhullah Humeyni. I once saw a documentary about this guy. He was a great scholar. He invested a lot of his time in understanding religious texts etc. so he came out with the most brilliant of all ideas: An Islamic social contract.
 
   The problem with this was that this was already tried by those before him. In a bid to save the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th / early 20th century. Our rulers at the time tried to promote something called pan-Islamism. One of the reason why the Germans became our allies in WWI was that they were hoping to harness the power of the Caliph which was the Ottoman ruler at the time… And it didn’t work. Corrupt Ottoman officials were treating Arabs very badly and all Arabs turned against their “Caliph” during WWI so the control of all these territories went to the French and British which they liked (and still like) more than us.
 
   And then (and I am going to finish with this) there was the 20th century. The simplicity and innocence of common people sort of died in that era. And this happened all over the world. People started to have ideologies instead of religious dogmas and moral values. Things like fascism, populism, populist interpretations of nationalism, and populist forms of communism started to emerge. Kadafi was a socialist of some sort. The Baas regime of Irak and Syria were close allies of Moscow with a seemingly “socialist” ideology.
 
   The Salafist / Wahabi ideology is also something like that. One element that proves that is the murder of Jamal Kassogi in 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi). The way I see it, those Arab Monarchies are not just some USA and Israel friendly monarchies in oil producing regions. Although it’s not as obvious as the IRI or the Taliban, they have their Ego-based political agendas too. They are working to spread their version of Islam in the African sub-continent + in place like Malaysia etc. they are promoting the wearing of the Hijab and are openly backing political İslamist government to promote their interpretation of Islam.
 
   So again, If our earlier rulers were somehow alive today, these would be things they they would not really tolerate
 
   Another point of imperialism: Imperialists like these people. People who turn their own population into complete idiots by the use of some twisted interpretation of religious values are a gift to imperialists (like China for instance – and also earlier European imperialists as well). Once the population is ignorant and stupid you can just forge relation with the aristocracy or oligarchy. Then you sell finished consumer goods to the rich and you make the poor local work in deplorable conditions and take away all the natural resource back to your home country and develop your industries even further.
 
   This is a bit harsh, but this is a scheme that Russia is currently using in several parts of Western and central Africa.
 

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   So as a person of faith, I like to remind people that all of this is complete B.S., that religion and spirituality is and can only be a personal path which is supposed to support one person (and that’s you) in his/her quest of trying to understand some inner realities (in which we all believe as theists around the world).
 
 

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BrianBoru:

But the converse is not necessarily true. Because authoritarians intimidate people via displays of weaponry doesn’t mean that anyone who does so is an authoritarian.

I am talking about populism in general and political Islam in particular. I am saying that this is a typical feature. We are talking about an ideology that does not want women to be seen. It’s an ideology that says LGBTQ+ people should not even exist. It’s also an ideology that abortion pills is a crime against God. (And yes: They are not that different from some Fundamentalist groups in the US and/or populist conservative in countries like Poland).

 

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   These are things we already all know about political Islamists. What I want to show is how low they can get. In this geography (Turkey): These guys were against everything “modern” and that includes the secular form of government as well. We were the ones who invested in these technologies and they were even opposed to that from the very beginning. Yet, he sees no problem in getting into one of these Kaan airplanes and have his pictures displayed in that plain saying “see what I just did?”, “See what I just did?”.
 
   And as I said. The Justice and Development Party is supposed to be a “moderate conservative” political party. In reality, they are just a neo-fascist movement (some use the term Islamic fascism) that is undermining all of our freedoms and working to gradually overturn all the accomplishments of our now one century old republic.
 
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   So I am showing you an example on their way of doing things: Because there are (many) people who are stupid enough to believe that it was his political party that did this. These guys are even messing with our Universities and primary education system to create a less critical minded and more “pious” people (who won’t even be able to assemble a puzzle with the picture of this plain on it). SO that’s the typical populist hypocrisy. It’s a pattern you can observe in the IRI, or in Maduro, or in Jair Bolsonaro, or in Mr. Victor Orban.

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   Anomalocaris:

 
- Yes: That’s what I am talking about. If we want it to not end up becoming something even less useful than our older fleet of F-16’s, we’ll have to keep investing in it and work to make it even more efficient. That’s why I am tarring my hairs out here:
 
We were a part of the F-35 program. We had pilots who were being trained in the USA + we were producing key components of that airplane. So these were all know-hows and technologies we could have adapted to or integrated into the Kaan airplane.
 
+ It will be at least a whole decade before we are able to mass produce this airplane (and it is not a piece of Junk, Countries like Ukraine and Azerbaijan are already interested). Greece is getting its 40 F-35’s now.
 
So there is this difference between really boosting our defensive capacities and this populist “gas lighting” that is actually serving one purpose only: to get more fools to vote for the 73 year old president who is already winning all elections since 2001