Hi Hubski,
with the recent surge of events related to extremism related to Islam and somebody's Jihad, a local politician (with whom I usually disagree) raised an interesting point that I'd like to forward for comment to you guys.
Many think - including me - that indeed the vast majority of Islam and of the "muslim community" in general is made of moderate, anti-violence, and civil human beings that just want to live their life as anybody else.
This obviously implies that only a tiny proportion of muslims are also Islamists. Given the latter's propensity toward a staggering combination of social media communication and extreme physical violence, it is clear that their "voice" is the one we all hear the most.
Yet, and here I get back to the initial proposition that one politician made, it appears that the "vast majority of muslims" are extremely timid in condemning, opposing, isolate the extremist part of their community. I think most would agree that we did not see popular protests in the Islamic community, strong voices coming from muslims worldwide against these acts of terrors. Please note I am not saying there are no such positions (the very governments that most suffers from these acts are openly fighting terrorism - e.g. Iran and even the all-but-moderated fundamentalist government of Saudi Arabia).
However, these positions are somewhat underwhelming in terms of strength, at least communicatively speaking. They are certain much less hearable, by several orders of magnitude, than the extremists'.
This, I think, may be due to a few, non mutually-exclusive factors:
- The relative measure of moderated muslims over Islamists stated above is incorrect, and the moderated part of Islam is -in absolute terms- much less prominent than many would think.
- Because the muslim society operates over different "social rules" than western societies, the idea itself of "social protesting" or "community position" does not exist. Therefore, measuring moderateness in the muslim community by the strength of its voice is misleading.
- The western media is actively ignoring those voices, not putting them upfront, in favour of the latest beheading or explosion.
The question of interest here is therefore: "What forces or conditions make the moderated Islam only so timidly opposing the more extremist and violent Islam?"