Struggle to Strengthen Muslim Moderates Is Today's Real Battleground, Says Scholar of Islam
Washington, September 10, 2003 --The real battle of the 21st century is not a "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and the West, but competing visions within different religious groups as to whether they want a flexible, pluralist culture, or a more rigid religious and social order, says Dr. John Voll, professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University.
Voll, also associate director of Georgetown's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, told the IRP Fellows in International Journalism that he had just returned from Jakarta, Indonesia. He said mainstream Muslim groups there are worried that small terrorist splinter groups there are tainting the West's perception of that country's larger, more moderate Islamic parties that have as many as 100 million adherents.
"The real danger is in locking Islam into a single box," said Voll, the author of several books on Islam, including Islam and Democracy and Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World. In fact, Voll said, as is true of Judaism and Christianity, Islam allows for variation in both interpretation and practice. While acknowledging that there are verses in the Koran that permit killing, Voll said many Christians forget that analogous passages also exist in the Bible.
Voll outlined different schools of Islamic legal thought to illustrate that it's possible to both define "an authentic, legitimately Islamic democracy" and at the same time "a persuasively Islamic autocracy." Voll said that journalists play inordinate attention to small, Islamic terrorist groups while overlooking the much larger moderate groups and schools of Islam that renounce violence.
Voll said he didn't view the Bush administration as declaring war on Islam. Nevertheless, he believes that using phrases such as "clash of civilizations" to describe post-September 11th actions make many Muslims believe that America is specifically targeting the Islamic world. He said "it is not a very good sign for the future" that the United States is aligning itself with religious conservatives in both Saudi Arabia and Israel.
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