Islam’s silent majority: moderate voices drowned out by extremists

Muslim scholars are also not in agreement on the authority of the holy text. Salafists claim that the apparent meaning of the Quran must be followed. Other schools of thought believe that this very simplistic view collides with the long historical distance between the revelation of the Quran and today, which makes the interpretation of the Quran difficult and requiring great expertise.

Many Muslim scholars, such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Muhammad Arkoun, Abdol Karim Soroush, and Mujtahid Shabistari, believe that the Quran is not the words of Allah directly, but rather is the expression of Muhammad from his spiritual experience. For Muslims, this opinion opens the door for criticism of holy text and allows them to not obey parts of the Quran that are considered historical and not belonging to the core of Islam.

The same situation exists in dealing with Islamic history and tradition. For example, many Muslims do not consider the Islamic conquests that occurred after Muhammad as a religious action and criticize them strongly.

Is sharia law dangerous?
When people hear the term sharia law, what springs to mind are images of beheading, stoning, lashing, and amputations in the name of Islam. While these do form a small part of sharia, again there exists a wide diversity of interpretations of sharia law among Muslims.

Sharia law includes the religious lifestyle of Muslims in both personal and social spheres. A significant part of it is acts of worship, personal status law, and other regulations, including dietary restrictions concerning food and drink.

Sharia’s most controversial element is the Islamic punishment law, which not all Muslims agree on. Some Muslim sects like Ismailism believe that sharia law is no longer valid. For them, sharia is just the ethical principles of Islam, which are mostly the same as other religions.

Many other scholars, not just today but even in the first centuries of Islam, believe that wide sections of sharia are not essential parts of Islam and can be disregarded — just as happened with the Jewish Torah, which is not dissimilar to its Islamic equivalent. The traditional Shi’ite opinion is that their imams have banned the political and juridical parts of sharia, and no-one has the authority to revive these laws today.

What is agreed is that an overwhelming majority of the Muslim population has nothing to do with terrorism. However, they are under pressure from small but powerful extremist groups and religious regimes. The silent majority of Muslims therefore shouldn’t be blamed for these people; they are instead victims of radical Islam themselves.

Islam should not be considered from the perspective of fundamentalism as, in the end, this will strengthen the extremists’ position. Rather, it should be understood by opening a dialogue, supporting, and co-operating with the moderates who offer a different understanding of Islam.

Ali Mamouri is Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).