The usual reply in arguments about Islam is that the people must change. They will, if they change. But, the people live inside institutions. The institutions pay the preacher, write the schoolbook, collect the zakat, license the “community” spokesman, and decide which verse is important and must be followed. Until those voices and proclamations change, sermons about moderate hearts are commentary.

Islamism understood this early. It is not a mood. It is the project that treats Islam as a constitution for the state. It built cadre schools, campus groups, charities, and mosque boards while most non-Islamist Muslims remained locally pious and politically quiet. There are more of the quiet than of the organizers. They know to start with the children, indoctrinate them, train them and discipline them.  The organizers, their institutions and supporters, hold the microphone.

Moderate Muslim/Islamist

“Moderate” is a test, not a compliment. A group that opposes ISIS and still will not say—in Arabic as well as English—no caliphate, no hudud* as public law, no punishment for apostasy, equal citizenship, and no partnership with Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood is not running a reform institution. It is running a public-relations office.

A Variety

The field is not one machine. Brotherhood-heritage groups in the West learned to speak civil rights. 

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and its education and youth arms are not Brotherhood chapters; they are the diplomatic average of fifty-seven governments. 

States are larger than all of them. Qatar and Turkey underwrite political Islam as soft power. Saudi Arabia built the old Salafi export and is now rewriting it into Islam that does not organize against monarchs—anti-Ikhwan, not liberal. 

Iran is a separate revolutionary factory. 

The UAE and post-2013 Egypt are already in the counter-Brotherhood column. 

A mosque can contain three of these at once: Saudi concrete (initial funding), a Qatari salary (ongoing support), and a Turkish channel (indoctrination and education parameters).

Bucking the System

That is why “join and change from within” almost never works against a cadre payroll. The Brotherhood practiced entryism. Doing it in reverse requires people orthodox enough to be hired and anti-Islamist enough to matter. Those people get frozen out. Reform clubs write declarations. They do not run Saturday schools.

Where to Begin

Start where power was built. Stop treating one set of Western groups as “the community.” Pressure OIC bodies as states, not as sects. Build schools and chaplaincies, not only think tanks. Use the mass traditions that already fight political Islam at home—above all Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama**—rather than inventing a denomination from op-eds. Tell quiet mosque-goers from organizers. Map the funder and the theology, not the name on the door.

People will fill whatever institution still writes the check. Change the check.

(more on this topic will be written in the near future)

by

Thomas Balderston, Author and Blogger

Notes:

•  Hudud – Fixed, divinely ordained punishments, defined in the Quran and Hadith (Islamic texts) for specific crimes considered violations of Allah’s limits. (boundaries)

** Nahdlatul Ulama – (NU) is the largest Islamic organization in the world, with an estimated membership of over 90 million people in Indonesia. “NU’s religious views are considered “traditionalist” in that it accepts local cultural traditions that do not conflict with Islamic law….It has been described by Western media as a progressive, liberal, and pluralistic Islamic movement,  but is a diverse organization with large conservative factions, as well.” – from Wikipedia