Resonse to the 'Looking Back' and 'Re-making Islam' postings

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Jan 2, 2011 at 14:40

The statistics on Dr Pipes website do not include how many posts have generated 112,000 comments and 60 million page visits, but I wonder if even one of those postings has given ANY significant content to his premise that there is such a thing as "moderate" Islam , and if so what its content would be as an opposition ideology to Radical Islam (which quite a few of us think is the real and only authentic Islam).

This seems surprising, since the overwhelming weight of his posts seem to be an articulate, scholarly, logical, and evidence-based indictment of Islam itself …… except for the detail that Pipes characterizes them as an indictment only of "radical" Islam rather than the religion itself.

Can it be that Dr. Pipes thinks that mere opposition to "Islamism" is all by itself an ideology that can be called "moderate' Islam? Without any affirmative content at all?

If Pipes thinks Islam can be doctrinally "remade', what are the materials for that remaking if Islam has never shown any doctrines that are analogous to the extensive human-centered doctrines to be found in both the Old and New testaments of the Christian bible, and in the Torah derived from the Jewish bible (the O.T.)?

Put another way, what would be an example of what-is-left if all the intolerant and supremacist statements in the Koran are removed, or "rethought"?

Given the radically different content and tenor of their respective remarks about Islam, it seems almost incredible that Dr Pipes and President Obama are much closer in their conclusions and hopes about the religion of Islam than Dr Pipes is with Robert Spencer, Ayaan Ali, and others who hold no hope than Islam can be reformed and whose work he admires and supports …. except for their final conclusion.

Dr Pipes discusses how pleased he is that his posts do not end up "wrapping fish but become a living archive."

But if it becomes inevitable that we in the West do have to face the fact that the world is not big enough for both a religion of militant hate and the values of the West, then surely this archive will look a little strange to future historians if its author could somehow never align himself with the logic of all his own writings.

Ron Thompson

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