Surprised Pipes has no complaints about Goodman's distinction between Islamism and Islam

Submitted by traeh (United States), Dec 4, 2006 at 03:53

Daniel Pipes in a New York Sun article of July 11, "What British Muslims Think," summed up the results of a number of polls of U.K. Muslims:

In sum, more than half of British Muslims want Islamic law and 5% endorse violence to achieve that end. These results demonstrate that Britain's potential terrorists live in a highly nurturing community.

If half of U.K. Muslims prefer Shar'ia law to democratic institutions and civil liberties, doesn't that make the distinction between Islamism and Islam a dubious one? The distinction between Islam and Islamism usually depends on the polite assumption that Islamists/extremists constitute only a tiny minority of Muslims. But if more than half of British Muslims support Shar'ia law and provide a "highly nurturing community" for potential terrorists, how can we legitimately speak of a "true," moderate Islam that the vast majority of Muslims supposedly believes in, and pretend there is this distortion called "Islamism" that is supported only by a tiny extremist minority?

Thus Islam and Islamism are more integrally related than Goodman suggests in the quoted speech, and I don't understand why Daniel Pipes offers no objections to that. Isn't this just perpetuating a myth, when what is needed is to open eyes to facts so they can be dealt with adequately?

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