Where Are The Moderate Muslims?

With headlines full of extremists in all quarters, the question is often asked, where are the moderates—especially in the Muslim world?

Yet I suspect that many who puzzle and pontificate over these “missing moderates” aren’t looking very hard. 

Have they talked with their own neighbors lately?  Recently I had a chance to meet one of mine, Imam Abdur Rauf, at the mosque just down the road from the church I serve as minister

The Iman invited clergy of all stripes to visit his community last month during Ramadan—the Jewish rabbi, the Episcopal priest, Quakers and Catholics—just to get acquainted.  So this morning, I reciprocated the invitation and asked the Iman to visit my church for a Sunday service.

A handsome, middle-aged man with dark vest and black taqiyah or skull cap, Abdur Rauf, I learned, was born in Spanish Harlem, but discovered Islam while studying geology at Cornell University.  At the Merrick Company where he currently works, Abdur Rauf is the chief scientist in charge of LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, analyzing digital data from satellites and translating these electronic bits into useful information about urban terrain and natural resources. In fact, I'm not sure just what he does, but he seems to know a lot more than me about lasers.

Not your typical Imam?

Spiritually, Abdur Rauf has been a leader and organizer of the Muslim Jewish Peace Walks which have taken place in many major cities around America—which began following 9/11 seeking a rapprochement among tribes of Moses and Mohammed, but now attract Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and other people of faith seeking non-violent solutions to world conflict.

Again, not your typical Imam? Abdur Rauf certainly breaks my stereotypes.  But then, how many of my stereotypes are based on media distortions and fear of the unknown rather than on the actual experience of meeting my neighbors and talking one-on-one?

I didn’t have to go far to find a moderate Muslim—indeed, just half a mile down the road, to the local mosque.  So maybe you might also try reaching out to that woman wearing the hijab (head scarf) or the man wearing the keffiyah (headdress)?  Where there’s now a stranger with a funny hat, you just might find a friend.  And where you now find reasons for paranoia, you just might meet a moderate Muslim.

Have You Heard the One About the Polack?

I hadn’t been in Santa Fe more than two weeks. “I guess we won’t be telling many Polack jokes now,” one of the members of my new congregation quipped. I grinned and responded, “No, not telling many Chopin jokes either,” I remarked.

Of course I had to smile. To do otherwise would indicate I didn’t have any sense of humor. Dago jokes, kike jokes, nigger jokes, chink and wop jokes are considered to be in bad taste now. But somehow Polack jokes still pass under the radar.

Really, I consider myself more American than Polish. My father died when I was five, and I was never really encouraged to stay in touch with the Kowalski side of my family. Why should I? They were Polish.

They were Polacks, like Copernicus. Like Marie Curie. Like Joseph Conrad. Like Lech Walensa, the leader of Solidarity who as much as any single individual brought down the hegemony of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.

Or like Tadeusz Kościuszko, whose fortifications of Saratoga in New York during the American Revolution led to the defeat of the British General Burgoyne and the turning point in the colonists’ war for independence. 

I don’t even know where my father’s family originated in Poland. I’m a fully assimilated, non-ethnic, generic U.S. citizen. But I wish I knew more about my national heritage.

And I wish I didn’t feel still so small—belittled--whenever I hear a Polack joke.

Martin Luther Beck?

This past weekend, Glenn Beck preposterously claimed the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly afterward criticizing President Obama as a proponent of liberation theology rather than a “true” Christian.

Caricaturing the President’s beliefs, Beck explained, "You see, it's all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it," Beck said.

I wonder if Glenn Beck has ever read the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, like the one he delivered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954 titled “What Is Man?” where he proclaimed:

Any religion that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, and the economic order that cripples them, is a dry, passive do-nothing religion in need of new blood.  As I look at the social and economic injustices existing in our world, I plead for a church that shall be the fountainhead of a better social order. 

Sounds like Dr. King was concerned with oppressors and oppressed, even “collectivism” over individual salvation.

Martin was deeply influenced by Walter Rauschenbush, an early twentieth century theologian who argued that the “Kingdom of God” Jesus preached implied a progressive egalitarian order here on earth.  He was also a disciple of Gandhi, who led a non-violent revolution of brown-skinned people against a colonizing white empire—a “liberation” if there ever was one.

James Cone, the father of black liberation theology described King as “a liberation theologian avant la lettre,” that is to say, before the phrase existed.

For a charlatan like Glenn Beck to claim King's mantle, while simultaneously distorting his message, is obscene.