Last week I went to listen to a French Catholic priest who was trying to enlighten the members of a church about Muslims and Islam. This man had lived all over the Middle East, he said, spoke Arabic, had friends of all religions, including Muslims, and was proud to say that he had celebrated mass in Saudi Arabia - without his dog collar.
I would never have believed that there are people like him unless I had heard him speaking myslef. He said a lot of things that made very angry because they were gross and deliberate misinterpretations of the Qur’an and the behaviour of unwitting muslims. His talk was certainly not aimed at improving relations between religions, and gave a lot of anti-islamists a boot, although based on incomplete, incorrect and flimsy evidence. I will not go into it here.
But one thing in particular struck me and I wanted your opinion on this. He said that muslims are unwilling to publicy differ with extremists or fundamentalists. He spoke, for instance, of a meeting where an Egyptian Muslim had held forth in a long and passionate speech about his right to four wives, and as soon as this priest stepped out of the room a Syrian couple came up to him and told him that they felt very differently about the issue of polygamy and wanted to disassociate themselves from what this man had said. This priest interpreted this action as the lack of courage of this couple to stand up in teh room under the gaze of fellow muslims and say something quite different. Then he cited the fact that in many instances muslims have been reluctant to condemn the terrorist attck on the Twin Towers outright. His conclusion; “The extremists always win”, because “moderate muslims cannot carry with them the weight of their religious convictions”. His conclusion: even if there are moderate muslims around, they are an aberration, as Islam is an extremist religion.
Opinions?