My much-thumbed Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “moderate” as someone “avoiding extremes” and being “temperate in conduct or expression.”
The Koran tells Muslims, “We have made you a temperate people that you act as witness over man and the messenger as witness over you.”
Yet those who usurped Islam thirsting for power – Islamists in our time or power-holders since the first generation of Arab-Muslim history – have been men of extremes.
The search of late for “moderate” Muslims in the West is back-handed recognition of the unavoidable fact that any sort of lasting peace between the Arab-Muslim world and the West (including Israel) will be secured only when Islamic moderation prevails in Muslim lands over Islamism in all its various bigoted interpretations.
The Arab-Muslim world is in the midst of an indefinitely long struggle between the forces of bigotry and fanaticism on the one side and the forces of moderation on the other. This is not a new struggle within Islam, yet it is a new situation unlike previous occasions when these conflicts, with their ebb and flow, were confined within the cultural boundaries of the Arab-Muslim world.
The intensity of the contemporary struggle reflects the extent to which the old unresolved conflict among Muslims have gone global, and the non-Muslim world cannot remain neutral or impervious watching this conflict unfold.
This struggle, moreover, is a reminder for those with open minds to a long view of history that progress is non-linear, while reform is threatened endlessly with subversion and reversal.
The Arab-Muslim world’s history is not less complex than that of the West, and observing its present broken state one might recall Europe’s history during the centuries known as the Dark Ages when superstition reigned, incessant wars raged across the continent, religion was the refuge of scoundrels, ignorance was worn with pride, and lawlessness made everyone victim. It is also worth recalling that at the heart of Europe’s medieval darkness was Rome as the centre of Christendom, and among the most corrupt were those who represented Jesus on earth.
But Europe eventually shed the impenetrable mindlessness of the Dark Ages, and the bitterly fought wars for the reform of Christianity contributed in various ways to the making of the modern West.
Though there is no one Vatican-type centre among Muslims, the Arab-Muslim world’s heart of darkness is Saudi Arabia where the Saudi-Wahhabi nexus represents the most bigoted centre of Islamist reaction against Muslim reform and moderation.
Periodic efforts at Muslim reform have failed as did the “tanzimat” – the early 19th century reform movement in the Ottoman Empire – given the entrenched position of reactionary religious scholars and their influence in societies beholden to pre-modern feudal culture.
A Muslim Luther is unlikely to make a difference between reform and reaction unless there emerges a determined Muslim ruler such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, pushing for a Muslim version of openness (glasnost) and change (perestroika).
Mustafa Kemal was one such ruler whose relative success in the making of modern Turkey holds forth the possibility of reform taking roots elsewhere in the Arab-Muslim world, and eventually prevailing over Islamist fanaticism.
This will not happen if the West abandons support for Muslim reform, in Iraq for instance, and concedes to the false argument that Muslim moderation is mythical.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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