In Search of Moderate Muslims By Joshua Muravchik and Charles P. Szrom

Ever since his first post-9/11 speech summoning the nation to a war against terrorism, President Bush has stressed that “our war is against evil, not against Islam.” Indeed, his administration has branded the terrorists as “traitors to their own faith”—outlaws who are “trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.”

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of such pronouncements. But they also reflect a strategic imperative—namely, to prevent the jihadists from attracting wide support in the Muslim world. The goal of Bush’s policy is, rather, to call forth the Muslim majority against the acts and ideology of the terrorists. As the Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes has put it: “radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam the solution.”

This is one facet of U.S. policy on which there has been virtually no dissent. But it begs the question: what exactly is moderate Islam, and where can we find it?

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