Slate has an interesting piece on the question of who has authority to say what is Islamic. First, it makes journalists look like idiots for not looking up some of their questions in the Koran or the Hadiths that are easy to get in translation/transliteration online. Second, it highlights the problem of appealing to people who have their own interests above and beyond what the "text might imply" (and sometimes, they flat out lie!).

We could settle these disputes if we could ask God, but he doesn't seem to be amenable to arbitrate. So rule of thumb:

1) If you want to make Islam seem pro-liberal, go talk to a liberal scholar.
2) If you want to make Islam seem anti-West, quote from the non-trivial number of insane psychos.

Islam is peace/submission, or Muslims believe in sexual equality/domination of men, and so forth. These stark dualities are the stock & trade of journalists who communicate to non-Muslims what Islam is all about. They also show up in the writings of apologists who set up a straw-man opponent, show how its case is not airtight, so the other option must be correct, since it is the only one in evidence.

Here is part of exchange I had with Cosma Shalizi:

Razib: "I see Islam as a naturalistic entity of the human psyche...."
Cosma: "I think it's more accurate to see it as a large population of entities in many human psyches (multiple entities per psyche), which like any biological population has considerable variation over space and time, as well as within any give region, and where many of the linkages are merely changeable statistical tendencies. The rational core of, say, Edward Said's criticism of orientalist scholarship is that they thought of Islam as a certain _type_, based on a limited range of sources, and consequently ignored the actual variation in the population."

To highlight issues of ignored substructure, I found this criticism of the Jamaa'ah at-Tableegh order which some members of my family are active in under "deviant groups" over at the Fatwa Online site. Many of the criticisms have to do with the fact that the Tableegh seems apolitical, quietist, and focused on person-to-person persuasion (a good analogy would be active evangelical Christian groups in the United States). Nevertheless, I have a hard time characterizing the Tableeghis as anything but fundamentalist, as they hew to a strict interpretation of Hanafi Sunni prescribed behavior in their personal life, and encourage this upon others (incessantly I might add!).

When commentators speak of "moderate Islam" vs. "fundamentalist Islam," there are serious typological issues here, as some moderate Muslim dictators are far more vicious and deleterious to the cause of individual rights and conscious than the more quietest fundamentalist Muslims. There are multiple cross-linkages that need to be characterized, and the fine-grained topography has to be studied before detailed analysis can be made (as opposed to rough-and-ready generalizations). Additionally, the correct way of stating it should be Islams, not Islam, at least from the perspective of a non-believer who sees Islam as simply one of many coalitions of belief systems.

Finally, I would end by saying there are some serious problems with the distribution of Muslim attidues and beliefs world-wide. No matter the distinctions within, one particular subset of the Ummah, characterized by intersecting values that place them on the tail ends of multiple distribution curves act out in a violent manner, all across the Muslim world and beyond. Certainly, similar things might be said of some obscure radical-right-wing Christian groups in the United States, often associated with Christian Identity racialism, but judging by the numbers, it seems that the intersection of values at extreme ends of the distributions are rather rarer in modern Christianity [1]. This to me suggests that the center of gravity of Islam is shifted over so that the violent and socially distruptive subset is a far larger faction of the total area under the curve. If Islam is to coexist in amity with other faiths and cultures, the mean must be driven in the other direction so that the numbers of the violent subset become trivial. Time will act as a solvent, as will economic development, the key is whether this will happen fast enough so that the destructive subset does not bring destruction down upon the House of Islam, and perhaps the world....

[1] As I like to say, in modern Christianity you see the God of Abraham gelded. He is no longer a God of Wars, but a God of Love, as his testosterone:estrogen ratio dropped after the loss of his God-man-parts during the Wars of Religion and Enlightenment.