Blair: Moderate Islam must Triumph

Tony Blair, for 10 years the Prime Minister of Great Britain, has now been given the task of being special envoy to the Middle East by the U.N., the European Union, Russia, and the United States. Though I have not quite understood how Blair could have backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq--unless he was misled by the Bush administration like the rest of us, I have great respect for Blair as a reasonable voice on the world stage. In an article today, he talks about a conference on Islam that he put together after leaving office. It was prompted, he said, by complaints from moderates that their voices were not being heard. Blair evidently came away from that conference believing that not only is moderate Islam a voice that must be heard; it is the force that we must rely upon to ultimately transform the Middle East, and defeat the evil forces behind terrorism. He writes:

"Defeating this evil will take many things. But one thing above all is essential. Ultimately it can only be defeated within Islam. Moderate, mainstream Islam must triumph.

One other fascinating aspect of the London conference was hearing genuine Islamic scholars speak about their religion in a way usually untold to Western audiences: how Islam was for centuries the progressive force in science and knowledge; how the Koran reveres Jesus and Mary; how the Abrahamic religions share so much common history and tradition; and how the actions of the extremists are not merely wrong, but directly contrary to the teaching of the Prophet Mohammed.

This is the authentic voice of Islam. It needs to be heard and to be listened to."

My first reaction to this is that moderate Christianity doesn't seem to be winning any battle over fundamentalist Christianity, so why should we expect moderate Islam to do any better?

One reason that I believe moderation has an uphill battle ahead in order to win is that moderates are the "odd man out." In a sense, we moderates align ourselves with science and enlightenment reasoning. But science and enlightenment principles have turned increasingly atheistic and materialist in their approach to the world. This only serves to inflame the will of fundamentalists, and to drive would-be moderates into the fundamentalist camp.

This is why I got into the work that I do. I have wanted to show that religion and science, or at least spirituality and science, can and must go together. The life of the spirit is real. There is an intelligence that guides the universe, and without faith in that intelligence, there wouldn't have been any science. But the religion that goes together with science and enlightenment principles is not the religion of fundamentalism. It is the religion of moderates.

I believe that the moderate religious voice will win in the end, but only if we can show the majority that there is a way of being both spiritually- and scientifically-oriented at the same time.