What does a moderate Muslim look like?

What would a moderate Muslim look like?

A moderate Muslim:

*Retains the narrative of one God and multiple prophets but regards most of the rest of contemporary  Islam as abhorent claptrap.

*Reads the Quran in its historical context and understands its claim to be Divine Speech not literally but as ‘Logos’ through an intelligent metaphysics.

*Does not detect even the slightest reference to modern technology in the Quran.

*Has an agnostic view of the life of the Prophet (Sira).

*Is sceptical of the entire Hadith literature and especially of ridiculous claims made for the veracity of al-Bukhari.

*Has a healthy contempt for religious scholars.

*Regards the entire Wahhabi sect as a noxious poison.

*Regards the building programs undertaken by the Saudis in Mecca and the Holy Places as damnable desecrations and a blasphemous destruction of the Islamic heritage.

*Thinks that the Sharia is a barbaric concoction of desert desperadoes in the late Dark Ages.

*Does not have an infantile desire to ape every item of trivia from fictional medieval accounts of the Prophet’s personal life.

*Admits that the expulsion of philosophy and rational methods of analysis from Islamic intellectual life in the late Middle Ages was a catastrophe.

*Thinks that the history of the four schools of Sunni law in which reasoning by analogy plays less and less a role is nothing less than a long slow lobotomy.

*Appreciates the Sufi traditions as the core of Islam transcending the limitations of the religion’s ossified outer forms.

*Demands that the doors of Ijtihad be opened.

*Loves the richness of the Islamic cultural tradition and sees the best of Islam in the Islamic Arts and Humanities.

*Does not believe that unthinking piety will restore Islam to its days of glory.

*Has separated religion from terriory and no longer thinks in terms of “Dar as Salam’ and the nexus between Islam and land.

*Rejects restorationism as a way forward for contemporary Islam.

*Shuns the post-colonial leftist conspiracy theory view of the world that attributes the derelect state of the entire Islamic world to the Americans.

*Never uses the moronic word "Islamophobia". 

*Doesn’t indulge in self-pitying victim narratives.

*Gave up on the Palestinians years ago.

*Thinks that the oft-quoted hadith about the best of ummahs is nothing less than risible.

*Thinks that halal food certification is an extortion racket.

*Wears tasteful contemporary clothing rather than dressing like a 6^th C. camel driver. 

That, at least, is a good start towards a moderate Muslim. 

- Harper McAlpine Black