I’m mainly referring to the Muslims in the united states and other westernized countries.
Not all of them wear head scarves and yell “Allah Akbar!” at the slightest provocation. Many of them lead pretty standard lives. I know this because I’ve talked to them, spent time with them, and shared meals with them. They are roughly the equivalent of nominal Christians who believe mostly out of a fear of offending their traditionalist parents, rather than out of any sort of fundamentalist devotion. They’re Americans through and through, and the fact that they have theological baggage they can’t easily discard only makes them seem more American to me, not less (not that I’m implying that you see them as unamerican, however I do believe a large portion of the country does, which is unfortunate) .
So yes, I agree that the “moderate” Muslim leaders have failed in containing extremism. I also think that the analogy to the Christian dark ages is mostly correct. However, when I think upon my Muslim friends, I simply can’t paint them all with the same brush. They don’t practice the same brand of Islam we often see portrayed on television. It would be nice, and spare us all a lot of confusion, if they simply adopted a different label than the extremists in their group. But the same could be said about Christianity.
Again, this needs a two pronged approach. We need to condemn unacceptable behavior from the outside of the religion. And they need to do so from within. The more they do it, the less we will have to. We’d be more than happy to let them clean their own house, but they seem incapable of doing so at the moment.