“There are genuine moderate Muslim organizations in the U.S. (the Clarion Project maintains a list of them), but they are mostly ignored by our government and by the media. If our establishment paid more attention to them and less to the stealth jihadists, moderation might have a better chance of success. The same is true on the international level.”
However, it does not seem that Islam can reform itself without help from the outside.
Who Will Reform Islam?
My bet is on Ahmadi Islam, specifically in Africa. Nigeria as a whole may be especially key to the whole thing.
First, Ahmadi Islam. It originated in Pakistan (in the 19th century, so at the time the whole subcontinent was India) and its founder claimed to be a “non-law-bearing prophet” and, essentially, the Messiah. That’s the main reason why most Muslims (especially in Pakistan) don’t acknowledge them as actual Muslims and don’t permit them to claim the name of Islam within Pakistan.
There are some other things that make Ahmadiyya very attractive to Westerners, though. Ahmadi Muslims are opposed to religious states, they have always been 100% in favor of secular governance and of love and peace for all. And that means right now, not waiting until after you’ve forced certain people to submit. It’s also far more effective with evangelism than the rest of Islam (and conventional evangelism is the exact extent to which they choose to understand jihad), they don’t lose their minds when people leave the Ahmadi faith, and although it continues to be a small community, it is the fastest growing sect of Islam as a percentage of itself, if you choose to call it a part of Islam.
In most of the countries in the world, Ahmadi Muslims make up less than 1% of a nation’s population and well under 5% of the Muslim population, with the exception of a handful of tiny islands to which Ahmadi missionaries have gone and no other type of Muslim has ever been. (They have at least been very effective in establishing a minimal presence of some kind everywhere, you have to give them that). Africa is a little different, though. Excluding tiny countries and countries with barely any Muslim population at all, Ghana, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Liberia all clock in with Muslim populations somewhere between 10 and 20% Ahmadi. Niger, a mostly Muslim country, is another one to keep an eye on as Ahmadiyya claims 6% of its population and is approaching the million mark there, and Nigeria’s Muslim population is 3% Ahmadi, but that accounts for nearly 3 million and is the single largest confirmed number for Ahmadis in any country (except maybe Pakistan, where the estimates are all over the place).
Basically, Ahmadiyya is going to continue its quiet growth, mostly in Africa and mostly by converting existing Muslims to this particular form of Islam. African Muslims will be a lot more tolerant of this group than Pakistanis or Persians or Arabians or the rest of the Middle East, and much of the rest of Islam in Africa will come around to a greater show of support for secular governance while rejecting the idea of a religious state, even among those who choose not to convert to the Ahmadi side of things but simply live in peace with them.
This is something to keep an eye on, and Africa is the main place where it’s happening. It will take awhile, but 20 or 30 years from now we’re going to look up and realize Africa is the most populous continent on the planet, Nigeria has overtaken the US as the third-most-populous nation in the world, and these Muslims in Africa are a whole different breed of Ahmadi, Sunni and Sufi, and non-denominational (yes that is a thing in Islam) compared to Muslims in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Indonesia.
I also want to point out Nigeria in particular for a couple of reasons. Nigeria is split very nearly 50-50 between Christians (mostly Protestant) and Muslims (mostly Sunni). There is a bit of an uneasy cooperation between them when it comes to overall governance, and most of those Sunni Muslims do belong to the Maliki school which favors Sharia law. At this time, however, Nigeria is the principle nation fighting against Boko Haram, which uses the ISIS flag, pledges its allegiance to ISIS, and is attempting to set up a caliphate in Africa, terrorizing four different countries in the process (the other three are mostly Muslim and mostly Sufi). A Muslim president won the most recent election and Nigeria appears to be just as committed to defeating this “black ISIS” group as ever, it might even happen on his watch.
At this point, it’s worth pointing out that Boko Haram, month over month for the past couple of years, has claimed more lives than any other terror group in the world. ISIS is number two to them in that category, not by much but Boko Haram has been killing slightly more people than ISIS in every month going back that far.
Anyway, Nigeria is increasingly being looked to as the richest, most populous, and most important country in Africa. In the short term, things are a little dicey, and they really need to take care of the Boko Haram situation. But in the medium to long term, I am pretty hopeful that Nigeria can establish a greater sense of peace and stability, and that these Sunni Muslims will increasingly back off from the Sharia law thing and make a secular society work with the Protestants and the Ahmadis. If they do pretty much go in this direction, much of the rest of Africa will more than most likely lean that way right along with them, and it’s even possible that the particular stance of Nigerian Muslims will one day mean something to Muslims well outside of their immediate region.
