The message conveyed to the West is that Islam is—within certain bounds—a multifaceted faith

The Myth of Islam’s Diversity

By William Kilpatrick

One of the big unexamined assumptions of our time is that Islam is a diverse religion which offers as many different flavors of the faith as Baskin-Robbins serves up in ice cream.

Just recently, Nicholas Kristof penned a column for the New York Times titled “The Diversity of Islam,” and a week after that, author Reza Aslan wrote an op-ed for theTimes with a similar theme. Aslan, a Muslim, took the diversity argument to unusual lengths, arguing, in effect, that all religions can be interpreted in an infinity of ways:

The abiding nature of scripture rests not so much in its truth claims as it does in its malleability, its ability to be molded and shaped into whatever form a worshipper requires.

This is essentially the post-modernist argument that texts have no meaning in themselves, but that the meaning of any particular text—say the Constitution—must be imposed by the reader. Robert Spencer makes short work of Aslan’s argument inPJ Media:

What Aslan is claiming here is absolutely nihilistic. He’s saying essentially that words have no meaning, that the various scriptures of various religion have no essential content or character, that the religions themselves are meaningless and interchangeable.

Aslan’s analysis doesn’t bear much relation to the way that most people over the centuries have understood religion, but it does play well with readers of the New York Times, and his post-modern views have earned him “guest expert” status on TV news programs. He’s popular with Catholic academics as well, presumably because his views can be fit into the Islam-is-just-like-Catholicism bias prevalent on many Catholic campuses. Either that, or the professors are confusing him with a certain character in The Chronicles of Narnia. In any event, there are at least a couple of Catholic seminaries which use No God but God, Aslan’s whitewash of Islam, as the main text in the Islamic studies course.

Despite its appeal to ivory tower types, the deconstructionist argument is a self-cancelling absurdity. How about the less extreme view that there are simply many varieties of Islam? Proponents of this view don’t say that Islam means whatever you want it to mean, only that there are several shades of it—each with a claim to validity because each is based on the Koran which Muslims believe is the eternal word of God. This line of reasoning preserves the authority of the Koran, but also conveys an appearance of plurality. By adopting this approach, Muslim scholars can have it both ways. The message conveyed to the West is that Islam is—within certain bounds—a multifaceted faith; the message to fellow Muslims who may be engaged in jihad is: “We won’t say that your understanding of Islam is not true and authentic.”

With the advent of ISIS and the outrage it has provoked around the world, this proposition has become less tenable.

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