Wafa Sultan has now weighed in as Islam's newest "voice in the wilderness," daring to speak out where no one else will. No need to go into specifics here. This has already been covered a million times with respect to Irshad Manji. The whole scheme is an intellectual three-card monty. They hawk the promise of 'the truth about Islam' but never produce the goods. Those who listen to them and promote their intellectually impoverished and historically inaccurate positions are either in on the con or marks who keep falling for it no matter how many times they've lost. But there is another level to the con of moderate Islam. This is the con we run on ourselves by rushing to speak moderately whenever non-Muslims demand it.

Non-Muslims continue to demand the truth about Islam. They keep telling us that moderate Muslims have to speak out against extremism. But Muslims have been producing internal critiques since the beginning of our community. This is the simple fact of interpretive history, nothing is ever agreed on. The center is everywhere and nowhere. The center is always being challenged and claimed by multiple intellectual, political, and social forces in different places and times. This is not to say that Muslims have not covered over or acquiesced to oppressive interpretations of Islam out of a desire to keep the peace and protect their brothers and sisters from outsiders. We have. But 9/11 made it perfectly clear to nearly everyone that at this point in history we keep the peace at the expense of justice. Internal critiques from multiple perspectives are common now. I would like to make it clear that many of these internal critiques are opposed to my own sense of what needs to change. But that is not my point here.

Non-Muslims are demanding the moderate critique out of all those multiple perspectives. Kamran Bokhari has nicely summed up the futility of that demand in his article "Who are the Moderate Muslims" in the March 2004 issue of Q-News. Moderate Muslims pop up to claim the Center—the Moderate position—from just about everywhere on the interpretive spectrum when non-Muslims ask for it. The demand for moderation creates an endless supply of Muslims claiming the authority to speak for moderation.

It gets pretty confusing with non-Muslims demanding we play 'pretty Muslim' and Muslims from every perspective volunteering that they are the 'true moderates'. As Bokhari has nicely pointed out, no one claimant can speak for anyone else, so all claims are useless. The non-Muslims see this as the impotent performance that it is and consider it proof of our essential inadequacy that drives their demand that we speak up in the first place.

The most recent demand for moderate critique comes from the editors at the New York Times who wrote, "It is time for moderate Muslims to abandon the illusion that they can placate the Islamists by straddling the fence. It is they who must explain to their people that the cartoons were an isolated incident, and not the face of hostile crusaders. It is they who must make it clear to their people that blowing up mosques, beheading hostages and strapping on belts of explosives are far, far greater evils than a few drawings in a distant paper. They must do so because their future is at stake — not Denmark's."

Muslims responded immediately. For instance, 11 Canadian Muslim academics and activists put out the plea "Don't be Silenced by Extremists." The language of their plea demonstrates they are speaking directly to the editorial in the NY Times. By responding on demand, they unwittingly erase the history of their long hard work fighting oppression in Muslim communities. The editors and readers think their demands are getting them "off the fence" as if any of these Muslims had ever been on the fence in the first place. Worse, these Muslims make it seem to non-Muslims as if other Muslims have not been fighting as long and as hard as they have. They end up sounding like voices in the wilderness to non-Muslims. Just like Irshad and Wafa. They end up producing a con without (I hope) intending it.

Answering calls to speak moderately on demand does nothing but play into non-Muslim privilege and its foundational assumptions that we, as Muslims, are essentially incapable of basic human ethical faculties such as self-consciousness, self-examination, self-critique, and independent agency. Non-Muslims demand us to prove that we are not inherently criminal, in the same repulsive manner that African Americans are required to defend their own humanity 'despite the clear statistics on Black crime rates.' In the end, we make them the arbiters of the adequacy of our 'moderation' and we cannot win.

My only sense is that we must continue to speak as we always have done, but not for the sake of non-Muslims. We must speak for our own sake when we speak with non-Muslims about our own self-understanding. We should continue and increase our self-critique according to our own terms. We should continue to work for an array of goals as we already have been doing. We should continue fighting about what those goals are and the proper methods of reaching them. And good. We have nothing to be ashamed of and we have nothing to lose in continuing to trust and make use of our rich intellectual and spiritual resources. We are a diverse community with a rich history of agreeing to disagree and we can resolve our very real problems in our own ways in varied relationships with other religious and secular communities including our home governments and the UN. We do not need to pander to anyone. When we speak for ourselves we speak from a place of self-respect and confidence in our own humanity that can withstand our differences of agreement as a mercy for the believers.

So when we speak, we should speak for ourselves just as sharply as we have been doing. But make it clear it is not for their sake.