Balancing the categories of
"moderation" and "extremism" in
academic and lay discourse
Nick Hopkins
Identity and interest:
Rational Actor Theory
• Actor’s desires and external environment
– minimalist psychological assumptions
– focuses on environmental contingency of cost/benefit
ratios associated with particular courses of action
• RAT’s attraction?
– ‘in spite of its asocial and individualistic orientation [it]
directs our attention away from the domain of
psychology and towards the structures of the social
world’ (Crossley, 2002).
Applicability
to religious
identities?
• Euben (1995): Islam’s language of
‘moral imperatives’ implicates
qualitatively different concerns from
those implicated in the language of
‘interests’.
– ‘the relevant unit of analysis is not
the individual actor. Nor is it the
actor's perceived self-interest.
Instead, it is the soul, destiny and
moral condition of an entire
community’
• She concludes RAT’s inapplicability
to Islamist politics
– ‘must be seen as an expression of a
deeper clash of world views, a clash
between a world defined by divine
sovereignty, and a world defined by
human knowledge and power’
(Euben, 1995).
Dichotomisation?
• Echoes ‘clash of civilization’ thesis?
• Reproduces problematic assumptions
about ‘conventional’ politics in West.
– gives RAT more credit than is warranted.
• Alternative
• social identity (multiple, variable, collective)
• self-interest depends upon one’s ‘social identity’
• interest: not just material: expression of identity also a
good
• construction of identity and interest central to all politics
The politics of identity construction
• Symbolic reserves
• National identities
– ‘a man’s a man for ‘a that’
• Consider how talk of moderation and
extremism may feature in category
construction and identity definition
– Entails viewing as a category of practice, not
of analysis
Extremism and moderation
• Popular images
– Aristotle: “It is better to rise from life as from
a banquet – neither thirsty or drunken”.
– Lord David Cecil: “All extremes are error.
The reverse of error is not truth, but error
still. Truth lies between these extremes.”
• Psychology uses these categories to
theorise behaviour
– Psychology assumes extremists are people
who fail “to see moderation for what it is:
truth and virtue” (Haslam and Turner, 1998).
Extremism and Moderation as categories
of analysis: problems ?
• Value-laden: who / what exemplifies categories?
• Get in way of what we should explore:
– social actors’ understandings of their situation and the
terms of reference relevant for their deliberation.
• Rather than imposing terms of reference, we
should
– consider how social actors themselves construct /
communicate understandings of social reality
– attend to communicative contexts in which
understandings of social reality are constructed
Extremism and Moderation as
categories of practice
• King depicted by local church as ‘extremist’
• Replied in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’
• Construed visionaries and moral entrepreneurs
as ‘extremists’
–
–
–
–
Jesus: extremist for love
Amos: extremist for justice
Lincoln and Jefferson: extremists for liberty and equality
“the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of
extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be
extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of
injustice - or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”
• Reshaped terms of reference: all right-thinking
must identify with the project of mass activism.
Extremism and Moderation as
categories of practice: Muslim
identity construction
• The Qur’an (2:143) describes the Muslim
community as the Ummatan wasatan
– “We have made you a temperate people”
– “Thus have We made of you an Ummah justly
balanced”.
• Often used to represent certain positions as
unacceptable
– Denies Islamic credentials, excludes from community
• But use can be contested
– Can be used to include in community
– Speech at memorial event for Kalim Siddiqui
Moderation and extremism contested
• Engaging with dominant usage:
“Western discourses tend to regard anything
Islamic as being somewhat alien, and
therefore extremist almost by definition:
those who are moderate are merely those
who are not as extremist as other Muslims.
In other words, the more Muslim you are the
more extremist you are. For Muslims, of
course, this does not (or should not) apply.
Being Muslim is the norm, not an extreme by
any definition.”
Moderation and extremism contested
• Redefining the extremes:
“At risk of seeming flippant, one might suggest from
this perspective that being properly Muslim is
moderate, while we have two extremes [ ] In terms of
a political understanding of the Islamic movement,
therefore, extremists could be either those whose
understanding of Islam is entirely apolitical, who have
accepted the Western idea of a separation of religion
and politics, and reduced Islam simply to a religion: or
those whose understanding of Islam has become
entirely political, focusing entirely on the ‘Islamic state’
or the khilafah without a broader understanding of
Islam as a personal, spiritual, communal, moral,
social and cultural phenomenon.”
Moderation and extremism contested
• Invoking Ummatan wasatan
“The Qur’anic ayah “We have willed you to be a
community of the middle way…” (2:143) is often
quoted to justify any and every understanding of
Islam; perhaps it should be understood not as
referring to any one understanding as to an approach
to finding the correct path (or the best of possible
correct paths) through the myriad of different
understandings put forward, a path somewhere
between the many possible extremes.”
Overview: 2:143
• Often used to undermine some actors’ Muslim
credentials
• Here allows their inclusion within community of
debate
• Does not mean prototypical (in fact condemned)
• Rather, construction of:
– 1. contrasting forms of extremism (spiritual vs statist)
– 2. moderation (finding a path through such diverse
extremes through debate)
– 1 & 2 are significant for the work that they do in
characterising the ummah
– ummah should be community of social and political
debate (even with those with whom disagree)
– implies such debates should count in Muslims’
everyday deliberations
Conclusion
• Question RAT
• Avoid dichotomisation proposed by Euben
• Alternative: Identity construction central to interest and
social action (wherever it takes place)
• View categories of extremism and moderation as
categories of practice
• Whether useful as categories of analysis to identify the
‘irrational’ is unclear:
– to understand people’s beliefs and behaviour we must
understand the terms of reference within which they derive their
meaning
– analysts’ commitment to a taxonomy rooted in their own
assumptions about what constitutes reality and deviance gets in
the way