Why are the extremist christians more pragmatic than the extremist muslims?

[Lechasseur]

Yeah I think secular strength in Christendom is probably the biggest reason

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yeah I think secular strength in Christendom is probably the biggest reason

People have taken the Philosophy out of Islam and the Christianity out of Philosophy.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Necessity is the mother of pragmatism. Islamism makes all sorts of pragmatic bargains with all kinds of secular movements - the far-left, other religious groups, liberals, nationalists etc; and normally there is lip service to the idea that sectarian conflict must be avoided. Heck, I've seen Ahmadi-led groups take charge in some European muslim circles.

With the specific Shia-Sunni split, the issue is more that that throughout MENA the split is more intrinsically linked with an ethnoreligious identity, in a way that we wouldn't see in the Christian world anymore outside of NI and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Necessity is the mother of pragmatism. Islamism makes all sorts of pragmatic bargains with all kinds of secular movements - the far-left, other religious groups, liberals, nationalists etc; and normally there is lip service to the idea that sectarian conflict must be avoided. Heck, I've seen Ahmadi-led groups take charge in some European muslim circles.

Famous members of the Muslim Brotherhood when they were young: Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat.

With the specific Shia-Sunni split, the issue is more that that throughout MENA the split is more intrinsically linked with an ethnoreligious identity, in a way that we wouldn't see in the Christian world anymore outside of NI and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

“Are the Shia population in this country Persian fifth columnists?” - many Arab leaders around the region since 1979, from Saddam Hussein to the al-Saud.

[pbrower2a]

It could be that Muslim countries largely have a heritage of being colonized or occupied by "Christian" countries. Even Iran was politically partitioned during World War II, and that still has an effect. The worst fanaticism among Christians in recent years was in the Balkans -- in lands ruled harshly by the Ottoman Empire. But even that heritage ended no later than a century ago.

OK, Indonesia seems to be less a hotbed of Islamic extremism than other predominantly-Muslim countries... perhaps because colonial rule in Indonesia ended so swiftly and decisively. The Dutch were ousted before they could reclaim Indonesia from the Japanese Empire. Indian Muslims may be the most placid... probably because the British were even handed between Hindus and Muslims, and the Indian government has generally left Muslims alone. Yes, there was the Islamic extremist attack on Mumbai, and before anyone could ask how those extremists got overland in India they were shown on video arriving by dinghies. There's no safe haven for Islamic extremism in India -- not even in the large Muslim population.

The Shiite-Sunni divide remains sharp... about as sharp as the Catholic protestant divide once was. Maybe the Protestant-Catholic divide faded as secular democracy made pragmatic solutions to social problems more appropriate than sectarian divisions.         

[Agonized-Statism]

The violence was comparable during the European wars of religion, but secular government keeps those differences from welling up and religion itself has declined in the West. Religion currently has a far more important role in Middle Eastern governments (particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran), and mixes with national identity to create a pretty explosive situation.

[SInNYC]

Most Christian countries were affected by the enlightenment, after which the countries became increasingly secular with little base for rearing extremist Christians.

Most Moslem countries were imperialistic colonies - since imperialism normally involves more modern countries taking over less modern ones, it also halts natural social progress of society since modernity is viewed as a sign of the imperialists. Many Moslem countries did have important Enlightenment-like movements after independence. But the movements tended to be nationalistic and/or socialistic (in the SD way, not the communist way), and the west thus decided they had to be wiped out. This left a choice between theocrats and autocrats, both of which lead to increased religious extremism post independence..

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

This also has to do with the comparative secularism of Confucianist Asia (i.e. non-Christian Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans were never uniformly Buddhist to begin with), but I do think differences between Abrahamic and Dharmic theology play some role in differential soft power of these religions, and also partially explains why Islam historically became as prevalent in the Indian subcontinent as it did.

Speaking of the Subcontinental Asian diaspora in the Anglosphere...

People often remark that British Muslims have very extremist views even by the standards of the rest of the Muslim World - which is strange because you might assume they would be more liberal living in the west. There are probably a few reasons for this:

• Deracination effects as a minority group with no mainstream heritage to integrate into. As an obvious outgroup that can’t really be integrated in the same way a Dutch or German person could be a lot of identity-forming, especially among second and third generation migrants, is done through latching onto cultural markers from their home countries. Historical British culture is always going to be alien because it obviously isn’t theirs. With the easy availability of extreme versions of Islam in their diaspora communities as well as Dawah content online it ends up being easy to fall into these worldviews. The zeal they develop also gets continually reinforced in their real life communities

• Many come from relative backwaters in the Muslim World, poor parts of places like Pakistan and Bangladesh. They are not the more urbane Muslim middle classes you’ll see more as immigrants in places like America. Often less intelligent and with a kind of peasant Islamic culture instead of a more sophisticated Islamic culture, there’s a lack of a nuanced ballast or cultural guardrails that stops them tipping over into more ‘out-there’ worldviews. This culture also often mixes with the generic western ‘black urban hiphop culture’ which doesn’t really encourage that refinement

• No checks on this kind of extremism by British Culture in the way you even see in many Muslim Cultures where very extreme forms of Islam get shut down, just as a function of pragmatic governance. The British state is often happy to let them do and say whatever they want as an extension of its ‘liberal principles’ or ‘multiculturalism’. No real attempts to integrate them or moderate them because it is regarded as racist to challenge the maladaptive parts of their culture

This is broadly consistent with things I've heard about the British South Asian diaspora elsewhere on the English-language Internet. (Off topic, but I've noticed there are a lot of RP-accented English-language YouTube videos explaining Quranic passages that were presumably narrated by individuals of Subcontinental heritage.)

[RINO Tom]

It's worth noting that even the most extremist fundamentalist Christians have a very different understanding of what the Bible is compared to their Muslim counterparts' understanding of what the Quran is.  The New Testament is a collection of writings and letters that Christians believe are historically accurate, but they're still written by men that are allegedly writing down what they witnessed after the fact.  They're primary sources claiming to have been witness to supernatural events.

Compare that to the Quran, which is said by Muslims to actually be a refined word of God that is the "final" dotting of the Is and crossing of the Ts to all of the holy texts that came before it.  It is believed to be "without error" in a much different, more dogmatic way than the Bible is to those who hold to inerrancy.  If Christians believed that Jesus wrote the whole New Testament himself, they'd have similar extremist issues as Muslims, JMO.