Where are you getting “moderate” from? That link only gives the support for the death penalty for apostacy among Muslims who want sharia to be enforced as national law—which isn’t incompatible with a moderate approach to the religion, for some values of “moderate”, but certainly doesn’t imply one. The percentages given also correspond pretty well to my expectations for religious fundamentalism in those countries.
If you combine those percentages with the percentages who want Sharia as national law in the first place, you end up concluding that the majority of some countries, and very large minorities of others, want apostates to die.
Of course, whether a group is “moderate” is a matter of semantics. These people are not moderate by comparison to Western standards, but they are moderate in the context of their own countries—that is, their positions are middle of the road compared to the general population (and they may actually be the general population).
(Is a Nazi whose beliefs are typical for Nazis considered a moderate Nazi or an extremist Nazi?)
So, in other words, you’re talking moderate relative to the country. That might make sense if we were discussing internal politics in Jordan, say, but it doesn’t seem like an especially natural interpretation of “moderate Muslim” in a global context: to me, that phrase brings to mind nations like Indonesia.
I was thinking more of cases such as high percentages of moderate Muslims in some countries support executing apostates.
Where are you getting “moderate” from? That link only gives the support for the death penalty for apostacy among Muslims who want sharia to be enforced as national law—which isn’t incompatible with a moderate approach to the religion, for some values of “moderate”, but certainly doesn’t imply one. The percentages given also correspond pretty well to my expectations for religious fundamentalism in those countries.
If you combine those percentages with the percentages who want Sharia as national law in the first place, you end up concluding that the majority of some countries, and very large minorities of others, want apostates to die.
Of course, whether a group is “moderate” is a matter of semantics. These people are not moderate by comparison to Western standards, but they are moderate in the context of their own countries—that is, their positions are middle of the road compared to the general population (and they may actually be the general population).
(Is a Nazi whose beliefs are typical for Nazis considered a moderate Nazi or an extremist Nazi?)
So, in other words, you’re talking moderate relative to the country. That might make sense if we were discussing internal politics in Jordan, say, but it doesn’t seem like an especially natural interpretation of “moderate Muslim” in a global context: to me, that phrase brings to mind nations like Indonesia.