In the article below, reposted from the Muftah website, Douglas Garrison echoes what I have been saying in recent blog posts regarding the importance of not talking about "true" Islam or "good" Islam versus "bad" Islam.

There is a well-established trend among western scholars of religion, public commentators on religion, and leaders within religious communities regarding the treatment of deviance from established religious norms. It seeks to set boundaries for what “is” and “is not” deemed authentic to a specific religious “tradition”, to regulate and police these boundaries, and to discipline those who violate them. Further, it seeks to sanitise the religious of any accoutrements that may offend the sensibilities of an increasingly secularised western public.

For all its good intentions, this practice must stop. An authentic, true, or pure version of any religion does not exist. It never has.

While the religious can certainly be a highly individualized experience, religion is by definition a shared experience — something intersubjectively constructed among people and therefore imbued with contradiction and compromise. Schism, wrought by difference, is in our nature as sentient creatures. This makes the discursive turn toward bounding religion all the more frustrating.

You know the arguments: “such-and-such does not represent real Christianity”, “the actions of so-and-so prove she is not a real Muslim”, or “the teachings of so-and-so do not correspond to what Judaism really means”. Examples of such rhetoric abound, particularly in recent days with respect to Islam and the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). Scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike are quick to denounce the organisation as un- or non-Islamic.

But what, if anything, does such denunciation accomplish besides lending credibility to the claim that the causal mechanism behind the acts of ISIS’s murderous thugs is religious? If people already think the sine qua non for ISIS is its religiosity, how does simply contesting the components of that religiosity change the debate in any substantive way? When we should be talking about varieties and causes of political violence, we are instead back to talking about religion and categorising “good Muslim” from “bad Muslim.”

Claimants to authenticity are inherently oppressive, for their implied knowledge of the “real” presumes a moral superiority relative to others and, more importantly, enables the justification of their chosen disciplinary practices. Pluralism — in belief, action, and person — is the vaccine against such people. Compelling radical religious sects to compete for attention and participation in a free and open “market of belief” is a far better option than ostracising and antagonising. As Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, writes in his recent New York Times opinion piece, “The solution to extremism is not less freedom, but more.”

This is not to say, of course, that we might defeat a threat like that posed by ISIS by merely offering them more religious freedom—that ship has long sailed. No, the point is to (1) help foster and sustain societies in which the social conditions the led to the rise of ISIS no longer exist; and (2) stop treating religion, irrespective of faith or locale, like the dominant organising principle of social action and in dire need of policing. This process can begin only when we no longer seek to define the religious in terms of what it is or should be, but what else it can and might be.