There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, stretching from India to Indonesia and from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, which makes Islam perhaps the world’s most heterodox faith [bold mine-DL]. ~Lee Smith

Via Matt Feeney

I will leave the speech itself for another time, but this sentence in particular has to be one of the more odd responses to it I have seen. It is all very well to acknowledge that Islam is not monolithic and that there is a variety of sects, traditions and ethnicities among Muslims around the world, but this does not imply a greater degree of heterodoxy than there is in the other comparably large (indeed larger) world religion of Christianity. Smith really means to say heterogeneous or diverse or perhaps multifaceted. Heterodox is simply the wrong word. Given that there is no single recognized teaching authority in Islam and no widely accepted institutional authority, one might expect there to be a great deal more difference of belief among Muslims than there is. That said, this does not have the political implications Smith fears.

Smith worries that Obama will lend credibility to Pan-Islamist forces by addressing Muslims in general, but Smith need not be so concerned. Hawks are always complaining that Muslims fail to show sufficient Pan-Islamic solidarity when it comes to showing gratitude to the U.S. for having come to the aid of this or that Muslim group over the years, but if we ignore for a moment the one-sided nature of such complaints we can see that a lack of Pan-Islamic solidarity is normal, much as most Christians around the world are not much bothered by what has been happening to the Copts or Chaldeans. As I remarked during the last round of caterwauling about Obama’s speech in Ankara:

It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims. In other words, Americanists want Muslims to think like Pan-Islamists when it serves Washington’s purposes (i.e., when it is supposed to make Muslims favorably disposed to us), but Muslims must never think like Pan-Islamists when it doesn’t.

In any case, the fear of building up Pan-Islamist power is misplaced for the same reason that fretting about the threat from latter-day caliphalists is misguided. Smith has already hit upon one of the reasons why politically active Pan-Islamism will go nowhere: the internal divisions and differences among Muslims, which separate them by ethnicity, language, culture and sect, make Pan-Islamism as non-viable as a movement as the fictitious construct of “Islamofascism” is nonsensical propaganda. Like the fiction of a unified communist world, which conveniently ignored the national rivalries and hatreds that actually shaped the policies of communist states, the Pan-Islamist menace that Obama has supposedly helped to build up with today’s speech is imaginary and the product of exaggerating the size and nature of the threats to our security. If there is anything encouraging about the speech, which I found underwhelming for all kinds of reasons, it is that Obama showed no signs of defining America’s real enemies according to the outlines of jihadist self-presentation and refused to lend credibility to a simplified definition of jihadism that encompasses any and all Islamic resistance and revolutionary groups under some overarching banner that obliges us to make all of them our enemy.