The Quiet Force of Moderate American Muslims

By Ayaan Karan

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

If we were to believe Republican Reps. Andy Ogles and Brandon Gill, all 4 million American Muslims are wholly radicalized, inclined to violence, and unassimilable. Indeed, back in March, Ogles stated that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Around the same time, Gill said, “Importing Islam will annihilate America as we know it.” While radicalization within the American Muslim community is undeniable, this broad claim of complete unassimilability is untrue and puts American Muslims at risk of violence.

 

After October 7, Palestinian flags populated the downtowns of major American cities as Muslims and non-Muslim leftists alike took to the streets in jubilation. Earlier this year in New York City, hijab-clad women led chants in support of Hezbollah and Hamas. After the death of Iran’s tyrant, Ali Khamenei, a mosque in Manassas, Virginia, held a memorial for him. At University of California, Berkeley—where I currently study—the Muslim Student Association holds rallies and posts on social media in explicit favor of Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. A Pew poll of American Muslim adults shows a staggering 37 percent approval of Hamas, in contrast to 8 percent of all American adults.

 

Some Muslims, then, are definitely extremists. But how do Muslims themselves view this type of extremism? As the writer Pradheep J. Shanker put it in March, “those Muslims that want to live peacefully are silent, because they are scared to speak because of extremists in the community.” Indeed, let’s remind ourselves that 58 percent of American Muslim adults disapprove of Hamas. But we never see this group of Muslims on the news or speaking for the Muslim community. This “third force” of Muslims is alive in America. But third-worldist institutions within their own community suppress them.

 

The dichotomy between third-worldist and third force Muslims runs deep, and not just within the United States. Third-worldism and its subsidiary ideologies, like much of pro-Palestinianism, contend that the West is an imperialist force that exploits the third world and its people. Developed out of the anticolonial movements of the mid-20^th century, it advocates for the unity and solidarity of all third world peoples to participate in violent resistance against the West. Third-worldism, as Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua put it, is “a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them… This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed.”

 

Notably, the worldview isn’t well developed beyond third-world unity, violent resistance, and grievance. This lets third-worldism bend and take different forms. In the Muslim world, third-worldism simply adopts the lexicon of Islam while pushing the same ideas. For example, the leader of the Islamist terror group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, wrote in 2007 that “Resistance for us is a societal vision in all its dimensions. … It is the resistance of the people and the mujahidin.” The same third-worldist worldview that organizes the world as “oppressed vs. oppressor” is simply painted over with Islamic rhetoric.

 

These calls for “unity and resistance” are often symptomatic of failed Islamic governance like in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gaza Strip. These transcend innocent calls for communal unity among different Muslim sects; instead, they call for the unity of all Muslims around a third-worldist political cause to distract from domestic crises. What develops is a culture of grievance where all Muslims are victims of the West.

 

The third force Muslims are different. Coined by British writer Alistair Horne, the phrase “third force” originally referred to the politically moderate Muslims of French Algeria. Today, the third force is characterized by a general disdain for extremism and fundamentalism, as well as ideologies that ruin the image of Islam as a religion of peace. It favors pragmatism and is suspicious of movements that promote violent uprising. However, being a third force Muslim is not indicative of an ideology per se; it’s indicative of a reserved and pragmatic demeanor toward politics. During the Algerian War (1954 to 1962), the third force sought colonial reform over armed struggle, rejecting the ideological extremism and increasing violence of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), a terrorist organization whose methods to achieve Algerian self-determination included targeting civilians.

 

Applied today, the label suggests that the average third force Muslim likely supports Palestinian self-determination, but refuses to follow the path of violent resistance or stubborn extremism. Simply put, third force Muslims reject the far-left idea of violent revolution and align with most Americans in participating in politics peacefully.

 

So why are these third force Muslims absent from the conversation? To their political loss, third force Muslims—like many pragmatists—lean quietist. Their levelheaded disposition toward politics leaves them unable to organize effectively against the populist exhortations of the third-worldists.

 

In addition to this disadvantage, the Muslim community must also contend with ideological purity tests. From the beginning of the conflict in Palestine in the 1920s, the Zionist cause was portrayed by Arab Palestinian leaders as the most egregious example of Western colonialism and Jewish aggression. Over time, that image was burned into the minds of successive generations of Muslims by Arab leaders trying to build mass support for their case against the Jewish state. Today, that image has been successfully laundered into Muslim identity worldwide.

 

The real-world effects of this are serious. For example, in 2025, a Shia Muslim cleric from the United Kingdom by the name of Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi had a planned religious lecture at a Houston mosque. Before he could begin his lecture, a portion of the attendees walked out in protest. Why, you may ask? Because Razawi signed the Drumlanrig Accords, a 2025 pact of respect and tolerance between senior U.K. Muslim and Jewish leaders. Razawi was thereafter labeled a “Zionist” for even discussing religious dialogue with Jews who supported Israel’s continued existence. In 2022, Saudi Arabia’s decision to appoint Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, a staunch opponent of antisemitism, as the imam to deliver the sermon during the annual hajj pilgrimage sparked outrage from many Muslims because he visited Auschwitz with the American Jewish Committee and some Israeli Jews as a symbol of Jewish-Islamic solidarity.

 

The solution to this fear-based echo chamber is empowering the third force. During the Algerian War, the French rejection of the third force as a political ally only polarized Muslims more toward the FLN. It therefore seems logical that the political establishment embrace the third force, not only in the interest of stamping out extremism, but also properly representing Muslim citizens in a republic.

 

But ever since October 7, Republicans have increasingly rejected the notion that Muslims have any place in America. The sitting lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, has said, “I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.” The aforementioned Reps. Ogles and Gill have continually painted American Muslims as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. This flawed view assumes that third-worldism and extremism are essential parts of Muslims. But as we saw with the poll on Hamas, that’s clearly untrue.

 

Most American Muslims oppose the group, and a Pew poll from 2017 found that 8 in 10 Muslims are concerned about terrorism done in the name of Islam. By saying that an entire group is somehow incompatible with America, we concede that American culture and its founding principles are unable to inspire and assimilate all groups. American Muslims are distinctly American in culture and attitude, evidenced by 9 in 10 American Muslims saying they are proud to be American. To drive the point home, nearly 6,000 Muslims serve in the United States military. This differs from the United Kingdom, where at one point more British Muslims (around 600 per one count) joined the Islamic State than served in the British military. In the United States, however, only around 300 American Muslims have joined the Islamic State.

 

What throws another wrench in the GOP’s idea of Muslims being subversive is that third-worldism is embraced by more than just Muslims. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 40 percent of young people in America, regardless of religion, support Hamas over Israel, compared with only 8 percent of people 65 and older. Indeed, protests at UC Berkeley didn’t just concern the war in Gaza—they fully embraced violence against civilians with chants like “Intifada! Intifada!” Nor did the Berkeley protests, or any other campus protests, involve only Muslims.

 

Repudiating radicalization is necessary. But such repudiations must be armed with facts and not sweeping generalizations that imply that some of our countrymen are invariably radical due to their faith or ethnic background. It’s clear that third-worldism has embedded itself within the American Muslim community and helped develop a purity mentality that silences voices of dissent and pragmatism. But it’s also true that this worldview is separate from Islam as a faith and instead seeks to brainwash swaths of the electorate, Muslim or non-Muslim.

 

The cautionary tale of French Algeria informs us that if the political establishment doesn’t take notice of the third force Muslims, they will cease to exist as a force and extremists will continually be observed as the representatives of all Muslims. The current strategy of assuming Muslims are all deranged radicals won’t lead to any good. Similarly, if we continue to frame this battle as one between America and Islam, we should consider ourselves guilty of providing the fuel that’ll burn down the third force. While there’s no clear panacea, the first step requires the GOP to abandon blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric and instead ally with the third force against the third-worldists.