Politics & Power Quote by Marvin Olasky

Olasky’s line is doing two jobs at once: it reassures a mainstream audience while quietly arguing for a more precise moral vocabulary in a political climate that treats “jihad” as a synonym for menace. The first clause, “Many American Muslims are peaceful,” sounds modest, almost bureaucratic, but it’s calibrated to push back against the post-9/11 reflex to collapse a diverse population into a security category. “Many” is strategic: it avoids the absolutism of “most” or “all,” granting room for exceptions so the statement can’t be dismissed as naive. That hedging is part of the intent.

The second clause is where the cultural work happens. By noting that Muslims “define jihad primarily as an internal struggle to improve,” Olasky reframes a word that has been flattened by media repetition and partisan talking points. “Primarily” signals an attempt to correct a dominant public misdefinition without denying that other interpretations exist; it’s an argument about emphasis, not denial. The phrase “internal struggle to improve” also borrows the language of self-help and Protestant moral striving, translating an Islamic concept into an idiom many American readers already respect. That translation is a bridge, but it’s also a subtle domestication: it makes jihad legible by aligning it with individual ethics over collective politics.

As an educator, Olasky is staking out a civic lesson: if you want a functioning pluralist society, you start by describing your neighbors accurately. The subtext is that misunderstanding isn’t just ignorance; it’s a mechanism that justifies suspicion, surveillance, and social exclusion.