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Religious Freedom in Islam
Religious Freedom in Islam
The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today
DANIEL PHILPOTT
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In Memoriam: Alfred Stepan
In gratitude: Timothy Samuel Shah
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
I.1. Global map 13
2.1. The range of restrictions on religious freedom (GRI) in the world’s countries 48
2.2. Categories of religious freedom in Muslimmajority states (as of 2009) 50
2.3. Map of religiously free countries 54
3.1. Map of secular repressive countries 80
3.2. Turkish government involvement in religion, 1990–2002 83
3.3. Political and civil liberties in Turkey, 1972–2010 84
3.4. Religious minority discrimination, 1990–2008 85
4.1. Map of religiously repressive countries 117
Tables
I.1. Islamoskeptics vs. Islamopluralists 5
2.1. The Criteria That Make up the GRI 47
2.2. What to Look for in a Religiously Free MuslimMajority State 52
2.3. Religiously Free Muslim-Majority Countries 53
2.4. Religious Demography of West Africa 55
3.1. Secular Repressive Muslim-Majority States and Their GRI Score 79
3.2. What to Look for in a Secular Repressive MuslimMajority Regime 82
x List of Figures and Tables
3.3. Religious Freedom in Turkey, 1981–2009 84
4.1. Religiously Repressive Muslim-Majority States and Their GRI Score 116
4.2. What to Look for in a Religiously Repressive Muslim-Majority Regime 123
5.1. The Fate of Religious Freedom in the Arab Uprisings 152
6.1. Arab Barometer Polling Results 197
6.2. Median Percentage of Muslims Who Say Religious Freedom Is a Good Thing 199
6.3. Support for Religious Freedom 199
6.4. Death Penalty for Leaving Islam 201
6.5. Median Percentage of Muslims Who Favor Enshrining Sharia 202
Preface
IS ISLAM HOSPITABLE to religious freedom? Many will bristle at such a question. Religious freedom is a Western principle, some will say, and to pose it to Islam is to impose it on Islam. Others will object that to speak of an entire religious tradition recklessly flattens diversity and muffles dissonance. Still others will ask why I, a Westerner, and a Christian at that, deign to ask why a religion other than my own is free. Should not Western Christians first acknowledge the plank of religious repression in the eye of their own tradition before concerning themselves with the speck in another tradition’s eye, to borrow a metaphor from Christianity’s founder?
Yet I persist in inquiring into religious freedom in Islam because I believe the question holds high stakes for peace, stability, and justice in the world. I also believe that scholars have a responsibility to speak to the important controversies of their day. The controversy at hand is the intense public debate over Islam in the West. It has flared up every time the headlines have reported Muslims involved in violence, at least as far back as the attacks of September 11, 2001. ISIS. Orlando. Paris. San Bernardino. Benghazi. London. Madrid. “Islamoskeptics” hold that violence and repression are hardwired in Islam’s texts and traditions and that the West must gird up for a struggle of decades. “Islamopluralists” counter that Islam, like all religions, is diverse and mostly peaceful but contains a fringe of violent extremists and counsel the West to engage in dialogue, avoid provocation, and own up to its historical role in the problems of the Muslim world.
This public debate is at times so heated that it resembles a culture war. As is true in all culture wars, the two sides fail not only to listen to each other but even to talk to each other, convinced that the other side’s position is outside the walls of acceptability. By contrast, this book aims to dignify both sides—as well as that fragile commodity, civil democratic debate—by entering the argument. It does so for the reason that much is at stake in this debate—for the foreign policies of western states toward Muslim-majority states, for the treatment
of Muslims within the West, for the treatment of religious minorities in the Muslim-majority world, for the religious vitality of Islam, for the reduction of terrorism and civil war, and for the success of constitutional democracy and peace. The book therefore addresses fellow westerners who are engaged in this lively dispute, a group that certainly includes Muslims living in the West, but also hopes to engage the arguments and perspectives of Muslims around the world and indeed of all who agree that this debate has great stakes.
Which side, then, is right? The book’s criterion is religious freedom—a universal human right that demands respect for the full citizenship rights of people who differ in their answers to ultimate questions. I apply this criterion to the 47 (or so) countries where Muslims are in a majority and then look more broadly at the Islamic tradition.
I find that Islamoskeptics and Islamopluralists are both right and both wrong—an answer that might reduce the temperature of the debate and point the way toward constructive relations.
From a satellite view, the landscape of Muslim-majority states favors the Islamoskeptics. Of 47 Muslim-majority states, 36, more than three-quarters, have strong restrictions on religious freedom. Taken as a whole, the set of Muslim-majority states is far less religiously free than the global average or the set of Christian-majority countries.
To adopt this landscape view as our conclusion, though, is to overlook important contours that come into focus when we zoom in from a satellite view to a close-up view of the Muslim-majority world—namely the presence of religious freedom and the factors that account for its absence. Here, the Islamopluralists prove insightful. If there is a relative dearth of religious freedom in the Muslim world, Islamic doctrine is not necessarily the cause of it. We discover that some 42% of the Muslim-majority states that have low levels of religious freedom are governed not by a radical form of Islam but rather by an aggressive form of secularism imported from the West. We also discover that 11 Muslim-majority countries are religiously free—far more than outliers—and that they are free not despite Islam but because of their very interpretation of Islam.
True, 58% of the countries with low levels of religious freedom are “Islamist,” meaning governed by a regime that deploys highly restrictive laws and policies to promote a strongly traditional form of Islam—which stands as evidence for the Islamoskeptic position—but even these have modern origins and are too simply deemed the real and true Islam. We discover, too, Muslim movements, parties, and intellectuals who espouse and advocate for religious freedom. When we turn our focus to the Islamic historical tradition, we also discover “seeds of freedom”—seven in particular—which carry potential for
germinating into full religious freedom in the Muslim world. The long road of the Catholic Church toward freedom offers a model for how a religious tradition can undergo reform through its own historical commitments.
The result is a synthesis that is both honest and hopeful. As argued in the first chapter, what we learn from Islamoskeptics is honesty. Considered in the aggregate, the Muslim-majority world is comparatively religiously unfree. What we derive from Islamopluralists is hope. Both the reality and the potential for religious freedom can be found in the Muslim-majority world and in the broader Islamic tradition as well. The book, then, aims to present a picture of Islam that is fuller and more balanced than either side of today’s public debate provides. The final chapter derives from this picture recommendations for action that can guide Western countries in their engagement with the Muslim world and contribute to an expansion of religious freedom around the globe.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK BEGAN in 2011 as a contribution to a body of research on religious freedom being fostered by the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. On a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Religious Freedom Project convened a group of scholars to investigate religious freedom and brought us together periodically to discuss ideas and drafts. In 2016, the Religious Freedom Project became the Religious Freedom Institute, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Washington, DC, and I continued to participate in its work. The numerous seminars, workshops, symposiums, and conversations convened in these settings were an ideal intellectual atmosphere: rigorous, collegial, good humored, and embodying a diversity of perspectives that is rare in today’s academy.
I am indebted to the leaders whose creative vision and tenacity made all of this possible: Thomas Banchoff, who was founding director of the Berkley Center from 2006 to 2017 and is now Vice President for Global Engagement at Georgetown University; Thomas Farr, who was Director of the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 to 2016 and is now President of the Religious Freedom Institute; Timothy Samuel Shah, who was Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 to 2016 and is now Senior Director of the South and Southeast Asia Action Team at the Religious Freedom Institute; and Kent Hill, who joined the Religious Freedom Institute as Executive Director in 2017. I am grateful as well to the staff in these programs who worked faithfully and tirelessly to organize the many events: Jeremy Barker, Nicholas Fedyk, Abigail Galvan, Kyle Van der Meulen, A. J. Nolte, and Claudia Winkler. Not least, I thank the fellow scholars for their critique and encouragement: Ilan Alon, Anthony Gill, Brian Grim, William Inboden, Karrie Koesel, Timur Kuran, John Owen, David Novak, Ani Sarkissian, Rebecca Samuel Shah, Mona Siddiqui, Monica Duffy Toft, Roger Trigg, Bradford Wilcox, and Robert Woodberry.
I have benefited capitally from opportunities to present versions of the book’s arguments. I thank the James Madison Program at Princeton University for its invitation to deliver the Charles E. Test, MD, Distinguished Lectures on April 27–29, 2016. I also presented portions of the book at the Annual Law and Religion Roundtable in Chicago, Bar Ilan University, Brigham Young University Law School, Georgetown University, Northwood University, the Notre Dame Islamic Studies Colloquium, a Religious Freedom Institute conference in Rome, Italy, the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and the University of Michigan. I am also grateful to several publishers of the book’s ideas: Acta Philosophica, America, The Journal of Law and Religion (with Timothy Samuel Shah), Lawfare, The New York Daily News, Public Discourse, and The Washington Post
I am indebted to numerous people who provided feedback on the manuscript. Those who commented on the entire manuscript include Jonathan Fox, Kent Hill, Habib Malik, Timothy Samuel Shah, and Nukhet Sandal. Conveying useful comments on portions of the text were Mustafa Akyol, Jeremy Barker, Paul Elhallal, Brian Grim, Robert Hefner, Jeremy Menchik, and Gabriel Reynolds. I am grateful to Timur Kuran, one of today’s most important scholars of Islam, for reading the entire manuscript and taking the time to talk through a range of important issues with me. Three reviewers for Oxford University Press provided very helpful feedback.
Among the most profitable sources of feedback were two review sessions whose participants agreed to read the manuscript and spend several hours discussing it. The first of these took place at the University of Notre Dame on May 5, 2017, and was supported by generous grants from the Institute for the Study of the Liberal Arts and the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry Into Religion and Public Life at Notre Dame. Its participants included Sahar Aziz, Robert Dowd, C.S.C., Richard Garnett, Scott Hibbard, Mark Hoipkemeier, Farahnaz Ispahani, Ahmet Kuru, Anna Moreland, and Mun’im Sirry. I thank Tocqueville’s Director Phillip Muñoz for his generous support, and Program Coordinator Jennifer Smith for a virtuoso job in organizing the event. The second workshop took place on May 26, 2017 and was organized by the Religious Freedom Research Program at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center. Its participants included Matthew Anderson, Marjorie Balzer, Jacques Berlinerblau, Jennifer Bryson, Gabrielle Girgis, Kent Hill, David Hollenbach, S.J., John Langan, S.J., Paul Manuel, Paul Marshall, Jane McAuliffe, Ismail Royer, Angela Senander, Denis Sokolov, Sayyid Syeed, and Sufian Zhemukhov. I am grateful to Timothy Samuel Shah for conceiving and initiating this event and to Jeremy Barker for cheerfully organizing it.
On a topic on which there is so much fierce public debate, it is especially worth stressing that the views in the book are solely my own and should not be imputed to any of the many people who commented on the manuscript.
A number of research assistants provided critical help, including Faisal Baluch, Andrew Bramsen, Sean Braniff, Caleb Hamman, Mark Hoipkemier, Ji Eun Kim, Sarah Miller, Elizabeth Mullen, Paul Nauert, Anna Peterson, Josiah Ponnudurai, Nilay Saiya, Carolyn Sweeney, Afiya Webb, and Cynthia Weber. I thank Josiah Ponnudurai and Hailey Vrdolyak for fact-checking the manuscript; Hailey Vrdolyak and Melody Wood for copy-editing and proofreading; Belinda Thompson of Notre Dame’s Marketing Communications office for composing the maps; and the Political Science Department and the Joan B. Kroc Institute at Notre Dame for providing institutional homes. At Oxford University Press, I am grateful to editors Theo Calderara and Drew Anderla for their invaluable support, to Victoria Danahy for her outstanding copyediting, and to Felshiya Manonmani for production editing.
It is all too easy to overlook the importance of those who enable a book’s writing more than any other—one’s family. My wife Diana and my children Angela, James, and Peter supported the project through their love, their patience, their infectious joy, and their consistent dinner table query, “Dad, how is your book going?”
I dedicate the book to two people. A close reading of the following pages will reveal numerous influences of the work of Alfred Stepan, who, until his death on September 26, 2017, was one of the world’s leading comparative political scientists and theorists of democratization, a pioneer in the study of religion and politics, and a friend to the University of Notre Dame (at one time a member of Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees), all of this following early stints in the US Marine Corps and as a journalist for The Economist. Al was a kind and generous mentor to young political scientists, including a cohort of us who study religion and politics. May he rest in peace.
A close reading of the preceding acknowledgments reveals several mentions of Timothy Samuel Shah, who has been a constant collaborator and conversation partner since we were graduate students together in the early 1990s and a brother who lays down his life for his friends.
Introduction
Interven I ng I n a Publ I c Debate
IN JUNE 2009, Barack Obama, early in his first term as President of the United States, delivered a most unusual speech in Cairo, Egypt. Instead of directing his words to the citizens of a country, a parliament, or an international organization, President Obama spoke to the members of a world religion. “I’ve come to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” he announced. It was perhaps the first time in history that a US president had chosen an entire religion as his audience. A host of the speech was Al-Azhar, one of Islam’s oldest and most prestigious universities, and a patron who could help Obama project his message to Muslims—all Muslims, everywhere.
Why did President Obama direct his speech to such an unusual set of hearers? The previous year, Obama had campaigned for president on a promise to end the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of his charges against these wars was that Muslims around the world perceived them as being waged against Islam. In fairness, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had made great efforts to communicate that the United States was fighting terrorists and a rogue dictator and not Islam, which Bush had called a “religion of peace.” Still, Obama saw a need for a realignment in the relationship between the United States and Muslims—all Muslims, everywhere. “We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world,” he began his speech, and he elicited applause when he declared, “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.”
The president proposed that the United States and the Muslim world could reduce tensions together by addressing several issues ranging from violent extremism to women’s rights to nuclear proliferation—to religious freedom. Obama’s inclusion of this last principle—religious freedom—was, to close
observers of US foreign policy, noteworthy and far from inevitable. Just over a decade earlier, in 1998, the US Congress had passed the International Religious Freedom Act, mandating that the US government promote religious freedom around the world. Although religious freedom was a signature feature of America’s heritage, the bill’s architects reasoned, overseas it had become one of the most widely violated human rights, and the United States had not responded adequately. George W. Bush’s administration spoke warmly and consistently of the principle, though it sometimes subordinated it to the fight against terrorism.
It was unclear, though, whether President Obama would take up the cause, one that critics portrayed as asserting Western superiority over Islam and fomenting a clash of civilizations—exactly what Obama was proposing to leave behind. In his Cairo speech, though, he spoke of religious freedom warmly and forcefully, stressing that the principle is particularly dear to the United States: “[F]reedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion.” The United States hosts 1,200 mosques, he pointed out, including one in every state. Religious freedom’s relevance is not confined to America’s borders, he went on to argue, praising Islam for its tradition of tolerance but also taking to task Muslims who are intolerant of religious minorities, Muslims who practice violence against other Muslims whom they deem heterodox, and certain Western countries who discriminate against their Muslim citizens. “Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together,” he added.
President Obama was right: Religious freedom is a universal principle, rooted in human dignity, that is critical to peace between Western countries and the Muslim world as well as within the Muslim world. This is the premise of this book, which asks: Is Islam hospitable to religious freedom? Such a question could be asked of any religion—or country, or civilization—but for three reasons, it is urgent to ask it of Islam.1
First, a fiery public debate over the character of Islam has been raging in the West at least as far back as the attacks of September 11, 2001, and its outcome matters a great deal for relations between Western countries and the Muslim world. I will argue that religious freedom is not only a good criterion for assessing this debate, but also, when applied, this principle may well simmer it and redirect it toward more constructive relations between the West and the Muslim world.
Second, religious freedom is a “force multiplier” that expands important goods that are now lacking in the Muslim world but whose increase could greatly benefit Muslim countries and their relations with the West. Among these goods are stable democracy, civil and human rights, economic
development, the advancement of women, reconciliation among people of different faiths, and the reduction of terrorism, civil war, and international war.
Third, religious freedom is a matter of intrinsic justice. It is a human right that enjoys a prominent place in international conventions and safeguards the dignity of persons and communities. Justice is most at stake for religious minorities living amid Muslim majorities, Muslims who dissent from the orthodoxy of surrounding Muslim populations, Muslim minorities within nonMuslim-majority countries, and predominantly Muslim populations ruled by secular dictatorships, which Western governments sometimes support.
Let us look closer at these reasons for urgency.
A Public Debate
On the morning of Sunday, June 12, 2016, Americans woke to gruesome news. In the wee hours of that morning, a gunman had killed 49 people and wounded 3 others in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It was the deadliest shooting in US history. Soon it was revealed that the killer, named Omar Mateen, was a Muslim. During the shooting ordeal, he had declared his fealty to the Islamic State and his outrage over US interventions in Iraq and Syria.
What ensued in the media was a debate that has been taking place again and again in the United States and other Western countries in recent years.
“Is it any surprise that a Muslim did this?” asked one side. Political correctness and multiculturalism have blinded people to Islam’s violent character despite the headlines before their eyes: attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, in the past couple of years and a long litany of terrorist incidents around the world in previous years.
Amplifying this criticism was the concurrent presidential campaign, one of the most rhetorically bombastic in US history. In a speech the next day, candidate Donald Trump used the occasion to repeat his charge that radical Islam was threatening the United States and to excoriate his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for being unwilling to use the words “radical Islam” in describing terrorism. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the City Journal, echoed Trump’s point: “The inability of Barack Obama and the latest incarnation of Hillary Clinton to utter ‘radical Islam’ or ‘Islamic terrorism’ in connection with Muslims’ murderous killing sprees again is exposed as an utterly bankrupt, deadly and callous politically correct platitude.”2 The same mentality, these critics averred, had prevented law enforcement officers from investigating Mateen prior to the shootings. They did not want to be branded Islamophobic, tantamount to racism.
Islam was not the problem, shot back the other side, but rather Omar Mateen, a deranged and disturbed young man. Islam, like every religion, is peaceful and tolerant, though it also has its extremists. Islamist terrorism is a “twisted interpretation of one of the world’s great religions,” President Obama said shortly after the attacks, echoing themes from his 2009 Cairo speech. Candidate Hillary Clinton charged that anti-Islamic rhetoric and Trump’s calls for draconian immigration and antiterrorist policies “[play] right into the terrorists’ hands.”3 Obama responded angrily to calls for him to voice the term radical Islam: “What exactly would using this label accomplish and what will it change? Will it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring more allies for military strategy than . . . is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”4
Although this debate may seem to be one of right versus left, the reality is more complicated. Stoking controversy was not only the identity of Mateen but also that of his victims. Mateen’s atrocity took place nearly a year after the US Supreme Court had accorded same-sex couples the right to marry and at a time when the issue continued to burn in courts, legislatures, and many other forums. Gay rights helped to scramble familiar ideological coalitions. Voices on both the right and the left cited Mateen’s atrocious deed as evidence of Islam’s homophobia, and voices on both sides volleyed back that the problem was not Islam but rather the hostility to gays that resided either in American culture or else simply in the heart of Omar Mateen. What remained salient, though, was the divide over the character of Islam: Voices lined up clearly as hostile or sympathetic.
This debate often resembles a culture war. It is carried out in public—on the Internet, cable news, radio talk shows, and newspaper opinion columns. It is polarized, with its two sides squaring off sharply with little common ground between them.5 As in other theaters of the culture war, combatants fire flaming words as their weapons, aiming as much to ignite the zeal—and the votes and the media consumption—of their supporters as to explode their enemies. The dispute has flared up every time an act of terrorism committed by a Muslim hits the headlines. Al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11, 2001, launched the hottest phase of this public debate. Subsequent events have fanned it: the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in fall 2004; bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005; Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed published in 2005; the Regensburg Address of Pope Benedict XVI in September 2006; the controversy of 2010 over the building of an Islamic Center near the site of the September 11 attacks in lower Manhattan; Fort Hood; Benghazi; The Boston
Marathon; Parliament Hill in Ottawa; the Islamic State; San Bernardino; Paris; Nice; Berlin.
Much as in the Cold War, this public debate has hawks and doves, which I herein call “Islamoskeptics” and “Islamopluralists,” respectively.6 Table I.1 summarizes their positions in four parallel tenets.
Islamoskeptics believe first that violence and intolerance are widespread in Islam. Referring to President George W. Bush, Christian leader Pat Robertson quipped, “I have taken issue with our esteemed president in regard to his stand in saying Islam is a peaceful religion. It’s just not.”7 In this school, it is dangerously naive to view Islam’s violent extremists as a small and aberrant faction. “[T]hat faction, militant Islam,” writes Islamoskeptic journalist Andrew McCarthy, “is plainly far more robust and extensive than the scant lunatic fringe the U.S. delusionally comforts itself to limn; and its killings, far from condemnation, provoke tepid admiration if not outright adulation in a further, considerable cross-section of the Muslim world.”8
Islam’s proneness to violence, a second tenet of Islamoskepticism runs, is hardwired into Islam’s founding texts and so is unlikely to change or to vary from place to place. Writer and former US government official Reuel Marc Gerecht takes to task westerners who “won’t probe too deeply, and certainly not critically, into how the Quran and the prophet’s traditions, as well as classical Islamic history, have given all believing Muslims certain common sentiments, passions, and reflexes.”9 One of the most prominent Islamoskeptics, Somaliborn writer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, holds that violent extremism is a “symptom of a much more profound ideological epidemic that has its root causes in Islamic
Table I.1. Islamoskeptics vs. Islamopluralists
Tenet →
Ideology↓
Extent of violence and intolerance in the Muslim world
Source of violence in the Muslim world Muslim attitude toward democracy
Recommendation for the West
Islamoskeptics Widespread Hardwired in Islamic doctrines Inhospitable Gird up for enduring conflict
Islamopluralists Limited; the Muslim world is diverse Local and contemporary circumstances Open Pursue dialogue, find common ground, own up to the West’s past injustices
doctrine.”10 A common charge is that Islam’s violent nature results from its stress on divine commands and its lack of a robust role for reason. Violence is rooted in Islamic theology, claims this school, and is not simply a product of poverty, corrupt regimes, or Western colonialism.
A third tenet follows: Islam is inhospitable to democracy. “Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms,” writes McCarthy, citing global polls showing a high percentage of Muslims favoring a strict form of sharia law. In recent years, Islamoskeptics have criticized Western liberals for naively expecting democracy to arise from the Arab Uprisings of 2011—once but no longer called “the Arab Spring.” “Islamism, if mentioned at all, was dismissed as irrelevant; experts in the studios and newsrooms at home were positive that this Arab Spring marked the success of secular and progressive values just like those they themselves had,” comments British author David Pryce-Jones.11
The fourth tenet of Islamoskepticism is a prescription for action: The West must gird up for a long struggle to defend its liberties and civilization against the Islamic threat. Islam “cannot be placated. It must be fought and, sadly, it must be fought continuously and fiercely,” wrote Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, not long after the attacks of September 11.12 Dialogue and accommodation will do little to change Islam’s hostility. If westerners engage in dialogue at all, it must be a tough dialogue, one that raises the hard issues of Islam’s violence and illiberalism. Otherwise the outcome will be, as National Review editor James Burnham warned, “the suicide of the West.”
At times, Islamoskeptics will acknowledge some diversity within Islam. Ali, for instance, proposes a catalogue of fundamentalist “Medina Muslims,” more peaceful “Mecca Muslims,” and reformist “modifying Muslims.” Among Islamoskeptics, though, such acknowledgments are a stage whisper, in contrast to their declamations of Islam’s true nature, which are loud and central. Even Ali stresses that all schools of Muslims must deal with the violence that dominates the tradition.13
Islamopluralists, by contrast, hold that Islam is diverse, not predominantly violent—their first tenet. The “majority of mainstream Muslims hate terrorism and violence as much as we do,” argues Georgetown University scholar of Islam John Esposito.14 Like all religions, Islam has its extremists, but they are in a small minority. Karen Armstrong, who also writes on Islam, cites a Gallup Poll showing that only 7% of Muslims thought that the September 11 attacks were justified.15
Where violence and intolerance do exist in Islam, a second Islamopluralist tenet holds, it feeds off local and historically particular circumstances. One
month after the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote a cover story for Newsweek entitled, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?,” in which he identified economic backwardness, illiteracy, the demographic “youth bulge,” corrupt autocrats, and the failure of socialism, nationalism, and modernization as the conditions in the swamp from which the monster of religious violence grows.16 Armstrong adds colonialism, secularism, and western states’ support for autocrats.17 One might add the Cold War, which often rendered Muslim-majority states pawns of the superpowers. For Islamopluralists, then, violence is not inherent in Islam’s teachings.
Third, Islamopluralists are more optimistic about prospects for democracy in Islam. In the book Islam and Democracy, Esposito and fellow scholar of Islam John Voll point to Islamic concepts like shura [consultation], ijma [consensus], and ijtihad [independent interpretive judgment], as favoring democracy, as well as to several actual democracies in Muslim-majority countries.18 Islamopluralists often also cite liberal democratic trends among Muslims in the 19th and 20th centuries, which, they point out, were later quelled by Western-backed authoritarian rulers.
Islamopluralists’ recommendation to the West, their fourth tenet, is to end politics that oppress Muslims and create a violent backlash and to engage in a two-way dialogue that can increase the sphere of shared understanding. They counsel against “orientalism,” the term that the famous Palestinian-born Western public intellectual Edward Said used to describe a Western colonialist mentality that rendered Muslims as backward and intolerant and that justified imperialism.19 In fact, argue Islamopluralists, the orientalist mentality and the policies that it spawns only serve to inflame violent backlash; shrill Islamoskeptics create the very problem that they identify. In a true dialogue, the West would own up to its own history of contributing to the problems of Muslims. It would also draw upon and develop further the sphere of beliefs shared by the “Abrahamic” faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—a sphere whose size Islamopluralists find impressive.
As with the post-Orlando debate, the argument between these schools is not the same as that between right and left. The ranks of Islamoskeptics include political conservatives and Christian conservatives, to be sure, but also feminists, atheists, gay rights activists, and other voices from the political left. Likewise, the ranks of Islamopluralists include multiculturalists and left-wing university professors but also those conservatives who decry the war on terror as an overextended foreign policy and who find common cause with Islam on marriage, sexuality, and family.20
Are there more nuanced positions whose complexity eludes both camps? Of course there are.21 Some of them appear in the pages that follow. Still, it is
