Ramadan wrote What I Believe as “a work of clarification.” In it, he emphasizes that his goal is to fashion a distinctively “Western” expression of Islam that does not require Muslims to choose between their national identities and their religious one. According to Ramadan, a person can be both fully Muslim and fully French, British, or German; these multiple identities shift and blend depending on the situation we face.

Ramadan’s intellectual agenda reflects his own unconventional upbringing: his maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group that championed the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt and which launched the modern era of Islamist politics. Ramadan’s father, Said, was one of al-Banna’s senior deputies, and after al-Banna’s death, he went into exile with his family in Geneva. There, he committed his life to preserving and disseminating al-Banna’s legacy. The first of Said Ramadan’s children born in Europe was Tariq. Caught between the Islamist cauldron of Egypt and cosmopolitan Geneva, Tariq grew up parsing his multiple and seemingly competing identities. As he writes, “I am Swiss by nationality, Egyptian by memory, Muslim by religion, European by culture, [and] universalist by principle.”

After a secular education at the University of Fribourg and religious training at Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the global center of Sunni learning), Ramadan made a name for himself  in the nineties as an expert on European Islam. It was a prescient concern. By that time, it was clear that the latest waves of immigrants—mainly Muslims from North Africa, Turkey, and south Asia, who had come to Europe to jumpstart manufacturing industries left crippled by the war—were not integrating properly. Despite having lived in Europe for decades and even having raised a new generation there, Europe’s immigrant Muslims were steeped in social, economic, and religious discontent. The discontent was exacerbated by widespread unemployment, low rates of education, and a seeming unwillingness to engage with the culture of their new countries. Most disturbingly, the malaise encouraged some young Muslims to experiment with rigid, literalist interpretations of their faith—expressions of Islam that promoted the use of Islamic law, sanctioned honor killings, and even condoned terrorism in the name of religion.

This powderkeg has prompted deep reflection among white Europeans and the European Muslims who live among them: Is Islam fundamentally opposed to European values? How can governments integrate groups unwilling to desegregate themselves? Is Europe a secular or religious continent? These represent the signal questions facing Europe today; and for much of the past fifteen years, Tariq Ramadan has been at the center of the debate.

Ramadan’s fame owes not only to his timely academic interests. He has also attracted considerable controversy. His connections to the Muslim Brotherhood have earned him deep suspicion. Meanwhile, in a 2004 book the French journalist Caroline Fourest chronicled examples of Ramadan’s alleged “double-speak”: instances of Ramadan modifying, even contradicting himself before Muslim and non-Muslim audiences, preaching a liberal message of integration, at the same time urging Muslims to resist European culture. Among his most notorious statements came during a 2003 debate with current French president Nicholas Sarkozy, in which Ramadan called for a “moratorium” on stoning, refusing to support an outright ban.

Despite the rancorous debate surrounding Ramadan’s true beliefs it is worth trying, at least for a moment, to separate the ideas from the man and ask whether Ramadan offers a workable solution to Europe’s “Muslim problem.” Fundamentally, Ramadan’s project focuses on integration. He wants to see Europe’s Muslim communities become full participants in their adoptive cultures, such that “Muslim” and “European” are regarded as complementary identities. Islamic and European values rest on a common bedrock of moral teachings, he argues, grounded in the pursuit of “justice, solidarity, and human dignity.” Acknowledging these shared principles could contribute to several goals: ending the tug-of-war many Muslims sense between their Islamic and European identities reconciling native Europeans with the immigrants who live among them; and building a multi-cultural society where difference flourishes among common civic principles.

Establishing common ground is key if Islam is to become a true interlocutor in the European conversation. To that end, Ramadan urges Muslims to distinguish between the cultural trappings of their faith, which tend to separate them from their new countries, and the essence of their faith, which has the potential to transcend cultures and continents. Many of the most troubling practices in Europe’s Muslim communities—such as stoning or genital mutilation—are “un-Islamic” in Ramadan’s view. They represent vestiges of Algerian, Egyptian, or Pakistani culture that immigrants have failed to jettison as they have settled in their new lands. So long as these groups continue to huddle in ethnic ghettos, resisting pressure to join the mainstream, they will cling to these practices.

Ramadan’s solution is to develop a new “Western Islam”—a radical “reconstruction” of the faith that upholds core beliefs shared by all Muslims, but which also embraces important European values, such as freedom of religion and respect for women. If history furnishes any clues, Ramadan’s “Western Islam” could become a reality one day. Over the centuries, Islam has proven remarkably durable and dynamic, capable of spreading among diverse cultures and across far-flung continents. From the first hundred years, when Muslim armies carved out an empire stretching from Portugal to China, to the fourteenth century, when Sufi missionaries began preaching deep in southeast Asia, to our modern day, when mosques rise around Detroit, Paris, and Rome, Islam has shown itself adept at inhabiting new cultures as it maintains its strong sense of self. While the situation in Europe may appear grim at the moment, there is ample precedent throughout history of Islam’s ability to adapt—even if it often entailed conquest.

On balance, Tariq Ramadan presents an attractive solution for Europe’s “Muslim problem.” Europe’s Muslim communities are not leaving anytime soon, so the present gridlock between them and the European mainstream must come to an end one way or another. There are far worse outcomes than what Ramadan proposes. Yet What I Believe suffers from a few key weaknesses.

First and foremost, for a work of clarification, What I Believe does little to dispel the most trenchant criticisms leveled at Ramadan: his alleged sympathies toward the Muslim Brotherhood and instances of double-speak. He dismisses them offhand, writing, “I will not waste my time here trying to defend myself.” While Ramadan understandably may not want to spend the entire book answering attacks, criticisms leveled against him are deep and detailed, and warrant more than the brief retorts we read.

Second, Ramadan goes to great lengths to portray European Muslims as peaceable, upstanding citizens. This is clearly a corrective to the Islamophobia that festers among certain sectors of the European public. For the vast majority of Muslims, Ramadan is undoubtedly right: Many immigrants have made the transition from Algeria, Turkey, or Pakistan with remarkable ease and now lead successful, stable lives in Europe. But Ramadan seems unwilling to concede that one of the biggest problem facing Europe’s Muslims may not be integration per se, but rather, the temptations toward fundamentalism and violence. Ramadan deals with these explicitly only once in a chapter on “Challenges,” where he commits a paragraph to describing them. Individuals such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the Christmas-Day bomber radicalized during his time at University College London—may be few in number, but they are the fruit of a broader culture that, at its worst, sanctions extremism, and at best, finds it difficult to denounce or defuse it.

The book’s third shortcoming concerns identity politics. Throughout, Ramadan argues that Muslims must be given a sense of belonging in European culture if they are ever truly to integrate. But as he reads the accounts narrated in textbooks, university syllabi, and popular culture, he finds a biased version of European history that excludes the achievements of Muslims. If Muslims do appear in the story, it is often as the ominous “other” lurking in the background as Europe undertakes its grand march from “Plato to NATO.”

For Ramadan, this traditional plotline is not only misleading, but also dangerous. It dismisses the major contributions of Islam to European civilization, especially the role of Muslim philosophers in transmitting classical learning to the medieval West. By denying these contributions, he argues, modern-day European Muslims are made to feel like second-class citizens in a civilization their ancestors helped to  build, but for which they get no credit.

In principle, Ramadan is correct: without Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna or Averroes, there would have been neither medieval Scholasticism nor the Renaissance. These contributions are substantial, and cannot be underestimated. Yet at the same time, to portray Islam as a constitutive part of Europe, a distinctively European achievement, or a core aspect of European identity from the beginning, is itself a misleading brand of revisionist history. To be sure, Islam played a huge role in the formation of Europe, but primarily as Europe’s existential rival and occasional collaborator. Islam is part of Europe’s modern identity, but it need not justify its place today by rewriting the past. As religious observance declines across Europe and the continent loses touch with its Christian roots, now is precisely the moment to recover a sense of historical self, not dilute it further.

This was part of the message in Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg, where he urged Europeans to recover their true cultural identity—an identity the Pope grounded in the twin legacies of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. For Ramadan, this approach is both reductionist and exclusive, for it essentializes a rich, textured history in order to protest the bugaboo of the multi-cultural present.

But Ramadan misses the point of Benedict’s speech, which in fact contains a kernel of wisdom that might be useful for Europe’s Muslims too. Over the centuries, Christianity has succeeded by translating the philosophical principles undergirding the faith into good public policy. It is no coincidence that secular ideologies such as universal human rights or economic subsidiarity took root in the Christian West; they represent political extensions of Christian ethics. Muslims need to consider the same principles that undergird their faith, and imagine how these principles can help them live as citizens in their new European environment. The currency of debate in Europe is not the Qur’an or the sayings of the Prophet, but the rational convictions enshrined therein. Islam has the intellectual resources in its past to excavate these principles; it just needs to relocate them.

Tariq Ramadan is an optimist, and in these times filled with apocalyptic predictions about “Londonistan” or the minarets of Notre Dame, it is refreshing to hear some good forecasts. Still, Ramadan’s optimism may also be his greatest weakness: In his eagerness to shrink the chasm between Europe and Islam, he seems to have lost sight of their fundamental and abiding differences. Thus, he succumbs to the temptations of flaccid ecumenism, which compels no one to reexamine his fundamental assumptions. Islam is not some exotic form of continental philosophy we can simply drop into the European equation and expect to balance effortlessly. Rather, it is a significantly different variable—and balancing this equation will take a lot more than liberal readings of the Qur’an mixed with a dose of Enlightenment thought. But the existence of a chasm between Europe and Islam does not necessarily entail the spread of bigotry or segregation. Neither group needs to whitewash its convictions or rewrite its past in order to live together. Islam has the power to enrich civil society in Europe—it can begin by identifying first principles it shares with the cultures around it.


Christian Sahner, a Rhodes Scholar, is presently a doctoral candidate in History at Princeton University. In May 2009, he worked with Tariq Ramadan on a symposium on religion and politics at the University of Oxford.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Lost in the Sacred, first published in German in 2005 and appearing in English translation earlier this spring, attributes the crisis of the Middle East to an “overflow of the sacred.” For Diner, “the sacred” is not a strictly religious category; it refers to “the burning omnipresence of transcendence in all areas of life.” Drawing examples from modern-day Baghdad, Istanbul at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, and Medina under Mohammad, Diner shows how divinity permeates spaces that the Western tradition never sees as “sacred”: from language and financial transactions, to conceptions of political authority and the home.

We often speak about a “crisis” in the Muslim world, but rarely define our terms. Diner sums it up by examining the groundbreaking U.N. Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), which Time magazine named “Book of the Year” in 2002. Though not written in response to 9-11, the AHDR seemed to provide a comprehensive diagnosis of the Middle East’s many social ills. It described a region destabilized by low technological development, authoritarian states, the absence of democratic institutions, the deliberate exclusion of women from public life, and a lethal hostility to the outside world—the sorts of problems that sustained rogue regimes in countries such as Libya, and allowed more virulent cancers like al-Qaeda to spread through the region.

But the report, written largely by social scientists from the Middle East, said nothing about religion or secularity. For Diner, this is a worrying sign. From his point of view, secularity is the engine of change in a dynamic society: It allows us to decode the world by human reason, respond to change, and rise to new challenges. He claims the certain brands of religion hamper this process. Especially in the case of Islam, a religion that professes to regulate all areas of life through a divine law, there can be no negotiation with an ever-changing modern world. As long as religion wins the day, Diner argues, the crisis of the Muslim world will result from “a deficit of secularization.”

Diner’s argument often depends on a dichotomous and simplistic portrait of “Islam” and “the West.” He juxtaposes a Muslim world consumed with the otherworldly and the past versus a West anchored in science and progress. We live in an age when such simplistic readings of the Middle East can have profound political consequences: We recall the American failure to court Arab public opinion after 9-11 and the post-invasion mishaps in Iraq as two glaring examples of how misreading the region can actually widen chasms between “us” and “them.”

It doesn’t help that Diner often uses untidy categories when he talks about the Muslim world. He gives a brief caveat about this in his introduction, but it would have been worth emphasizing throughout the book that not every Muslim is an Arab, nor every Arab a Muslim, nor every Muslim deeply religious. Even if Diner understands these distinctions himself, most readers do not. We tend to see the Middle East as a cultural, religious, and political monolith, a view specialists should work to dispel.

Diner’s analysis of the AHDR introduces a particularly controversial thesis. In it, he argues that the problems of the Middle East derive from cultural and religious characteristics. Obvious socio-economic factors like income inequality or repressive governments are pushed to the side; they are treated as symptoms of a deeper crisis, the failure to delineate sacred and secular space. Embedded in this argument is a more general suspicion of religion itself. According to Diner’s view of the Middle East, religion can only retard, never stimulate progress. But even as Diner condemns a “deficit of secularization” in the Muslim world, he forgets that the historical apogee of Muslim culture—the so-called “renaissance” of the ninth and tenth centuries, which fertilized the European renaissance—was ultimately a religious enterprise.

To identify the “deficit of secularization,” Diner wanders far and wide. One “problem” he cites is that of the Arabic language. On the one hand, Arabic exists in the form of “Fusha,” the classical, quasi-Qur’anic dialect used in mosque sermons, political speeches, newspaper articles, and other formal settings; on the other, it exists as “Amiyya,” the colloquial dialect of everyday life. Even in a secular context, Fusha is infused with a sacred quality, and as a sacred language, it responds slowly to changing cultural circumstances. It is also inaccessible to vast sections of the Arab public, who speak and experience life through local dialects. According to Diner, the tension between these “registers” hampers intellectual growth, since the real language of cultural and social change is not sanctioned as intellectually respectable, while the intellectually respectable language is somewhat archaic.

The sacred also permeates literary culture in the Muslim world. For centuries, literary culture was tied to the Qur’an. But the Qur’an is largely an oral text—heard aloud in a mosque—and due to its sacred, unchanging quality, huge taboos originally surrounded its printing. Indeed, the first printed Qur’ans appeared in sizeable numbers a full three centuries after Europe’s presses began printing Bibles. And unlike the Bible, whose translation and mass production prepared a European public to consume other genres of printed literature, the slow appearance of the Qur’an in print form stunted access and interest in other kinds of written material. To this day, most written materials are in Fusha (as opposed to the more widely-understood colloquial), and forms of literature such as novels still have tiny followings in the Arab world. The statistics bear this out: In 1991, there were 102,000 new books published in North America. In the entire Arab world, 6,500 books were published (on mostly religious or technical subjects): 1.1% of the world’s book production for 5% of its population. The transmission of outside knowledge into Arabic is equally abysmal.

Diner’s argument about language and reading is interesting, but it leaves a few questions unanswered: How does a diglossic language like Arabic compare to something like Japanese, which has succeeded as a modern language despite rigid distinctions among “honorific,” “written,” and “colloquial” forms? How does book production in the Arab world compare to other regions at similar developmental stages? Surely there are places in the world where written culture is even more embryonic, yet where the Qur’an exercises no special influence. And what about forms of literature, such as poetry, that remain wildly popular in the Arab world? Do they not count as “suitably enriched” forms of writing?

For most readers, the biggest problems in today’s Muslim world are not language and books, but the marriage of religion and political authority. Perhaps because these issues typically receive the most attention, Diner does not devote much space to discussing them. But if we want to engage in the dangerous dance of identifying “intrinsic qualities” in Muslim culture that blur the line between “sacred” and the “secular,” this is the place to focus.

One relevant issue Diner does discuss is the famous Qur’anic exhortation “to command the right and forbid the wrong.” Throughout the history of Islam, it has served as a mandate for each individual to obey the law, and when necessary, ensure that others do the same. After all, Islam has never been comfortable ensuring the salvation of the individual in isolation from his community. Communal salvation depends on the shari’a—an all-encompassing divine law taken from the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet and his followers. It theoretically imbues even the most secular spaces with a sense of the sacred, for in everything Muslims do, from performing the Hajj to taking out bank loans, they are theoretically supposed to act out a particular obligation to God.

This is certainly true in classical Islam, but in much of today’s Muslim world—even in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia, which profess to enforce shari’a—civil law has displaced divine law. Diner acknowledges this, but fails to demonstrate in concrete terms how an ancient legal ethos that blurred “secular” and “sacred” still affects a modern Muslim world where God is no longer lawgiver except in certain jurisdictions, like family or inheritance law, where shari’a holds undisputed sway.

Throughout Lost in the Sacred, we see a few key weaknesses surface time and again. The most obvious remains the unresolved tension over responsibility: Do the problems of the Muslim world come principally from religion and culture or politics and economics? Skeptical readers will rightly wonder why Diner must seek elusive explanations for the “9-11 world” when the obvious suffices in so many cases. Chronic food shortages, ferocious censorship laws, and income inequality are among the unambiguous factors that have contributed to the crisis of the modern Middle East, none of which have anything to do with religion. But Diner argues it must be something older, embedded in the fabric of society. It is a theory difficult to prove, and whatever its merits, Diner must discount the more obvious explanations before he can substantiate his subtler claims.

Secondly, if Islam is the “x-factor” in the crisis of the Middle East, how does Diner explain the existence of similar, perhaps worse conditions in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where Islam has no foothold? Could the Middle East’s problems simply be the growing pains of an average developing society?

Thirdly, Diner often resorts to broad caricatures of the Muslim world—a realm that stretches from the suburbs of Detroit to Morocco, Iran and the Philippines. Its inhabitants speak Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu and dozens of other languages. If we can still speak of a single “Muslim world” and not a diverse collection of cultures that practice Islam, Diner needs to tell us why.

As a final reflection, Diner takes a fairly pessimistic stance toward the central role of religion in Muslim countries. The only way out of the crisis, he writes, is to delimit the sacred through Western-style secularization. But Diner forgets that the fallout of secularization is not always pretty—in the West, the removal of religion from the public sphere has caused an erosion of public values, the collapse of the family, and a bitter string of culture wars, to name a few negative consequences. Lost in the Sacred fails to identify these corrosive side effects, and in the process, finds it hard to sympathize with the positive role religion can play in an individual’s life and in the welfare of a nation. What the Muslim world needs is not Western-style secularization that stresses the privatization of religion, but a form of authentic faith at ease with modernity—one which encourages peace, equality among men and women, engagement with the outside world, and an openness to change. This is the challenge: to identify traditions that preserve Islam but which allow it to speak the language of modernity, and in turn, help modernity speak the language of religion.

Christian C. Sahner is a Rhodes Scholar studying Islamic history at the University of Oxford.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Many Syrians are acutely aware of the tensions that exist in their country. Talk to a Damascene merchant for ten minutes and the conversation invariably veers to a favorite subject: Syria’s tarnished image abroad. “When the West looks at Syria, they see terrorism and Islam,” says Khalid, a grocer. “But you come here and you see how Syria is different. The people are not terrorists. We are open.”

If there’s one place in Damascus that bucks the stereotype of a culturally monolithic Middle East, it’s Bab Touma, the ancient Christian quarter where Saint Paul himself once preached. Nationally, Christians constitute around ten percent of the population. They are disappearing in many Middle Eastern countries in the face of mounting persecution, but not in Syria—a point many residents of Bab Touma are eager to make. “I am Syrian,” says Marie, a Christian shopkeeper, “My neighbor is Muslim, my family is Christian, but we are all Syrians.” The feeling of inclusion among religious minorities is often attributed to Syria’s ruling family, the Assads. They belong to the Alawi sect of Shi’a Islam, which for centuries existed on the margins of this majority-Sunni society. With an Alawi-led secular government, Syria is among the most hospitable places in the region for minority groups.

Those expecting an Arab Pyongyang will be deeply disappointed when they arrive in Damascus, a city as cosmopolitan as it is diverse. For millennia, it has been a crossroads of intellectual and commercial exchange with the West. Its bazaars still brim with goods from around the world; it boasts a fine opera house and lively music scene, and its streets hum with conversation in Arabic, English, French, and Farsi. Wander around certain neighborhoods of Damascus late at night, and you’ll see restaurants packed with people casually smoking water pipes and children playing in the streets. As Layla, a former journalist, remarks, “In some ways Damascus has always felt like a part of Europe to me; we live in a Mediterranean world that’s closer to Rome than to Saudi Arabia or Egypt.”

Though the capital bucks the all-too pervasive image of Syria as a closed, autocratic society, the country defies easy categorization. For its many bright spots, Damascus is still a place encumbered by restriction and silence.

In the streets, it’s hard to avoid the image of President Bashar al-Assad. It hangs prominently in shop windows, on billboards, and in family homes. Yet frank discussion of politics in Syria is highly circumscribed. Part of the problem is Syria’s security force, the Mukhabarat, whose plainclothes officers far outnumber their uniformed counterparts. On a walk through Bab Touma Square, a Syrian friend points discreetly toward two men husking corn into a large wicker bowl. “Police,” he says, “They’re watching everything.” Thanks to the Mukhabarat, anyone who squawks too loudly in public about President Assad or Israel may find himself under surveillance or abducted into custody. But their influence is also more subtle: The perception of an omnipresent “Big Brother” creates a culture of self-censorship in Syria that, in a sense, polices itself.

Whatever restrictions they encounter on the streets, Syrians are eager to talk politics in private—especially the American presidential election. Like most countries in the Middle East, Syria polled “deep blue” in the period leading up to the election. The Iraq war is hugely unpopular, and Sen. Obama was enthusiastically greeted as a change-agent. President Assad even issued a note of congratulations to the president-elect, expressing “hope that dialogue would prevail to overcome the difficulties that have hindered real progress toward peace, stability and prosperity in the Middle East.” John McCain had his fans as well—if for less principled reasons. As Hassan, a young Arabic-language instructor told me before the election, “Obama will end the war; without war in the Middle East, Americans and Europeans lose interest in the language, and I lose my customers!”

Despite the “Axis” label America has given their nation, many Syrians have great admiration for America. The huge line for visas at the door of the American embassy and the wildly popular Oprah Winfrey Show reveal a society open and at ease with Western culture. The only foreign power that arouses truly unequivocal complaints is Israel. The state-controlled media is filled with reports slamming Israel for aggression and human rights abuses. It’s an adversarial relationship that colors the views of even the most apolitical Syrians.

Take Iman, a 23-year old education student at the University of Damascus. A Sunday school teacher at her local Catholic church and an ardent devotee of Queen Latifah, she embodies the refreshing blend of old and new ascendant in modern Syria. Yet when Israel comes up in conversation, she stiffens. She speaks passionately about Israeli attacks on Palestinian women and children, and the widespread deprivations in the West Bank. When discussion veers toward Israel’s nemesis, Hassan Nasrallah, the fiery head of Hezbollah (considered a terrorist group by the U.S.), her mood lightens. “His words are like poetry,” she gushes, “he speaks only the truth, truth to power. He is a freedom fighter.” Her support for Hezbollah is typical here; the group’s yellow flag is easy to spot throughout Damascus. It’s been flying ever since the 2006 summer war with Israel, which was widely seen as a victory for Hezbollah, and by extension, its main allies, Syria and Iran.

For all the chatter about Israel, Syria’s media is quiet about another thorny issue: human rights. Human Rights Watch reports that Syrian jails confine hundreds and possibly thousands of political prisoners, ranging from pro-democracy activists to members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Kangaroo courts try government critics for seditious behavior every year, and Syrians live under an indefinite state of “emergency rule,” instated when the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963.

In spite of this, the government commands huge support. (President Assad was reelected last year with 97 percent of the vote.) Even young people, typically sources of dissent, are not shy in their enthusiasm. Iman is again a case in point. When I asked her about Syria’s political problems, she didn’t seem to grasp what I meant. After explaining, she became visibly upset. “So many Westerners criticize our government for these things [censorship, human rights abuses, etc.]. We have freedom here, we can speak openly about our politics. The police make us safe.”

The response reminded me of how many Chinese reacted to the surge of human-rights coverage during August’s Olympics. In Syria, as in China, information about the government is tightly controlled. Thus, from Iman’s point of view, my questions were as irrelevant as they were misguided. After all, the Mukhabarat are mostly believed to protect rights, not restrict them. The Assad government is largely viewed as a source of stability, not a hegemony, and jailed activists generally seen as troublemakers, not peaceful dissenters.

It’s hard to say what creates these attitudes; some blend of misinformation, alternative conceptions of what makes for a healthy civil society, and a degree of ambivalence toward Syria’s underlying problems seems like a likely explanation. As a new administration in Washington begins engaging with old enemies, we should acknowledge that Syria—both culturally and intellectually—defies our perceptions about life inside the “Axis of Evil.” We must seek and promote the good that exists in Syria, but at the same time, soberly acknowledge that true openness and real freedom remain far off.

Christian C. Sahner is a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford studying Islamic history.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.