Prior to the 9/11 attacks, as I completed my PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies, I applied to a mass number of three-letter government departments and agencies for a job. Yet many months and even more resumes later, I was unemployed.

A decade ago, to study history, languages, and cultures for a PhD and seek a job in public service was like wearing a neon sign over one’s head that flashed, “Don’t hire me.” I was told I was “over-educated,” that I had studied something “obscure and irrelevant,” and that in my early 30s I was, yes, “too old” for the jobs I’d qualify for, and that my research and teaching experience in graduate school counted for “nothing.”

Unfortunately, it took the catastrophe of 9/11 to make my humanities degree a valuable asset. Starting late in the fall of 2001, I began to work for the Department of Defense, first as a contractor for a year and then as a civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for six years. In work ranging from strategic engagement of foreign audiences to interrogating detainees at Guantanamo, my studies in culture, religion, history, and foreign languages served as excellent preparation.

I volunteered for this work. I cared about public service and national security and was pleased to have an opportunity to use my Stanford and Yale education by supporting our military as a civilian.

The most demanding, challenging, and meaningful assignment during my years working for the military was serving as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay. Becoming an interrogator was not my idea, but when I was asked to go, I went willingly.

I completed training provided by the military for uniformed, i.e., active duty and reservist, interrogators. During this training, I was fortunate to receive instruction from interrogators whose conflict experience ranged from the Vietnam War up to and including post-9/11 interrogations. These experienced, skilled professionals consistently taught that interrogation which follows the guidelines of the Army Field Manual, namely rapport-based interrogation, is both what is right and what works. My experience at Guantanamo consistently confirmed this.

Until now, I have neither written nor spoken publicly about my work as an interrogator. Public support for torture in interrogation from certain quarters of the American public, and the risks at stake if the public misunderstands what interrogation is, deeply trouble me. So I have decided to write, to the extent possible, about the nature of interrogation and my experience.

I think it is particularly important to address the topic of interrogation now as campaigning ramps up for the 2012 presidential and congressional elections. Candidates and voters need to understand how valuable interrogation is for the protection of our nation, how wretched torture is, and why torture is not a method of interrogation properly understood.

For too long since 9/11, public discussions of interrogation have been dominated by the uninformed assertions of “armchair interrogators,” a term coined by former CIA interrogator and now opponent of torture Glenn Carle.

All too often, inexperienced pundits have presented us with a stark choice between security and humane treatment of detainees. This is a false set of options. The real contrast is between torture, on the one hand, and security through interrogation consistent with respect for the humanity of the detainee, on the other.

I believe that America, as a country that defends human dignity, is a country worth defending, and I want our country to remain in that position. Torture, however, is an affront to human dignity on at least three levels.

(1) Torture violates the dignity of the detainee. We may not like our enemies, but they are human beings; as such they deserve respect for their basic human dignity.

(2) Torture degrades the integrity of the interrogator. When we recruit men and women into our armed forces and as civilians working for the military, we should offer them opportunities to serve with honor, not pressure them to engage in profound moral evil.

(3) Torture betrays the dignity of those who suffer from intelligence failures; this includes those who may be victims of otherwise preventable attacks. Torture is not only unnecessary and abusive to detainees; in intelligence collection torture is counter-productive. Instead of torture, the populations that interrogators seek to protect by intelligence collection deserve nothing short of excellence in the collection process.

First, torture is cruel and thus wrong. As Christopher Tollefsen explains, “if torture is understood to mean an intentional damaging of bodily or personal integrity, then it is intrinsically wrong, and hence absolutely prohibited.” Tollefsen goes on to explain how certain U.S. “interrogation” techniques really amounted to torture when used in combination:

standing naked, shackled, deprived of sleep, kept awake with cold water and loud noise, prevented from cleaning oneself after defecation, and subject to painful (though not physically damaging) slaps and disorienting smacks against a wall—and then subject to repeated waterboarding over a course of weeks or months: this looks like precisely the sort of choice . . . to disrupt an agent’s capacities for personal integrity by disrupting his control over his emotions, choices, self-awareness and self-image, connection to other human beings, and judgments.

Second, engaging in torture damages the torturer. The starting point for torture is the dehumanization of a detainee. Those who dehumanize others corrupt themselves in the process; dehumanization of others is a paradigm shift in how two people relate to each other, and as such it has an impact on both sides of the relationship. Once the detainee’s human status no longer matters in the mind of the torturer, he or she can unleash personal, even national, aggression. The detainee is subjected to suffering and the torturer lets go of reason, one of the marks of humanity, and descends into rage.

Third, torture is antithetical to effective intelligence collection. Torture is not just ineffective; it is counter-effective. To understand why torture and interrogation are incompatible, one needs to consider what interrogation itself is. In contrast to the dehumanization underlying torture, the interrogator must begin with an eye to the detainee’s humanity. In order to draw necessary breadth and depth of information from the interrogation process, the interrogator, assisted by analysts, must discern, “What is this person’s personality? Values? Beliefs? Culture?”

As is true of any human being, a detainee is a unique, complex web of beliefs, values, behaviors, past experiences, relationships, loyalties, and culture which are carried around in the heart and mind. The information an interrogator wants is embedded in that web. To get at it, an interrogator must be able to find the most efficient and effective way to discern a route through the labyrinth of that web. From this the interrogator can find openings for rapport-oriented emotional connection and build on these.

A moment of violence might provoke a quick response, but the response is likely to be one of defense—doing, saying anything, no matter how false, to stop the violence—and a jolt in response to violence may at best only skim the surface of an individual. Interrogation is different altogether. An interrogator seeks depth and breadth of information.

Getting to such depth and breadth requires finding a way to create an opening in the internal web of the detainee’s person. Perhaps an insecure young man craves having someone treat him with dignity. Perhaps a lonely detainee misses the attentive care and wisdom of a favorite aunt. Perhaps a proud warrior wants to feel respected for how hard he has fought for his beloved cause. These are the types of emotional openings a skilled interrogator can home in on and then build from in order to form a connection between the interrogator and the detainee.

One piece of information leads to another, and another, and so on, as the interrogator learns how to read the detainee and comes to find out what the detainee values, what motivates him, and what he knows.

The well-trained interrogator committed to personal integrity and professional excellence knows that the humanity of the detainee is of central importance. He or she learns to leave his or her personal emotional responses outside of the process. The detainee’s hopes, dreams, quirks, foibles, and idiosyncrasies, i.e., components of the detainee’s humanity, must be the core focus of all efforts.

Thus torture and interrogation are opposites. Torture eliminates the humanity of the detainee and unleashes what is inside the torturer, whereas interrogation is built precisely on the humanity of the detainee. Thus dehumanization in torture actually creates a barrier for interrogation.

Torture, moreover, stains America’s reputation. It brings decay rather than improvement and excellence to our intelligence collection professionals. Also it can undermine public support for detention and interrogation in times of military conflict from those Americans who, rightly, reject torture, but conflate torture with legitimate interrogation. And a lack of public support from certain quarters for our national intelligence efforts can in and of itself be a barrier to intelligence collection. We need to consider not only today’s conflicts, but also those of tomorrow, which surely will come. For these and other reasons torture in interrogation should be of particular concern to those who want to support intelligence collection for the prevention of future aggression.

What our nation needs is a rejection of torture in order to support intelligence collection through interrogation. We must eliminate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” from our discussion. Methods implied by this phrase do not “enhance” interrogation. Techniques of cruelty and torture are no enhancement nor are they part of the interrogation methods of the U.S. military.

From my experience as an interrogator, I consider rejection of torture both an affirmation of human dignity and an expression of support for excellence, integrity, and long-term sustainability in intelligence collection.

Whether and how we Americans conduct interrogations reflect who we are as a people. Humane treatment of detainees, and interrogation, are vital for our security and they are, when carried out with excellence and integrity, entirely consistent with each other. For Americans voting soon in presidential and congressional primaries and elections, now is the time to consider that what we need is national level leadership that supports interrogation and rejects torture.


Jennifer S. Bryson is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. She holds a B.A. from Stanford in Political Science as well as an M.A. in History and a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Yale.

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I say: it is.

A strategy of democracy promotion does not have to employ the force of arms, but it should deploy the force of ideas. The record of the twentieth century, in Germany, Italy, and Japan, in Spain and Korea, and in the countries that emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, demonstrates that the ideal of free self-government can have powerful and beneficial effects, for the countries that undergo such changes, for the world at large, and for the United States.

What we must learn from our difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is not that leaving others in tyranny is easier and therefore better. Instead, learning from these experiences, we must come to terms with how profoundly complex human societies are, and see our way to alternative paths forward rather than lose our sense of direction.

As Americans prepare to vote in the 2012 presidential election, it is important that they consider which candidates would be leaders capable of identifying and persevering along such paths of “soft power,” seizing these opportunities to expand democracy, and recognizing the danger of failing to do so.

Three components of international democracy promotion have particular strategic significance for America today, namely: our credibility, our Constitution, and our communication.

Credibility

America’s credibility in the world is a powerful asset when it is strong, and it is painfully difficult to recover when lost. Two aspects of American international credibility that need reinvigoration are our financial reliability and the alignment of our actions with our values.

The enormous scale of the U.S. national debt—and Congress’s ongoing inability to grapple seriously with it—is harmful to Americans at home and to our foreign credibility. The spending and borrowing habits of the American government constitute a reckless, self-destructive “perpetual binge.” For the wellbeing of coming generations and for American credibility in the world now and in the future, we need a president who understands that one cannot spend the nation’s resources as though there will never be any reckoning with the consequences.

As for our values, the foundation of credibility is integrity. Putting American values into action in the U.S. is not simply the right thing to do, but it is also integral to enabling foreign audiences to understand these values. Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) recently provided a fine example of this when defending a recent judicial appointment, Sohail Mohammed, who seemed to be drawing fire simply because of his religion (he is Muslim). Gov. Christie adeptly moved the discussion away from prejudice and back to qualifications, merit, fairness, and respect for public service. In case anyone may have been questioning whether America is a land of opportunity for all, including for religious minorities, Gov. Christie, by putting American values into action, answered resoundingly, “Yes, it is.”

Constitution

As the populations of Arab states strive, with democratic fervor, to extricate themselves from decades of authoritarianism, it is especially important for us to highlight the vital importance of constitutional democracy. In these potential democracies, where fundamentally anti-democratic forces are at work, good constitutions will be among the best protections available for the noble aspirations of those who strive for genuine, sustainable democracy.

Good constitutions can foil the efforts of those who seek to win elections only to eliminate them once they gain power. America needs a leader who understands the vital role of our own Constitution in providing a foundation and framework for an enduring, well-ordered democracy at home. America’s next leader must not be shy about promoting constitutional democracy abroad.

America also needs a president who recognizes that religious freedom is one of the great success stories of America’s constitutional democracy. At the same time, the next president should remember that this freedom is routinely crushed and trampled on globally today. We need a president who values religious freedom, first by calling it what it is. (The Obama administration has often referred only to the “freedom of worship,” which is only one aspect of religious freedom, not the whole of it.) We need a president who appreciates a robust conception of religious freedom, who will defend it at home, and who will help our foreign partners develop constitutional protections for religious freedom in their countries, as well.

Communication

Responsible stewardship of American influence includes recognizing that prudent communication is one of the most effective soft-power tools available. In American foreign engagement, executive-level leadership in strategic communication is needed.

A prime example right now of the importance and sensitivity of strategic communication is Syria. This Middle Eastern country, currently roiling with demonstrations and resistance to the Assad dictatorship, is strategically important to the future of the region and to the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Assad regime is running a public communication offensive by repeating its mantra that the unrest is due only to foreign-influenced, armed militias. The U.S. has an absolutely vital strategic interest in the emergence of countervailing narratives and yet currently has seriously low credibility in the region. This is a moment for presidential leadership that can handle volatile complexity.

Excellence in communication also requires knowing one’s audience. One audience-awareness failure in recent years has been America’s dismissal of the religious and family values of vast swaths of foreign populations. Pushing policies that are rooted solely in Washington, D.C.-designed objectives, without any connection to or consideration of foreign populations, can have a long-term deleterious impact. As an example of this, a recently published history by Mara Hvistendahl of the spread of sex-selection (actually, femicide) abortion globally offers a jarring account of this phenomenon and the role of American abortion-promotion overseas in facilitating it. Even if we take with a grain of salt her vehement conviction that “it’s all the West’s fault,” we must recognize that past American short-sightedness in abortion promotion abroad has led to generations-long tragic consequences and long-term undermining of American credibility. American values include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and our actions are an important means of communicating these to the rest of the world.

2005, 2012, and Beyond

In his memoir Decision Points, President George W. Bush writes about the importance of “advancing liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.” Bush saw that this was both the right thing to do and part of “a strategy to protect the country.”

In Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, he stressed that “as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather…and cross the most defended borders…There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretentions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and the tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.”

America’s credibility, Constitution, and communication offer us ways to engage effectively in defense of our nation and as partners in the human quest for freedom. Intellectually grasping and pragmatically leveraging these soft-power capacities will require the ability to exercise nuanced, complex decision-making. America needs executive-level leadership that is up to the task.

Jennifer S. Bryson is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. This essay is part of the 2012 Election Symposium. Read all of the entries here:

• Ryan T. Anderson, “Liberty, Justice, and the Common Good:
  Political Principles for 2012 and Beyond”
   
• O. Carter Snead, “Protect the Weak and Vulnerable:
  The Primacy of the Life Issue”
• Maggie Gallagher, “Defend Marriage: Moms and Dads Matter”
• Samuel Gregg, “Fix America’s Economy:
  Two Principles for Reform”
• Ed Whelan, “Defend Our Laws: Justice Matters”
• Helen Alvaré, “Uphold Conscience Protection:
  Religious Freedom’s Contribution to the American
  Experience and Threats to its Survival”
   
• Jennifer Bryson, “Promote Democracy:
  Start at Home but Don’t Stay at Home”
• Yuval Levin, “Heal the Sick and Reduce the Debt:
  The Moral Economy of the Healthcare Debate”
• Jane Robbins, “Empower Parents:
  Return Educational Policy to the States”
• Patrick Trueman, “End Child Pornography:
  Enforce Adult Pornography Laws”
• Laura Lederer, “End Human Trafficking:
  A Contemporary Slavery”
   
• Robert P. George, “Reflections of a Questioner:
  The Palmetto Freedom Forum Revisited”

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Support the work of Public Discourse by making a secure donation to The Witherspoon Institute.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Much of the attention on this case so far has focused on Abdo’s religion—Islam—and his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan. As Rep. John Carter, whose 31^st District in Texas includes Fort Hood, announced, “We may well have averted a repeat of the tragic 2009 radical Islamic terror attack.”

Any effort to make sense of this troubled young man will need to include understanding how he chose to approach and interpret his religion, and perhaps most importantly, why he adopted the interpretation he did. Any effort to understand Abdo without considering this question would be profoundly incomplete.

Yet tucked away, often near the closing paragraph of the articles about this case, is mention of an issue that I believe warrants more attention than it has received in the past decade of terrorism studies: namely, pornography. And in Abdo’s case, child pornography.

In May, the Army charged Abdo with possession of child pornography found on a computer he used. Due to this charge, when Abdo was found to be “absent without leave” (AWOL) from his unit in Kentucky earlier this month, the Army was preparing an Article 32 hearing against him, which can lead to a general court martial.

Before examining this, I want to be clear. Considering whether pornography use may have been one factor shaping Abdo’s disturbing behavior is not to pin the lone cause of Abdo’s pursuit of terrorist violence on pornography.

Pornography is not a necessary cause of terrorism. The abolition of pornography would not lead to the cessation of terrorism in the world. Terrorism existed well before graphic pornography and its mass spread via the internet.

Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism. There are pornography users, even addicts, who do not become terrorists. Given how widespread the viewing of pornography is today, if the direct result of each individual’s pornography use were terrorist violence, one could conceivably argue that pornography proliferation would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation.

Yet pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden. Regarding “smut” found on captured media, in 2010, a Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst was quoted in The Atlantic: “We have terabytes of this stuff.” Terabytes. That’s a lot of “smut.”

I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence.

Would those terabytes of pornography and such more aptly be dubbed “terrorbytes”? Why, after all, would an al-Qaeda affiliate, as reported in 2009 from interrogations in Mauritania, select pornography to target new recruits? We need to know.

As terrorism researchers Daniel Bynum and Christine Fair point out in an article about the modern terrorists we have been pursuing, especially since 9/11, the fact of the matter is that “they get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?”

In a powerful 1993 article, Andrea Dworkin maintains that it was no coincidence that the former Yugoslavia was home to both a free-flow of pornography, which was remarkably fluid and unbounded by the standards of that pre-internet time, and then absolutely horrific violence. She suggests that the wide circulation of pornography functioned as instruction in “a way of being: dehumanization of women; bigotry and aggression harnessed to destroying the body of the enemy; invasion as a male right.”

In the former Yugoslavia, “the pornography,” Dworkin argues, “was war propaganda that trained an army of rapists who waited for permission to advance. An atavistic nationalism provided the trigger and defined the targets.” Ideas, ideologies, and –isms do matter, but they do not exist in isolation.

Consider an ideology like a seed and the disposition of the mind like soil. The particular nature of the seed determines what may become of it. Yet at the same time, the elements of the soil are part and parcel of shaping the manner in which the particular seed grows. A seed in toxic soil can grow into a terrible distortion of the plant it is meant to become. What happens when a radical ideology adheres in a pornography-saturated mind?

I believe our country needs to invest in research that questions whether it makes a difference when the minds that advocate for extremist ideologies are minds warped by pornography use. Perhaps the twisting of the mind that results from pornography has an impact—an exceptionally dark, dangerous impact—on how radicalized individuals act out the concepts of their ideology.

Dworkin raised this specter in 1993, but since then, our general public attitude to the presence of pornography in violent conflict seems virtually unchanged. Just as in 1993, our tendency today is to dismiss it as simply an indicator that “boys will be boys.”

However, two changes since 1993 may jolt us into at least considering that a dismissive “boys will be boys” attitude is no longer a sufficient level of understanding.

The first change is that since 1993, we have experienced the domestication of terrorist violence in America. This conflict-violence can no longer be dismissed as an “over there,” foreign, out-of-sight-out-of-mind issue. If, if, there is a pornography association with this terrorist violence, then today, unlike in 1993, the potential impact now is here, right here at home. It was as morally repugnant in 1993 as it is today, but now it is harder to turn a blind eye to it.

The second change is that since 9/11, the U.S. government has had opportunity to observe, and in many cases, acquire, personal media from untold numbers of those involved in terrorism and the support of terrorism. We may be sitting on a massive data set for studying the intersection of pornography use and support for twisted violence such as terrorism.

The coalescence of these two changes presents not only horrific new challenges, but also an opportunity to bring research to bear on whether or not there is a nexus of influence with pornography and the grotesqueness of some modern conflict-violence.

We may need to invest in understanding the impact of pornography on those who use it, particularly on those who also become obsessed with extremist ideologies. So, I wonder, is anyone in the U.S. government tracking and surveying the presence and types of pornography on these media? If we have access to the libraries of the personal pornography preferences of those who support and engage in terrorist violence, we may have a window into the dark corners of their minds. What lurks there? It may be to our own peril that we would ignore this information before us.

In seeking to understand terrorists, studying their ideas alone is not enough. We need to study and understand their minds—and in this day and age, this includes, in perhaps more cases than we are aware of, minds shaped by pornography.

Sometimes terrorists’ identification of their motivating ideologies can tell us more about who the terrorists aspire to be than who they actually are. Most significantly, if we want to understand modern terrorism in order better to prevent and counter it, we need to go beyond the surface level of what terrorists want us to believe about themselves and delve instead, to the extent possible, into the deepest levels of their actual lived reality.

Consider Abdo. In his words, he kept trying to portray himself as a man driven by righteous religious motivation. When he volunteered to join the military in 2009, he said, “I thought God would be proud of me.” Just a year later, he sought exemption from his Army unit’s deployment to Afghanistan on grounds of conscientious objection, again citing his personal religious motivation.

Contrary to his views of 2009 and contrary to the view of other Muslims, including Muslim jurists, Abdo claimed in 2010, “Any Muslim who knows his religion or maybe takes into account what his religion says can find out very clearly why he should not participate in the U.S. military.” Abdo wrote that instead of deploying to Afghanistan, he wanted to use his time to “revive the faith of the Muslim nation.” He also claimed, “I want to use my experience to show Muslims how we can lead our lives.”

Yet his words do not tell the whole story. As evidenced by Abdo’s possession of child pornography, he appears to have had interests other than—and in conflict with—just being a man who “knows his religion” or who takes his religion “into account.”

When there is dissonance of words and actions, words are not enough to explain behavior. What is needed is a comprehensive and authentic account of who an individual is. Focusing exclusively on ideology, as expressed in words, risks turning a blind eye to the internal reality of a person as expressed in his or her actions.

If we want to understand the inner workings of terrorists and would-be terrorists, we must seek to understand their entire person, including the relationship—or inconsistencies—between their words and actions. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs, and in the case of Abdo and among what seems like an increasing number of terrorists, actions include sexual perversions and pornography use that cannot be squared with what these ideological terrorists and their supporters espouse.

I do not know what link, if any, exists between terrorism and pornography, but I do think this question warrants attention. Since 9/11, we have investigated radical ideologies that claim their affirmation in Islam, and that terrorists have identified as their inspiration. Yet when terrorists adhering to such ideologies are found with pornography, we tend to look only at the terrorists’ words, not at the reality of their behavior.

Today, the lives of terrorists and aspiring terrorists often include the use of pornography. The pornography on their captured media and in their online activities is information that tells us something about them. What remains in question, however, is whether or not we will seek knowledge and understanding from this information.

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks staring us in the face, we already know that our failure to have an approach to security that is robust and accurate has dire consequences. Pornography has long circulated nearly unbounded due to calls for “freedom,” but what if we are actually making ourselves less free by allowing pornography itself to be more freely accessible?

Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?

I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?

As Bynum and Fair pointedly questioned, “Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?”

Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own national peril.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The phrase “the Muslim world” inaccurately implies that Muslims are in some separate location and that they are a monolith. Muslims, however, are not segregated in one part of the globe. Muslims live in many different communities, including right here in America. In America Muslims are part and parcel of my town, owners of businesses where I shop, colleagues at work, public servants in government, members of the military which protects us.

In the event one needed a reminder of how talk of “the Muslim world” is not only dangerous but also just simply ridiculous, consider Anwar al-Awlaki’s recent assertion that Americans are “the Devil” and “of the party of Satan,” and that therefore no fatwa is needed to target Americans for death. The fact of the matter is that al-Awlaki, while portraying himself as an uber-Muslim, is actually calling all of us Americans, non-Muslim and Muslim together, “the Devil,” and “of the party of Satan,” and al-Awlaki has opened hunting season in America for non-Muslims and Muslims alike.

Al-Qaeda leaders like al-Awlaki preach a hyper-simplified view of a black-and-white, us vs. them world. President Obama, meanwhile, has done well in making an effort not to encourage this with hyper-simplistic, factually inaccurate language such as “the Muslim world.”

Muslim populations themselves contain complex diversity. Not only are there sects and sub-movements inside these sects of Islam, but also, and more significantly, Muslims have differing interpretations of their faith and robust internal engagement in questions of interpretation and meaning. The native languages of Muslims range from English to Bolaang Mongondow to Chinese and beyond. Muslims live in over sixty countries. In his Jakarta speech, President Obama was smart to sustain his use of phrases such as “Muslim communities” and “Muslims around the world.”

President Obama offered a strategic reframing, insisting that “those who want to build must not cede ground to terrorists who seek to destroy.” This is a war of builders vs. destroyers, not a war of non-Muslims vs. Muslims. Countering Islamist violent extremists is a task for Muslims and non-Muslims. Those who are truly “other” are the violent Islamist extremists. But there is work to be done, and responsibility for it lies with all “who want to build.”

And yet, a counter-current in President Obama’s Jakarta speech risks undermining this. I can understand President Obama reiterating the clarification President Bush made again and again, namely that America’s post-9/11 defenses are not at war against Islam. Confusion about this abounds in some corners of the world, so reiteration is in order. However what I find baffling and, frankly, dangerous, is the president’s claim that, “al-Qaeda and its affiliates…have no claim to be leaders of any religion—certainly not a great world religion like Islam.” This strange phrase sidesteps the fact that these terrorists self-identify as Muslims. They are not generic terrorists (as if there were such a thing).

Muslims in many communities around the globe reject al-Qaeda-esque interpretations of Islam, and Muslims number among those risking their lives to counter Islamist violent extremism. And yet the fact remains that bin Laden and his cohorts self-identify as Muslims and cite their interpretation of Islam as a core component of their motivation.

Al-Qaeda claims to speak and act in the name of Islam. We must remember that recognizing that al-Qaeda supporters claim to act in the name of Islam is not the same as recognizing them as Islam. This is a vitally important distinction.

If the U.S. starting point in trying to counter al-Qaeda is based on obfuscation or even denial about who these violent extremists understand themselves to be, then we will launch our efforts on the wrong trajectory. With such an approach, efforts to counter al-Qaeda’s bloody terrorism can amount to little more than stabbing blindly at imaginary windmills.

Al-Qaeda members are shouting loudly and clearly about who they understand themselves to be; we ignore them at our own peril. Let’s face it: if religion is part of the problem, then it has to be part of the solution. As Chris Seiple, the President of the Institute for Global Engagement is fond of saying, “only good theology beats bad theology.”

Intra-Muslim struggles underway today are at the heart of efforts to counter al-Qaeda’s influence. In addition to (and at times as part of) the military efforts of the U.S. and NATO allies in places like Afghanistan, Muslims themselves number among those who are at the front lines fighting against Islamist extremists. Examples of the latter are in historian James Le Sueur’s forthcoming documentary film on writers and creative intellectuals, including many Muslims, exiled from Muslim-majority communities and living with threats from Islamist-extremists of violence and even death.

Those of us who oppose Taliban-esque societal takeovers and terror need to find ways to understand anti-terrorist Muslims and remove the barriers, like widespread censorship, that limit their efforts. Denying, however, that Islam has anything whatsoever to do with this is a recipe for the U.S. government to waste taxpayer money and precious time and miss opportunities to support Muslims who can engage religiously in a way those of us who are not Muslim cannot.

When it came to the topic of religious freedom, President Obama in his Jakarta speech continued a trend in his presidency to speak only of one aspect of religious freedom, namely freedom to worship, as if this in and of itself were religious freedom. It is not. He spoke in Jakarta only of, “the freedom to practice your faith without fear or restriction,” and that “people choose to worship God as they please.”

This is an impoverished concept of religious freedom which does not reflect the Congressional mandate in the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, nor Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Curiously, President Obama followed his eviscerated references to religious freedom in Jakarta by advocating Americans and Indonesians treat what some might consider political programs—about progress, unity, and peaceful coexistence—as “truths” that we should share “with faith and determination…with all mankind.”

Reducing discussions of truth to the endorsement of a political program while treating religion as a quaint set of cultural traditions or denying the relevance of religion outright will not empower populations to tackle the ideology of al Qaeda and related Islamist movements, nor will this foster authentic religious freedom.

If we Americans, non-Muslim and Muslim alike, want to seek meaningful partnerships with Muslims in other populations of the world for countering terrorism and fostering human welfare, we need to stop hiding behind verbal gymnastics to avoid facing the reality of the vital role faith plays in the lives of many populations in the world today. This includes those who respond in faith to build, and those who manipulate religion to destroy.

Jennifer S. Bryson is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

And yet, by this point in the film Arranged the students’ Muslim teacher, Nasira, and the Orthodox Jewish special education teacher, Rochel, have begun to suspect that they may have more in common with each other as religious women than with anyone else in the secular environment of their Brooklyn public school.

The lunchtime chit-chat of the other female school teachers is about parties and sleeping with guys. Nasira and Rochel have, however, opted for a different approach to life. This means eating lunch alone instead—until they discover each other, that is.

There are those who would like to get Nasira and Rochel to abandon their “backward” ways. In the view of the school principal, for example, the religiosity and consequent modesty of Nasira and Rochel are outdated and irrational. At a workshop to instruct teachers about tolerance, the principal simply assumes and then goes on to tell the whole group that she thinks Nasira wears a headscarf because her father forces her to do so. Nasira, however, refuses to let this snide remark pass and shares with the group an eloquent explanation of her personal choice to follow her religious faith and how this informs her understanding of feminine modesty. She does so gracefully and confidently, not angrily or bitterly. This piques Rochel’s interest. Rochel discovers that Nasira too is facing the challenge of trying to fit in but not give in to the culture at their school.

Nasira’s explanation of why she chooses to wear the hijab does, however, not alleviate the principal’s crusade to ‘enlighten’ and ‘liberate’ Nasira and Rochel with her own brand of feminism.

The principal’s enthusiasm for diversity and tolerance wanes when it comes to the modest attire these young women have chosen out of their religious convictions. The principal considers these women among her two best teachers in the school, but for her that’s not enough. She tells them, “You’re successful participants in the modern world, except for this religious thing. You know I mean—the rules, the regulations, the way you dress… I mean come on we’re in the 21^st century here for crying out loud. There was a women’s movement!” Nasira and Rochel try to be polite, but clearly they feel more irritation than liberation at hearing this. The principal, on the other hand, is so flustered by Nasira and Rochel’s calm, confident disinterest in the type of free-for-all feminism she promotes that she finally resorts to offering them her own personal money for them to go out and buy some “designer” clothes as a replacement for “those farkakte outfits” (which seems to be a Yiddish nod, from the secular Jewish principal, to the line from the Blues Brothers, “What are you guys gonna do? The same act? Wearing the same farkakte suits?”). Nasira and Rochel decline and walk out of her office.

This is a delightful film with a positive, substantive message. It deserves more viewers than its somewhat confusing title might attract. Arranged, as in arranged marriage, conjures up for many images of child marriage and forced marriage. This film does not attempt to downplay the abusiveness of such practices. Rather, in this film the “arranging” of marriage refers to family engagement in the process of searching for a suitable spouse.

(In fact, it is worth noting that today there are devout Muslims and Jews working to protect women and men from potential abuses resulting from distorted concepts of marriage. For example, this Fall the Muslim chaplain at New York University, Imam Khalid Latif, devoted a Friday sermon to differentiating between marriage and forced marriage.)

Nasira and Rochel discover they are both exploring the possibility of getting married, and that both of them are from devout religious families with cultural traditions of parents’ involvement in suggesting and getting to know eligible bachelors.

At the same time, even with a role for their families in seeking a suitable spouse, each woman has veto authority over any of the proposed suitors. And they exercise it.

But when Rochel spots a handsome, single Orthodox Jewish student with kind, bright eyes in a university study group with Nasira’s brother, some dreaming and scheming ensue. The most helpful person along the way proves to be her Muslim friend Nasira, who comes up with a humorous ploy to bring him to the attention of the women helping Rochel find a husband.

In a day and age in America when public discussion of marriage tends to be limited to either vicious fighting or depressing divorce statistics, Arranged provides a welcome respite from this. The film offers instead a focus on the centrality of relationship, commitment, and family in marriage.

This story—devout Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women discovering common ground in valuing feminine dignity and family—is not just some fictional tale of unrealistic wishful-thinking. Arranged is based on the real life account of an Orthodox Jewish woman, a teacher in the New York public schools, and her experiences getting to know the Pakistani-American Muslim mother of one of her pupils.

These filmmakers are not naïve. As one of them explains in an interview about the making of the film, included on the DVD, Israel and Lebanon were at war during the shooting of this movie. Challenges abound and they are very real. And in the film Nasira and Rochel have to maneuver their budding friendship through the obstacles of family members’ skepticism and even opposition to their Muslim-Jewish friendship. But even so, real friendships are also possible, and alliances to protect religious freedom can cross unexpected lines.

(For example, in Montreal the Orthodox Jewish community is fighting against a bill which would ban the Muslim facial veil, niqab, in Quebec for women seeking government services. The Orthodox Jewish community there has expressed concern about the government trying to regulate the attire of religious believers and doing so by targeting one minority.)

Shared values provide a bridge for Nasira and Rochel. They are women with humble self-dignity in a world not disposed to support integrity or family. What these women learn is that kindness begets friendship, and genuine friendship can handle differences. They don’t have to deny their difference to get along. The bridge they build proves to be stronger than cross-currents around them. Friendship, and healthy relationships, ensue and grow.


Jennifer S. Bryson is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The makers of Four Lions have created a movie of side-splitting humor that exposes how in terrorism everyone stands to lose.

The leaders of the pack, Omar and Barry (aka Azzam al-Britaini) are more obsessed with self-glory than with God. They see the valorization of terrorists in media and want others to look up to them in this way. They seek exciting adventure and think a terrorist training camp in Pakistan is their best shot at this. All this mixed with their own ignorance and emotional insecurity creates a fertile soil in these men’s hearts, suitable for germination of the seeds of terrorism.

Their craving to have others look up to them leads them into denial of their own foibles and thus an inability to confront failure honestly. For example, Omar and Barry manipulate their less intelligent co-conspirators, but hints of guilt emerge in all the team members when one of their followers stumbles while carrying explosives and blows himself up. Barry tries to snuff out their concern for loss of life and keep the other team members operationally enthused by explaining that this death, in which a sheep was also killed, qualified as “martyrdom” because it was an “attack on the food supply system.” Yeah, right.

The film manages to be preposterously absurd while skating right at the edge of plausibility. Hilariously, the would-be terrorists use a children’s computer game called “Puffin Party” to communicate with each other via the internet. In the otherwise cute world of Puffin Party, each terrorist in the group has his own eponymous animated puffin. Seeing a cartoonish puffin named “Waj” scoot across the screen while a deadly serious Omar looks on may be funny, but it is also creepy in a could-be-real way.

Four Lions poses a challenge to the notion that an increase in religiosity means an increased menace to society. Omar’s brother is an extremely devout Muslim captivated with a hyper-literalist approach to Islam. He refuses to be, and is clearly paranoid of being, in the same room as his sister-in-law. He dresses only in non-Western attire although he lives in Sheffield and his long pantaloons and flowing top not only look out of place but also are not very practical in Britain’s hefty rains. He only socializes with men. He is obsessed with studying and memorizing Islamic legal rulings. And yet it is due to his deep piety that he is meek and mild. Significantly, he is the one, indeed the only one in the film, who challenges his brother Omar’s growing obsession with violence and who tries to intervene to stop Omar. The dangerous ones in this film are not Omar’s brother and buddies in the Quranic study group. Rather they are the men untethered from their tradition and anxious to demonstrate their ‘Muslim pride.’

The inability of Omar’s brother to break the trajectory of violence raises interesting questions about effective intervention with young Muslims who have become starry-eyed with enthusiasm for terrorism. What Omar’s brother values is Islamic religious teachings, and he sprinkles these into their conversations incessantly. He can cite so many of them that Omar mocks him for it. The failure of Omar’s brother is that he is starting from his own standpoint and takes action on the assumption that Omar is standing on the very same point. He does not go beyond this to enter into the mindset of Omar and try to understand what the world looks like from Omar’s perspective. He doesn’t listen to Omar; he just speaks at Omar.

To be effective in reaching the Omars of this world, we can’t just tell them about us; for example we can’t just promote the spread of information about the U.S.A. as if to know us is to love us. It is not. Many of these aspiring terrorists have been in the West and they hate us. Look at Omar in this film; he has a beautiful wife, a cute son, and a middle-class standard of living in a British city. And yet, the more Omar fails, the more obsessed he becomes with carrying out a grand terror-jihad plot against the “kuffars” (the heretics, the non-Muslims). Omar’s transference of aggression to the kuffars fuels a utopian ideology with the lie that eliminating non-Muslims would essentially eliminate problems in the world. This is bizarre and twisted. We can’t just tell “moderate” Muslims to speak more loudly and think that sprinkling a few religious teachings on top will work like a solvent. Something deeper is at play, and that is the point from which countering it must begin.

But as for this film, it counters its legitimately serious moments with humor, even if dark humor. The film takes a deft jab, for example, at the pure absurdity of the extremist anti-Jewish blame-game. When the group’s car breaks down, the driver tries to escape taking responsibility for neglecting car maintenance by blaming the breakdown on “Jewish parts.” The ridiculousness of this claim and the driver, Barry, becomes crystal clear.

In competition for funniest character, the bungling terrorist-wanna-be’s face competition from a UK government counter-terrorism official. The public perception of his work as buffoonery makes one wonder how the public in the U.S. actually perceives the efforts of workers from the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and other government counter-terrorism officials.

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, Inc., maker of Kleenex, may have had a hand in this film. Four Lions is so side-splittingly hilarious that you will laugh hard enough to cry. Simultaneously this film is so gut-wrenchingly sad that you will cry. Bring tissues. Granted, the film has more than a little absurdity in it and at times the filmmakers stretch this just plain too far, but on the whole the humor and thought-provoking social critique in the film make up for the suspension of some reality in Four Lions.

Without revealing the end of the film, I’ll just say the plot goes wildly wrong. Not just snafu’ed. Really deadly wrong. You know things have gone awry when one of the plotters murders a fellow group member who decides he does not want to carry out a suicide attack, and the U.K.’s elite sharp-shooters in the London police are so entangled in a quarrel over the difference between a wookie, a grizzly bear, and a honey bear (an argument which, I must admit, is very funny, in a Four-Lions-sort-of-way) that a would-be suicide attacker gets away while civilians of London are on the brink of becoming mass-casualties (very not-funny).

Omar’s underlying craving for respect, no matter how twisted such respect may be, is underscored in his final words. His efforts in the film have led to failure after failure. Omar desperately wants to be looked up to, not least of all by his little son. His group’s “grand” suicide attack has been not only a failure (phew), but really a terrible tragedy. Yet Omar won’t admit he could not complete what he set out to do and thus return to his darling son and charming wife. (Charm aside, his wife is chillingly-supportive of her husband becoming a suicide attacker; but then again, the devastation on her face at his farewell reveals another side). The agony on Omar’s face at the end is truth-revealing: deep inside he knows there is something wrong with what he is doing. And yet, his mind has become so warped that right and wrong no longer matter. Only self-glory matters, even if it means death. Before running off to blow himself up he begs a hapless, clueless colleague from work whom he happens to run into right then, “Tell them I was smiling. Tell them I was smiling.” In the end, the supposed grandeur of terrorist-jihad turns out to be nothing but a big, tragic lie.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The German Muhajid centers on Rachel (short for Rachid Helmut) and his younger brother Malrich (Malek Ulrich), both born in Algeria to an Algerian mother and German father. They are raised in Algeria until they are seven and eight, respectively; then their parents send them to France where an aunt and uncle take them in.

Sansal brings the readers through a detailed account of what Rachel discovered as Malrich reads Rachel’s diary, and through Malrich’s response to this in Malrich’s diary.  The passages alternate back and forth between the two diaries. What the brothers learn is horror beyond words, though Sansal brilliantly uses words to convey what he can. The book’s translator into English, Frank Wynne, skillfully conveys the sense and thrust of Sansal’s novel across the language barrier.

It opens with Malrich recounting Rachel’s suicide, after which Malrich reads his brother’s diary. In it he learns that their father had been an SS Officer in Nazi Germany. And not just that; their father studied chemistry in Frankfurt, where the Nazis conducted human extermination chemical tests, and then had assignments under Nazi rule at Auschwitz and beyond.

After Rachel discovers his father’s Nazi military records in the home of his dead parents in Algeria, Rachel becomes obsessed with trying to find out what happened. He researches, travels to archives and visits concentration camps. He studies, he learns. Rachel admits he had previously not known what happened in Germany during World War II; he seeks to rectify his ignorance, and grapple with his father’s life-long, continued support for the Nazi movement. Malrich learns of this only upon discovering Rachel’s diary, and then he too confronts his own ignorance about recent history, and about his own father.

Before his brother’s suicide, Malrich’s life held some memories of Algeria, but otherwise it was mostly limited to his ghetto of immigrants in France, “with the dregs of the estate.”  He felt unwelcome in France, and after getting expelled from school in his first year of high school, he floated around from odd job to odd job.

During this time, Malrich also floated into the local mosque, where he was initially captivated by the cosmic, or at least rhetorical, grandeur of the Islamists who had been expelled from Algeria and were now in France. For Malrich, however, cracks develop in this Islamist ideology that initially gripped him. He eventually turns his back on the Islamists, thinking he is done with them.

But then Malrich learns what can happen when a hate-based ideology claiming transcendent self-justification sets roots in a population. Upon initially reading Rachel’s diary, Malrich falls into shock. Some days later, however, he comes to the realization:

Where my father and Rachel had failed, I had to try to survive. I felt like this was all too much for me. But I also felt, and I don’t know why, I had to tell the world. I knew it was all ancient history, but still, life doesn’t change and what happened to us could happen again.

Malrich does not think it is sufficient just to proclaim his personal rejection of fanaticism. Instead, he takes action where he can, starting in his own neighborhood, against the creeping reach of the increasingly totalitarian Islamists. He leaves what he calls “dumb apathy” behind.

Malrich begins by trying to awaken his immediate circle of friends to the depth of threat growing right in their own neighborhood where the Islamists are taking over. They discuss launching a “counter-jihad” and other options. He even writes to public officials, bluntly explaining, “Jihadists have taken over our estate and are making our lives hell.” He signs the letter, “A furious citizen notionally under your jurisdiction but forced to live under Islamic law.” But still, even though he knows he needs to do something, he’s not sure what. He finds himself in “a state of permanent panic somewhere between madness, anger, and the urge to rush half way across the world and drown” himself.

Sansal uses crass, blunt language for Malrich’s voice in the novel. Some readers may find this jarring at first, but it proves to be a strength of the novel. Through Malrich’s first-person narrative, Sansal helps the reader see what the discovery of human horror and the awakening of individual conscience look like through the eyes of a male teenager.

The German Mujahid’s quality and urgent relevance also remind us of the need for funding and organizational dedication to make works like this available in translations and multi-media formatting, e.g. audio-books, in languages such as Arabic. The tremendously important role the U.S. government played in fostering movement of strategically important ideas through translation during the Cold War has today nearly evaporated and shows no serious signs of revival, even nine years after 9/11. The need for large-scale re-engagement of such efforts may need to come from the private sector.

Toward the end of the novel, Malrich quotes his aunt’s view that “the difference between yesterday and tomorrow is today, because we don’t know how it will end.” Even when figuring out what action to take is hard, Malrich has at least recognized that today is where opportunity lies, and that today what he as an individual chooses to do, and whether or not he chooses to do anything, matters.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Meanwhile, violent jihadists themselves are telling us what works for them. We would do well to pay attention.

One thing violent jihadists tell us is that “madrasas” that limit children’s education solely to Quran memorization are effective in broadening the pool of recruits to their cause.

The nature of children’s education matters to them. It should matter to us.

One veteran of the 1980s Afghan jihad and supporter of ongoing violent jihad argues that narrow Islamic “madrasa” education is the best way to dispose Muslims to be willing to fight violent jihad.

Take the experience of the Egyptian Dr. Ayman Sabri Faraj in Pakistan. His observations of Western educational models in Muslim countries convinced him that this form of education made Muslims lose interest in fighting jihad. He is so certain from his first-hand experience that Western education is antithetical to breeding young jihadis, that he believes even illiteracy and ignorance combined with religious influences are preferable to Western education.

Below is my translation, from Arabic, of Faraj’s plea for schools that will dispose children to desire fighting violent jihad. He calls for replacing multi-faceted civic education with “madrasas” limited almost exclusively to Quran memorization:

In Afghanistan a very strange phenomenon caught my attention, namely the vast difference between governmental civic education and religious education, or even illiteracy. I saw with my very own eyes the results of the two.

Those who reached secondary school loaf around in Pakistan and work at foundations or hospitals. When I was lying in a number of hospitals for a few months I had the opportunity to get to know how they think. All of the health-care attendants were Afghans educated in government schools and it was their opinion that the Soviet Union was a superpower which could not be defeated and that what the mujahedin were doing was in vain and senseless. When we would ask them, ‘but the mujahedin actually defeated the Soviets and the Russians withdrew’ they would say that America is the one who defeated the Russians. You fools! And these were not Socialists nor were they Americanized, but rather they were members in various jihad parties.

There was a vast difference between these individuals and the illiterate ones whom I saw, whether in a refugee camp or on the fronts. The illiterate individuals were the ones who drank up the religious culture from the Mullahs. The students of knowledge were actually worse, they were incomparable.

Their thinking about themselves, considering themselves Muslims, was that they were the best and the strongest of God’s creation, and that if they would wage war against a nation of the infidels they would defeat them by God’s grace, even if the infidels of the world were to join together against them. They would be victorious against them because they are Muslims and God must grant victory to the Muslims. They do not care about a superpower, nor about nuclear weapons, nor are they dazzled by technology, but rather they use it with ease and also they develop it further. I marveled at this and by God this contradiction between the results of the two kinds of education preoccupied me.

I did not find any explanation for this except that civic education is propagated as a covert method for being dazzled by the West and feeling inferior to it. It kills self-respect and it makes the goal of a person in his life little more than something fleeting and accidental. This is what is happening in our country too and in all the Muslim countries to the point that our religious education has been polluted with these afflictions. But in Afghanistan the education remains as it was in the days of the Abbasid state [749-1258 AD]—and this last statement is no exaggeration.

When I was asked about the reason for the victory of the mujahedin against the Soviets, I would say quite clearly that the reason was this ignorance! Then, after that, I would explain the matter. If the majority of Afghans had been educated like these health-care attendants, then Afghanistan would now be one of the republics of the Soviet Union.

This is why I cry out at the top of my voice to those responsible for education in the lands of the Islamic world: reform education, reform education, otherwise even ignorance would be preferable! Seek and explore the hidden motives of educational methods which make the educated like mice and lambs who have no confidence except that they are able to learn or perhaps they can think, rather than that they can take initiative and be inventive.

(From: Memoirs of an Afghan-Arab: Abu Jafar al-Masri al-Qandahari, by Dr. Ayman Sabri Faraj [a pen-name], Cairo: Dar ash-Shuruq, 1422AH/2002AD, pp. 56-57.)

Faraj associates initiative and inventiveness with youths finding increasingly clever ways to destroy others. Education that is rooted in basic questions such as “What is a human being?”, however, has the potential to enable and inspire youths to take initiative and be inventive to help their families, their communities, and their societies.

Educational reform should not focus on eliminating “madrasas” per se, and we should not become hysterical each time we hear the word. “Madrasa” is simply the Arabic word for school. So, “madrasa” just means “school,” and schools can come in many forms.

Yes, “madrasa” is the term commonly used for institutions that limit children’s education to Quran memorization, even if the children do not know Arabic. But at the same time, for example, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, “madrasa” is a generic word for school, including schools that teach basic reading and math, that inspire and enable citizens to contribute to society in medicine, agriculture, art, and other fields. A clear example of this is the wonderful work of the Central Asia Institute, made famous through the book Three Cups of Tea— a book all Americans should read. The Central Asia Institute, based in Montana, builds schools, i.e. madrasas, especially for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan to offer children a civic education.

So, madrasas per se are not the problem. The problem is, rather, programs masquerading as education that dull rather than expand children’s minds. The nature of the education is what matters.

Some deny that education could help counter terrorism by noting that the terrorists and would-be terrorists such as the 9/11 hijackers and failed Christmas Day bomber had an abundance of education. There is no indication that more education would have prevented their desire to carry out a terrorist attack.

This, however, is a false conclusion. This dismisses education as a counter-terrorism tool by limiting the discussion to just more education versus less education. That is the wrong focus. We need to devote research into and support for the kinds of education which can bring out the best in youths.

What we need to do is ask: Is there something in an engineering education, such as that of 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta, that, due to a lack of a component of humanities study, could lead to a lack of compassion for others? What happens when education consists of just rote memorization rather than fostering critical thinking? This line of questioning about the nature of education is one of the directions that both counter-terrorism and pedagogical research need to take more seriously.

We can expand the Transportation Security Administration all we want, so long as the American people are willing to expand the national deficit, but this alone will not keep us safe.

Of course, education reform alone will not stop terrorism. If, however, education of certain kinds can foster critical thinking and constructive engagement in society, if it can lead individuals to work in hospitals rather than blowing them up, we face not only a humanitarian call but also a national security imperative to support and promote it in populations at heightened risk of being drawn into violent extremism.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved

First, the Swiss population voted in favor of a ban on the construction of minarets. This was a bad day for religious freedom, and the vote seemed to stand in stark contrast toArticle 15 of the Federal Swiss Constitution, which protects religious freedom.

Next, instead of seizing the opportunity to advocate for human rights per se and for universal religious freedom, some key Muslim leaders lined up to complain about the West. The only element their complaints had in common was the absence of advocacy for religious freedom in their own countries. Granted, some of them gave a passing nod to “human rights,” but again and again their criticism of the Swiss ban was about how the Swiss and other western countries deal with their Muslim populations. That this ban sets a harmful precedent for all multi-faith populations, including the ones where they’re in the majority, seems to have escaped them.

Three Muslim leaders seem to be striving to outdo the Swiss population: Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the OIC Ambassadorial Group, and Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt who is the most senior official interpreter of Islamic law for the Egyptian government.

The response of Secretary General Ihsanoglu to the Swiss minaret ban vote was one of “disappointment” and “concern.” As a Muslim leader, he has good reason to be concerned. After all, verse 2:256 of the Quran makes an injunction against religious coercion. But where is Ihsanoglu’s “disappointment” and “concern” about countries with Muslim majorities ignoring the injunction of Quran verse 2:256 against religious coercion, by their intimidation, punishment, and death sentences to discourage apostasy?

To be fair, in his statement Ihsanoglu did mention the existence of “universal human rights.” But the conclusion he draws is that “the decision of the Swiss people stood to be interpreted as xenophobic, prejudiced, discriminative . . . and it would tarnish the reputation of the Swiss people as a tolerant and progressive society.” The broader implications of the Swiss minaret ban for religious freedom, the real reason this vote is so troubling and alarming, seem lost on (or perhaps just too uncomfortable for?) Ihsanoglu.

Earlier this month, the press release for Ihsanoglu’s Message on Human Rights Day found time to devote a whole paragraph to condemning Israel, but nowhere in the document does he include advocacy for religious freedom. He mentions “religious diversity” in passing, but strangely, even bizarrely, the OIC, a religious organization, does not seem to have an interest in religious freedom as a core component of human rights.

Ihsanoglu’s remarks about universal human rights reveal more about hesitation than about endorsement. In his Human Rights Day Message, Ihsanoglu stated, “I would also like to reiterate once more my call to all OIC Member States and to the international community at large as well to give full consideration to the developmental challenges which constitute serious obstacles in implementing the noble objectives of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” So, he does call for some internal house-cleaning, good, but his language of “developmental challenges” exudes obfuscation. And then: “noble objectives”? This seems to suggest that human rights are just nice-sounding ideas, but really not something anyone takes seriously, not something actually to strive for, concretely, not something for which violators need to be held accountable.

Next in line to compete with the Swiss population is the OIC Ambassadorial Group in Geneva which sent a letter to the Swiss government strongly condemning “the discriminatory decision to ban constructing minarets.” If the OIC Ambassadorial Group is now concerned about discriminatory decisions, when are they going to condemn and seek to eliminate violations of religious freedom by OIC member countries against Muslim dissenters, non-Muslim religious believers, and those of no faith?

In the letter, they explained that their concern was that “the decision was a manifest attack on an Islamic symbol which could only serve to spread hatred and intolerance towards Muslims in general and those living in Switzerland in particular.”

The press release about this letter explains that “the OIC Group has consistently pointed towards the xenophobic and Islamophobic trends in Western societies.” They themselves admit that their finger-pointing at Western countries has been “consistent.” And they continue in this vein, explaining that “the OIC Ambassadors further hope that sustained efforts would be made by the Swiss authorities in particular and western authorities in general, including the civil society, to fight the scourge of discrimination and xenophobia.”

The OIC Ambassadorial Group’s criticism of the Swiss minaret ban is narrow; they assert that “this ban also stands in sharp contradiction to Switzerland’s international human rights obligations concerning freedom of expression, conscience and religion.” Again they sidestep advocating for universal religious freedom and recognizing their own human rights obligations.

How can countering discrimination be meaningful if it is only the big-bad-West which is to blame? Without universal principles and a core shared concept of human dignity, including the right to religious freedom, efforts to counter religious discrimination lack foundation.

The next competitor who has entered this race to find the most counter-productive approach to building stability and human flourishing amid religious diversity is Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa.

Gomaa’s first criticism of the minaret ban vote is that he considers it “an attack on freedom of beliefs.”  Granted, he deserves some credit for supporting “freedom of beliefs.”  However, effectively countering discrimination such as the Swiss minaret ban has got to go beyond just “freedom of beliefs.” Religious freedom is more than just freedom to believe. Religious freedom, to be meaningful, includes freedom to enter and exit a religion or to choose not to believe; it includes freedom to worship communally, and freedom to engage in the public square as believers. The Grand Mufti had a grand opportunity to defend religious freedom, and yet his response was to sidestep. Perhaps Egypt’s own track record of respecting religious freedom on paper but then using bureaucratic hurdles to block Christians from renovating churches, (and denying Egyptian Bahais basic Egyptian identity cards, to note another example) gave Ali Gomaa pause.

It is important to note that in response to the Swiss minaret ban some Muslims in charge of local community-level groups and writing in newspapers called for calm and noted that poor treatment of minorities in many Muslim-majority communities makes criticism of the Swiss minaret ban difficult.

At the international level, however, credibility in advocacy for human rights, including religious freedom, is at stake for all parties: the Swiss, the OIC, and the Grand Mufti. If the Swiss vote is upheld, there is a danger that Switzerland will end up in the position many Muslim-majority countries are in—hypocritically demanding liberty for their citizens living as religious minorities in other countries while they restrict the rights of religious minorities at home. As for bodies such as Al-Azhar and the OIC, their own silence and obfuscation on religious freedom, starting in their own countries, undermines their credibility even before they open their mouths.

As for Ihsanoglu, the OIC Ambassadorial Group, and Ali Gomaa, if they want to exercise effective leadership, to provide a substantive challenge the Swiss minaret-ban vote, they first need to become credible advocates for religious freedom. They need to start at home to advocate and take steps to realize religious freedom on their own door steps. Short of this, their complaints against the Swiss carry about as much weight as individual snowflakes falling onto the Alps. In the end, their complaints are not just inconsequential, but are harmful, like adding fuel to a fire, because rather than countering the Swiss minaret-ban in principle, they endorse the Swiss population’s selective discrimination by exercising selective “rights” advocacy. Only with credibility established by a substantive, coherent, universal track record of advocating and enforcing religious freedom can the engagement of Muslim leaders credibly rebuff religious discrimination in Switzerland.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In response to the news that Abdulmutallab’s trail to Detroit seems to have gone through Yemen, Yemen’s Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi acknowledged the presence of al-Qaeda in Yemen and has already used this incident to try to secure more financial assistance for his country. Discussing counter-terrorism aid so far, Al-Qirbi complained, “I must say it is inadequate.” He went on to say, “We need more training, we have to expand our counter-terrorism units and provide them with equipment and transportation like helicopters.”

There is a striking disconnect between the information coming out about the young Nigerian terrorism suspect in custody now, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and the nature of the Yemeni request. This disconnect also highlights a gaping hole in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

Information currently available about Abdulmutallab paints a picture of a young college student in London who adopted and sought to act on extremist ideas. While there is a role for military hardware in tracking down and eliminating violent extremists, it is unclear how adding helicopters in Yemen, or London for that matter, would stem the stream of young radicalized Muslims coming out of London and other areas.

Helicopters may intimidate, but they do not change hearts, minds, or wills at the deep level necessary for transformative change. Instead, a more pressing need in counterterrorism assistance is a focus on causative factors of the problem combined with long-term perseverance to counter these causative factors at the root level. Our cooperation with countries such as Yemen must be primarily at this root level.

No quantity of helicopters would be sufficient to stem the zeal of all the al-Qaeda enthusiasts in the world who have become starry-eyed in their obsession with al-Qaeda’s cosmic narratives of utopian global domination.

For those wondering how someone with the tremendous privilege of studying in London would abandon such an opportunity to pursue the goals of Islamist extremists, I recommend Ed Husain’s autobiographical account of his experience in London as a young Muslim. In The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, Husain details his radicalization, Islamist activism, and the eventual opening of his heart and mind. He walks the reader through his youth in London and into the seductiveness of the Islamists’ claim to have solutions to all the problems of being a teenager, and of the world too.

Husain’s differentiation of various strands of Islamism, including accounts of infighting between various Islamist groups, is an important aspect of his book. He combines this with reflections on his own individual process of questioning, doubting, and ultimately turning away from the black-and-white, bellicose worldview of the Islamists. His account is a stark reminder that the Islamist movements are manifold, not a monolith, at both a macro and a micro level.

In this complexity lies opportunity, for in this complexity there are cracks and openings. In these cracks and openings are opportunities to begin turning hardened individuals away from radicalism, and to deter would-be adherents of these violent ideologies.

Granted, engaging this complex realm will not be easy. Our counterterrorism programs need to focus more on the view of the world as it appears looking out through the eyes of individuals such as Abdulmutallab and relatively less on the view of the ground from the air in far-off helicopters. There is a role for helicopters, but it is an ancillary role. The core of our approach must engage hearts, minds, and wills.

Opportunities to do so abound, if we seize them. For example, reach out to key audiences and teach critical thinking, so that youth can penetrate the simplistic narratives of extremists with questions. Place role models in the paths of youth—role models who can handle ambiguity and deal with disappointments. These role models don’t have to all be real people—characters in movies and other media attractive to the target audiences can contribute to this. Stop turning a blind eye to the censorship of progressive Muslim thinkers by dictators we support such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Media by progressive Muslims abound, but often languish in obscurity due to censorship and lack of access to major media markets. One way to help these already existing media get broader circulation and multiply their audiences is through translations.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a high-level meeting in London January 28 to discuss measures to counter radicalization in Yemen. This sounds good, though it is unclear what mechanisms exist to implement the long-range follow up which would be necessary for a substantive, astutely designed counter-radicalization effort in Yemen.

As for President Obama, he has not shown signs of taking ideological drivers of terrorism seriously. Who in the U.S. government is in charge of countering ideological support to terrorism? Having a smattering of offices interested in the topic scattered across lots of departments and agencies in the U.S. government is insufficient. President Obama needs to identify countering ideological support to terrorism as a top priority and assign this priority leadership, long-term commitment of resources, and authority to act.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Ten months have passed since the inauguration of President Obama for a four-year term. However, President Obama has not so much as even nominated a candidate to fill the vacant position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research indicates that religious freedom appears to be a positive factor in enabling societies to be prosperous and stable, and individuals to be happy. The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index, which ranks countries on how well they support combined factors of wealth and human well-being, found that countries that attain well-rounded success – economic prosperity and happy citizens – treat a bundle of freedoms all together like a prix fixe meal, not like a pick-and-choose visit to a cafeteria. “Freedom,” according to a key finding of the report, “cannot be divided. While some nations seek to allow one aspect of freedom while restricting other aspects, prosperous nations respect freedom in all of its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and personal.” Also, “The highest levels of overall life satisfaction are reported in countries which score best in the areas of health, safety, personal freedom, and social capital.” So, Finland, which offers economic, political, religious, and political freedom comes out on top, while by contrast Saudi Arabia, a foe of religious freedom if there ever was one, may have monetary wealth but scores in the lowest quartile of human prosperity (81^st out of 104) when considering well-rounded human flourishing.

In 1998, Congress enacted the International Religious Freedom Act establishing and requiring appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and creating an Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) in the State Department.

Yet, in this effort to advance religious freedom the State Department’s IRF office faces several challenges. To begin with, it is structurally and culturally isolated inside the State Department bureaucracy. Outside of the IRF office itself, the Department of State IRF Fan Club is, alas, not vast. To correct this, the IRF office needs to establish long-term working partnerships with other sections in the State Department, such as Public Diplomacy, in order to extend integration of religious freedom into U.S. foreign engagement.

In addition, the IRF office needs to increase awareness inside the State Department about the positive contributions of religious freedom to human well-being. The nearly exclusive focus of the IRF office on highlighting and seeking short-term intervention in cases of religious persecution and oppression has led some in the powerful regional bureaus of the State Department to flee the moment they see IRF staff coming. The IRF office would do well to expand its efforts to highlight and expand programs supporting the advantages offered by religious freedom, so that the regional bureaus will pursue rather than repel IRF engagement.

This is not just a matter of promoting a nice-sounding ideal to make the world a better place. There is also a national security imperative in supporting religious freedom. At a time when Muslims who advocate for peaceful pluralism face crushing censorship and devastating intimidation in many volatile areas of the world such as Egypt, creating and protecting freedom for constructive Muslim voices to participate freely and vigorously in public discussion is vital.

Support for religious freedom needs to be “translated” into concrete steps forward.

The area which offers the most potential for fruitful expansion is more robust incorporation of religious freedom into U.S. public diplomacy. Public diplomacy, the Cinderella of the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the abolition of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, is an underfunded and underestimated asset in our foreign engagement toolbox—including for advancement of international religious freedom. And other U.S. government-funded foreign engagement efforts also could be potentially fruitful allies for expanding religious freedom.

To its credit, Department of State Public Diplomacy has some efforts related to religious freedom. So too, though on an even lesser scale, with the radio and television programs of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). However, these tend to be sporadic at best, and at any rate not a priority or an area with long-term dedicated funding and staff.

With an eye to concrete action, I would like to suggest some avenues for supporting religious freedom. No one of these ideas is a “silver bullet.” Rather, these suggestions are meant encourage creative thinking about ways to foster engagement with Muslim and other voices on multiple fronts, leveraging already existing programs in the U.S. government. Perhaps this may spark other ideas in both foreign policy circles and the private sector that will expand religious freedom.

1. Book translations. The Department of State’s Public Diplomacy Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) office facilitates translation and publication of American books overseas. Fund an effort to include books about religious freedom in the IIP Book Program. This could include American books by Muslims about religious freedom. But don’t just print paper books; make the translated books available online in both text and audio versions.

2. Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau run by the Department of State Public Diplomacy sends Americans overseas to engage foreign audiences. Establish long-term funding and develop a Speakers Bureau program dedicated to sending experts on religious freedom and religious leaders with experience in religious freedom issues overseas.

3. Exchange programs. Expand access to exchange programs offered by State Department Public Diplomacy Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) for religious leaders, seminary students, academics, and others with an interest in religious freedom so they can participate in foreign exchange programs.

4. International visitor programs. Boost the budget of ECA in order to enable ECA collaboration with the Department of State Office of International Religious Freedom to bring academics, civic leaders, seminary students, and religious leaders to the U.S. to learn about what religious freedom is and how it benefits society at large in the U.S.

5. Films. The American Film Program of ECA lists support for, among other values, religious freedom. Collaboration with the IRF office and dedicated funding could expand this effort, for example supporting the dubbing and subtitling of films about religious freedom into key foreign languages. This should not be limited to documentaries; include feature films.

6. Polling. Understanding perceptions and misperceptions of foreign populations regarding religious freedom is essential if one wants to identify hurdles as well as opportunities in the expansion of religious freedom. When we say, “religious freedom,” what do people in Egypt, China, and Iran think this means? Which aspects of religious freedom are least understood in key target audiences? Understanding this would help us best determine how to use limited resources wisely in promoting religious freedom.

7. Radio and television. Provide funding specifically for programming about religious freedom on the radio and in television broadcasts, such as Voice of America and Al-Hurra, funded by U.S. tax payers, overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

8. Arts. Develop a Religious Freedom and the Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts which would support development, translation, and distribution of creative media, such as plays and novels, that explore the role of religious freedom, and the social consequences of the lack thereof. To begin with, translate Akbar Ahmed’s play The Trial of Dara Shikoh and the novel The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout into Arabic and other languages.

9.  USAID. Expand USAID support for inclusion of religious freedom promotion in development projects, and establish long-term mechanisms for collaboration between USAID and the IRF office.

10.  U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). Designate funding for collaboration between IRF and USIP to examine and foster ways in which protection of religious freedom can support peace and stability.

On Thursday, November 19, the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, part of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, plans to hold a hearing on, “The State of Political and Religious Freedom in the Middle East”. Hopefully Congress will support not only the Congressionally mandated Office of International Religious Freedom, but also a variety of other efforts to expand religious freedom.

As for President Obama, the clock is ticking. He has only three years and two months left before this term is up. If his administration is to make a difference for religious freedom, he needs to appoint an ambassador for religious freedom. The president will need to move quickly to set attainable goals to support international religious freedom and stand behind implementation of them before the window of opportunity in this term of the Obama administration ends.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Who defines what Islam is? Even among Muslims, this is a complicated question. Some simply argue that Islam is whatever good-willed Muslims say it is; others defer to Al-Azhar (even though it has become, for the most part, a political puppet of the Egyptian regime); others to Qom in Iran; others to others, and so on. Far-reaching intra-Muslim discussions about Islam are underway today, and in the question of who defines Islam, the voices of Muslims deserve, at the very least, a hearing.

An array of American and Europeans who are not Muslims are eager to explain to you what Islam is.

For example, Robert Spencer from the United States insists, “individual Muslims may genuinely regard their religion as ‘peaceful’—but only insofar as they are ignorant of its true teachings.” He asserts, “Islam today is what it has been fourteen centuries: violent, intolerant, and expansionary” and “Islam is intrinsically violent.”

In the United Kingdom, Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP) has asserted that Islam is “a wicked, vicious faith.” (Recently the Muslim anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation in the U.K. issued a thoughtful analysis and refutation of such BNP claims.)

Yet when non-Muslims insist that they know better than Muslims what constitutes Islam, a key perspective is lost: namely, the views of Muslims themselves.

The issue of outsiders trying to monopolize God to set the boundaries of Islam is not just an issue for Muslims. It has implications for other religious believers who seek to articulate publicly their own perspectives on who they are, and how they understand their own faith.

Consider the position of Christians in Europe, who face more than a few opponents who are outright anti-religious. Should such anti-religionists be the ones to define what religion is and even who the “God” is whom Christians worship? Richard Dawkins attempted to do just that in his book The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Just because Richard Dawkins offers a jolting, bestselling picture of who the God of the Old Testament is does not mean that when I as a Christian pray that I pray to such a monstrosity.

This is not to say that we cannot comment on or gain knowledge of faiths other than our own. There are not only good reasons to pursue scholarly inquiry into other faiths, there is a pragmatic necessity to gain knowledge of them if we wish to have peace and meaningful toleration. There is also a role for critical challenges to faith claims. Fortunately, our society protects freedom of the press for all, Richard Dawkins included, thus assuring robust and open engagement between people of different faiths or no faith at all.

Ultimately, however, those seeking to understand other faiths need to consider how the believers themselves understand their own faith. This includes recognizing the perspectives not only of those who hold power in a faith community, but also the believers in day-to-day life trying to live out their faith.

An example of this is in a stunning new novel set in Saudi Arabia, The Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia. In this story an Eritrean Muslim falsely accused of adultery sits in a Saudi jail cell, after being “convicted” with no witnesses, no lawyer, and no trial. He anticipates his punishment: having the lower part of his body buried and then, incapable of moving, being publicly stoned to death. His cellmate is a Nigerian Muslim whose circumstances suggest another miscarriage of justice. When the Eritrean resists his jailers’ attempt to force him to attend prayers at the jail mosque, the Nigerian tells him not to resist, saying, “Remember that Allah is not theirs alone.” The same could be said of those who insist they alone offer the definitive declaration of who the God of Muslims is when they do not even practice that faith.

Consider the perspective of Country-Western singer Kareem Salama, a Muslim from Oklahoma. In the song, “Rise Up,” he directly challenges those who try to monopolize by means of violence the definition of who God is. He says that they “swear they take life in the name of God / but they lie they take it in their own name.”

In Salama’s song “Get Busy Living,” Salama understands his life as a Muslim this way: “So that when the fateful day does come / When I’m six feet in the ground / The poor and the weak and the orphan and meek will miss having me around.”

Granted, Salama’s gentle, tuneful perspective is far from the lone voice of Islam in the modern world. His songs compete with the shrill cries of some of his coreligionists for suicide attacks. Salama’s voice is significant because it is one of many similar voices, all of them seemingly minor and unheard, but numerous enough to form a considerable chorus.

It would be unwise to forget that those who attacked us were motivated by religious concerns. At the same time, we should not, by adding more shrill cries to the cacophony, place hurdles in the path of the efforts of Salama, the Quilliam Foundation, and other Muslims to offer a “Generous Peace.” Indeed, the memory of the victims of September 11 attacks and our national interests will be best served if, when some Muslims tell us they worship a God who cares about the poor, the weak, the orphan, the meek, we take time to listen.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

On its own, the term “respect” seems to represent a positive concept. And yet when the terms “respect” and “Islam” come together there is tension. The problem in our public discourse about respect and Islam lies in confusion in terminology—attaching different meanings to the term “respect” while assuming we all mean the same thing when we use this term, when in fact we do not.

One helpful resource to untangle this knot is the work of the Respect Research Group of the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Rotterdam School of Management in Holland. Their research into “respect” is complex—it is academic work complete with social science jargon and detailed flow-charts. From their work we can distill some helpful insights with broader applications that will help us maneuver through the controversies about “respecting Islam.”

A key distinction that these “respect” researchers point out is between respect that involves appraisal or evaluation of an issue (e.g. respecting a public leader for his or her political stances) and respect that is an attitude of basic recognition (e.g. respecting the right to life of a human being because of recognition of basic human dignity). They call these two kinds of respect “appraisal respect” and “recognition respect.”

Another aspect of their research that is helpful for working through the controversy about “respecting Islam” is their focus on interpersonal relations. With this in mind, I think shifting discussion away from “respecting Islam” to “respecting Muslims” changes the dynamic in a way that could foster fruitful discussions instead of generating more controversy.

As for the phrase “respecting Islam,” one needs to ask whose Islam? Islam is a vast, complex, diverse realm filled with a multitude of individual, human interpreters. Does “respecting Islam” mean respecting the arguments of those who throw acid in the faces of girls trying to attend school in Afghanistan, or does it mean respecting the arguments of a woman such as Asra Nomani who seeks access to mosques for Muslim women? In both cases this entails “appraisal respect,” dependent on the speaker’s evaluation of others’ actions and attitudes. We should not feel obliged to respect a position that claims the authority of Islam if that position is without merit.

By contrast, the phrase “respecting Muslims” shifts the discussion away from abstraction and toward the plane of human dignity and interpersonal relations. In the case of some Muslims throwing acid on the faces of Muslim girls trying to attend school, I can—even if I do so gnashing my teeth—respect the humanity in the acid-throwers without having to agree with them or condone their actions. With respect for their humanity I can feel concern for them—as believers in their faith they claim to be truth-seekers yet engage in destruction and brutality; it seems that in them there is an internal decay underway that harms them and others around them.

Respecting Muslims means recognizing, on a foundation of human dignity, the humanity—and thus also the diversity—among those who are followers of Islam. It does not mean agreeing with every single one of them on every issue, which would mean simultaneously accepting contradictions.

Consider the true story of the stoning to death of a woman named Soraya for alleged adultery in Iran. A tremendously powerful film based on this story, “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” opens in U.S. theaters today. The film is well made on many levels, and its story of the efforts of Soraya’s aunt and a foreign journalist to make known the profound horror of this case reminds all who see it what the word “courage” means.

When colossal barbarity such as beheading, stoning, or throwing acid into the faces of schoolgirls occurs in Muslim communities, sometimes one sees in the media accusations, or at least insinuations, that because Muslims did these things therefore this represents the true essence of Islam. There is a danger in this approach. I call it “selective Islamicization,” namely associating Islam with barbaric acts carried out by some Muslims while neglecting to associate Islam with the victims and opponents of these acts who are also often Muslims. There are Muslims involved in committing horrific acts, but that is not the whole story.

“The Stoning of Soraya M.” is a case in point. Yes, in this incident the imam, who convicts her in a kangaroo court, and Soraya’s husband, who hatches the plot to get Soraya stoned to serve his own selfish desires, are Muslims. But does this mean Muslims favor stoning innocent women to death? Such a perspective neglects consideration of those getting stoned, and those who are voices instead for justice. In Soraya’s case, she for one, to put it mildly, certainly doesn’t favor getting stoned to death. Likewise, there are Muslims in her community who do not support the injustice of the imam’s kangaroo court or favor the stoning; these Muslims instead seek dignity and authentic justice.

The making of this story into a film is an important project. For one thing, audiences need to understand the depth of the horror in such real-life situations; in this film actress Shohreh Aghdashloo and others excel in conveying raw, excruciating emotion.

Another reason this particular film is important is that director Cyrus Nowrasteh’s telling of this story portrays the lived-practice, not just abstract concept, of Islam with nuance. This film is not a cheap shot at Islam or Muslims. Rather, in “The Stoning of Soraya M.” the faults of those who manipulate religion for selfish gain say more about individual human folly and the brokenness of the political system in that location than about Islam or religion. The filmmakers have steered clear of simplistically assuming and portraying that simply because one man has the title of imam, and another man sporadically drops references to Islam, that therefore all their thoughts, words, and deeds are Islam itself.

The viewer also sees the face of Islam in the woman who is about to be stoned. She is Muslim, and so too is her aunt, who tries to protect her and risks her own life to expose the deeds of Soraya’s attackers. Soraya and her aunt are anything but savage stone throwers. They are Muslim women who care about their families and try to lead decent lives.

So, what does it mean to “respect Islam”? I think the best respect we can show is to respect Muslims themselves, as human beings with human dignity. This is interpersonal respect, human to human. This is different than respect for ideas and concepts.

For me as a non-Muslim, respecting Muslims does not mean that I will always agree with my Muslim interlocutors, but I can respect that they are seekers of truth, seeking God, and that they are human beings created by the same Creator who created me.

Respecting a Muslim who throws acid on a schoolgirl’s face does not mean I am called to silence out of “respect.” On the contrary, it is precisely because I respect the human dignity of both the victim and the perpetrator that I will openly disagree with such destructiveness and the attitude behind it. When heinous acts threaten the humanity of victims as well as the perpetrators’ own humanity, speaking out in opposition is an act of respect for victim and perpetrator alike. Silence would not be respectful, and I would threaten my own human dignity and undermine any possibility for self-respect.

“Recognition respect” of Muslims recognizes and respects their humanity. This should not be confused with “appraisal respect” which involves evaluation of the normative claims of another. With “recognition respect” we can agree to disagree while remaining civil and also leave open a space for the possibility of agreement and collaborative efforts. This does not compromise our own convictions.

The problem with the broad form of “appraisal respect” is that it forces the appraiser to take a monolithic view of what one is appraising, such as the abstract concept of Islam, and then face the binary option of accepting or rejecting the concept.

This is not to say that a person’s beliefs are irrelevant. Respecting an individual requires us to see that a person’s beliefs are important to and valued by that person, and this forces us to recognize the importance of preserving a space for religion in society. When I don’t understand someone’s faith, but respect that person as a human being because his faith is important to him, I am called to listen, inquire further, and learn. This type of respect enables the listener to become a learner, to understand the diversity which can be present within a community, even within a religion.

Focusing on interpersonal respect of Muslims makes human beings the focus and allows room for individual diversity within groups of people. Recognizing this diversity is as important today as it ever has been.

In the struggles and controversies underway at present over the future of Islam and the roles of non-Muslims alongside Muslims, we would do well not to lump peaceful Muslims together with their abusers. Soraya, her aunt, and individuals like them in Muslim communities stand to be allies for human dignity; we should seek out opportunities to partner with them and help their side.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

I first heard about Obama’s speech to “the Muslim world” from National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” top-of-the-hour report. It expressed the same impression conveyed by many news reports on the speech. From what the news outlets said, it seemed as if the United States government would remain trapped in post-9/11 strategic communication follies of feeding into Osama bin Laden’s “Muslims versus non-Muslims” narrative. For those first moments yesterday as I made my morning cup of coffee, it seemed, sadly, as if nothing had changed, as if this would be no “new beginning” at all.

The actual text of Obama’s speech, however, gives a much different picture. Obama did not fall into the familiar trap of referring to Muslims as if they were part of some entity in opposition to the United States called “the Muslim world”—a phrase which creates a seeming monolith which is wholly separate. Rather, in this speech Obama dropped the terminology of “the Muslim world,” and in its place he used phrases such as “Muslim communities” and “Muslims around the world” to convey the complexity of modern, lived Islam. When reflected in policy changes, these subtle but significant rhetorical shifts spell trouble for the Osama bin Ladens of this world.

In his speech, President Obama never referred to “Muslim countries.” This was spot-on. Instead he referred to Indonesia as an “overwhelmingly Muslim country” and to Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia as “Muslim-majority countries.” When he spoke of other topics, such as the vitally important topic of expanding literacy for girls, he referred again to “Muslim-majority countries.”

Faith is something held by an individual, not a political entity. The political decisions of a dictator such as Egypt’s President Mubarak represent his political regime, not the religion of Islam, not the religion of the millions of non-Muslims in Egypt, and not the religion of the Muslim intellectuals his regime bullies, censors, and imprisons. Today there are vibrant debates underway in and between diverse Muslim communities, in spite of efforts by authoritarian regimes such as the Saudis to crush the independent voices among Muslim intellectuals and artists.

Osama bin Laden views Islam as a simplistic monolith, of which he is the self-appointed “representative.” The reality is that Muslims live out their faith in a multitude of diverse cultures, communities, and continents.

Oh, would that the White House would notify the State Department of this! At the time of Obama’s speech, www.america.gov, a primary platform for the State Department’s communication to foreign audiences, headlined, “Obama Speaks to Muslim World from Cairo.” Granted, by 1:30pm EST the State Department changed the headline on the English version of the site to “Obama Seeks New U.S. Start with Muslims Worldwide.” Yet the story was covered also on the Arabic, French, and Spanish language portions of the State Department’s site where by the afternoon the headline about his speech still featured the phrases “the Islamic world” and “the Muslim world.”

This is not a matter of linguistic nit-picking. This really is of strategic significance, both on the level of what message we send with terminology, and what message we send when the White House and the State Department communications offices, located just blocks from each other, fail to communicate with each other on what is being heralded as one of the most important speeches yet of President Obama’s administration.

I was reminded of the importance of Obama’s speech when, that same day, I experienced a concrete reminder of the integrated role of some Muslims in America. Yesterday I had a medical appointment at a facility where a female Muslim doctor provides care for me. She is part of the society in which I live, not part of some separate “Muslim world,” and I am better off because of this. I benefit from her intellect and her willingness to apply her intellect to a profession of public service. And she benefits from freedom for women to pursue education and contribute to society here in America, and from freedom to practice her faith freely, wearing a headscarf to work if she wants to. This doctor does not live in some separate realm; she and I are part of the same world, the same society, the same citizenry.

Are there Muslims who, by contrast, do not engage, do not serve, and who fight against our society? Yes, to be sure there are. But let’s not conspire to help the latter prevail. Osama bin Laden and his allies would like to perpetuate a narrative of divisiveness, of “the Muslim world” against everyone else.

Those of us who aspire to a world in which freedom and peaceful pluralism expand, rather than contract, need to stop abetting the Osama bin Laden narrative of “Islam vs. everyone else” with falsely monolithizing phrases such as “the Muslim world.” Let’s hope that the Obama administration figures out how to move information a few hundred yards from the White House to the State Department, and that along with the White House the State Department will come down on the side of freedom and peaceful pluralism.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One way President Obama could be respectful of and show his appreciation for Islam would be to nominate an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom and support religious freedom in his administration’s foreign policy.

To those who dismiss religious freedom as a “western” concept or the desire only of Christian missionaries, and argue that out of respect we should not “impose” this on Muslims, I would like to provide an overview of the perspectives of some of the many Muslim thinkers, both Sunni and Shia, who argue for religious freedom.

There are Muslims who oppose religious freedom, of course, and they are well-known. The exploits of the Taliban and the Saudi government get press. The views of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are available free online in many languages. But there are also Muslims who favor religious freedom. It is high time the perspectives of the latter get the public attention they deserve.

A key phrase in President Obama’s Istanbul speech was that “we seek broader engagement” with Muslims. If President Obama is sincere in his desire to “seek broader engagement,” his outreach must extend beyond foreign-government-sanctioned and foreign-government-financed Muslim institutions, which tend to have more to do with representing the political needs of authoritarian regimes (often regimes the U.S. government readily supports) than with the actual broader dynamic underway among Muslims today.

If our American “engagement” is to be authentically “broader,” it needs to be open to the diversity that exists in Islam. This would include considering the perspectives of Muslims who favor religious freedom. What follows is an overview of why some Muslims favor religious freedom. These authors have rooted their arguments in foundational Islamic texts, the Quran and Hadith, and principles of Islamic law.

These authors are not arguing for religious freedom simply to secure minority rights (such as those of the persecuted Shia in Saudi Arabia), nor do they argue for religious freedom as a temporary bridge to get them into political power. Quite to the contrary, their arguments support the principle of religious freedom as integral to the practice of Islam, and more broadly as beneficial to humanity. These authors shun the mixing of political and religious authority, and highlight this as a threat to the well-being of Muslims and to their faith lives. In addition, these authors see freedom of Muslims and non-Muslims to enter and exit faith communities as essential if belief in Islam is to have any meaning.

Abdullah Saeed, a professor at the University of Melbourne, and his brother Hassan Saeed, Attorney-General of the Maldives, offer an in depth examination of Islam and religious freedom. Their study, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam, is an exploration of the topic of religious freedom in the Quran and the Hadith. Based on the results of their study, they argue, “ . . . freedom of religion is a fundamental principle of Islam and that the death penalty for apostasy violates this principle.” They conclude that Islam and freedom of religion are not just simply compatible; the findings of their study reach further. They observe, “One of the new positions emerging among many Muslims today is that the Qur’an supports the view that freedom of belief is an essential aspect of Islam.”

Other Muslim writers addressing religious freedom include Mohamed Talbi, from Tunisia, Mohsen Kadivar, from Iran, and Abdolkarim Soroush, also from Iran. Essays by these three authors are now available in English in the excellent compendium, The New Muslim Voices: Rethinking Politics and Modernity, edited by Mehran Kamrava. This compendium includes both Sunni and Shia perspectives on issues of importance to modern Muslims, such as religious freedom. Also in Kamrava’s compendium is an article by Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian, which touches on the issue of religious freedom. (Some of Kavidar’s writings are available at his website in English, though the English translation in Kamrava’s collection is of higher quality.)

These authors critically examine and debunk popular assumptions and inherited traditionalist interpretations about Islam and religious freedom, including the assumption that Islam must respond to apostasy with execution. Kavidar observes, “ . . . these interpretations [of the Quran and Hadith] often fall significantly short of capturing the essence of the Holy Book or a particular Prophetic tradition and, in fact, often contradict them.”

While Saeed and Saeed focus on textual exegesis, Talbi, Kavidar and Soroush elaborate guiding principles for approaching the issue of religious freedom as Muslims. The types of advantages they, as Muslims, see in religious freedom include the following:

1. Religious liberty provides a foundation for authentic belief:

Talbi notes the “inner liberty” of individuals, and observes that recognition of this inner liberty enriches how he, as a Muslim, interacts with non-Muslims. This is not just a matter of peaceful-coexistence, but rather recognition of the “sacredness” of each individual. He writes of bearing witness to non-believers of his Muslim faith neither by sword nor with scratchy, screechy loudspeakers blasting from mosques, but rather “in the most courteous way that is most respectful of the inner liberty of our neighbors and their sacredness.”

Kavidar observes that the notion of religion without religious freedom lacks logical coherence. He observes, “ . . . the freedom to choose one’s beliefs and creed predates religion. It is through this freedom that religion is chosen and belief is established.” Furthermore, he questions, “How could a religion, one that asks of its followers to explore for themselves and to choose their beliefs based on critical reason and thought, deny the necessity of freedom of religion and belief?”

2. Religious liberty frees Islam from political manipulation:

Since religious freedom makes possible faith as individual belief, it transfers the centrality of religion in society away from a cultural or tribal identity, and removes it from the hands of power-hoarders who would use religion as a political football for their personal, near-term objectives. A free environment, namely one that includes religious freedom, makes possible exposure of the falsehoods of those who would manipulate religion for personal gain.

Soroush offers the frank observation that, “The contest of freedom eliminates the masters of mediocrity, the pompous windbags, and the incompetent overlords . . . .In a closed and oppressive system . . . truths do not get a chance to shine against falsehoods.”

The Saeeds note the harm caused to Islam by political abuse—not only in the eyes of non-believers, but also in the eyes of Muslims: “ . . . the misuse of Islam by political authorities in the Muslim world to suit their own political agendas plays a significant role in driving some Muslims away from Islam.”

3. Religious liberty enriches Muslims’ faith:

The arguments these authors present supporting religious freedom suggest that religious freedom offers an enriching—not a threatening—environment for the Islamic faith.

Soroush observes (echoing Quran verse 2:256), “Religion is, by definition, incompatible with coercion. Freedom has two virtures: it endows life and the choices we make in it with meaning.” Kavidar notes, “If free will did not exist, sin and atonement would be meaningless. Religion and faith are meaningful only when people can freely choose them.” And Talbi observes, “Faith, to be true and reliable faith, absolutely needs to be a free and voluntary act.”

Societal freedom, argues Soroush, is as an environmental necessity for internal spiritual life, and the lack thereof is a threat to Muslims seeking to live out their faith. He argues, “Living under tyranny plunges the whole society into such iniquity and causes such legitimation and institutionalization of corruption that fighting the internal battle becomes impossible.”

4. Religious liberty promotes respect for Muslims

Respect for Islam and Muslims is a recurring theme in these authors’ arguments for religious freedom. Religious freedom provides an environment to protect Islam from political manipulation and settling for mediocrity. These authors honor their faith and consider it unworthy of mediocrity.

Soroush discusses the complexity of truth and the resulting need for pursuit of truth to be a shared enterprise. He writes, “Freedom is there not only for people to say their piece and blow off steam. It is there because they need each others’ help against darkness and falsehood.”

Integrally linked to their respect for Islam is these authors’ respect for Muslims alongside all human beings. Hence they highlight the benefits of religious freedom for all society and note their concerns of harm to society where freedom is denied. Kavidar asserts, “ . . . freedom of thought and religion are beneficial for society at large and ought to be sought after.” He observes, “limiting the choice of religion and belief leads to discord, deceit, and hypocrisy. Those who would be persecuted or killed for spreading false beliefs have no choice but to feign obedience to whatever religion happens to dominate at that the time. Hypocrisy undermines and destroys faith. Robbing people of their right to choose their religious beliefs only results in the spread of discord and hypocrisy.”

The Egyptian Muslim author, Nasr Abu Zayd, now exiled to Europe, also emphasizes in Kamrava’s anthology the detrimental impact on society when there is a lack of freedom for “religious discourse.” He observes, “Censorship and stagnation go hand in hand. Because religious discourse is tied to public discourse, all facets of society deteriorate as a result of censorship. Only confident and free societies have an ability to repel stagnation and decay . . . People must be free to challenge opinions in the marketplace of ideas. Islam must protect this right.”

5. Religious liberty reflects respect for God’s sovereignty.

These Muslim writers also believe that religious freedom reflects respect for God’s sovereignty. Kavidar comments on the Islamic belief that God rewards good and punishes evil and observes that denial of freedom would run counter to this understanding of who God is. He writes, “If there were only one path that everyone had to follow—the right path—then there would be no need for independent judgment, and for God’s rewarding of good and His punishment of evil.”

Soroush notes that valuing reason and truth reflects trust in God, “Where both reason and the truth are held to be weak, freedom cannot be cultivated.” He writes, arguing for an intellectual rather than a bloody jihad, of the need to “struggle and wage Jihad against falsehoods, and put our trust in God. We must know that fraud will not succeed nor the iniquitous prevail. This is the meaning of tavakkol (trust in God).”

For Talbi too, his support for religious freedom is related to his understanding of who God is. He observes, “From a Muslim perspective, and on the basis of the Qur’an’s basic teachings . . . religious liberty is fundamentally and ultimately an act of respect for God’s sovereignty and for the mystery of God’s plan for humanity, which has been given the terrible privilege of shaping entirely on its own responsibility its destiny on earth and hereafter. Ultimately, to respect humanity’s freedom is to respect God’s plan. To be a true Muslim is to submit to this plan. It is to put one’s self, voluntarily and freely, with confidence and love, into the hands of God.”

These Muslim voice represent an important segment of a critical population. If President Obama wishes to follow through on his stated desire to “respect Islam” and “broaden engagement” with Muslims, he should look at the too-little-known writings of these authors. He can lead our government’s outreach to Muslims beyond listening only to authoritarian political leaders of Muslim populations, such as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Appointing an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom who could engage with these voices of Islam would be one concrete step in the right direction.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Approximately 20% of the world’s population is Muslim, yet according to Reporters Without Borders, 58% of the “Internet Enemies” are Muslim-majority countries. These are Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (alongside Burma, China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam). As if this were not enough, 45% of the eleven countries listed as secondary level offenders, “Under Surveillance,” are either Muslim-majority—Bahrain, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen—or, in the case of Eritrea, about half Muslim.

As for “friends” of the U.S. on this list, the 2009 “Internet Enemies” report identifies Egyptian bloggers as “among the most hounded in the world” and “since the beginning of 2007, the government of Egypt has stepped up its surveillance of the web.” Tunisia “is one of the most draconian on the Internet.” In Turkmenistan, “the Internet remains one of the areas that the new government keeps under tightest control.” Uzbekistan maintains “very tight control over the Internet” and has a media law which makes way for “extensive and abusive censorship.” Also the state of Internet freedom in U.A.E., Bahrain, Yemen, Malaysia, and Eritrea is nothing to cheer about.

Meanwhile, in the most recent (2008) annual Department of State Report on International Religious Freedom 62% of the “Countries of Particular Concern” (the most egregious offenders) are Muslim-majority—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan—with, again, Eritrea being about half Muslim (alongside Burma, China, North Korea).

Egypt’s starring role among the world’s “Internet Enemies” goes along with a religious freedom record that, while not one of the absolute worst, is still deeply problematic. These facts are particularly disconcerting because Egypt used to be a major intellectual and artistic hub in the Muslim world and now is supposedly a close U.S. ally. One would hope that a country in such a position would be a center for peaceful, reformist Islam.

There are two key misperceptions about anti-freedom measures in these Muslim majority countries, and both apply to Egypt. The first is that we Americans need to allow these countries great leeway in anti-freedom-of-speech and anti-religious-freedom policies because they use such policies only to fight against violent extremists. The second is that the only significant violations of religious freedom these countries perpetrate are against relatively small minorities such as Christians and Bahai.

In reality, “allies” of the U.S. such as Egypt use suppression of freedom of speech (on the Internet and in other media) and deny freedom of religion in order to block efforts by moderate and progressive Muslim reformers.

Consider just two examples of this problem in Egypt, the cases of Al-Azhar student Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman (known as “Kareem Amer”) and writer Dr. Muhammad Futuh. These are peaceful, pro-democracy Muslims who chose to be publicly engaged because they care about the future of Islam.

Amer now sits in an Egyptian prison for calling attention to abuses by the Mubarak government and challenging the status quo at Al-Azhar, an influential Islamic university in Egypt increasingly known for rising fundamentalism. On his website, Amer wrote that he wants to open a law firm to protect the rights of Muslim and Arab women. This is an example of the type of “threat” he poses. The Egyptian government imprisoned him for two years for “insulting the president” and one year for “incitement to hatred of Islam.” A campaign for his release continues.

Futuh published a collection of essays calling for critical thinking, education reform, government accountability, poverty reduction, and, not least of all, openness and rationality in public discussions of Islam. His book, Modern Sheikhs and the Manufacture of Religious Extremism, did not see the light of day for more than a few hours when it appeared in Egypt in 2006. The Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar, granted authority by the Egyptian government to determine what is “religiously acceptable,” deemed Futuh’s book “insulting” to Islam. Police stormed the bookstore and confiscated the books. (The book was written in Arabic; an English translation is expected later this year.) Mind you, Futuh is a Muslim. If he were anti-Muslim he would be fighting against himself. He’s not. But Egypt will not allow a space for moderate voices like Futuh’s in public discussions about Islam.

When Muslim-majority regimes such as Egypt’s claim they need censorship of Muslims to “protect Islam,” they are not “protecting” the Islam of the Muslims they censor, intimidate, and imprison. Rather, such regimes are harming fellow Muslims in order to “protect” specific interpretations of Islam which serve their own power. Censoring Muslims in order to centralize power in the hands of Egyptian President Mubarak, autocrat-for-life, and Al-Azhar University is an act of power-hoarding, not protection of a religion. When we Americans show deference to the Egyptian government’s censorship of Muslims out of supposed “respect for Islam,” we err.

Keep in mind that Egypt is one of the very largest recipients in the world of U.S. foreign assistance—annually over 800 million dollars in development assistance, and over a billion dollars, each year, for military hardware. We might want to re-evaluate whether this is an effective investment of U.S. money.

Consider the irony. When a congressional committee held a hearing on “Strategic Communication and Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism,” (CIST) a Public Diplomacy official informed Congress that cornerstones of Department of State’s CIST efforts include use of the Internet and empowering moderate Muslims. While these are laudable efforts, one wonders what the point of them is when simultaneously the very same U.S. government is using large amounts of taxpayer money to support one of the world’s greatest “Internet Enemies” as it censors, harasses, and imprisons moderate Muslims. We are feeding the hand that bites us.

Today, opening freedom of speech and freedom of religion in Muslim-majority countries, including Egypt, is more than a moral nicety. It is a strategic necessity.

One can only hope that President Obama will apply the level of interest he shows in protecting polar bears to protecting freedom of speech and freedom of religion, particularly in the strategically significant realms of Muslim-majority countries.

Please don’t get me wrong. I like polar bears, and even if I didn’t like them I would still argue that as creatures of this planet they deserve protection from extinction. Yet in prioritizing limited resources, it is worth noting that polar bears are not establishing sleeper cells in Europe or the U.S., trying to kill us and our way of life. Violent extremists in Muslim communities are.

Meanwhile, President Obama quickly filled the post of EPA Administrator and has established an executive level Council on Environmental Quality. Yet President Obama has not even so much as nominated an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, the U.S. government lead for engaging foreign audiences, and our gung-ho support for Egypt the Internet Enemy continues unabated.

It seems surreal, and more than a little dangerous, that we apply our resources with alacrity and vigor to support polar bears and governments hostile to progressive reformist Muslims, while neglecting public diplomacy and protection of the freedoms of speech and religion which are essential for growth of reformist Muslim movements.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Well, o.k., not quite, but almost.

In the play Madah-Sartre: The Kidnapping, Trial and Conver(sat/s)ion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir by Algerian Francophone playwright Alek Baylee Toumi, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir show up in Algeria at the 1993 funeral of Tahar Djaout, a writer who was assassinated by Islamists. (Wait, you say, Sartre died in 1980 and De Beauvoir in 1986! Yes, but this is fiction.)

Islamists kidnap Sartre and De Beauvoir at gunpoint and then threaten them with death unless they convert to Islam. An international outcry leads to a flurry of activity and an ineffective “diplomatic waltz.” As for the captives, already being dead gives them a great advantage: Sartre and De Beauvoir have utterly nothing to fear in the face of a death threat. They challenge their captors—intellectually, of course.

So begins Madah-Sartre, written originally in French, and now available in English translation. What follows is a spirited debate between Madah (part of a group of Islamist thugs) and Sartre, and a debate of somewhat less substance between Madah’s nameless female counterpart “Chief Chador” (reflecting her leadership role among the female Islamists and veiled attire) and De Beauvoir.

Madah and his Islamist gang view intellectuals as their movement’s greatest threat. As a result, they desperately seek to convert Sartre and De Beauvoir to Islam.

Yet Madah is more desperate than he is clever. Early on he gives Sartre a Quran to read in between “conversion” sessions. Madah returns from a weekend hiatus expecting that Sartre’s reading of the Quran has led him to embrace Madah’s Islamism. Quite to the contrary, Sartre has been armed with arguments against Madah’s fundamentalist ideology. The philosopher contrasts what he has learned from the Quran about respect for “people of the Book” (Christians and Jews) with the extreme restrictions in Algeria placed not only on Christians, Jews, and atheists, but on Muslims who disagree with the Islamist creed.

Sartre launches into a hefty argument in favor of religious freedom for believers and non-believers alike. Sartre defends rights for Madah which Madah denies for Sartre; Sartre asserts, “Democracy and freedom are not Western luxuries, but rights for everyone. I have defended, and still defend, liberty and justice for all, including you Madah.” Madah has no substantive response; he just calls Sartre a heretic. (Sartre’s “heresy” in the play is, however, not atheism. Sartre and De Beauvoir now live in heaven where they have encountered God.)

Madah seems to have quite a high opinion of himself and his ideology. But Sartre is unimpressed. He bluntly points out that his captors have failed in providing their people with such basics as food, literacy, and an economic livelihood, all because Madah and his cohorts pursue their “obsession” with “eliminating others who are different, at all costs.”

Rather than just sitting back smugly and condemning their captors while patting themselves on the back for their own tolerance and critical thinking, Sartre and De Beauvoir engage their opponents, trying to unravel the fundamentalism which has their captors tied in mental knots. It is listening to the arguments of their captors that enables Sartre and De Beauvoir to counter their captors’ arguments, and from time to time even toss in a slam-dunk argument which leaves their captors dumbfounded. Engagement leads to cracks in an ideology which had thrived in isolation. The partial success Sartre has in his debates with Madah comes not by self-promotion, but rather by focusing on Madah’s ideology and highlighting the weaknesses in it. Sartre does not try to change Madah’s mind by promoting all-things-French and all-things-existentialist the way State Department public diplomacy seems to believe that if they just repeat promotion of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” like a broken record it will sway our adversaries to turn away from hateful ideologies.

In all this, Toumi may nudge some play-watchers and play-readers out of their comfort zones. His proposal is a bold one. It asserts that Islamists should be met by arguments, and not just by guns, wiretaps, and airport screening lines.

The juxtaposition of Islamists with super secular Europeans advancing superior arguments might make one wonder if the plot is anti-Muslim. Au contraire. Before the play even starts Toumi includes a “WARNING”. He notes, “The victims are Muslims, while the killers, the assassins, the terrorists are Islamists” (emphasis his). In the play itself Toumi stresses repeatedly that Madah and Chief Chador do not represent Islam. Toumi’s portrayal of “man-on-the-street” Muslims is sympathetic.

The play’s most powerful testament to the suffering of peaceful Muslims at the hands of Islamists is the character of the taxi driver—a nameless, hardworking, faithful Muslim man just trying to feed his nine children and wife, and care for his ailing mother. He does not, like Madah, drive around in a Saudi-provided Rolls Royce. Rather, the taxi driver struggles terribly to meet day-to-day needs and is treated badly at every turn: bullied by Islamist thugs, bullied by government thugs, unable to get basic healthcare in a healthcare system void of “care” but full of corruption.

Still, reading these debates in which only anti-religious secularists get a say against the Islamists left me wondering what Muslims who favor peace and are comfortable with pluralism (like the taxi driver) would say to Madah and Chief Chador. Toumi’s amusing creativity has developed a plot with potential beyond just this play. Imagine a television series in which Muslim champions of peace and creativity return to have a word or two with Madah and Chief Chador. Just for starters, Pathan leader Badshah Khan (1890-1988), an effective Muslim advocate of non-violence, Iranian poet/painter Sohrab Sepheri (1928-1980), a voice for beauty and joy, and Sufi Rabia (717-801), who highlighted God’s love, would, be candidates. Of course one would hope that already being dead would not be a prerequisite for intellectual engagement free from fear. Stay tuned.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The primary example Senator Clinton provided for what she would do for public diplomacy as Secretary of State was “. . . opening ‘America Houses’ in cities across the Arab world, which will be modeled on the successful program the United States launched following World War II.” (America Houses were publicly accessible centers featuring American books and films, and hosting events about America.)

The mere fact—cited by Senator Clinton herself—that these America Houses were particularly effective during the Cold War, under different circumstances, should give cause to question, not necessarily cause to embrace, this approach.

More fundamentally, we need to step back and question the underlying assumption that public diplomacy means promoting the U.S.A. This approach yielded unimpressive results the past few years, and there is little reason to expect an improvement now.

When foreign audiences are deeply concerned with other topics, are angry at us, and don’t want to hear about us, a “Let me tell you about America . . .” approach could do more to agitate than to convince. Look at what happened to China during the 2008 Olympic torch relay, when China apparently thought it could improve its image by increasing attention on China in the media. China was out of touch with audiences in Europe and North America, where concern about Chinese human rights abuses was at the fore. When China raised its profile in the news media through the Olympic torch relay, these audiences responded with an angry sense of “China?? You want to talk about China?!? Sure, let’s do that . . .” and they went on to heap negative attention on China in public protests and news editorials. The result was, arguably, a net loss for China’s public image.

How does this translate to American public diplomacy? Consider the Palestinians in Gaza today. America needs a strategy to engage this foreign audience (not just their political leaders) in a manner that supports our national interests. It is unlikely that erecting an “America House” and telling them about the U.S.A. is going to alleviate their current concerns or reduce the number of rockets Hamas is launching into Israel. I expect it would instead provoke an anti-American backlash even stronger than the current anti-Americanism in Gaza, and could even fuel motivation for increasing rocket launches into Israel.

This is as true outside of the crisis zone. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, to name just a few, we have more to gain from an increase in protection of freedom of speech, to allow for progressive Muslim media, than from pushing more stories about America into these populations, especially with the youth.

As an alternative to the self-promotion definition of public diplomacy that Senator Clinton seems to have adopted without much reflection, we need to consider alternative frameworks for public diplomacy. One possible definition I propose is this:

Public diplomacy engages foreign audiences to promote ideas, issues, and concepts that are in our national interest.

There is, to be sure, an important role for telling people about America, and there are times and audiences for which this is in our national interest. But at other times, with other audiences, we may have more to gain by setting ourselves aside and engaging their issues instead. It is not always about us. We need to stop behaving like a child belting out what one might call opera voice training, namely, “me, me, me, me, me.”

This is particularly important for U.S. engagement of foreign Muslim populations. There is currently a large-scale intra-Muslim struggle underway over the future of Islam. In a nutshell (though recognizing that the overall struggle is highly complex), the core struggle is between Muslims who view Islam as inherently totalitarian and Muslims who consider civility to be an inherent part of Islam.

America needs to have government officials focused on effective engagement that supports our national interests in this struggle. While this intra-Muslim struggle is not a fight for our government, it is vital that we do what we can to facilitate creation, growth, and protection of free and open public space for engagement by Muslims. The last item, protection, is particularly important. Protection codified in a constitution and protected by a fair judiciary is what prevents fundamentalist groups from manipulating open forums to gain power precisely in order to shut them down.

But whose job is this? If Secretary of State-designate Clinton adopts the assumption that public diplomacy only means promoting America, then whose job is it to engage foreign audiences strategically? Our strategic interests in foreign populations go far beyond trying to get them to wear “I ♥ America” baseball caps.

As a concrete example of the problem that large-scale, strategically astute engagement of foreign audiences seems to be no one’s job in the U.S. government, I recently mentioned the need to get Tahar Djaout’s important novel The Last Summer of Reason translated into Arabic. Getting this freedom-and-human-dignity-promoting Algerian novel translated from the French original into Arabic is in our national interest on a myriad of levels. But, whose job is such a task? Certainly not State Department public diplomacy, if their job is defined narrowly as just promoting the U.S.A.

There is a Book Program at the State Department, but they have chosen to define their job narrowly as translating only American books into foreign languages. So, instead of getting The Last Summer of Reason translated into Arabic, the State Department Book Program has instead, for example, translated into Arabic a biography of Benjamin Franklin, a horror novel about bounty hunters for Indian scalps, and a controversial children’s book perhaps best known for the rape of a minor in Alaska. There is a role for translation of American books into Arabic, but with limited public diplomacy resources, are these really the only books—for that matter the only media—we should be translating into Arabic?

I remain highly skeptical that young Muslims in Cairo, Gaza City, and Riyadh will desire to rush to book stores to buy a biography of Benjamin Franklin, or be inspired to pursue non-violence by a novel about collecting Indian scalps. By contrast, a book such as The Last Summer of Reason fosters ideas which are in our national interest, is rooted in issues of concern to key Muslims audiences, and supports our national interest because it would mean investing tax dollars in a manner which connects with key foreign audiences such as young Arab Muslims. But whose job in the U.S. government is it to translate such a book into Arabic?

If Secretary of State nominee Clinton is only going to reproduce more business-as-usual in public diplomacy, and just promote the image of the U.S.A., there may be need for Congress to step in. It may even be time to remove public diplomacy from the State Department. After all, the core mission of the State Department is government-to-government relations, not concern with populations at large. We have significant security interests resting on our country’s engagement of foreign audiences; what happens with public diplomacy matters for our national security. Therefore we need to question critically what the nature of our public diplomacy should be.

Simply put, when foreign populations are not attacking us, our interests, and our allies, we are better off. Therefore engagement of foreign populations in ways which reduces their desire to engage in such attacks is in our interest. Public diplomacy is about us in so far as it serves our security and other national interests, but it is not all about us all the time. To be effective, we need to engage foreign audiences in ways which are relevant and attractive for them. If the lone song our public diplomacy Foreign Service Officers sing is, “me, me, me, me , me,” they will find an ever-shrinking audience.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Algerian author Tahar Djaout, born January 11, 1954, would have turned 55 this past Sunday.

Instead he is dead. In May 1993 Islamists in Algiers shot Djaout in the head. Several days later he died. The Islamists viewed Djaout’s creative and intellectually rich writing as a threat to their efforts to control and narrow the horizons of Algerian society.

Djaout is dead, but fortunately not silent. His poetry, novels, and articles remain—and deserve a broader audience. His works are in French, his language of publication, and while a few are available in English, German, and Dutch translation, almost none have been translated into Arabic, the language in which they could have the most impact.

One of the gems of his legacy is a short novel appropriately and chillingly titled The Last Summer of Reason. The manuscript for the book, without a title, was found among his papers after his murder. The title comes from a passage in the book. The book itself seems to have come as a prophecy of Djaout’s own fate—to put it mildly, things did not end well for Djaout. In lusciously beautiful prose in this novel, Djaout takes the reader on a walk through the reflections and experiences of the main character, Boualem Yekker. It is a walk which is gorgeous yet also painful; things do not end well for Boualem.

Boualem is a bookseller in a city with a religion identical to Islam (this society’s religion is not named, but the parallels to Islam are unambiguous). A particular strain of the local religion, very Talibanesque, has almost completely taken over the society and its government. This totalitarian movement is policed by the “Vigilant Brothers” (V.B.) whose love for power is matched only by their fear and hatred of creativity and beauty.

For example, plans are underway to ban spare tires in automobiles, justified by the claim these indicate lack of confidence in the abilities of God. Alongside this, violence and death become common. Boualem lives in a world overtaken by a “logic that causes blood to flow out of passion, that has claimed the right to destroy people in order to save their souls.” Absurdity abounds. Destruction abounds. Salvation, not so much.

For survival, Boualem nourishes his mind and soul through his memories of an era before the V.B., when intellectual inquiry and art were part of the fabric of day-to-day life. His books provide a lifeline for him, at least for a while. Boualem lives in a “gruesome-faced present,” in a city “bleeding so dreadfully inside, this city predisposed to joy but from which joy has been banned.” Integral to the V.B. banning of joy is their banning of books, and eventually burning of them. Though devastated, Boualem is not surprised, for he sees that “words, put end to end, bring doubt and change,” which are clearly foes of the neat, tidy absolutism of the V.B., who have manipulated a religion into a fundamentalism which is more focused on wielding human power than enriching humans’ relationship with their Creator.

The vital importance of Boualem’s rich memories is made particularly poignant by the contrast of these with the rigid attitudes children have acquired from their schooling in this “new world” of the V.B. So pervasive and deep is the V.B. indoctrination in society that even Boualem’s wife and his own children become estranged.

In the new world of the V.B., children are brought up to be “blind and convinced executors of a truth that has been presented to them as a higher truth. They have nothing on this earth: no material goods, no culture, no leisure activities, no affection, no hopes; their horizons are blocked.” In the realm of the V.B., any sense of educating children to be explorers, inventors, problem-solvers, and/or entrepreneurs has been extinguished. The next generation will not have memories, to say nothing of role models, to inspire broader deeper thinking.

This, precisely, is the risk we Americans and our allies face if we fail to confront the creep, and in some places the sweep, of Islamist ideologies taking root and marginalizing, or, worse yet, assassinating, Muslims who embrace intellectual inquiry, creativity, and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims.

Djaout knew that the confrontation of fundamentalism had to take place in hearts and minds. This is why he placed particular importance on education. In a magazine he founded, Ruptures, he asserted in January 1993, “Among the structures to be remodeled as fast as possible is the educational system. It is useless to repress fundamentalism if the Algerian school continues to prepare for us new packs of fundamentalists who, in their turn, will take up arms in ten or fifteen years.”

Perhaps while reading this article you are thinking of a gazillion other articles and books you ought to read, and feel you don’t have time to read some Algerian novel. Frankly, I suggest you do not have time not to read this novel; its tour-de-force message is of vital importance to our era. Thanks to University of Nebraska Press and translator Marjolijn de Jager, The Last Summer of Reason is available in paperback (a short book, just 146 pages) in an excellent English translation from the French original.

The character Boualem “used to tell himself that the city would not be long in expelling the parasitic body that was such an insult to the landscape. Thus he waited for things to return to normal, for the messengers of fanaticism to go back to their dark corners . . . [yet] It was enough for beauty and reason to doze off for a moment, abandoning their defenses, for night to shove day out and pour across the city like a horrifying flood.”

We cannot sit back and wait for the fanatics to just go away, for life to return to our blissful ignorance of September 10, 2001. The lull of September 10 only yielded September 11.

As Julija Sukys notes in her biography and reflections about Djaout, in Ruptures in January 1993 Djaout observed, “Algeria is going through a period of decisive battles, in which every silence, every indifference, every abdication, every inch of surrendered territory can prove fatal.” For Djaout, the silence, indifference, abdication, surrenders of others did prove fatal.

We would do well to reflect on our own silence, indifference, abdication, surrender in the “war of ideas” both before and since 2001, and look now instead for opportunities in the new administration to protect and empower those in Muslim communities who speak out, take interest, hold firm to positive values, and forge ahead on the offensive in favor of peaceful, tolerant civil society.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, who converted to Islam at age 15, is a professor at the university in Munster, Germany. So far the focus of the controversy has gravitated to Kalisch’s peculiar historical-critical approach. But due to the nature of Kalisch’s university position—as much one of a government official as an esoteric scholar—what might otherwise be an academic molehill is becoming a public mountain.

In 2005 Kalisch became the first faculty member in Germany assigned the task of training Islam instructors for German public schools. While American public schools, for example, usually give students a social-studies introduction to world religions, German public schools offer students government-sanctioned instruction in their respective religious faiths.

And it is this—the role of the German government in trying to determine what is and what is not a “legitimate” interpretation of a faith— which merits attention.

Kalisch is a strong advocate of academic freedom, including in Islamic studies. But his role as a government-appointed professor tasked to train government-sanctioned public school teachers of Islam leaves academic freedom subject to political pressures. In fact, the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany has rejected Kalisch. They have begun to call for a replacement for Kalisch and have urged aspiring teachers of Islam to not take Kalisch’s lectures. Even in this there is a government role, namely in selecting which Muslim organizations the government chooses to recognize as the official representatives of Islam, which lacks the formal structures of, for example, the Roman Catholic Church.

Entangling intellectual explorations of Islam with governmental attempts to sanction one viewpoint over another for children’s religious education is more likely to stifle than encourage the much needed open, free public space for explorations of the meaning of Islam. In selecting Kalisch, a moderate Muslim from the minority Zaidi sect of Shia Islam, the German government appears to have thought it could impose moderate Islam. But in fact, all the German government accomplished was to establish itself as arbiter of Islam. Kalisch is now out, but the efforts to bring government-sanctioned Islamic education into the public schools are already well underway. The established Islamic groups in Germany are more likely to represent conservative interpretations of Islam, and are now seizing the ouster of Kalisch to impose their own selection.

The structure of the German government’s sanctioning of religious instruction in schools was designed with organized religions that have a clearly identifiable hierarchy in mind. Islam, however, has no such formal structure, especially not in its Sunni branch. Rushed efforts to recognize the most organized groups as the official representative of Muslims in Germany may in fact aid rigid conservatives and inhibit free discussion and exploration of the relation of Islam to modern society.

So what is the alternative? The golden rule for government protection of religious freedom is play fair. In light of this, the German government cannot continue to offer Christian religious education in public schools while excluding Muslims from their own religious education. It may be time to consider that, perhaps, the most fair and sensible move the German government could make is to extricate itself from the business of religious education entirely.

The German government has a legitimate concern that now-marginal radical Islamism could become main-stream among Muslims in Germany. Yet what the German government views as a solution—namely government sanctioned religious education in public schools—may well prove to be the primary barrier to a solution. In Muslim majority countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the governments exercise tight political control over the Islamic universities, leaving little room for intellectual freedom, and even less room for religious freedom. The result has been marginalization, or even exile, of rationalist, liberal Muslims from Arab Islamic studies programs. Now in Germany, by trying to place the government as an arbiter of intra-Muslim (and for that matter intra-any-faith) disputes, the German government risks limiting, rather than protecting, free intellectual exploration of faith at a time when the need for such free and open exploration within Islam is great.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.