Would 9/11 have happened?

There are good reasons to believe that the answer is “no.” Religious freedom, the evidence shows, can be an antidote to religion-related extremism, including terrorism. Despite this, the United States has made little effort to advance international religious freedom as part of either its counter-terrorism strategy or its democracy assistance programs in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Both the Obama administration and Congress have been unwilling to back a serious religious freedom policy, even though the potential benefits are enormous and the costs would be very low.

The explanation lies in a perfect storm of official inertia, grounded in political correctness, a lack of imagination, and—worst of all—indifference.

First, the evidence. Recall how the 9/11 Commission defined the danger:

The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is … Islamist terrorism—especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology … [which]  draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. … It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground—not even respect for life—on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated.

Religious liberty cannot destroy the terrorists, but it can help isolate them and their ideas. Empirical sociologists Brian Grim and Roger Finke have demonstrated in their work a causal connection between the absence of religious freedom and the incubation of religious terrorism. Where there is a closed religious orthodoxy, as in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, extremist ideas flourish. But the reverse appears to be true as well: When all religious actors and ideas enjoy equal access to public life, including democratic political life, liberal political theologies emerge and the appeal of extremism diminishes.

Electoral democracy can help undermine extremism and encourage liberalism, but elections alone are not enough. In order to take root, democracy must embrace the fundamental tenets of liberalism, including a bundled commodity of fundamental freedoms that include religious liberty. Several Muslim societies are struggling to establish democracy, and while some are making good progress, particularly Turkey and Indonesia, none has embraced religious freedom in full. Each continues to suppress religious minorities and to silence Islamic reformers, some by prosecuting them for blasphemy. Of course, if the voices calling for liberalization are silenced, the winners are Islamist extremists and, often, terrorists.

Are Grim and Finke right? If so, how does religious liberty help democracy take root and undermine terrorism?

Timothy Samuel Shah, Monica Duffy Toft, and Daniel Philpott, scholars in the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, have shown in their book God’s Century that the exclusion of religious actors from politics can encourage a turn to violence and extremism. Seeing no outlet for their ideas and objectives in the democratic public square, some religious individuals and groups—perhaps already inclined toward violence because of the political theologies to which they are attracted—will become fiercely anti-democratic and all the more radical.

For example, the radicalization of Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s and 1960s can be attributed in part to his experience of the West, to which he applied his extremist understanding of Islam. His writings matured into a blueprint for terrorism, however, during the repressive reign of Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, who banned the Muslim Brotherhood, threw Qutb into prison, and sanctioned his torture. The current head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was imprisoned and tortured by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat.

On the other hand, the active involvement of religious actors in democratic politics can undermine the extremist tendencies already present in their political theologies, and can encourage them to adopt more liberal policies. This de-radicalizing tendency of democracy may result from the need to win votes, which typically requires a more moderate and diverse platform that goes beyond political theologies per se. For example, Turkey’s ruling (and Islamic) Justice and Development Party has won support from skeptics by adopting free-market economic policies.

De-radicalization and liberalization also may result from the limits necessarily imposed by a functioning, healthy democracy, particularly the constraints imposed by the foundational democratic principle of full equality under the law for all religious individuals and groups. For example, if the Muslim Brothers truly want the advantages of a stable democracy (an aspiration that currently remains ambiguous), they will ultimately have to accept the core principle of full equality for other Muslims and non-Muslims, whether in the majority or minority. If they do not, democracy is unlikely ever to flourish in Egypt, and Egyptians will never experience its long-term benefits, including economic growth, security, and social harmony.

Perhaps most important of all, political theologies are more likely to liberalize when they are forced to compete in a marketplace of religious ideas. If religious leaders are required to defend their teachings—for example, their views on the meaning of justice, freedom, equality, and the common good—against competing conceptions (religious or not), their teachings are less likely to remain extremist. A monopoly on thought is not good for any body of ideas, including political theologies.

Given the evidence that religious freedom can contribute to de-radicalization, American foreign policy should be integrating international religious freedom into its governance strategies for the broader Middle East. Unfortunately, it is failing to do so. In his June 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama said that “freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.” He’s right; but words do not substitute for policy action. It took the Obama administration two and a half years to get in place its ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom—the senior official who implements American policy on religious freedom—and when the ambassador finally stepped into her office, she found herself working for a lower-ranking official, far removed from the Secretary of State. While other similarly ranked officials, such as the ambassador-at-large for women’s issues, work directly under Secretary Clinton, the ambassador for religious freedom remains isolated and under-resourced.

Meanwhile, minority Christians, disfavored Muslims, and other groups are being persecuted around the globe. In 2009, the Pew Forum reported that 70 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where their religious freedom is severely restricted, often by violent persecution. An August update says that the problem is getting worse. Political upheaval in the Middle East will likely lead to catastrophe unless the religion-state problem is resolved. Yet the administration does not see the urgency. Obama and Clinton have prioritized other foreign policy issues, investing the administration’s energy and resources in projects like climate change research, closing Guantanamo, “engaging Islam,” and internationalizing gay rights.

Of late, Congress also has done little to advance the cause of religious freedom. In 1998, it passed the International Religious Freedom Act, which provided the statutory basis for U.S. policy. Recently, a bipartisan group in the House sponsored a bill with amendments that would force the State Department to prioritize religious freedom—putting the ambassador under the Secretary, allocating democracy funding to religious freedom, and mandating training for American diplomats.

Unfortunately, neither Senate Democrat nor House Republican leaders appear to see the value of passing these amendments. In mid-September, all State Department language was summarily stripped from the bill, leaving only the reauthorization of an advisory panel called the Commission on International Religious Freedom. The Commission is important and should be reauthorized, but it is only an advisory body, unable to drive U.S. policy.

If policy is to have an impact on religious persecution, the emergence of stable democracies in the Middle East, or the defeat of Islamist terrorism, the Department of State must take the lead. At the moment, there is little sign of that happening. The great tragedy is that the proposed bill, if successfully passed in full, could help both reduce the deaths and injuries of young American men and women, and curtail the extraordinary sums we are spending to fight terrorism.

Can religious freedom prevent another 9/11 attack? If Congress passes the State Department’s amendments to the law, we’ll be given a chance to find out.

Thomas F. Farr, a former American diplomat, is Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and World Affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs at Georgetown University. He also chairs the Witherspoon Institute’s task force on International Religious Freedom.

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First of all, one should acknowledge the problem: the Muslim Middle East, broadly speaking, is quite an illiberal part of the world, in which political, religious, cultural, and even economic freedoms are either limited or, in some cases, non-existent. (In the world freedom map of Freedom House, only a few Muslim-majority countries rank as “partly free,” while most of them are simply “not free.”)

Recently, this problem has become a major concern to those in the West, partly due to their appreciation of liberty in principle, but also due to some of the disturbing byproducts of the lack of liberty in Islamdom, such as terrorism and other forms of seemingly religious violence.

This Western interest in the liberty of Muslim lands is understandable, and is even welcomed by the liberal Muslims of the Middle East, such as myself. But the same Western concern, in my view, has led to some misinterpretations of the problem. The most common, and the most mistaken, is the argument that the root of the problem is nothing other than Islam itself.

This argument, knowingly or unknowingly, ignores two crucial facts:

First, the scarcity of liberty in the Muslim world is not always connected with Islamic theology. There are many other factors, such as nationalism, political conflicts, secular tyrannies, and the deep-seated “oriental despotism” in that part of the world. Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, maps out some of these problems in his recent book, A World Without Islam, in which he persuasively argues that the political problems of the Middle East would probably be very similar if the region were dominated by some other religion. These problems, Fuller notes, stem from “nonreligious sources, not Islamic theology.”

Secondly, while there are surely problems with regard to Islamic doctrine, such as misogyny, imposition of piety, or the ban on apostasy in classical Islam, this same classical Islam also has the interpretive tools to reform these illiberal aspects. There are many different schools of Islam, some of which have advanced quite liberal views, as I have shown in my just-released book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (W.W. Norton, 2011). The medieval Islamic theological school called Murji’ah, for example, has laid a ground for religious pluralism by arguing that all unsolved disputes can be “postponed” to the afterlife, to be resolved by God (hence their name: “Murjiite” means “Postponer”). Another school, the Mu’tazili, developed a doctrine that stressed the role of reason in interpreting the scripture, defended freewill, and even supported people’s right to make different religious choices. The influence of these early schools has survived in later ones to varying degrees.

Now, Michael Novak is right to point out themes in Islamic thought that can be utilized to promote a liberal and democratic culture. He is also right to remind us that some illiberal strains of thought existed within Catholicism, as well, until quite recently. So if Catholicism has changed its attitude about freedom, especially religious freedom, and undergone a “development of doctrine,” why can’t Islam do the same?

Of course, there is an important difference between the two traditions in question, for Islam, unlike Catholicism, lacks a religious hierarchy that can issue binding doctrinal statements. There is no central authority in Islam, in other words; there are just learned men (imams) whose views become popular by persuasion. In that sense, Islam is more “Protestant” than “Catholic” (and, ultimately, I would say it is actually more “Jewish” than “Christian”). So, a “development of doctrine” within Islam would be a much more decentralized and ad hoc job than the steps taken by the Catholic Church, such as Vatican II.

FROM THE LIBERAL AGE TO THE ARAB SPRING

At this point, there is something I would like to add to the discussion: Significant efforts for such a “development of doctrine” are, in fact, not unknown in the Muslim world. They were actually very popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Intellectuals and statesmen from the Ottoman Empire, including some of its Arab provinces, admired the achievements in Europe—not just in science and technology, but also in freedom and democracy—and embarked on a mission to emulate them in Islamdom. These Muslim modernists, as they were called, saw problems in the Islamic tradition but not at the core of the religion, and believed that the Koran could be reinterpreted in a liberal spirit.

Thus in the 19^th century the Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the caliphate, made important reforms—reforms such as giving Christians and Jews equal citizenship status, drafting a constitution, opening up a representative parliament, and accepting freedom of religion. Similarly, in the Arab world, there emerged the period that the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as “the liberal age.”

Quite notably, this liberal strain was the dominant trend in the early 20^th century among Islamic thinkers, statesmen, and even theologians. This trend declined sharply, however, in the second quarter of the 20^th century, and soon was replaced by a synthesis of Islam and totalitarianism, which is commonly known as Islamism.

The reason for this tragic decline of liberalism in the Muslim world of the 20^th century is one of the themes I have probed in my book. And I have found the answer, at least in large part, in the changing political context of the Muslim world: This was when the Ottoman Empire fell, and most of the more than dozen Muslim states that emerged from its ashes were colonized by European powers. Colonization provoked an anti-colonial reaction, which defined not just Europe, but also Europe’s liberalism, as the enemy. This reactionary trend led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism, and ultimately to the Islamist ideology.

When the colonial period ended in the mid-20^th century, another terrible trend began: secular dictatorships, which promised to “modernize” their countries with iron fists, often at the expense of the conservative Islamic groups that they typically suppressed. That is why the political movements that emerged from these Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, became increasingly radical, and even gave rise to radical offshoots that resorted to armed struggle (jihad) to fight the regimes that suppressed them and even their Western patrons.

The modern Middle East, in other words, has been haunted by the vicious cycle between two extremes: secular authoritarianism and Islamic authoritarianism. Islamic liberalism, which had its roots in tradition, and which looked promising in the 19^th century, was obscured.

But now, with the Arab Spring of 2011, we seem to be at a critical turning point: First in Tunis and then in Egypt, the secular dictators who dominated these countries were overthrown by popular uprisings. But the Islamic groups that joined and even helped lead these revolts did not attempt to establish dictatorships of their own; they vowed to join the democratic process for which the masses have yearned. This embrace of democratic principles seems to have freed these countries from the extremes between which they were caught, and has created the right context in which Islamic liberalism, once again, might flourish.

That is why I am optimistic about the future of the Muslim Middle East. I even hope that I can congratulate Michael Novak in person in the year 2020, and tell him, “Mr. Novak, you were right.”


Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist, and the author of the just-released Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (W.W. Norton, 2011).

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After the Second World War, when various Muslim-majority countries gained their long-sought independence, their new autonomy generally did not lead to a greater level of freedom for their citizens. Instead, authoritarian figures quickly took over the newly independent states, often ruling with an iron fist.

From Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, to Nigeria, with its less substantial Muslim majority, military officers seized power and sidelined popular political leaders, severely restricting religious and intellectual freedom as well as political freedom. The ascendency of strong military men in Muslim governments, exemplified by such figures as Soeharto, Muammar Qaddafi, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Zia ul Haq, and Saddam Hussein, was evident in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Since the two Cold-War superpowers took negligible interest in supporting greater levels of freedom, whether in the form of political freedom, democracy, or human rights, they in fact facilitated authoritarian dominance.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent increase of freedom in much of Eastern Europe were just a few of many events that impacted people in Muslim-majority countries as well. As the wave of freedom across the world began to shake the foundations of authoritarianism, the military men and other autocrats who, until then, had felt comfortably supported in their fiefdoms by one superpower or the other became suddenly aware that their positions were no longer secure.

During the past decade we have begun to see slow but real change in the political landscape of Muslim-majority countries. In the Arab world, despite some promising advances, such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, what appeared to be the Arab resistance to liberty remained an exception to the general trend to democratization until the beginning of this year’s Arab “spring,” when the masses in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other countries challenged aging but powerful strongmen and began to topple them. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, Soeharto and Musharraf, for example, are now gone, and countries from Indonesia to Turkey are beginning to embrace democratic principles and promote greater freedom.

Even the much-maligned “global war on terror” is playing a significant part in this call for freedom in the Muslim world. While for a brief period the strongmen used their alleged efforts against extremism and in support of the “global war on terror” as a pretense to restrict their citizens’ freedoms further, many people soon realized that they were being deceived. Authoritarianism was, in fact, fueling the very extremism that was a key target of the “war on terror.” Fighting extremism, therefore, also meant fighting authoritarianism and supporting greater freedom, democracy, and human rights for Muslim societies. This further weakened the foundations of despotism, forcing these regimes to introduce a series of political reforms, even if only half-heartedly.

Restrictions on Muslim women is another pillar of repression under threat. While many Muslim societies still have a long way to go in allowing women’s full civic participation, the trend in even some of the most conservative societies is extremely encouraging. In the Gulf, for example, one of the most conservative regions of the Muslim world, the rising level of women’s education and the large number of women who are receiving higher education is a strong indicator that the pillars of authoritarianism are weakening. Only 40 or 50 years ago, controversies existed in places such as Saudi Arabia about whether girls should even attend primary school, and yet current evidence from the region indicates that even at the university level female students’ numbers are higher than those of their male counterparts: they perform better overall, and they earn better grades. More importantly, these women’s economic power appears to be growing substantially.

While many Muslims still do live in extremely repressive societies, a substantial number of those in Muslim-majority countries are enjoying a level of freedom comparable to that in the West. With such freedom, Muslims have been able to discuss, promote, and propagate ideas about intellectual, political, and religious freedom, topics that were taboo until recently. Debates on human rights are taking place on internet sites and blogs, as well as in academia. Even the most controversial issues, including religious freedom, apostasy, and blasphemy, are being openly discussed.

State censorship of writing and speeches, which managed to successfully eliminate any public call for freedom, is no longer as pervasive, and where it still exists, it is no longer as effective. People’s greater freedom to express themselves has resulted in an ever-rising level of intellectual output, in books, television programs, discussions, debates, and on the internet, which has further weakened the despots’ hold over Muslim societies.

The use of such platforms of communication is important for encouraging grassroots support for freedom. For a discourse to have legitimacy, it must occur at various societal levels, and such multi-level debates are happening in the Muslim world right now. The internet has provided a particularly valuable forum for the open discussion of ideas about freedom, especially for Muslims who live in countries where public debate may not be possible. Many Muslims are effectively using web-based forums to inject new ideas about freedom into the public domain. Such new media, as well as global television networks, have helped to provide the mechanism for promoting freedom without being subjected to state control.

Repression in Muslim societies is not necessarily a byproduct of a lack of support for freedom in the Islamic tradition. In fact, with Michael Novak, I believe that Islamic theology and thought do indeed provide resources that promote freedom. The diversity of the Islamic tradition means that it naturally includes a wide range of views on all theological issues, but the broad thrust of the Qur’an as well as the traditions of the Prophet strongly emphasize personal liberty. Personal liberty is the Qur’an’s core message, for each individual must choose to believe in God for himself or herself: it is free and genuine personal conviction that is the basis of salvation. No one—not community, family, clan, tribe, or state—may require or impose this belief. A freely chosen, personal relationship with God is fundamental to who Muslims are. Very early in its history, the Islamic tradition also developed tenets about the proper limitations of political rule: rulers are subject to God’s law and not above it, and people should have the necessary freedom to function as citizens. Though many rulers simply ignored these ideas in practice, the resources are there, and they can be used to offer theological justification for greater levels of freedom today.

Even as far as religious institutions and authorities are concerned, the Qur’an does not tolerate religious authoritarianism. Religious leaders are not there to mediate between individuals and God, and people are free to relate to God without any intermediary. The Qur’an declares that religious establishments should not play the role of God, and it stipulates that people should be free to believe in God, to relate to God, and to be connected to God without restrictions. It does not support religious authoritarianism, describing such rule as akin to the greatest sin of idolatry.

Many factors are fueling the move towards broader freedom in the Muslim world, including the overall political situation in the world today, our greater interconnectedness, technological advances, the efforts of Muslim scholars and thinkers to present new ideas and arguments publicly, and grassroots engagement in Muslim-majority countries. Freedom is expanding in Muslim societies at the political, religious, and intellectual levels, and the momentous changes that these societies are experiencing, most recently in the Arab spring, are unlikely to be reversed. I think that Michael Novak will prove to be right in his assessment of the potential for greater freedoms in Muslim societies. All the achievements discussed above, grounded not just in theory but also in practice, provide the basis for freedom’s further expansion in the Muslim world.


Abdullah Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This summer he will be leading the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Religious Freedom Seminar.

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I was very early at the center of the American Catholic argument on religious liberty. Reporting from Rome during the Second Vatican Council, I recorded the first passionate stirrings of the discussion of religious liberty at the Council, and followed the backstage private debates at individual episcopal conferences. That is where I first heard the name Karol Wojtyla, the new and youngest ever cardinal of Krakow, and his fresh insistence that the episcopal conferences of Central and Eastern Europe must have a declaration of religious liberty from the Council. Some say his cool intellectual passion did more than anything else to sway Paul VI to throw his weight in favor of bringing that issue to a vote, even though powerful forces (especially but not only) in the Latin world feared greatly that it would lead to relativism and religious indifferentism.

In a word, I saw firsthand how the Catholic Church needed a “development of doctrine”—and quickly—on religious liberty. As an American, I was acutely aware of how late it was in coming. I could not help rejoicing, later, at the powerful similarities between key passages of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty and central lines of argument in James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

A Not-So-Bold Prediction

The development of doctrine is happening in dozens of Islamic countries, especially in the eighteen key ones of the Middle East. We watch the news and see it happening—every night since January in Egypt, then exploding in Libya, and then back the other way into bloody Syria. And who can forget last autumn’s heroic rebellion in Iran, in the name of liberation from the cruel tyranny of the Mullahs, a rebellion crushed without mercy.

So far in 2011, we have lived through a sudden and startling rebellion against tyranny all along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, once the stronghold of the early Christian church from Antioch to Alexandria to Hippo. Some have objected that these battles today are rebellions against tyranny, but so far not for democracy nor human rights nor religious liberty. That may be true.

Yet Benjamin Franklin did say in 1776, “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” Rebellion against tyrants is not a sufficient vision, but it is a necessary and even great step on the way—the positive way toward religious liberty and respect for all other human rights. And this small step, combined with other background factors, does allow us to make what some will regard as a bold prediction, although I do not consider it bold at all.

My prediction is this: By the year 2020, rough and painful human experience will lead the Islamic nations of the Mediterranean Basin to resound with positive cries for democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and the dignity of every man, woman, and child. By 2020, Islamic peoples will be crying out publicly in favor of regimes that allow men and women to act from reflection and choice, and to live as peoples who are free and responsible, and who are eager to show initiative and unprecedented creativity.

Even if you don’t believe me, mark my words. There are a great many reasons, not often brought to light, that suggest that this prediction is likely to come true. “Come on!” some of you may say. “There is no tradition for these developments in the Islamic Middle East.” In Islam, it is true, there are only weak traditions about the very possibility of a “development of doctrine.” Nonetheless, there is hope.

Ever since 1991, a large number of shrewd Arab observers have noted that the progress of one partially successful election after another, and the quick and successful removal of Saddam Hussein, the megalomaniac and sadistic tyrant of Iraq, stimulated the publication of far more books and articles published in the Arab world on freedom, human rights, and democracy than during the preceding five hundred years. It is as if millions, watching these events unfold on television, suddenly asked themselves, why can’t we govern ourselves by our own consent? Why can’t we reach our own constitutional accommodation between Islam and the state, each one preventing the other from totally dominating our societies? I want to predict two broad paths up which this development of doctrine, both in religious and in political thinking, will slowly but inexorably gain power in the Arab states.

The First Path Propelling Development

The first path is the long, slow development of five or more principles rooted deep in Islamic theology and concrete practice for many centuries now. There are many factors operating in the faith and practice of Islam today. These political and historical experiences have unfolded across three great continents, from the Far East to the Middle East to Africa, in dozens of different Muslim lands, in many climates, in a rich geographical and topographical variety, within vastly different cultural and political histories. The body of practical experience lived through by Islamic cultures for more than a millennium is vast and diverse. Whoever speaks today of Islamic culture as though it is only one thing is committing an enormous intellectual error.

Although briefly, I have treated of many of these differences in The Universal Hunger for Liberty. Allow me to highlight some of those ideas. The first is the unusually high version of transcendence that Muslim theology has long reverenced in Allah; the second is the profound assumption buried in the ethic of Islam: the assumption that the fundamental fact in Islamic religious and moral life is personal liberty.

On the first characteristic: Allah is so great, so beyond measure, so beyond compare, that his greatness is a warning to any mere mortal spokesman about his own shortsightedness and inadequacy in the face of Allah. The greatness of Allah relativizes all human pretensions. No matter how wealthy or powerful a human being is, in comparison with Allah, this is as nothing. “Allahu Akbar!” opens the mind to the possibility that only Allah knows all the paths that lead to him, and that women and men would do well to respect the freedom of religious conscience of all persons. For Muslims, Islam is the one true religion, but no single Muslim can claim to know all the mysterious paths along which Allah leads all the other peoples of the earth. Historically, the super-transcendence of the Islamic doctrine of God has not been made as prominent as it might be. But perhaps it has lain fallow these many years so that its true beauty might flower in, as it were, a delayed springtime for Islam worldwide.

In this respect, let me cite just one impressive scholarly observation by Mumtaz Ahmad:

If God had willed, He could surely have made you one people, professing one faith, but He did not do so. He wished to try and test you. So try to compete with one another in good deeds. Unto God you shall return, all together. And He will tell you the truth about what you have been disputing.

Islam speaks constantly of rewards and punishments not only after death but also in this life. Such assertions make no sense at all if Muslim theology does not assume personal choice, on which such rewards and punishments are meted out. The doctrine of personal liberty and responsibility may remain largely implicit, not nearly often enough explicit, in Muslim tradition and catechesis. But without it as a foundation, the central preaching of Islam about reward versus punishment makes no sense whatever. For example, as Ismail al-Faruqi wrote in 1992:

Fulfillment of his vocation is the only condition Islam knows for man’s salvation. Either it is his own doing or it is worthless. Nobody can do the job for him, not even God, without rendering him a puppet. This follows from the nature of moral action, namely, it is not itself moral unless it is freely willed and undertaken to completion by a free agent. Without the initiative and effort of man, all moral worth or value falls to the ground.

Though they are diverse, Muslim cultures worldwide share a dozen or so characteristics rooted in their theological and scriptural tradition—cultural resources that make these settings hospitable to democratic transformations. A number of scholars have identified and written on these.

Bernard Lewis, for example, points to five features of the Muslim culture. First: “Islamic tradition strongly disapproves of arbitrary rule.” Lewis adds that in Islamic tradition, the exercise of political power is conceived of “as a contract, creating bonds of mutual obligation between the ruler and the ruled.” Other writers emphasize at this point the great efforts that Muslim rulers are expected to go through to achieve consensus among all branches of society.

The second resource Lewis notes is the need for continuing consent: “The contract can be dissolved if the ruler fails to fulfill or ceases to be capable of fulfilling his obligations.”

The third is the Islamic notion of civil disobedience, namely, that “if the sovereign commands something that is sinful, the duty of obedience lapses.” One Hadith says, “Do not obey a creature against his Creator.” Another adds, “There is no duty to obedience in sin.”

The fourth resource is the principle of accepting diversity. As the Prophet says, “Difference of opinion within my community is a sign of God’s mercy.”

The fifth resource is the traditional stress on the dignity and humility of all citizens. Dignity gives all citizens a place and a right to be taken seriously. Humility applies to the great and the mighty as well as to the ordinary person. The transcendence of the Almighty Creator is an efficient equalizer.

Similarly, in an essay on “Reviving Middle Eastern Liberalism,” Saad Eddin Ibrahim points to a hundred-year period between 1850 and 1952, when there flourished in Egypt a liberal age that was the light of the modern Muslim world. During that time, civil society was defined as “a free space within which people can assemble, work together, express themselves, organize, and pursue shared interests in an open and peaceful manner.”

Finally, one of the most important of the young Muslim scholars in the United States, Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl of the UCLA School of Law, has summarized many of his writings on Muslim developments in religious liberty, democracy, and human rights in a fairly succinct paragraph that deserves quoting in full:

My argument for democracy draws on six basic ideas: 1) Human beings are God’s vicegerents on earth; 2) this vicegerency is the basis of individual responsibility; 3) individual responsibility and vicegerency provide the basis for human rights and equality; 4) human beings in general, and Muslims specifically, have a fundamental obligation to foster justice (and more generally to command right and forbid wrong), and to preserve and promote God’s law; 5) divine law must be distinguished from fallible human interpretations; and 6) the state should not pretend to embody divine sovereignty and majesty.

The materials embodied so briefly here are very rich, and largely unplumbed by thematization and careful theoretical development. A huge amount of work in accomplishing this theoretical exploration and formulation lies before this and the next generation. But let us now return to the second propellant of a rapid development of doctrine.

The Second and Overwhelming Propellant: the Via Negativa

The second path is what I call the Via Negativa, which is constituted by intense persecution, violence, and suffering. It is probably true that during the last 60 years, ever since the end of World War II, the human rights of few peoples on earth have been so neglected by the larger world as those of the Muslim Middle East. The Soviets could not credibly defend the rights of the peoples of the Middle East, while abusing so badly the rights of their own people. The Western nations did not wish to create social and political turmoil in a region whose oil and strategic position at the crossroads of three great continents were of such delicate importance to free societies. The peoples of the Arab societies were left to suffer alone from cruel and merciless leaders, close scrutiny of their private persons by the secret police of the regime, the security agents of local jurisdictions, and the religious police. The liberties of whole peoples were tightly restrained. Muslim suffering went without empathy, without notice, and, above all, without relief from outside.

To be yet more specific, millions of Arabs have died by violence (mostly at each other’s hands) during the last 60 years. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands have rotted in ghastly jails. In some places, nearly all signs of independent civic life have been smothered out.

The pressure of this intense suffering will probably be the most powerful incentive for finding a new politics of liberty and dignity in the Middle East. The Via Negativa will teach irresistible lessons that no development of abstract doctrine can match, just as often before in history, intense suffering has led to rapid development of religious and political doctrine. So it will here. Human nature itself will support it.


Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Chair (emeritus) in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ave Maria University. He is the 1994 recipient of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Mr. Novak has written numerous influential books on the philosophy and theology of culture. He was three times U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva and the Helsinki Round in Bern.

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His articles reveal how odd it is for one group to fiat the end of debate by declaring a particular set of arguments unworthy of consideration; or, more peculiarly, by declaring that these arguments may not be considered without thereby revealing one’s own status as bigoted, hateful, and offensive.

These absurdities to which Franck points make criticism in contemporary argument a process often uncomfortable and futile. In his masterful That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect, Stefan Collini summarizes our resulting hesitation toward argument by explaining how debate is shut down when members of criticized groups believe they are at a historical disadvantage. For many contemporaries, he writes, “an enlightened global politics” requires “treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.” Given their historically disadvantaged and ostracized position, Collini reports, it is thought that some “social groups … have an equal right to hold or express their convictions without being ‘dissed’ by anyone else.” In other words, to argue against a historically disadvantaged group is apparently to commit an intrinsically hateful, bigoted, and offensive act.

Offense cannot but emphasize “the subjectivity of the person offended.” Yet Collini rightly insists that the mere fact of feeling offended is an insufficient reason to believe that one should take offense; rather, there is “some element of conviction that such a reaction is legitimate or justified.” Since one who takes offense realizes to some degree that he reacts to a case “that others will find appropriate or persuasive … about something generally acknowledged to be significant,” his mere feeling of being offended is not endowed with “unchallengeable authority.” Nevertheless, if the dominant culture is thought to be “constituted by precisely those widespread assumptions and habits” that the offended party finds offensive, appeals to general acknowledgment as the standard of legitimacy hardly settles the problem of subjectivity. Indeed, it is precisely when the majority culture is tone-deaf that an oppressed group’s subjective experience allegedly requires no other justification than its own offense.

Collini argues that the heart of the matter is resentment against those perceived as powerful; even if the criticism against our belief or action has some tinge of truth to it, the feeling of powerlessness is worsened when the criticism is by them (of all people!) against us, and against us now. Here Collini articulates a profound problem: If someone of good fortune or historical privilege criticizes me, and I belong to a subordinate group conscious of its subordination and articulating this feeling to the dominant group, then “their own relative good fortune,” it is felt, “should disqualify them as critics in this case.”

If it were true that someone’s good fortune or historical privilege disqualifies him or her as a critic of lesser privileged groups, then we could understand the claim that even good arguments against same-sex marriage should not be made when members of the subordinate class, namely those desirous of same-sex marriage, “are already vulnerable on other counts.” On this account, good arguments might be persuasive, but persuasion is a “species of power.” Consequently, by refusing to allow the dominant group to argue, the subordinate group sees itself as “standing up for … autonomy,” for its dignity and right to be respected.

Collini’s description of contemporary offense partially explains, it seems, the phenomenon discussed by Franck: even if there are good arguments against same-sex marriage, they are “disqualified” as hateful and bigoted when they are made by a historically dominant group. The better the arguments, the more offensive the position, it is thought, and the more that position must not be considered, but instead be subjected only to scorn by all thinking persons of good will.

This standoff followed by ceasefire presents a dilemma. On the one hand, arguments made against the positions and actions of the disadvantaged require special care and caution so as to avoid that unjust reality where public reason masks a power ploy, even if implicitly and unintentionally so. Fair argument demands, at the least, frank discourse among equal partners, but equality can be made difficult by history; equality can be subverted by frankness when one appeals to general consensus at the expense of the powerless.

On the other hand, Collini is correct that taking offense should “be regarded as initiating a reasoned argument rather than foreclosing on one.” In fact, if offense is a demand for equal respect, then argument should follow on offense, “for how does respect exist except in the company of critical judgment?” To pretend that those who are mistaken are either correct or are “too fragile or too touchy or too stupid to bear reasoned disagreement is to condescend to them … is precisely not to treat them as equal adults.”

Collini’s defense of criticism rejects the primacy of identity politics with its “defining error” of acting “as though one characteristic over-rides all others, thereby homogenizing those who possess it and imposing a binary separation from those who do not.” It is not membership in particular communities based on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation that matters most, for the “most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.” All persons are “potentially capable of understanding the grounds for any action or statement that concerns us.” Treating others as “reflective intelligent individuals not wholly reducible to being members of any one community” is not a Western or liberal standard; it is a human one. Any other standard, he claims, treats the other with condescension, as below us. Treating others with respect can require great effort, but exempting others from criticism is not respectful.

There is, Collini argues, a “right to be offended,” and using offense to end criticism “may not only deny the rights of the speaker—it may deny the rights of the listener as well.” Humans reveal their humanity in their ability to offer justification for their actions and beliefs, and to exempt an individual or group from the requirement to justify themselves reveals contempt, even if benignly intended.

Nonetheless, it remains the case, as Franck describes, that some individuals or groups reject arguments against their position merely because those arguments are made now (when we should know better given our knowledge of historical disadvantage) by them (the powerful) against us (the powerless), and indignation and offense are thought legitimate and autonomous responses. How, then, are we to defend criticism when it contributes, or is perceived to contribute, to unfairness?

The key realization is that offense operates within the realm of reason. When I am offended, I have not simply felt resentment, nor merely intuited a wrong; I have performed a cognitive act, namely, judging based on what seem to me to be good and understandable reasons for that act of judging. Whenever we make a judgment of fact (x is) or value (x ought to be), we commit ourselves to the truth and worth of our judgment. To do otherwise disqualifies us from reasonable discussion, as there would be no reason to be taken seriously if we did not claim that our judgment had worth.

Fair criticism aims at truth, at a judgment of what is the case. Offense also demonstrates a commitment to the truth, and thus both criticism and offense share a commitment to truth as an intrinsically valuable aim of human action. Both the critic and the offended party, then, seek truth as a value, and their seeking of truth demonstrates that truth is valuable for everyone like themselves, that is, for all humans. Consequently, both criticism and offense judge truth to be a human good. This judgment also claims that truth is a good for beings like oneself, and so to pursue truth through criticism is to demonstrate that one believes the other is equal to oneself and to wish a good for them—which is a kind of friendship.

Consequently, (1) to take offense is to make a truth claim that one asserts as serious, as does offering criticism; (2) to make a judgment is to claim that truth is good and worth attaining, and it is impossible to seriously deny this without contradiction; (3) to judge that truth is a good is to claim that it is a good for those equal to you; (4) to criticize, and to take offense at that criticism, is to claim that others are your equals and are benefitted by the same goods as you; (5) to criticize is a mark of friendship, which is itself a condition of ethical discourse.

As Franck highlights, we find ourselves in a strange situation when argument is considered unreasonable. I can sympathize with those communities that view themselves as subordinate, and I can understand why they might resent arguments and criticisms made from the majority culture, but to comply with their request for equality in the way they have requested it would be to render them unequal, and that is a wicked thing to do.


R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University.

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Marriage-movement social scientists establish the relationship between variables. The greatest living defender of the family from the standpoint of social science is David Popenoe, whose work, helpfully and self-consciously, shows the limits of the social-scientific perspective. Popenoe establishes in his Life Without Father that family decline, as encapsulated in the decline of fatherhood, leads to the “human carnage of fatherlessness”—to crime, educational failure, future family failure, lower incomes, future violence, personal dependency on government, and other signs of social and psychic sickness. Contemporary society, in disturbing the nest, reaps the whirlwind.

Popenoe and his compatriots in the marriage movement truly reveal an inconvenient truth, and feminists—ardent separators or de-institutionalizers—tirelessly seek to combat the methods and conclusions of the marriage movement. These critics do have a point, as Popenoe recognized. Today’s “human carnage” may well be just a bump on the road toward greater de-institutionalization; new institutions may arise to meet the needs of old ones; and right now we are suffering through the birth pains for an emerging post-nuclear family order.

Popenoe’s depth of purpose lies in his attempt to show that there is a natural or anatomical basis for his sociological findings and that we cannot expect any institution to answer the demands of nature as well as the nuclear family can. Popenoe’s social science becomes sociobiology with a Darwinian basis, which allows him to attribute some degree of permanence to his findings. Marriage is a solution to the natural problem of childhood dependence, and each spouse is biologically and anatomically suited to provide what is necessary for the other and for the raising of children. Hear Popenoe:

Even though family life today is heavily shaped by a massive layer of culture, the predispositions of our biological makeup are ever present. It is almost certainly the case that families are more than just arbitrary social constructs that can be redesigned at will. They are partly rooted in biology, especially because they intimately concern what is most basic to life—the reproduction of the species.

Popenoe arrives at the nature of nature through studies showing the historically constant attributes of family life, the traits of men and women, and the needs of maturing children. Nature, for Popenoe and other sociobiologists, does not have a particular destiny or direction; it does not invite us to wonder about the meaning of the historically constant. Nature is. Nature is inescapable, and any effort to deny the is-ness of nature involves putting ideology before sound science.

I honor the findings of Popenoe and others, but I do not think they are, of themselves, adequate as a defense of the family. They reproduce the problems of sociology on another level, because it is entirely possible, as feminists suggest, that other institutions could arise in response to the challenges of nature. Further, it is difficult to get modern peoples, so taken with the idea of conquering nature, to respect the is-ness or inescapability of nature. We have so often transgressed the supposed boundaries of nature that we no longer really doubt our power to do so. We need a compelling reason to respect nature and to react to nature’s challenges with humility and awe instead of as conquerors.

Unable to find the permanence we need in anatomy, it is necessary to turn to moral philosophy to show how nature, as it manifests itself in marriage and family life, is connected to the permanent human good of betrothed love. For this, we must recover the logic of marital unity and put the necessities that are implicated in marriage and family life in their proper place. This is the logic of marital unity. When marriage concerns serious ends, it makes demands on the time and resources of the couple; the more serious the ends, the more serious the demands. The more time- and resource-intensive the demands, the more members of the family are likely to practice some form of the division of labor to meet those demands. Married couples strive for ends, in other words, that exist in time and space or in life—so they implicate “necessities” within a larger context of meaning.

The necessities of nature gain their dignity by their relation to the ends of marriage. While it is easy for feminists, for instance, to depict the mundane tasks of motherhood and housekeeping as Sisyphean tasks, such necessitous household activities contribute to the building of a home, which is, at least in part, a home of love. In the context of love, the household management of a mother takes on greater dignity and receives higher meaning. Dusting or washing are acts of self-giving that contribute to an environment of nurturing that can best take place in the intense order of family life. There are certainly contractual appearances to this relationship—the husband and wife say “I do” and they agree on how to divide household labors. The contractual appearance, however, is only a moment in the experience of marriage and family life. Marriage may, as Hegel, that oracle of clarity, tells us, “begin from the point of view of contract,” but it does so “in order to supersede it.” This supersession is love, and love is a permanent human good that defines the order of the family.

As we hear so often today, love makes the family. What is love? Most refrain from raising this more significant question, for fear that such a question would give rise to endless controversy or hopeless subjectivity. Here, again, I would suggest that nature or anatomy must be understood in the light of love, the permanent attribute that lends meaning to the natural. Nature points up, toward the love that defines marriage and family life. We see this in sex, which reflects a human search for completion by joining with another, and which cannot be consummated without another. Though sex does not really satisfy that desire for another and sexual desire is soon extinguished when satisfied, this does not mean that one is alone. Sex happens on the level of the passions and the body, but points to something higher than itself. Genuine love integrates and subordinates the moment of sex within this larger unified framework. A relationship based on sex is not a proper marital relationship—though sex is part of a marital relationship—because it does not put sex in its proper place.

Betrothed love also grows from two becoming one in the procreation of children. A couple practices a form of self-giving in their life together, providing a fertile ground for the self-giving of parenthood. Parenthood is a picture of marital unity. A couple’s unified love is literally present in the person of the child, which explains why parents so often love their children more than their children love them: children are living embodiments of marital unity. Married couples are more than parents, yet parenthood points to the betrothed love that makes parents, in part, more than parents.

Modern thinkers, with partial exceptions, initiated a revolution in marriage at the level of betrothed love. They questioned whether self-giving was healthy, possible, safe, or consistent with human liberty and equality. Love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. When the self-giving of betrothed love is no longer the end of marriage, the preparation ground for parenthood erodes; divorce seems more tenable as partners hold something back; more individualistic principles fill in to justify or define marriage; and sex and procreation, no longer pointing beyond themselves toward a higher good, come to be seen as individual goods or burdens instead of as common goods.

Marriage has contractual moments, but it ultimately, as Hegel writes, supersedes the point of view of contract as the individuals lose their identity by becoming members of the family. A healthy culture recognizes this and laws create a fertile space for such mutual self-giving. It is difficult to see how a healthy marriage culture can exist until we recover the language of self-giving to reflect its continuing reality in our lives. The language of contract is not sufficient to that experience.


Scott Yenor is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Boise State University.  This article is drawn partly from his book Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought (February 2011).

Part I of this article may be read here.

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At its inception, the “gay rights” movement could reasonably present itself as a struggle against societal oppression. Forty years ago, American law in most states punished homosexual acts as criminal offenses. In many cases the penalties attending such laws were severe. In Bowers v. Hardwick—the 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy statute—Justice Lewis Powell observed with understandable concern that the law at issue in that case permitted a sentence of up to twenty years in prison for the commission of a single homosexual act. In addition to such a legal landscape, homosexuals confronted a rather censorious culture. Mainstream America not only looked upon homosexual acts with disapproval, but also treated homosexual persons as objects of ridicule (at best) and hostility (at worst).

This is not to concede the claim often deployed by gay rights activists that such traditional laws and mores were based upon nothing but an irrational and malicious hatred of homosexuals. Such a claim unjustly overlooks ancient philosophical and religious beliefs that deeply influenced the Western understanding of the purposes of human sexuality, an understanding that included principled grounds upon which to view homosexual acts as morally disordered. It is, after all, hardly plausible that such beliefs were invented for no other reason than to justify hatred of homosexuals. It is to admit, however, that society’s earlier strictures against homosexuality could reasonably be viewed—even by those who still today disapprove of homosexual conduct—as uncharitable and excessively punitive.

Homosexuals today face a markedly changed legal and cultural environment. Criminal anti-sodomy statutes, seldom enforced in the first place, have now been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Moreover, the Lawrence decision has been greeted by very little protest even from the most conservative defenders of traditional sexual morality, most of whom, despite their disapproval of homosexual acts, have no interest in seeing such acts punished as crimes. Indeed, American culture overall is more tolerant of homosexuality now than it has ever been. The ridicule and anger that homosexuals once faced is no longer mainstream but is now itself the object of mainstream disapproval.

Despite these changes, the gay rights movement persists. Having succeeded in changing American law and culture to such a remarkable extent in such a short time, it has moved on to a new quest, the quest for same-sex marriage. This new goal is different in kind from the ones already achieved: it is not so much a demand to be freed from evils imposed by society as it is a demand for positive public benefits, specifically the benefits that attend marriage. It is a mistake, however, to think that the same-sex marriage movement is aimed primarily at acquiring the material benefits and legal prerogatives that accompany publicly recognized marriage. The aim, rather, is equality of public recognition or approval.

This is most obvious in the ongoing federal lawsuit brought against California’s constitutional provision defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman, a suit that has no other object but equal recognition of—that is, equal public status or honor for—homosexual relationships. California already has a law recognizing the domestic partnerships of committed homosexual couples. That law affords homosexual relationships some measure of public status, and it bestows upon them the same legal benefits as heterosexual marriage. The extent of California’s legal “discrimination” against homosexuals, then, is that the state has sought to reserve a traditional and honorable title for heterosexual unions. This is all that is at issue in the Proposition Eight lawsuit, and it demonstrates that the aim of the same-sex marriage activists behind it is equality of public recognition.

It is not clear, however, that the quest for same-sex marriage offers any substantive good to those on whose behalf it is so insistently demanded. Put another way, it is hard to see why such an absolute equality of public recognition should be essential to the happiness of homosexuals. Let me explain.

The strongest argument against same-sex marriage—in the sense of the argument with the deepest philosophic roots, or the argument that gets to the most fundamental issues at stake—is that homosexual activity is contrary to the natural law. This argument is either true, or it is not. If it is true, then publicly sanctioned same-sex marriage will contribute nothing substantial to the happiness of homosexuals. There are various understandings of natural law, but all present the natural law as a reality that exists independent of human opinion, a rule for human flourishing that human beings can ignore only at their own peril. On this view, the real issue in human happiness is the moral quality of our lives and not how they are regarded by society at large. As Socrates explains to his young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic, the actual being of the soul, and not its mere seeming, is decisive for human happiness. That is to say, happiness is the fruit of the proper functioning of the human soul, so that character, and not reputation or opinion, is the source of genuine flourishing. On this understanding, Socrates explains, a just soul, one ruled according to reason, is happier than an unjust one, regardless of whatever praises are heaped upon the successfully unjust man by a corrupted public opinion.

Accordingly, if homosexual conduct really is, as its natural law critics contend, a perversion of human desires and capacities, a wrenching of them away from their natural purposes, then such conduct will be a source of frustration and unhappiness regardless of whether society bestows its “recognition,” and hence its approval, on it. On this view, there is nothing of substance to be gained from same-sex marriage even for homosexuals. Indeed, if traditional natural law theorists are correct in their assessment of homosexual conduct, then same-sex marriage would be not only pointless but positively damaging, to the extent that it could mislead people to their own harm by bestowing a spurious respectability on an objectively disordered way of life.

But of course the proponents of same-sex marriage adamantly deny the truth of the traditional natural law critique of homosexual conduct. On the contrary, they hold that this natural law critique is, despite its philosophic pretensions, a mere prejudice with no basis in nature or reason. For them, homosexual relationships are naturally enriching to those who desire them, and for that reason they deserve the same public recognition that heterosexual unions enjoy. Once again, however, Socrates’ point about the priority of nature to opinion, or of being to seeming, of soul to reputation, indicates that, if this view is correct, same-sex marriage would be nothing more than a needless addition to a naturally fulfilling undertaking.

In Socrates’ time, the philosophic life was largely held in disrepute, thought to be the province of the unmanly and the politically unserious. According to Socrates, however, this negative reputation posed no serious impediment to his happiness precisely because the pursuit of wisdom is by nature a source, indeed the highest source, of human happiness. To take a less lofty example, contemporary American society loads massive amounts of attention and honor on sports at all levels, and hardly any at all on chess. This huge disparity in recognition, however, makes no difference at all to the true chess lover: precisely because he experiences chess as fulfilling his natural faculties and desires he has no interest in what other people think about his love for the game. Indeed, if the supposed lover of chess were to demand indignantly that his activity deserves recognition on a par with other games, we would rightly suspect that there is, in fact, some deficiency in the intrinsic satisfactions of chess that he seeks to make up through the more superficial satisfactions of recognition or public honor. In sum, if our activities are the genuine seat of happiness, then the quest for “recognition” of same-sex unions is really just the pursuit not of a reality but of a mere appearance.

The preceding argument does not hold that reputation is a matter of complete indifference. We are sociable beings. Hence we crave honor and feel the sting of disgrace. Accordingly, gays would be pursuing something of serious value if they were trying to overcome disgrace. But they do not now live in disgrace. Their lives are now viewed as a legitimate minority alternative. Their being known as homosexuals does not preclude their winning public recognition on other grounds. They are, again, merely seeking equality of public recognition. But this is not a making up of some serious deficiency, and it is in fact the kind of mild lack that is endured by everyone who pursues some love that is tolerated but not wholly understood or endorsed by the public at large. (We might also add that it is strange for a movement that began by presenting itself as a bold repudiation of conventional morality now to be demanding conventional recognition.)

There is, moreover, a further emptiness in this quest for equal recognition. The progress of same-sex marriage in American politics has been almost entirely the result not of legislation but of litigation. The final, national victory of same-sex marriage, if it comes, will come as the result of a ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States issued not only without the consent of a majority of Americans, but even against the legally expressed will of majorities in a majority of states. Public recognition of same-sex marriage is demanded as a sign of equal public acceptance, but the mode in which it is being sought ensures that the acceptance will be fraudulent. It will be in fact not a public acceptance but the acceptance of a legal and political elite that is able to force its will on the public.

Given the substantial—unprecedented, in fact—toleration and freedom that homosexuals already enjoy, and given the inevitable sense of grievance that a victory through litigation will produce in the defenders of traditional marriage, the proponents of same-sex marriage should ask themselves whether it is really worthwhile to exert themselves so much, and to so roil the politics of their country, in the pursuit of absolute equality of recognition.


Carson Holloway is political scientist and the author most recently of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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Part of the great surprise of religion’s resurgence is that it also has been a forceful instrument of tearing down dictatorships, promoting democracy, mediating peace, and healing the wounds of war and dictatorship—quite the opposite of violence. And where religion is the source of violence, it results from the same factors that explain peace and democracy—degree of independence from the state and political theology. In the case of violence, though, these variables take on readings that are the opposite of those that lead to the more peaceful outcomes.

First, religious actors are likely to become the source of civil war and terrorism when they inhabit states with a close integration of state and religion, particularly ones where the state is cozy with a dominant religious group and then marginalizes a dissenting or minority religious group. This pattern has been quite common in the Arab world since World War II, as in the case of Egypt, from Nasser’s officer coup in 1952 up until the recent overthrow of Mubarak. A government that is secular in spirit typically allies closely with a dominant faction of Islam, usually a moderate one, and then marginalizes more traditional groups.

Second, religious actors carry political theologies that lead to violence. On the basis of their understanding of their very doctrines, they advocate a state where they will enjoy a close integration with the ruling regime, and thereby threaten other religious groups. This marginalization leads to a backlash of violence. Or, quite simply, they hold doctrines that sanction violence for their cause.

About a third of all civil wars since 1940 (42 of 133 civil wars) have had a religious basis. Their proportion has been increasing over time, beginning in the 1970s, and religious civil wars now make up about half of all ongoing civil wars. In many, religion is peripheral, meaning that it is the source of identities, but that the religious laws and policies of the nation are not a direct object of dispute. An example of this is Northern Ireland. In others, it is central, meaning that the religious character of the state is at issue, as in Sudan. This surge in civil wars based in religion is concerning. Religious civil wars last longer than non-religious civil wars (2 years more, on average) and are less amenable to negotiated settlement. They are also more likely to recur and are more deadly to noncombatants.

Religious civil wars occur disproportionately in Islam. In upwards of 80 percent of civil wars, Islamic groups have been one or both of the combatants. In 58 percent of these wars, the states involved have Islam as a dominant religion. This occurs in two patterns:

The first is found in secular integralist states built on nationalism and modernization, as in the Arab world since World War II. Again, the pattern is that the government allies with moderate Islam and marginalizes conservative Islam. A paradigmatic example is the Algerian civil war that broke out in the early 1990s and brought about the deaths of some 200,000 people. True to the argument, the post-colonial government in Algeria was a socialist dictatorship, dedicated to building an Algeria based on equality, loyalty to the nation, and secularism, which it promoted by making official a moderate version of Islam while suppressing more traditional forms, which it expected to fade away. But they did not. In the 1970s, they resurged among the population. By the 1980s, amidst an economic crisis that accentuated the corruption and poor economic performance of the socialist regime, the Islamists threatened an electoral victory. When they won the first round of national elections in 1991, the regime’s army stepped in and canceled the second round, touching off a decade of massive bloodshed.

The second factor is the growth of radical Islamic revivalism and its capture of some regimes. The belief that Islam has gone into decline and a radical revival is needed has resulted in calls for a strong form of Sharia law that sometimes threatens minorities, as in the case of the civil war in Sudan from 1982 to 2005. This same pattern can be found in other religions, as well, as in Sri Lanka, where the Buddhist Sangha’s exclusion of Tamils resulted in civil war.

Religiously-inspired terrorism has also been on the rise. Prior to the 1980s, religious terrorist actions or activities were practically non-existent. However, after the 1980s, the numbers increased, and increased proportionally from the 1980s, 1990s, and into this century. In 1980, 4 percent of known international terrorist organizations had a religious basis, compared with 33 percent in 1994, and 46 percent in 1995 and 2004.

Religiously-inspired terrorism is also more deadly than secular terrorism. While the attacks of secular groups tend to kill, on average, 3-4 people and wound another 8-16, religious terrorists tend to kill 17 people per attack and wound another 39. Since 2001, Salafi jihadist groups have been responsible for the largest number of terrorist missions and proportion of deaths. Not only do such groups support the spread of Islam through violence (jihad), but they give a violent interpretation of jihad an elevated status as a permanent individual obligation. Additionally, the excommunication (takfir) of other Muslims is practiced strongly, while suicide attacks and the targeting of civilians is justified.

As transnational actors, these jihadis have managed to escape the confines of state boundaries. Historically, they tended to be local actors fighting local battles, but by the 1980s, especially after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, religious terrorism became a global phenomenon, or more precisely, a “glocal” one, in which local issues became linked to global ones. This can be seen in the case of foreign fighters who, often uninvited, spontaneously joined fights to defend fellow Muslims (e.g., Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya). The reorientation of U.S. foreign policy in the last two decades to Afghanistan and fighting al Qaeda is the result of religiously-inspired violence that continues today. Again, the explanation is similar: such violence occurs due to Islamist revivalism and the marginalizing of Islamists by a highly secularized regime.

But religion is not just about violence; it also promotes peace and reconciliation. Every religion has a peace tradition; in every religion, inspiring activists can be found who work hard for peace. For comparison’s sake, let us focus on religion’s peace-building work in two contexts. The first is mediation. During the past half-century, the preponderance of violence in the world has taken place in civil wars, not international wars. As Monica Duffy Toft has shown in her separate work, the period since the end of the Cold War has seen a historically high concentration of civil wars ending through negotiation. In God’s Century, we survey 26 cases of peace negotiations since the end of the Cold War and find that, in 11 of these cases, religious actors played a strong mediating role; in 11 of these cases, they played a weak mediating role; and in only four of these cases, they played no significant role at all.

What characterized the effective mediators? Independence mattered a great deal, though here it was with respect to both the state and to armed opponents. A political theology that placed a special stress on peace was essential, as well. Perhaps the quintessential religious negotiator has been the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay community of the Catholic Church. Through befriending parties on all sides of the civil war in Mozambique over 16 years—yet affiliating with none—and through the community’s political theology of peace and reconciliation, the Community was able to bring all sides to the negotiating table and secure peace in 1992. It has since served as a key negotiator in Algeria, Guatemala, Liberia, Burundi, and elsewhere.

We also surveyed 19 cases of transitional justice—that is, countries’ choices about how to deal with past crimes after a transition to peace or democracy. Common approaches include punitive justice, epitomized by the ICC, and truth recovery, the most famous of which remains South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We found that, in eight of these cases, religious actors were importantly influential. In all of these cases, they favored truth recovery, though in a few cases, they also favored trials. The influential ones carried a political theology of reconciliation and, once again, independence from the state. The signature actor here is Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had been both a leader in the anti-apartheid movement and a pioneering theologian of reconciliation. Following South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, he rose to lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

To summarize, religion has made a political comeback, abetted by globalization, democratization, and technological development. Those religious actors who are most closely integrated with state authority and who hold a political theology that calls for state sponsorship, the subordination of minorities, and the use of violence are most likely to be violent. Those who have remained independent of state authority and carry a political theology that prescribes democracy, peace, and reconciliation are most likely to be peaceful and democratic.

This argument has important implications for U.S. foreign policy. First, quite simply, it is essential that foreign policymakers come to understand better that religion is not going away—the 21^st century is God’s century. Whether or not one likes religious actors, they are here to stay. The issue is not whether but when and how religious actors will enter public life and shape political outcomes. Second, better understanding the forces that shape the politics of the religious can help the U.S. pursue its goals of democratization, stability, and fighting terrorism more effectively. The U.S. would know better which religious actors are likely to support these goals, which are likely to be its allies, and which are likely to stand in the way. No better illustration for this claim can be found than in the current Arab Spring, as we struggle to answer certain key questions: What is the political role of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood likely to be? What about the Shi’ite crowds in Bahrain? What sort of regime do they have in mind? And what about those Libyan rebels, whose identity we are only beginning to learn? In what way are they religious? And how does this religion translate into politics?

Some unabashedly universalistic claims can be derived from this argument, as well. Namely, where government and religion lack institutional independence, the result is likely to be conflict, whereas independence is a precondition for democracy and a mediating influence. Thus it seems that a healthy institutional independence between religion and state is good for everyone, everywhere. This carries with it an important lesson for policy. While it does not mean that the U.S. ought to replicate exactly the first amendment of the Constitution, it does mean that a healthy secularism of separation is better for democracy, human rights, and peace, on one hand, and for the flourishing of religion, on the other. The U.S., therefore, should be highly reluctant to support authoritarian secular regimes on the argument that they are needed to marginalize religious actors—as the U.S. did for so many years in the Arab world.

Religious actors cannot be confined to a private sphere and we should not try to keep them there. Today, one of the biggest questions in Egyptian politics is the place of the Muslim Brotherhood. Will it be a democratic player or is it an aspiring oppressor? In fact, the Brotherhood is a complex organization with many factions, and its future is not without risks. But it is far more likely to be peaceful and democratic precisely if it is brought into the fold of Egyptian democracy rather than being marginalized.

To conclude, religion is far from being the only or even the most decisive factor in global politics. But it has played—and will continue to play—a key role. The 21^st century has brought us a world radically different from the one that secularization theory promised. We have no choice but to build new theories and devise fresh policy strategies for the religious age we live in, not for the secular age that never came.


Timothy Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Georgetown University. Daniel Philpott is Associate Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Monica Toft is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. They are the authors of the recently published God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics and continue to collaborate closely as associate scholars of the new Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In God’s Century, we argue that if American foreign policymakers want to promote democracy and stability, they must come to realize that secularism is a poor analytical tool. The great surprise of the past generation of global politics is a resurgence of religion’s political influence across the world. Despite a powerful array of secularizing regimes, ideologies, and social trends, the self-proclaimed partisans of God outlasted and politically outcompeted the self-proclaimed enemies of God.

Part of what happened is that being a determined enemy of God, like Señor Canabal from Tabasco (described in part I), just didn’t turn out to be the growth industry it was supposed to be. If you were an investor in ideological movements at the beginning of the 20^th century, all the trends would have told you to invest in atheism and agnosticism. But if you had done that, you would have lost a lot of money. According to respected religion demographer Todd Johnson, the proportion of the world’s population that was atheist or agnostic increased for much of the 20^th century, but then peaked and declined around 1970. On the other hand, if you had invested in religion—say, dispersing your investment across a broad portfolio of the world’s largest religious communities—well, you would have done very well, and much, much better than Daniel Lerner and others would have predicted you would do for Islam. In fact, in terms of the sheer number of adherents, the world’s largest religions have expanded at a rate that exceeds that of global population growth. Consider the two largest Christian confessions, Catholicism and Protestantism, and the two largest non-Christian religions, Islam and Hinduism. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, the most comprehensive and up-to-date publication on global religious demographics available, a greater proportion of the world’s population adhered to each of these religious systems in 2000 than in 1900. At the beginning of the 20^th century, a bare majority of the world’s people, 50%, were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. At the beginning of the 21^st century, however, nearly 64% of the world’s people belonged to these four religious groupings.

The Muslim Brotherhood stands as a perfect example of a group that defied the expectations of investors: it is a religiously based organization that faced decades of harsh repression and seemed finished in the late 1960s, yet today it represents perhaps as much as 15-20% of the Egyptian people. Nor is the Brotherhood an isolated case. Communities of faith everywhere—Buddhist monks in Burma, Hindu nationalists in India, Pentecostals in Brazil and Nigeria—are playing a critical role in defining the dominant patterns of world politics in the unfolding 21^st century.

How did this happen? Ironically, the resurgence has been empowered by three trends that secularization theory predicted would bury religion. The first is modernization. Religion was supposed to wither as people became “modern”—i.e., socialized into an industrialized, urban society in which each individual would exercise control over his or her fate. In 1968, the great sociologist of religion Peter Berger predicted that communities of faith would dwindle and that the religious faithful would be left isolated, “huddled together [in small sects] to resist a world-wide secular culture.” Thirty years later, he retracted his thesis. Even among people in advanced industrialized countries, more than 60% claim that religion remains important to them.

A second trend is globalization. People and ideas now travel across the globe at much greater distances, at much faster speeds, and in much greater volume. As transnational actors, not confined to any single state, religious actors were well positioned to harness new technologies and innovations.

The third major trend is democratization, which took off in the early 1970s. In contrast to many authoritarian regimes that were sometimes self-proclaimed “enemies of God,” which sought to eradicate or subjugate religious actors, democracies usually gave religious actors some room to enter politics and compete for influence. As the norms and practices of democracy spread, religious actors were often seen as trusted authorities who could challenge repressive political orders.

This global resurgence of religion—until recently, either denied or ignored—is thus an established political reality. But this takes us to the big question: is, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood’s greater civic role in a more open Egypt to be feared or welcomed? Two factors are critical to arriving at an answer: The first is the political theology that religious actors espouse. Does it include the need or right to challenge political authority? If yes, does the group’s political theology make it legitimate to challenge that authority with violence? The second critical factor is the freedom that religious actors enjoy vis-à-vis state authority. Religious actors with some semblance of freedom have been able to play liberal, peaceful, and accommodating roles, both advancing democracy and building peace in conflict-ridden societies.

We will discuss the peaceful—as well as the violent—potential of religion in some detail in the third and final part of our Public Discourse article on May 20^th. But let’s offer here a summary of what we argue in God’s Century about the relationship between religion’s political resurgence and democratization.

Part of the great surprise of religion’s resurgence is that it has been a forceful instrument of tearing down dictatorships. In the 78 cases of democratization since 1972, religion has contributed strongly in 48 of these cases. You may remember Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimages to Communist Poland beginning in 1979, where he preached to hundreds of thousands. But this was not just any old homily; rather, in terms that were unmistakable to Poles, he challenged the legitimacy of the regime. You may also remember the Protestants who gathered in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig in November 1989. Or the Muslim leaders in Indonesia who helped to bring down Suharto in 1998.

This was not supposed to happen, according to the secularization thesis. Democracy, with its open debate and its popular control, was supposed to have exposed religion as a crutch for primitive people. Surprisingly, though, religion has profited precisely from the open debate and room to operate that democracy affords. The best squelchers of religion are, in fact, secular dictators.

Religious actors are not always supporters of democracy, though. Catholics in Rwanda were acquiescent and even somewhat participatory in the genocide of 1994. So what distinguishes the democratizers from the supporters of authoritarianism? The most forceful democratizers have been those religious actors who, often through determined resistance, preserved a measure of independence from the state. An example is the major Islamic movements under Suharto in Indonesia. Where religious actors remained cozy with the state, they had little incentive to support democracy. Examples include the Argentine Catholic Church in the late 1970s and the Buddhist sangha in Sri Lanka. In other cases, religious actors are so suppressed by the state that they simply lack power to act independently. The Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe are illustrative.

We also found that religious actors who agitate for democracy are ones whose doctrines involve a political theology that supports democracy and human rights. A striking trend was what the late Samuel Huntington called the “Catholic Wave”—the preponderant role of the Catholic Church in the Third Wave of democratization. National Catholic Churches constituted 36 out of the 48 cases of religious democratizers. What motored this trend, we argue, was an important shift in political theology—namely, a full embrace of religious freedom and other human rights by the Church at the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965.

As for Islam, we find that democracy is still relatively rare. Only 3 out of 47 Muslim countries are ranked “free” by Freedom House. Still, Islam has had strong democratizers in places like Turkey and Indonesia—movements with independence from the state and a democratic political theology. It is these that hold promise for the future.

What’s the bottom line? The bottom line is that in God’s Century, the unfolding 21^st century of politically resurgent religion, we can no longer afford to hang on to the secularization theories that are the holdover of a long-gone era. They not only make us ignorant, they make us stupid. And stupidity is something we can ill afford as we design policy for nations from Libya to Egypt, Iran to Pakistan, Nigeria to Indonesia, and the numerous other societies being reshaped by the partisans of God in the 21^st century.

Timothy Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Georgetown University. Daniel Philpott is Associate Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Monica Toft is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. They are the authors of the recently published God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics and continue to collaborate closely as associate scholars of the new Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

We don’t know exactly how many of our graduate school classmates went on to work in the State Department or the Defense Department or the Rand Corporation or the White House or Capitol Hill. We don’t know exactly how many of them went on to study and teach Middle East politics to other people, including people who would then go on to work in the State Department or the Defense Department or the Rand Corporation or the White House or Capitol Hill. But we know that some of them went on to jobs in government, and some of them went on to jobs as professors of political science at major universities. But wherever they went, the view of global politics in which they were immersed—in which we were immersed—was, we’re sorry to say, the poorest possible preparation for the era of global politics in which we now live—the era we call “God’s Century” in our new book by that name: God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics.

All of our Harvard classmates (and in Monica Toft’s case, University of Chicago classmates) who entered, say, the State Department had lots of political economy, or political sociology, or international security, or theories of democratization, crammed into their heads, and were well prepared to analyze almost any conceivable global political problem. But the one thing they did not have crammed into their heads was any understanding of religion, or even any expectation that religion might be an important factor in shaping global politics.

Though Islam was supposed to be “absolutely defenseless” in the face of modernity, here we are today, mesmerized by the events of the current Arab Spring. Right now, in country after country, the central issue is what kinds of regimes, what kinds of systems and societies, will come next—now that so many authoritarian lids are being blown off, from Egypt to Libya, from Yemen to Bahrain. And in all these cases, whatever the ultimate political outcomes may be, the various Islamic groups right now flooding into the foreground are going to have a major impact on determining the future of these societies. In other words, as we grapple with the central issue of what the future in the Middle East will look like, a central task becomes understanding an Islam that some of our most influential social scientists told us was supposed to be “absolutely defenseless.”

As we address some of our most central geopolitical challenges, we must delve into the details of religion and religious actors. What is their real organizational capacity? What are their real political intentions? What are their theologies of politics? What is their religious inspiration? What is their religious agenda?

Of course, religious groups—such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islah Party in Yemen—may not always be leading the pro-freedom charge. Still, the religious leanings of the masses have been visible almost everywhere, as when the conservative Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi addressed the praying crowds of Egyptians in Tahrir Square at the enormous victory rally on February 18^th. He praised the “youth of the revolution,” which “has lifted the head of this country and made us proud once again.” And he called the young people who made the revolution “the new partisans of God.”

Sheik Qaradawi was right. Demonstrably religious young people, Muslims and Coptic Christians alike, were very much partisans of God in their consistent invocation of religious slogans, signs, and symbols. And it was these religious people who, rather than having been secularized by the revolution of modernity, actually made a political revolution that our secular, sophisticated political science did not anticipate.

And this revolution raises questions for which our secular policy frameworks have few, if any, answers. On the contrary, our policy frameworks condition us to believe either that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood do not matter or that such groups are an utterly alien and abnormal force that should make us panic.

Which is to say that we, along with all of our Harvard- and Chicago-trained classmates, were rendered far worse than ignorant. It’s not just that religion was not on the syllabus. It is that we were trained to think that religion could not matter; our mental maps were wired to screen religion out as powerless, as something that would just roll over in the face of modernity, and therefore, as something that required no theoretical or practical attention.

But where are we now? Now, the true character of the Islam that was supposed to be “absolutely defenseless” in the face of modernization has become a central issue—if not the critical issue—as we navigate the new Middle East. And yet, right now, how many of our analysts of international relations, our makers of foreign policy, have the education, the background, and the tools for developing a fine-grained analysis of these “partisans of God”? How many of our State Department’s staff and the writers of the President’s daily briefs can think clearly and knowledgeably about the resurgence of religion that has so surprised us?

How many of us are remotely ready for God’s Century? After all, the very fact that the 21^st century is as religious as it is is a shock. The century most of us thought was coming was supposed to look very different. It was supposed to look like the last century, only more so—a 20^th century, as Lerner and so many others suggested, in which religion was put on the defensive by modern forces, movements, and ideologies. In many ways, it really was the case that in the 20^th century, the world’s most cutting-edge and consequential political forces were anything but self-proclaimed “partisans of God.” On the contrary, the cutting-edge agents and actors sweeping global politics in the 20^th century were, more often than not, the opposite of self-proclaimed partisans of God and were far more frequently the self-proclaimed enemies of God. This may sound like an exaggeration. It’s not.

Consider Mexican politician Tomás Garrido Canabal. In many ways, Tomás Canabal was an apt symbol of 20^th-century politics. In the mid-1920s, about ten years after the radically anti-clerical Mexican Revolution, Canabal became the governor of the state of Tabasco, in the south of the country. He made it such an important plank of his political platform to rid Tabasco of what he called “clerical opium” that he made it illegal to wear a crucifix or to say “adios”—because it had “Dios” in it. He even proudly handed out little calling cards that described himself as “the personal enemy of God”—a habit that would have limited his networking opportunities, one would think, but he was a man of strong conviction.

Though this sounds outlandish, it’s a pretty good exemplar of political ideologies and trends that became increasingly common and influential in global politics, from the time of the anti-clerical French Revolution of 1789 until they became a largely spent force by the time of the pro-clerical Iranian revolution of 1979.

Beginning in the 19^th century, secularist movements and ideologies were more the norm than the exception in world politics, and they swept over every part of the world in the 20^th century, peaking in influence and reach between 1917 and 1967. Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, Ataturk’s Turkish Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Nasser’s Pan-Arab Revolution, the Shah of Iran’s White Revolution, the viciously anti-religious Cambodian Revolution—the list goes on and on, of ideologies and movements that were successful, at least for a time, in attacking or at least containing the power of religion.

Even in the United States, various cultural, legal, and political forces worked together to promote a kind of secular separationism that exerted a powerful influence from the 1920s into the 1970s. Court cases, the ideas of influential thinkers such as John Dewey and Carl Becker, Protestant opposition to the alleged rise of Catholic power in American society and politics—these often encouraged a view that politics and public life were not supposed to be interfered with by “sectarianism.” If religion did not disappear, it should be closeted. As Carl Becker said at Harvard in 1931, “We may still believe in Zeus; many people do. Even scientists, historians, philosophers still accord him the customary worship. But this is no more than a personal privilege, to be exercised in private.”

Indeed, the success of these political enemies of God helped to make it seem that secularization was the wave of the future. They made it seem that religion was a dying supernova, enjoying its penultimate glow before disappearing from history. They made it easily forgivable to think of the 20^th century as the “Godless Century,” at least as far as politics was concerned, making it increasingly common to ask whether God was dead, as Time magazine famously did on its cover in April 1966. They made it possible to view religion as absolutely defenseless in the face of modernity.

Today, however, most of these political ideologies and movements are a spent force. Today, the politics of secularization has less of the world in its grip than, perhaps, in any time since the early 19^th century.

Yet if the politics of secularization has gone into steep decline, the theory of secularization is remarkably stubborn. There is evidence that it still has much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment—trained at lingering bastions of secularization theory—very much in its grip. More on that on May 18^th, in part II of this essay.


Timothy Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Georgetown University. Daniel Philpott is Associate Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Monica Toft is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. They are the authors of the recently published God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics and continue to collaborate closely as associate scholars of the new Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In the classical legal texts, all surviving Islamic schools of law argue that the apostate should be put to death, despite the fact that some of the leading figures of early Islam argued that the death penalty should not be applied. In juristic literature, one finds claims of “consensus” among Muslims on the death penalty for apostasy. Naturally, the claimed “consensus” ignores the views of this “minority” that did not support the death penalty.

Before discussing the issue of hadith and apostasy, a number of observations should be noted. First, the Quran, the most important text of Islam, does not specify any worldly punishment for apostasy, let alone death. This is especially noteworthy considering that the Quran describes two episodes that bear on the issue of apostasy. The first of these concerns the Muslims in the Medinan period (622-632 CE) of Islam—the last ten years of Prophet Muhammad—who professed Islam outwardly, but attempted to destroy the community from within, using every opportunity to discredit the Prophet. For all practical purposes, from a Quranic point of view, these people should be considered “apostates.” The Quran also describes Muslims who rejected Islam and then returned to it, only to reject it for a second or even a third time for their former religions. The Quran does not suggest the death penalty in either of these cases, but specifies a severe punishment for the apostates, almost certainly in the life after death. This absence of the death penalty is understandable, as the Quran emphasises again and again that belief is essentially a matter between the individual and God.

Second, there is no evidence to indicate that the Prophet Muhammad himself ever imposed the death penalty on any apostate for a simple act of conversion from Islam. If such evidence had existed, it would have provided the necessary prophetic authority to back the death penalty. On the contrary, however, one hadith in the collection of Bukhari (one of the most important collections of hadith for Sunni Muslims) details a man who came to Medina and converted to Islam. Shortly after his arrival, this man wanted to return to his former religion and asked the Prophet for permission to do so. The Prophet let him go free, without imposing the death penalty or, indeed, any punishment.

The important question is, therefore, if there is no clear evidence either in the Quran or in the actual practice of the Prophet to support the death penalty, how did the classical Muslim jurists support their position that apostasy should be punished by death? The answer lies mainly in a few sayings (hadith) attributed to the Prophet. Such sayings, while considered “reliable,” do not appear to reach the level of certainty that is required from textual evidence to justify the penalty of taking one’s life. More importantly, these few sayings contradict a large number of Quranic texts that emphasize freedom of belief. Given that the Quran, as the most important source for Islam, emphasises freedom of belief and does not appear to support the death penalty, any contrary sayings attributed to the Prophet should be read with a high degree of caution.

Perhaps the most important saying attributed to the Prophet in this regard is “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” This seems to explicitly permit or even command Muslims to kill anyone who changes his religion from Islam. Although this hadith is considered “reliable” (as it is found in the collection of Bukhari), there are concerns about taking it at face value.

Firstly, at least in its most well-known version, the hadith appears first to have surfaced decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, from Ibn Abbas, who was only around 12 years old when the Prophet died in 632. It is reported that Ibn Abbas mentioned this saying in the context of an event that occurred roughly 25 years after the death of the Prophet, when the caliph (ruler) Ali apparently ordered that certain rebellious heretics be burned. When news of their executions reached Ibn Abbas, he stated that burning anyone with fire was prohibited, but that he still would have had these people executed, on the grounds that the Prophet had once said, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.”

It is strange that such an important message remained hidden for decades after the death of the Prophet. Ali, being a Muslim from his early childhood, one of the Muslims closest to the Prophet, and an advisor to the first three caliphs of Islam, should have known of such a penalty if it existed at the time of the Prophet, particularly since it involved taking a life, not a small matter.

Secondly, there are concerns about the hadith’s content: it is very brief and general. If one were to take this hadith literally, the punishment of death would apply even to those who wish to convert to Islam, or to those who want to convert, say, from Christianity to Judaism. Such an interpretation is obviously incomprehensible and highly problematic.

The majority of Muslim jurists, therefore, narrowed down the meaning of this hadith to a more specific one: that the convert to be killed is a Muslim who converts to another religion. Jurists have since limited this meaning further with a series of exceptions to the general rule. For example, religious hypocrites who outwardly profess Islam but are not really Muslims should not be killed; neither should minors or women (according to the Hanafi school of law). Likewise, anyone who professes Islam under duress and then returns to his former religion should not be killed. The question of interpretation, then, lingers.

Even if we consider this hadith and those with similar meanings to be historically reliable, such hadith have to be understood in their proper context. At the time of Prophet Muhammad, there was no “state” akin to modern-day states. Rather, a tribal system prevailed in much of Arabia. With the rise of Islam and its consolidation in Medina during the last 10 years of the Prophet’s life (622-632 CE), people from various tribes joined the supra-tribal community of Muslims. Given the hostility and the state of war that often existed between the Muslims and their opponents, converting from Islam generally took a person out of the Muslim community and placed them in that of their opponents. Conversion, or apostasy, was, then, not only a matter of renouncing faith, but also the rejection of membership of the community, which provided a person with security of life and property. Often, the only option for an apostate was to join the “enemy” and take up arms against the Muslim community.

Thus any reported sayings of the Prophet about the death penalty can be understood relatively easily, as communities had the right to kill their opponents in war, in line with the norms that existed then. In a modern state, however, the situation often is quite different. Membership (or, as we would call it, citizenship) does not generally depend on being part of a particular religious community; a clear distinction can be made between a person’s religious and political identities. In the multi-religious, pluralistic societies of today, it is normal for people to belong to different religions and still enjoy the fundamental rights of a citizen, except, of course, in a very few countries.

Based on this reading of the hadith discussed above, opponents of the death penalty argue that even if there was a death penalty in early Islam for apostasy, it was because, at that time, apostasy was equivalent to the crime of treason. Such an interpretation can be supported by other hadith. The second most important hadith used to support the death penalty for apostasy links apostasy with separating oneself from the community. The following hadith emphasizes this meaning:

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: The blood of a Muslim who confesses that there is no god but Allah and that I am the messenger of Allah cannot be shed except in three cases: a life for life, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse, and the one who turns away from Islam and leaves the community.

This hadith has a number of different versions, each with slightly different wording. A number of these emphasise that the person who is referred to in the hadith is not just a simple apostate. According to another version, “A man who leaves Islam and engages in fighting against God and his Prophet shall be executed, crucified, or exiled.” This hadith, therefore, makes a very clear connection between apostasy and the crime of taking up arms and fighting against the community/state.

There is also other evidence to support this reading. Some prominent Muslim scholars make a connection between apostasy and the taking up of arms against the community. In the second most important Sunni hadith collection—that of Muslim ibn Hajjaj—one of the chapter titles is: “Ruling relating to those who take up arms against the community and apostates.” The Hanafi school of law argues that a female apostate should not be put to death, because a female apostate in those days would not usually take up arms to fight against the Muslim community/state.

A number of today’s top Muslim scholars (for example, Muhammad Hashim Kamli, Hasan al-Turabi, Rashid Ghannouch, and Taha Jabir al-Alwani) argue that there is no evidence in the actual practice of the Prophet to suggest that he put anyone to death simply because of his or her conversion from Islam. Any association of the death penalty with apostasy in sayings attributed to the Prophet should therefore be interpreted in light of the socio-political context of the time.

In the modern period, in which religious freedom has been guaranteed in major international human rights documents and is considered one of the most important rights of a human being, Muslims should emphasise the Quranic position on freedom of belief; that is, there is no coercion in matters of faith and belief. Any hadith that exist on this issue should be interpreted (or reinterpreted) in light of the guidance of the Quran, which has supremacy over all other forms of evidence in Islamic norms and values.


Abdullah Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This summer he will be leading the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Religious Freedom Seminar.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Holder’s announcement was greeted as breaking news. In one important sense, though, it was not news at all. Despite President Obama’s oft-repeated view that he “opposes” same-sex marriage, his Administration has been steadily advancing toward last week’s announcement since Obama was inaugurated. Administration lawyers have never defended DOMA in any convincing way; in fact, their fallacious arguments in “defense” of DOMA have done more to undermine its constitutionality than to buttress it. All along the Administration has unmistakably signaled that it held the conclusion that it finally forthrightly articulated last Wednesday.

The announcement is nonetheless a bit startling. The Attorney General himself admitted that the Justice Department “has a longstanding practice of defending the constitutionality of duly enacted statutes.” No one suggests otherwise about the enactment of DOMA. Congress passed it in conscious response to the first wave of legalized same-sex marriage, which came from Hawaii’s courts in the mid-1990’s. That effort failed. But to make sure that no state or the federal government would be conscripted into recognizing an aberrant form of marriage, the Senate voted 85-14 and the House 342-67 to enact DOMA. President Bill Clinton signed it into law on September 21, 1996. It settled what “marriage” means in federal law. DOMA also protected states from having to recognize the “marriages” of same-sex couples contracted in other jurisdictions (such as Massachusetts, which became the first state to recognize same-sex marriage, in 2004).

The Department’s practice has been—we were informed last week—conditional: it was predicated upon the availability of “reasonable arguments” which could “be made in” a statute’s “defense.” “Reasonable defenses” of DOMA are not the same things, however, as what the Attorney General called “professionally responsible arguments.” These, Holder conceded, are indeed “available.” (I have even offered some myself.) The Attorney General declared that none of these “responsible” defenses is “reasonable.” And so (Holder wrote in his letter to House Speaker Boehner) DOMA is the “rare case where the proper course is to forgo the defense of” a duly enacted statute.

The Department is nonetheless determined, Holder added, to continue “enforc[ing]” DOMA, notwithstanding its “unconstitutionality.” I guess this means that, come this April 15, same-sex couples may not check the “married, filing jointly” box on their Form 1040s. But this dodge puts all the relevant federal enforcement employees in a real bind. For their bosses would now have them treat same-sex couples arbitrarily, discriminating among “married” couples who wish to “file jointly” according to an unconstitutional law, a law which their bosses say has no basis in reason.

The immediate practical effect of Wednesday’s announcement appears to be limited to pending DOMA litigation in New York Federal court. Now Congress itself will have to intervene if DOMA is to be defended at all. The further effects may be considerably larger. Some judges and legislators—both state and federal—may be emboldened to embrace the position announced by the Administration. The Administration’s switch could, possibly, contribute to the decision of a Supreme Court Justice who is deeply concerned about discrimination against homosexuals and lesbians, but who is also traditional-minded when it comes to the institution of marriage. Such a Justice would be racked by ambivalence when he is called upon to confront squarely the question about same-sex marriage and the Constitution. Such a Justice would be named Anthony Kennedy.

Supporters of same-sex marriage have been toasting the President and each other for several days now. They are confidently predicting tidal waves of change in the wake of Holder’s announcement. Do not believe it. Talking that way is part of their script. Theirs is the tale often told of inevitable “progress,” the story in which same-sex marriage has an undeniable rendezvous with destiny. Theirs is the most Whiggish of Whig views of history. The reverse side of this view is, of course, that traditionalists are on the “wrong” side of history, and that the sooner they recognize the futility of resisting the irresistible the better off we shall all be. So The New York Times rushed to tell us last Friday that Republicans and conservatives more generally have largely reacted with a shrug. Evidently, we should all take our whuppin’ with similar equanimity.

The Justice Department’s proffered defense of abandoning DOMA is on a par with its previous “defenses” of DOMA—superficial, question-begging, fallacious. In his letter to House Speaker Boehner, Holder carried on at considerable length about changed circumstances which have “caused the President and the Department to conduct a new examination of the defense” of DOMA. Do not believe a word of it. It is all blather. It is all transparent pabulum which utterly fails to conceal the political ukase which Eric Holder was sent to publish last Wednesday.

Most tellingly, the Attorney General advanced no argument—“professionally responsible” or otherwise—for the Department’s rejection of (what he called) “procreational responsibility” as a justification for traditional marriage. He said curtly that “the Department has disavowed already” this justification as “unreasonable.” Maybe so. But to “disavow” an argument is not to refute it. And no one in the Obama Administration (or anywhere else, for that matter) has successfully refuted the claim that marriage is intrinsically connected to procreation, such that only opposite-sex couples may marry.


Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Said Musa’s case highlights a major problem that Muslims today are facing. Conversion from and to Islam and other religions is taking place at an unprecedented rate and will almost certainly continue. If so, what should be done about the problem of conversion from Islam, known as apostasy? Should we Muslims continue to follow the age-old “law” of apostasy, punished by the death penalty, and force converts to come back to Islam literally on pain of death at a time when “freedom of religion” is considered a universal human right? If a person genuinely converts to another religion, what right do others have to force him or her to change their mind? Why should we human beings play God’s role in such an important and personal matter? At the end of the day, isn’t belief an issue between a person and God, as the Quran declares?

If there is a punishment for conversion it should be on the Day of Judgement and God is the only one who can make that decision. There must be a good reason why the Quran doesn’t specify a worldly punishment for rejecting Islam. Indeed, this would have gone against the Quranic idea that religious belief and conversion should come from within a person and be genuine, not through the use of force.

Although conversions from Islam to other religions do take place in many Muslim societies, we do not hear much about them. Some conversions take place pretty much in the open. Converts go around and live freely in society, just like any other fellow citizen. Their rights are protected by law and they remain free to practice their religion. Other conversions happen in secret. In these cases converts do not reveal their conversion for fear that fellow Muslims may not treat them well. They could be imprisoned or even executed in some countries. Although the vast majority of the 57 Muslim-majority countries have no specific laws against conversion and do not apply death penalty for apostasy, a handful of countries like Saudi Arabia still do.

The situation with respect to conversion varies from country to country. Some Muslim-majority countries rely on the classical or pre-modern Islamic law of apostasy to execute converts, while others legally allow conversion. Still others do not apply the death penalty but criminalize associated acts like proselytization among Muslims or inducements to convert from Islam. Even so, most Muslim-majority countries are parties to the major international human rights covenants, such as ICCPR, which clearly declare that all people have the right to freedom of belief, including the right to change and manifest their religion. Most Muslims would also say that they are comfortable with the religious freedom that Islam gave people some 1400 years ago, summed up in the famous Quranic declaration “There is no coercion in matters of faith/religion.”

For many in the West this case again highlights how “Islam” appears to be in conflict with “our” values today—including freedom of religion. The common perception is that because of this law of apostasy and the death penalty associated with it, Islam restricts religious freedom and punishes converts from Islam with death. Many Muslims and non-Muslims mistakenly believe that the death penalty is “divine law,” based on the teachings of the Quran and the practice of Prophet Muhammad, the two most important sources of Islamic law and ethics. However, this interpretation is questionable at best.

It is true that in classical Islamic law there was almost unanimous agreement among the jurists that if a Muslim converts to another religion he or she should be punished by death. This position, however, is not based on either a particular text of the Quran or the overall practice of the Prophet. In fact, a vast array of Quranic verses specify—without ambiguity—that the question of faith and belief is a personal matter between the individual and God. Numerous verses in the Quran support absolute religious freedom, one being “There is no coercion in matters of faith/religion.” Others state that no one should be forced to follow a particular religion or belief.

There is, in fact, no single verse of the Quran that specifies any kind of worldly punishment for converting from Islam, let alone death. The opposite is true. Many verses assert that all human beings are free to believe or not to believe in God or in any particular religion. For example, “Let him who wills believe in it [Islam], and let him who wills, reject it.” Or, “Whoever chooses to follow the right path, follows it for his own good; and if any one wills to go astray, say [O Prophet, to him] ‘I am only a warner.’”

Other verses clearly state that the role of the prophets was simply to show people “the true path” and not to compel them to believe. The Quran in fact reminded Prophet Muhammad that he did not have the power to force people to convert to Islam: it is a choice that individuals should make for themselves. It also emphasised that different religious traditions will always exist, that there will always be believers in the One God and non-believers, and that forced belief is no belief at all.

The Quran’s very clear position on freedom of belief and religion was, however, sidelined in the development of classical Islamic law. Instead of emphasizing the Quran’s view, classical Muslim jurists interpreted some of the sayings of the Prophet to mean that a simple conversion from Islam should be punished by death, despite the fact that there is no evidence that Prophet Muhammad himself ever imposed this penalty for a simple conversion from Islam.

Because there is no significant support for the application of capital punishment for apostasy in the Quran or in the overall practice of the Prophet, several 20^th-century Muslim scholars have argued that the classical position on conversion from Islam and its penalty should be discarded. Professor Hashim Kamali, a respected legal scholar based in Malaysia, says that “the Quran prescribes absolutely no temporal punishment for apostasy, nor has the Prophet, peace be upon him, sentenced anyone to death for it.” Another leading scholar of Islamic law, Professor Salim al-Awa from Egypt, argues that “the Quranic verses concerned did not prescribe any punishment for apostasy but simply declared it to be a great sin.”

Even a number of so-called political Islamists such as Hasan al-Turabi of Sudan and Rashid Ghannushi of Tunisia have argued that no one should be compelled to believe in any religion and that an apostate should not be put to death. Sayyid Qutb also argued that “freedom of belief is the first human right which gives the attribute of ‘humanity’ to the human being. Whoever robs a human being of freedom of belief in fact robs him of his humanity.”

Today, more and more Muslim thinkers and scholars are adopting the Quranic view of absolute freedom of belief and religion, with the result that in most Muslim-majority countries the classical Islamic law prescribing death for conversion is virtually ignored. Where the law exists it is also often used more broadly to suppress dissent, intellectual freedom and the religious freedom of certain minority Muslim groups. Afghanistan now finds itself being forced to decide whether it will continue down this regressive path.

Like many other issues Muslims are facing in the modern period, freedom of belief is intensely debated. While many still hold the classical position that restricts this freedom, others are openly challenging it, relying on the Quran and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad for support. For them, the classical laws concerning conversion and punishment are human interpretations that need to be re-examined in a way faithful to the Quran and to the example of Muhammad.

The existence of a clear, unambiguous, and direct instruction in the Quran that conversion from Islam is punishable by death would have made it difficult for Muslim scholars to legitimately undertake this re-examination. But its absence gives Muslims grounds to argue for absolute freedom of religion and belief as a fundamental human right, something that was granted 1400 years ago in the Quran but thereafter constrained by classical Islamic legal tradition.

The debate on apostasy and freedom of belief is thus just one dimension of a continuing process of renewal and reform in Islamic thought today. As part of this process Muslims should emphasise the Quran’s values of freedom of belief, compassion for all, and the need not to play God’s role in matters of belief.

Abdullah Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Director of National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This summer he will be leading the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Religious Freedom Seminar (applications due March 15).

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The question that now hangs over Egypt is whether real freedom is possible, or whether the country inevitably will fall under authoritarian control or the rule of Islamic extremists. As an Egyptian and as a devout mainstream Muslim who chose to participate in the protests, I believe that there is hope for a future of freedom in Egypt.

It is both necessary and possible for Egypt to steer a course between both political authoritarianism and an extremist interpretation of Islam that would hinder our transition to liberal democracy and would reject freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and equality and dignity for all people regardless of their beliefs or races.

The future of religious freedom was a central concern for many who looked warily on the demonstrations. Many Egyptian Christians, for example, initially rejected the protests. However, the attitude of many of these Christians changed when they saw the Quran and the Cross rise together in Tahrir Square in Cairo. This change was beautifully demonstrated when Christian protesters guarded their Muslims counterparts while Muslims were praying and the Muslims did the same for the Christians. Where I stood in Tahrir Square, now called by many “Liberation Square,” I saw Egypt’s two major religious groups protect each other from the bloody and deadly attacks of Mubarak’s thugs.

There are several factors supporting the hypothesis that Egypt after Mubarak will not be ruled by a religious regime. The vast majority of Egyptians are Sunni, and unlike Shiite Muslims they do not follow a single interpretive body. Instead of having loyalty to one Islamic figure or group, they rely on usually moderate interpretations of the Quran and Sunna (the instructions and behavior of the Prophet Mohammed).

What had made the Muslim Brotherhood the most influential opposition group in Egypt during Mubarak’s era was that Mubarak blocked, denigrated, and even imprisoned all non-religious political parties and figures who could have been viable alternatives to Mubarak. At the same time Mubarak was relatively tolerant of the political Islamic movement in Egypt. He did this because the Islamic movement gave him a bogeyman with which he could threaten any country that pushed for real democratic reforms.

Another factor that gave the Muslim Brotherhood the power to appear as the only alternative to Mubarak’s regime was that the vast majority of Egyptians are not involved in politics. Therefore the Brotherhood was the only organized alternative. There is no accurate count of its members, but some experts estimated that the number ranges between 500,000 and 1 million, while the permitted parties have just a few tens, hundreds, or thousands of active members.

Given the relative insignificance of the membership of the Muslim Brotherhood compared to the 40 million Egyptians who are eligible to vote in elections, there is cause for cautious optimism that Egyptians will be able to steer another course. It is worth noting that about 10% of Egypt’s population (of 83 million) is Christian, and these people would have strong reasons to vote against an Islamist party.

It is also important to consider that in Egypt there are many different Sunni Muslim religious organizations and movements which are not part of the Muslim Brotherhood and which are not involved in politics. These other Muslim currents vary in their interpretations of Islam, and many disagree with the Brotherhood’s vision of Islam. These theological differences are likely to be expressed politically.

Though Egyptians admittedly have little experience with democratic institutions, I can testify to the fact that many Egyptians keenly desire to build a vibrant, liberal civic space and would work to avoid the creation of a religious state.

It is crucial that the pro-democracy activists move quickly to engage the population and gain support in parliamentary and presidential elections, and that they spread liberal principles in the society through media, public events, and face-to-face encounters. Liberal youth also need to work quickly and with perseverance, both through social networks and on the ground.

In the near term, Egyptians must focus on reintroducing global values, including a return to the roots of meaning in the values of a healthy secularism, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression. We need to help the population at large understand that these values don’t threaten religion, but rather they provide a foundation upon which to build a better society which can hold within it diversity and differences in a peaceful manner.

The mid-term focus needs to be on education and critical thinking. Developing open-minded generations will help in securing a better future for Egypt. Because of three decades of Western support for Mubarak’s authoritarian regime, there is a deep and abiding feeling that Westerners do not want Egypt to progress, that they wish Egypt to remain dependent on U.S. aid. Learning that the West is not against the progress of the Egyptian people will open hearts and minds to Western values.

Fostering an environment of hatred of the West and Western allies helped Mubarak blame his failures on the “hidden hand” of the West. When Egyptians come to see that Mubarak’s regime covered up its faults by promoting false information about supposed “Western plots” against Egypt, attitudes towards many values that have been labeled as “Western,” including freedom of speech, association, and religion, may shift. Egypt’s future is uncertain, but it should give cautious hope to all lovers of freedom.

Yasser Khalil is a researcher and journalist in Cairo, Egypt who participated in the “January 25” protests. He is an alumnus of the Witherspoon Institute’s 2009 Islam and Civil Society Seminar.

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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.

It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?

The “good” here in question is not merely the product of passing fads or idiosyncratic preferences. When something is wrong, it is not wrong merely because it offends someone’s personal taste. The governing authority’s power to pass and enforce laws takes account of the beastly side of human nature while holding that some wrongs are so fundamental that they demand a robust and coercive response. If there are truly deeds that are gravely morally wrong, then it follows that there must be an authority established to command that such deeds be avoided and to punish the transgressors who commit them.

As Hadley Arkes has argued, if it is wrong to torture other human beings, then we do not content ourselves with mere tax incentives to encourage citizens to stop. We know that the wrong of torture requires that this choice be removed altogether from the domain of what is acceptable. You can enjoy the symphony, a NASCAR race, or the latest offering at the movies, but the logic of morals and law removes the option of torturing your neighbor for your weekend’s entertainment—even if your neighbor annoys you.

Of course, some choices will fall within the discretion of a polity’s citizens. Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our moral understanding. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he noted that Douglas’ professed ambivalence about whether states voted for or against slavery showed that he did not think slavery belonged in that category of actions that are truly morally wrong. If you don’t care which way a state votes on slavery, then you clearly don’t view it as a horrendous moral evil. Rather, you treat it like a state lottery: it is fine if the people want it and vote for it, and it is fine if they don’t.

The logic of morals, then, means that there can be no right to do a wrong. Built into the notion of wrong is the corresponding truth that an authority is right to punish perpetrators of the wrong. The idea that government can act as a neutral arbitrator between competing notions of the good life is ultimately incoherent because the idea itself promotes an underlying conception that this arrangement will lead to the best state of affairs.

It is a historical irony that the most famous attempt to sever the connection between law and morality illustrates the enduring link between the two. This attempt was made by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1897 address at the graduation of Boston University Law School, “The Path of the Law.”

Holmes argued that high-minded moral concepts only detract from a clear understanding of what law is and what it should do. Holmes proposed to completely eviscerate moral considerations from our understanding of law. “For my own part,” he said, “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” To understand law, Holmes declared, we must adopt the point of view of a “bad man” trying to avoid getting in trouble rather than start off with idealistic concepts of moral improvement and the good life.

Unfortunately for Holmes’ argument, his denial of the link between law and morality can only be made by invoking the language of morals and law. To understand the law, he suggests, is to look at the law as the bad man does. But this raises a question: How, might we ask, are we to truly understand what it means to be a “bad man” and what it means to be a “good one”? Is it not telling that Holmes’s very attempt to expurgate morality from the law itself depends on making a moral distinction? If Holmes is using the terms “good” and “bad” merely as descriptive statements about how some men see themselves (the bad men looking to keep out of trouble, and the good men thinking that they are beholden to some external morality), then he is doing more than attempting to separate morality and law; he seems to be denying morality altogether. Yet he explicitly denied any moral skepticism in his address.

But if Holmes is using the normative words as truly normative, then he cannot help but back himself into the logic of morals by requiring us to make a judgment about good and bad men. That is, he requires us not merely to make moral judgments distinguishing between “goodness” and “badness” (and thus better and worse, right and wrong) but also to associate “badness” with those who do not see a link between morals and law. Whatever his intentions might have been, Holmes winds up illustrating the link between the logic of morals and the logic of law.

To legislate, then, is to legislate morality. One can no more avoid legislating morality than one can speak without syntax. One cannot sever morality from the law. Even partisans of the most spartan libertarian conception of the state would themselves employ state power to enforce their vision of the common good. Given this understanding, the term “morals legislation” is, strictly speaking, redundant. The real question is not whether the political community will legislate morality; the question is which vision of morality will be enforced and by what sort of government.


Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay on morals legislation in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.

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 forcing bed of this nation’s most mortal threat is a multifaceted idea. It is the idea that the God of Islam wills torture and death—not just for adultery, but for acts such as apostasy, blasphemy, defamation of Islam, or conversion from Islam to another faith. It is the idea that women, Jews and other non-Muslims, and disfavored Muslims, are less than human in God’s eyes, some deserving of slaughter. It is the idea that America, and especially its system of religious freedom, is the enemy of God and of Islam.

Most Americans will accept—are eager to accept—that this idea is a distortion of Islam. They do not believe it is embraced by their Muslim neighbors. They want to support Muslims who reject it, whether they live in America or abroad.

Some analysts have argued that this anti-radical immunization of American Muslims is weakening, or that it was always an illusion. Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and others have consistently sounded the alarm that indigenous Islamist extremism is a clear and present danger to the United States. And they do not lack evidence: U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre of innocents at Fort Hood, his connection to American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, now in Yemen recruiting Islamist terrorists, or native Californian Adam Gadahn, who has become a spokesman for Al Qaeda. As U.S. Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism Dan Benjamin put it bluntly last month, “The assumption that Americans have some special immunity to al-Qaida’s ideology [has been] dispelled.”

I’m uneasy with that logic. It seems to me that religious freedom remains a vital and highly effective bulwark against the radicalization of American Muslims. Indeed, U.S. foreign policy should be far more interested in advancing religious freedom abroad—especially in the lands of Islam—and American conservatives should be far more assiduous in supporting such a policy.

But Americans also instinctively know that the idea provides a theological warrant for Al Qaeda and others who threaten them and their children. Osama bin Laden was weaned on Wahhabism—the Saudi version of this perverse and anti-human political theology. Wahhabism was the school of his adolescence and his early adult years, from which he graduated to do even greater things in God’s name.

America has historically been strengthened by its diverse and vigorous religious communities. Our founders understood this well, and acted resolutely to encourage the involvement of religious ideas and actors in American public life. With the First Amendment they ensured the right to worship and to act on the basis of religious belief, in full equality with other citizens and communities, religious or not. Importantly, our system also requires religious groups to accept the limits imposed by democracy, including the principle of equality under the law. Generations of religious immigrants have been enticed by the bargain of democracy, accepting its limits in return for the opportunity to live their lives—privately and publicly—in accord with their beliefs.

In short, the American experience teaches that religious liberty can be an effective way to engage religious actors in the project of self governance, and to forestall religion-based violence and terrorism. This is why religious freedom should be at the forefront of our counter-terrorism diplomacy. It is no accident that where religious freedom does not exist, or is under siege, Islamist terrorism is incubated, nourished, and exported, including to American shores.

A recent Pew Forum study shows that 70 percent of the world’s population lives in nations where religious liberty is severely restricted, most of them Muslim-majority nations. Extremist policies such as anti-blasphemy and anti-apostasy laws fuel the persecution of Christians in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, and the cruel repression of Muslim minorities in Pakistan and Iran. The absence of religious freedom prevents the emergence of Muslim reformers who oppose religion-based persecution and who are capable of developing a liberal Islamic political theology.

Unfortunately, American foreign policy has long been complicit in supporting authoritarian regimes in Muslim nations. It has also been lethargic and inept in advancing international religious freedom—even though it is required by law to do so—including in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration has been especially negligent on this score, failing even to mention religious freedom in its National Security Strategy. Almost two years into the President’s tenure, the senior State Department official responsible for promoting religious freedom abroad is still not in place. As I have argued here and here, the State Department has apparently concluded that the vigorous defense of religious liberty in Muslim-majority nations will offend Muslims and be resisted by their governments.

Of course religious liberty will be opposed by Muslim governments that are authoritarian or theocratic. Even democratic states will resist if they feel threatened. But polls show that Muslims themselves deeply desire religious freedom, and social science is demonstrating that democracy cannot be sustained, especially in highly religious societies, without the right to religious freedom. The idea that we should not assist Muslim nations in procuring it is both preposterous and dangerous. Our policy must change, and American Muslims should be leading the charge to change it.

In sum, if we are to help Muslim reformers win the war of ideas, and to kill the extremist, malevolent idea that threatens America, we must protect religious liberty in the homeland, and advance it in the lands where true extremism abides. Our security depends on it.


Thomas F. Farr, a former American diplomat, is Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and World Affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and chairs its task force on International Religious Freedom. This article is the second of two installments. You can find the first installment here.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The film version of the execution is difficult to watch—and not simply because of the violence, which is vivid and terrible. What wrenches the soul is the Satanic betrayal of the innocent Soraya by those she loves. The first stone is cast by her own father. Then, in excruciating sequence, by her two young sons.

How can a father come to revile and brutalize his daughter? How can young boys cooperate in the torture and execution of their mother? Their actions were not caused by deprivation, tribal rivalries, rage at modernity, or anti-colonialism. They stoned Soraya because they believed God desired them to do so.

Most Muslims, no doubt including many Iranian citizens, reject such acts as fundamentally anti-Islamic. For one thing, stoning is not sanctioned in the Koran. For another, most Muslims claim Allah to be a God of mercy and human cruelty an abomination in his eyes.

And yet the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country of 72 million people, routinely holds that stoning is an Islamic obligation. Iran’s government supports terrorism, opposes Israel’s right to exist, and seeks nuclear weapons, all in the name of God. “Let this land burn,” said Ayatollah Khomeini of his own country. “Let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Iran is not alone. Just last month the Afghan Taliban stoned a young unmarried couple (they had tried and failed to elope). According to the New York Times, after the execution the national Ulema Council and Afghan government officials issued a joint statement calling for more Shariah punishments, including stonings and amputations. These punishments occur in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and, on occasion, elsewhere in the Muslim world. It is no coincidence that Islamist terrorists and their ideas flourish in such countries.

Some Americans—mainly Muslims and liberal intellectuals—argue that the actions and ideas of Islamic extremists have nothing substantively to do with contemporary Islam. All religions have extremists, they say. The real battle today is not within Islam over its meaning and role in the world, but between moderates of all religions and extremists of all religions.

The moderates-against-extremists argument has some merit. Indian Hindu puritans, for example, have been responsible for massacres of minority Indian Muslims. The brutal assault on Muslims by Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was fueled by Christian-Orthodox-driven nationalism. Sri Lanka is home to a violent and radical Buddhist movement. But none of these phenomena threaten international order—and the American homeland—as does Islamist terrorism.

Most American Muslims are good citizens who, like others before them, have profited greatly from our system of religious freedom. Religious conservatives, of all people, should understand this, even if they oppose the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero.

But some American Muslim leaders are ill serving their country by imputing extremism to traditional Christians and Jews who oppose the project. In this they are, perhaps unwittingly, joining hands with aggressive secularists who, at the end of the day, will not stand with them. They do not seem to realize that their mortal enemy—and the enemy of their country—is not religious conservatism but Islamist extremism; that there is a war of ideas within Islam for its very soul; that they should be on the front lines of that war at home and abroad, precisely because of their love for Islam and for America; and that their greatest allies can be conservative Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews.

American conservatives, as a result, should think twice about how they articulate their opposition to the Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero. It is a grave error simply to conflate the likes of Hassan or Al-Awlaki with U.S. Muslims in general, or with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (leader of the project) in particular. There is virtually no evidence to support the charge that he and his wife, Daisy Khan, are seeking to establish radical Shariah courts in the United States, or provide a sanctuary for extremist Islamist ideas. Although Rauf and Khan have said some highly inflammatory things, their lives of service and outreach belie the charge of extremism. On balance, the evidence suggests that they have been good Americans, seeking to live out their faith in a productive—and very American—way.

Unfortunately, their reaction to those who oppose their project, and to the concerns their opponents express about Islam, risks diminishing the effectiveness of their work. They, and too many other American Muslim leaders, are too quick to don the victim’s mantle. And they seem to suggest that Islam has nothing to do with the extremism that threatens the United States, both from abroad and from within. (Not all Muslim leaders accept this view, of course. See this piece by Salam Al Marayati.) Ironically, many are beginning to stand with the secular left in America—a group which, although it may see temporary benefits in supporting Muslims against Christian and Jewish conservatives, will not at the end of the day countenance any religion in the public square, including Islam.

Take my friend Eboo Patel—a highly talented and accomplished Muslim leader who has created interfaith youth action groups across the country. Eboo wrote recently in the Washington Post that “the forces of intolerance in America have used the time since 9/11 to destroy the bonds of our diverse nation. They have established a well-funded, highly organized ‘Hate your Muslim Neighbor’ campaign.”

Or listen to Imam Rauf speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations: The “real battle front … is between moderates of all the faith traditions against the extremists of all the faith traditions.” By “extremists” Imam Rauf doubtless means both Al Qaeda and American religious conservatives who are heading the opposition to his project.

Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, said on national television that opposition to the Islamic Center “is like a metastasized anti-Semitism. … It’s not even Islamophobia; it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims….”

I recently participated in a symposium at Georgetown on the Islamic center controversy. My colleagues on the panel included two scholars of Islam who opined that the American people, duped by conservatives, were “fearful,” “angry,” and full of hate for Islam.

There are many examples of this kind of rhetoric coming from Muslim leaders. Can they really believe that they are hated and reviled by the conservative Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews who oppose this project (or by liberals like Harry Reid and Howard Dean, who also reject it)? Do they really think that the 70 percent of the American public who oppose it have been duped? Is it not possible to credit their opponents’ concerns without concluding that they hate Islam or Muslims, that, in the infamous words of the Washington Post, conservative Christians are “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command”?

Do these Muslim leaders not see the intellectual dishonesty, and the strategic danger, in comparing, even implicitly, America’s religious conservatives and Al Qaeda? Can they not understand that the real war is not between opponents of the mosque project and themselves; rather, it is a war of ideas for the soul of Islam, in which they should be fully engaged?

The irony is that, when all is said and done, none of this suggests that the Imam, or other American Muslims with such views, are extremists. Rather, it shows that their views reflect the belligerent moral confusion, and angst about traditional Christianity, that is characteristic of the American left. This very American social pathology was graphically on display after the reelection of George Bush in 2004. Writing in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd referred to Bush’s victory as “a jihad in America;” Garry Wills opined that America was, like Al Qaeda, captive to “fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, [and] religious intolerance….”

It would be a tragedy if Muslims became so absorbed in this fantasy that they render themselves incapable of performing a task that they are well suited to perform, one that is vital to America—fighting Islamist extremism at home and abroad. The kind of ordered liberty in which they live, and the freedom they enjoy, would, if it took root in Muslim lands, provide a powerful antidote to the malevolent idea that threatens America. But the temptation to stay out of this fight is proving to be surprisingly powerful among some segments of the Muslim community.

It would be equally tragic if American conservatives—especially Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews—did not recognize the vital role that American Muslims must play in defeating Islamist extremism. Unfortunately, many conservative Christians seem reluctant to engage with Muslims, ceding the “inter-religious dialogue” to the left. Moreover, some conservatives appear to have concluded that all of Islam is irredeemable. They seem to believe that Islam itself, not Islamist extremism, threatens America. This is a tragic and destructive error.


Thomas F. Farr, a former American diplomat, is Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and World Affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and chairs its task force on International Religious Freedom. This article is the first of two installments. You can find the second installment here.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.