Acknowledgments
TWO CIRCLES OF special people have made this book possible. The first arose from decades of interaction with friends, colleagues, and a multitude of strangers in the Islamic lands where I have lived and traveled for some four decades. Always to my great delight, they have very often been more than willing to share with an American student of their religion, culture, and political life their experiences and their feelings—not to mention whatever they were eating or drinking as I passed by. Endless acts of generosity have marked those encounters. Relationships of all kinds emerged, and those relationships inform the observations offered here. The second circle has taken shape from the generations of students, especially in Egypt and the United States, who have struggled with me to better understand and appreciate one of the world’s great civilizations and the astonishingly diverse personal and collective lives it has made possible.
Only living in communities of Muslims can provide the indispensable experiential grounding for an interpretive essay on contemporary Islam like this one. Islam is about acting in the world. For believers, faith is very much about the struggle to live personally and in community as God intended for his creations. I am grateful for the wonderful opportunities I have received from the Muslims among whom I have lived to share joys and sorrows through the years. Without my designation as a Carnegie Islam Scholar and the generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York that came with it, travel to these far-flung places to meet and discuss with scholars, public intellectuals, and ordinary people would not have been possible, although Carnegie bears no responsibility for what I imagined I learned from those encounters.
Academic colleagues across the disciplines and around the globe, most notably those in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Syria, Tunisia, and Iraq as well as the United States, have reacted continuously to my earlier published work on Islam. I have greatly appreciated their kindnesses in pointing out shortcomings and misinterpretations. I like to imagine that their efforts have improved this latest effort. It is impossible to list all of those colleagues. However, I simply cannot fail to mention three: Tareq Ismael of the University of Calgary, Manar Shorbagy of the American University in Cairo, and John Esposito of Georgetown.
Of the hundreds of students who have studied things Islamic with me, two Americans have been especially helpful on this project: Alex Henry over the course of several years, including a summer in Cairo, and Alex Hermsen, most recently, for assisting in the very final stages of the manuscript. Of former Egyptian and Arab students, allow me to celebrate Karen Aboul Kheir and Omar Mahmoud, two of the most brilliant who very early made the teacher–student role a reversible one and taught me a great deal about Islam, the many Muslim worlds, and the world beyond. They are now lifelong friends and professional peers in very different fields. I have learned most when our disagreements on issues have been sharpest and the discussions most animated. I have reveled in those friendships. Miraculously, both Karen and Omar still respond to calls for help from a former teacher. Lively discussions with both of them have proceeded apace as I have worked for a very long time to finish this manuscript. Omar, I should also add, has read every line in this book. He helped me reconsider and rewrite more sections than I can count. He corrected errors and offered suggestions for important improvements all along the way. Omar deserves considerable credit for any strength the book may have and no blame at all for the weaknesses and misinterpretations that remain, since I did not always take his advice.
In Cairo, I am indebted to Mostafa Mohamed, my lead research assistant for the book and for a myriad of other research projects. We have worked together for years now, and I still marvel at his prodigious memory and impressive analytical skills. To Ramadan Abd el Aziz I owe deep gratitude for managing my research office and great affection for decades of close friendship. Finally, I appreciate the support and assistance of Muhammad Ismail who found smart ways to overcome the everyday challenges of life in Cairo and Alexandria to make sure I had time to revel in the endless adventures possible in those wonderful cities.
Big projects never go forward without the support of family and friends. My sister-in-law Jan Baker and her mother, Joyce Townsend Garrod, rival my Muslim friends in their Methodist version of generosity of spirit and hospitality, while my endlessly talented brother Don repeatedly offers support in matters large and small. When I took breaks from the writing, my nephew Huan Ngoyen and I had great discussions on life chances and choices, across the generations and in out-of-the-way locations. Many ideas and concerns from this book found their way into those talks.
Tareq Ismail and Jack Waggett have been a part of my life for years that we have stopped counting but have never ceased to enjoy. Shafiq Badan has managed over some ten years of friendship to meld together the roles of father, brother, and son. I have no idea how he accomplishes this improbable feat; the mystery only increases the pleasure of our deep friendship. Only the Persian mystic poets Rumi and Hafez rival the standing of these three personal friends as life companions and sources of support.
I have lost my beloved wife, Elaine, with whom I began the adventures recorded here. Our four children, Sarah, Dorian, Madalyn, and Pamela, are all sources of unabashed pride, not least for the ways they cherish and live the humane values and perspectives of citizens of the world that Elaine and I strived to impart. Elaine’s unbounded goodness, ease of forgiveness, and compassionate caring for the most wounded among us survive through their presence and their acts of kindness in the world.
THIS BOOK IS not intended to be a work of social science. It offers an interpretation of midstream Islam today. It is written in essay style. This approach has made the avoidance of jargon possible. It has produced a text as unburdened by notes as possible. In addition, the essay style has also allowed a streamlined approach to problems encountered going from Arabic sources to an English text.
All Arabic-language materials are listed only with English translations of titles and without cumbersome transliterations of the Arabic titles. The translations will make the Arabic original obvious to Arabic readers while sparing English readers distracting and meaningless transliterations. Arabic newspaper articles are cited in streamlined fashion by author, source, and date only. However, important Arabic terms used in the text have been transliterated in a simplified way that avoids hyphens and diacritics, except for the ain and the hamza, both represented by (‘). Readers of Arabic will immediately recognize the original, while non-Arabic readers will be spared the cumbersome symbols necessary to render Arabic letters in English. For plurals, I have simply added an “s” to singular forms rather than introduce complicated Arabic forms, unless they have already become somewhat familiar. I hope that the relief afforded general readers will mollify the rightful objections of purists to these deviations. All citations in the notes are complete, allowing the omission of a separate bibliography while still enabling interested readers to locate sources used.
There are no absolute equivalents in English for many of the important Islamic concepts and phrases used throughout the book. The translations provided should be viewed as only rough approximations to the Arabic terms. They are offered with the practical aim of helping non-Arabic readers to overcome initial discomfort with important Islamic concepts with which they are unfamiliar. In all cases, the translations follow as closely as possible the meaning given to these terms in their works by the centrist Islamic thinkers and activists who are the subjects of this study. Readers should understand that other Islamic scholars might well contest these meanings. Indeed, even among the centrists there are disagreements about the precise ways in which particular terms are to be understood. A fuller sense of the meaning of all of these phrases will come with attention to the actual contexts in which they are used. The format for the Arabic terms used in the text generally will be that the first time the expression is used in a given chapter it will appear in italicized Arabic transliteration followed by English equivalent in parentheses. However, for a small group of terms for which an adequate and relatively standardized translation is available, the English translation may also be used after the term has been introduced with the transliteration. A handful of Arabic words, now widely used and understood in English, will be treated as English words. Throughout, I avoid the adjective “Islamist” and substitute “Islamic” for it. In Arabic, the phrase is “Islami” and it is simply the adjective “Islamic.” In the Western press the translation of the term as “Islamist” has in recent years become a term of opprobrium and condemnation when applied to politicized Islam. It is now too negatively freighted in English to be useful, and I have therefore reverted to the literal and neutral translation.