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The Epochal Story of Islam and the Common People

And verily, We shall recount their whole story with knowledge,

For We were never absent (at any time or place).

QUR’AN 7:7

THROUGH HIS PROPHETS, God spoke to all of humanity (al Nas). The Qur’an tells the Prophet: “Oh Prophet, We have indeed dispatched you as a witness, a healer, and a warner.”¹ The Prophet in his life and in his example was to assume specific responsibilities for all of humankind, but especially for the common people. Today, Islam is telling an epochal story, scripted from the lives of millions across Dar al Islam. For all those who have contributed their personal narratives, no matter their other differences, it is a grand chronicle of Qur’anic inspiration, recounted with the “witness” of the Prophet. It tells of the cosmic human struggle for justice in the face of evil. It sounds a call to spiritual renewal as the way to find strength for this most daunting of battles. It is, at the same time, a very human story of the struggles of ordinary people against tyrants, social injustice, extremists, and invaders.

Muslims are not alone in their battles. The Qur’an tells us that the core message conveyed by the prophets to people everywhere is the same. Muslims stand with all other human beings in their dreams and highest aspirations. They are called, like all of humanity, to recognize and embrace in their lives the values of justice, love, peace, and freedom, all of which have a spiritual dimension. The details of the revelations and the nuances of prescribed forms of worship and ways of living inevitably varied. Yet the higher spiritual purposes of the charge to humanity of the great religious faiths transcended all differences.

All prophets sought to inspire al Nas to live good and just lives, lifted up by spirituality. Repeatedly throughout human history, a flawed humanity has stumbled on that path, only to find in God’s “signs” ways to regain secure footing and guidance for the way forward. Muslims, the Qur’an makes clear, can rightfully look, alongside their Holy Book and the example of the Prophet, to communities outside their own for ways to attain desired goals and for allies in their worldly struggles. God’s world, by design, is a plural world.

In a fourth great surge of renewal that swept through all of Dar al Islam, Muslims have called themselves to al Tagdid al Islami (the Islamic Renewal). They seek to renew their sense of the meaning of God’s final message to humanity. Reverberations of that energizing wave have been felt most recently with particular effect in Tunisia and Egypt. Organized movements of politicized Islam have made themselves a presence in public life in both countries, acting as visible reminders of the spirit of Islamic Renewal afoot in the land. However, the response that matters most in these sites, and others like them, has come not from particular movements, charismatic figures, or parties. It originates from the spiritual power generated by common people, acting together in massive numbers. Politicized Islam and the movements it generates at times actually weaken the Renewal by overemphasizing its political dimension. It is the spontaneous collective action of al Nas on behalf of freedom and justice that has done most to advance the Islamic Renewal, however limited particular achievements might be.

The Qur’an, all Muslims know, was sent to humanity by God. Throughout Dar al Islam, the Qur’an is everywhere a presence to guide humanity’s spiritual and worldly struggles. The first verse of the Qur’an commands Muslims to “read, recite.”² They are not called to worship the Qur’an or to treat their Holy Book as a religious relic. Rather, believers are summoned to use their minds and to respond to the promptings of their hearts to understand the guidance the Qur’an provides. In this difficult work of ijtihad (interpretation), they find assistance in the hadiths (prophetic traditions that record the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad). The Prophet acts as an exemplar of how to live in accord with Islam. For all the challenges through the centuries of interpretation and evaluation, the Sunnah (all the deeds and words of the Prophet) of the Prophet Muhammad has retained its place in the minds and hearts of Muslims as the second source for understanding Islam.

The Sunnah of the Prophet preserves a record of his leadership of the first community of Muslims. An important verse instructs the Prophet to act in his role as a guide but not a governor: “So revive their memories! You are but a reminder! Not their dominating governor.”³ The Prophet is to be a presence in the lives of Muslims as an inspiration for the creation of communities that will enable people to live as God intended in ways that make sense, given their own particular circumstances. The Prophet is not, however, the advocate of any particular societal order. Neither the Qur’an nor the Sunnah provides a rigid template for the building of community. That task must be the work of al Nas, inspired by the Message.

God’s confidence in humanity is reflected in the fact that the imperative to create communities of believers is central to the message of Islam. It is as members of the ummah that Muslims tell their worldly stories. Like Jews and Christians, Muslims are a people of the Book. They, too, have received their holy book from God. For Muslims, to practice Islam is to be reminded not only of the sacred texts but also of community bonds that create a way of life centered on the truths those texts convey. The doctrine of Islam reassures Muslims that they are not alone in the world. The ummah gives them brothers and sisters in Islam. However dispersed they may be, the ummah links them to a worldwide community. Islam, expressed in their beliefs and behaviors, instructs them in what should be the larger purposes of their collective lives. Some fifty verses in the Qur’an remind believers of the necessity of acting on belief. Qur’anic descriptions of true believers refer to them as “those who believed and were righteous in deeds.”⁴ Passive belief alone does not suffice: Righteous actions and behavior are essential parts of a good Muslim life.

Worldly Islam, as understood by the Wassatteyya (the Islamic midstream), today calls ordinary Muslims to reform and spiritual renewal, as well as resistance where circumstances require. Those who have responded by the millions include Sunnis, who represent some 85 percent or more of the world’s Muslims; Shi’a, who represent somewhat less than 15 percent; as well as those from both main branches who have turned to Sufism, Islamic mysticism. The division in the ummah between Sunni and Shi’a arose shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. At issue were pressing questions of political succession, rather than doctrine. The great Sufi orders (turuq) spread throughout Islamic lands, including such far-flung places as India, central Asia, and Africa as well as the Arab, Turkish, and Iranian heartland areas. In earlier waves of Islamic Renewal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sufis had a substantial role. Today, the Sufis remain of great importance, although often in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.⁵ Dar al Islam (the Islamic world) is suffused by a rich and pervasive Sufi influence that all those who traverse Islamic lands cannot help but feel. The Islamic midstream embraces all of these communities of Muslims, whatever tensions and even conflicts that arise among them and however distinctive their traditions become. Midstream religious scholars see them simply as communities of Muslims, part of the ummah. For the midstream, what matters most are not the surface differences but the core beliefs that are shared. They all recognize that there is but one God and that he is one (tawhid).⁶ Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufis are joined in their reverence for the Prophet Muhammad. They all pray in the direction of Mecca.

These diverse communities of Muslims have all been touched by the Renewal. All have contributed to it. The Renewal cannot be labeled Sunni, Shi’a, or Sufi. It bears no exclusively Arab, Iranian, Turkish, or any other ethnic imprint. The Renewal takes on all of these characteristics and more besides. It is an Islamic Renewal (al Tagdid al Islami) that resonates around the world, wherever communities of Muslims are found. Today, the realities of bitter splits in the ummah, often created and manipulated by authoritarian and hostile outside powers, challenge this precious unity. However, the Wassatteyya clings to the ideal of tawhid and works to strengthen it.

For all its power and critical importance, this epochal story of Islamic Renewal in our time has yet to be heard in the West. The West has not listened. The idea that something of global importance is happening in Islamic lands, but independent of Western influence, simply cannot be entertained. For decades, the Arab heartlands of the Islamic world have been in the American sphere of influence as a strategic reserve. Inevitably, American dominance has meant that reasons of empire have taken priority over all else. Every American global initiative has had a special place for a dominated and subordinated Middle East. Local elites, whatever their character, are bent to those ends. Everywhere, the needs of ordinary people are sacrificed. The Renewal inherently challenges that dominance; for that reason, resistance is at the heart of this latest wave of Islamic assertiveness.

The United States has its own, all-consuming agenda. The details have varied but the same sweeping vision of global hegemony has consistently animated American policies and obliterated all else from view. That imperial vision came with the onset of the Cold War, while World War II was still raging. The guiding principle from the first has been “full-spectrum world dominance.” The means to achieve it all flow from overwhelming military capability and the political will to wield it. Opposition to the American imperium assumes a variety of guises. In essence, however, it is always the same. Essentially, any independent force with any capability at all to challenge the American imperial vision earns that status, whether a rising challenger nation, like China or Russia, or any of a variety of mass movements, from leftists and communists to Islamic resistance parties and groups. Genuine mass movements with popular support, in particular, are always and everywhere treated as a threat to American empire. When possible, they are brutally repressed. At other times, they are manipulated and controlled. However, such management strategies do not always work and, even when they do, they do not last forever. The elusive potential for resistance is always there.

The Islamic Renewal for decades has represented just such a potential threat, although its relative importance has fluctuated. When it cannot be controlled and manipulated, it is demonized. Today in the Western media and scholarly work, all attention is riveted on the extremists as the face of Islam. They provide the essential justification for the brutalization of Islamic societies and the rationalization of empire for domestic publics.

For these durable reasons of empire, the self-directed and defensive work of the autonomous Islamic midstream to renew and protect Islam receives almost no attention at all in the West. Such massive inattention has occurred before. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Western scholars and policymakers, convinced of their own vision of the secular future of Dar al Islam, failed to hear the announcements of Islamic intellectuals and activists of the emergence of the contemporary al Tagdid al Islami. The Renewal, heralded by intellectuals and activists across Dar al Islam, penetrated deeply into Muslim societies throughout the region in subsequent decades. It did so in ways that confounded Western expectations and stock understanding of the future of Islam and the Islamic world.

Today, the most important story from Islamic lands tells how the Islamic Renewal has taken hold in the lives of millions of common people, making it a powerful force not only among Islamic intellectuals and movements but on a mass level.⁷ Exaggerated attention to the extremists and their narrative of distortion of the faith and violence is misplaced. The Wassatteyya of centrist intellectuals and diverse groupings has succeeded as no other Islamic grouping in giving voice to the everyday dreams of ordinary people for a better life as Muslims. In doing so, the Wassatteyya strives to guide the Islamic Renewal. It looks to its worldly as well as spiritual success.⁸

The extraordinary energy of the Renewal comes from the response of the masses. This impressive wave of Islamic Renewal is inclusive, although not without definition. It is not owned by particular individuals or movements, nor can it be hijacked by any of them. Rather, the contemporary Islamic Renewal speaks for the oldest, midstream trend in modern Islamic thought, with its roots in the works of the pioneering figures of Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and Gamal Eddine al Afghani (1838/9–1897). The Islamic scholars of the Wassatteyya take as their most fundamental sources the Qur’an and the Sunnah, enriched further by the insights of Sufism and the rich body of fiqh (understandings of Qur’an and Sunnah, the work of specialists). Fiqh, Yusuf al Qaradawi has pronounced, provides a virtual “ocean” of interpretive scholarship as a resource to guide the ummah.⁹ For each generation of Muslims, the Wassatteyya has taken new forms and drawn diverse individuals and groupings to its banner. Today, it is a diffuse, mass trend with tributaries throughout the Islamic world.

The rigid typologies and “bucket thinking” typical of so much of Western social science can contribute little to the characterization of so fluid and adaptive a phenomenon as the Wassatteyya.¹⁰ In our age of Islamic Renewal, the Wassatteyya raises the banner of reform of Islamic thought. At the same time, it calls for legitimate resistance to imperialism, colonialism, and domestic tyranny. In doing so, it opens a space between midstream Islamic scholars and movements, on the one hand, and traditionalists who cling to rigid and inflexible understandings of the heritage, on the other. The Wassatteyya holds itself apart even more emphatically from extremists, who have little regard for the heritage of learning on which the Wassatteyya draws for its creative adaptations to rapidly changing global conditions. The extremists, in contrast, either adhere to literalist and outmoded views or innovate with radical distortions of Islamic thought. They translate these distortions of the faith into violent actions that tarnish legitimate struggles of resistance. Midstream scholars have not hesitated to condemn their indiscriminate actions as haraba (war on civilization).¹¹

Characterizations of the midstream must be kept flexible to be useful. The center itself is always moving. What is midstream in one context may well not be in another. Moreover, particular individuals and groupings may well move between these typifications. They may also take on the markers of more than one type. All categorizations of Islamic groupings should be thought of as eddies in a river rather than islands, fixed and set apart.

No one scholar or public figure can speak for the Wassatteyya in all its variety, nor can any single grouping of activists. The contemporary Islamic midstream has at times found leadership in diverse figures such as the Egyptian Yusuf al Qaradawi, who heads the Union of Islamic Scholars and is a prominent member of the New Islamic school of Egyptian centrists.¹² In addition, mention should be made of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with his Islamic roots, former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, and the Tunisian leader of the Renaissance Party, Rashid al Ghannouchi. However, a simple catalogue of centrist Islamic scholars, collectives, and public figures across Dar al Islam would overwhelm this brief chapter. Yet, because they are invariably overlooked by Western pundits and scholars who focus on extremists, some representative examples can usefully be mentioned. In the Arab world, for example, the venerable and now violently persecuted Muslim Brothers in Egypt do not stand alone. There are other centrist Islamic actors, rarely given much attention, from a variety of sites in the Arab Islamic world. They include the now-banned Wassat Party in Egypt, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, the Reform Party in Algeria, the Renaissance Party in Tunisia, the Jordanian Islamic Action Front, the Ummah Party in Kuwait, and the Yemeni Reformist Union. Each of these parties of politicized Islam has contributed experience and theoretical understanding to the development of Islamic centrism.

Midstream Islamic intellectuals, from these and other similar groupings, have taken the lead in an innovative transnational Islamic project of radical rethinking and renewal to advance the relevance and cogency of contemporary Islamic discourse and practice. They balance their attention to adaptations to contemporary conditions with insistence on thoughtfully drawing strength from the heritage. The three great demographic and cultural reservoirs at the heart of the Islamic world, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, have each played important, complementary roles in the Renewal. Outside this Islamic strategic triangle, developments to the west in North Africa, to the north in central Asia, and to the east in southwest Asia have made the Renewal a presence in the lives of the immense communities of Muslims in these areas. In each of these cases, and others like them, including growing Muslim minority communities in the East and West, the Islamic Renewal takes at times strikingly varied forms. Yet “they are all Muslims,” to echo the words of Ibn Battuta from the fourteenth century.¹³

America and the Islamic Renewal

For a brief moment, it appeared that a new American president had grasped the importance of these momentous developments and sought accommodation with midstream Islam. In July 2009, Barack Hussein Obama traveled to Cairo, the intellectual and cultural capital of centrist Islam.¹⁴ He addressed an audience of students, intellectuals, and public figures at Cairo University. Obama seemed poised to turn a page in America’s relationships with the Islamic world. The speech did open with some stunning new language of respect and appreciation for Islam and for Islamic civilization. From his highly visible platform in Cairo, Obama addressed the Muslim world as a man of color with a middle name and family roots that connect him to the Islamic world. The new American president translated the symbolism of his person into an historic call for a transformed relationship between the West and Islam. The speech was remarkable in many ways: No American president had ever before spoken with such respect for the contributions of the Islamic heritage for humankind. The Qur’anic passages cited by the president captured the most uplifting dimensions of Islam’s universal message for the moral and material progress of humanity. The president quoted them with an aptness that was captivating.

The magic of the moment dissipated, however, when President Obama turned in his Cairo speech from generalities about Islam to actual policies at the heart of American tensions with the Islamic world. The thread of the old narrative that justified limitless support for the militarism of the War on Terror and one-sided support for Israel ran through all his remarks.

Yet again, the world was told the fabulous tale of America as a caring colossus, tiptoeing in innocence and good intentions across the globe, uninterested in resources or bases, although notably tarrying in the oil-rich and strategically important Middle East region. The colossus moves protectively, hand in hand with a tiny, frightened ward with a tragic past and a future at risk. His plucky companion acts only in self-defense, although with a “terrible, swift sword” when threatened.¹⁵

The inhabitants of distant lands, notably the Muslims among them, find it difficult to fathom such a powerful yet selfless and well-intentioned force for good. They are unable to comprehend all the gifts the colossus and his tiny companion seek to bring to one of the most troubled regions in the world. They see only “an interested empire” and its regional junior partner. Blinded by jealousy and envy, some from these misguided peoples respond to the presence of the colossus in the region with deadly strikes on the symbols of its power back home, killing several thousand innocents. They do so by sending fanatic murderers from sanctuaries in a distant, mountain land. The colossus must respond to these wanton and irrational acts of violence. The betrayal of such innocent benevolence fully justifies the death and destruction the colossus must rain on that distant refuge for the evildoers.

Once the mist of the warm rhetoric about Islam had cleared, one could not fail to see all these misguided self-delusions of the Bush years. Obama’s underlying narrative in Cairo reaffirmed the basic arguments that rationalized the endless War on Terror, initially centered on Afghanistan and Iraq and extended by the new president to Pakistan and Yemen. The president intoned ominously that the Afghani people are better off without the Taliban, the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam, and so the wars must continue, not just for self-defense but also so the troops can come home from these pacified, secured lands. This unchanged narrative makes it clear that the violence begins with 9/11 and the irrational and unwarranted attack that brought the twin towers down. Obama identified the core problem of the area as the violent extremism of Islamic movements.

There was no mention at all of the provocative work of imperialism or the repressive client regimes that America backed. There was no strong position against the expansion of Israeli settlement of the remnants of historic Palestine. Obama let it be known one more time that America was no “interested empire.” America, he averred, seeks neither oil nor bases. The U.S. aim is rather the transformation of the tumultuous Middle East region into an oasis of peace and prosperity, open to global investment and trade. Israel exercised only its right to defend itself from the existential threats it faces. Violence had other wellsprings. The Islamic world remained dangerously mired in age-old conflicts and irrational hatreds. These irrational hatreds make the realization of the disinterested and benign vision of the colossus unattainable. They also necessitate the cleansing assertions of American and Israeli power. Terrorist states must be “ended,” terrorist groups wiped out to provide security for Israel and to protect the American homeland from an infiltration of terror to its shores. Ironically, in Cairo Barack Hussein Obama announced quite clearly that the American War on Terror was henceforth a bipartisan war, as fully embraced by Democrats as by Republicans.

Obama’s retelling of the narrative left no space for even a hint that U.S. intrusions, often violent, have been the main motivation for the various forces, and not just the extremists, that feed the resistance to American policies in the Islamic world. A reasonably fair accounting of the sources of American tensions with the Islamic world would include, as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst has forthrightly explained, U.S. and Western exploitation of the region’s energy resources; unlimited support for Israel and its expansionist actions; U.S. backing for the brutal police states that rule in much of the Arab and Islamic world; compliant acquiescence by the United States in the oppression of Muslims by other great powers, like Russia, China, and India; and, perhaps most damaging of all, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries.¹⁶

The unchanged narrative gives no space for even an acknowledgment of the horrific price paid for the false gifts of “freedom and progress” by the Muslim peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Palestine. Little wonder that the Democratic president with the anomalous middle name preferred to see only the Islamist Imaginary rather than these very real policies as the root cause of American policies.¹⁷ There was no repudiation of the disastrous and explicitly imperial policies of the Bush years that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians, as well as over four thousand young Americans. The president failed to even mention the terrible and totally disproportionate violence unleashed on the essentially defenseless people of Gaza just six months before his address, nor the “separation” wall, nor the widespread Israeli settler violence against the occupied Palestinians on the West Bank.¹⁸ Obama repeated the American mantra that the only violence that must be stopped was Palestinian resistance. In Cairo, the president unveiled no new thinking to make sense of the terrible moral and political failures of U.S. policy in the region. Hopes were dashed that the president would find a way to chart a more rational and modest foreign-policy course. Instead, the president’s words simply reinforced the rationale for the violence of empire and colonization. The message only sounded new because it was delivered by a charismatic president with a warm smile and a talent for ringing phrases. It was not new in any significant way. What President Obama offered in Cairo was nothing more than an elegant retelling of the old story that had brought Muslims such endless suffering.

The record is now clear that the initial assault on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the subsequent invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and then Obama’s war in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan (the so-called Af-Pak theater) and the president’s unrestrained impulse to “send in the drones” have all deepened the enmity toward the United States of ordinary people throughout the Islamic world. They have also proved a recruitment boon for extremists, including both al Qaeda and its Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) offshoot. Bloody military interventions, and the civilian deaths and maiming in large numbers that they inevitably inflict, are a stimulus rather than a cure for extremism.

The president’s Cairo narrative, for those with ears to hear, made it perfectly clear that the man who urged Americans not to look back had ensured two things about the future: There would be endless American wars in Islamic lands, and, at home, there would be a corrupting and unaccountable surveillance state that guaranteed those wars would be waged in secrecy and at the cost of self-inflicted wounds to American democracy.

The Extremist Challenge

Imperial wars and their inevitable civilian casualties provide the core explanation for the rise of ever-more-militant extremisms. However, it is no contradiction to recognize the Islamic rationalization of the murderous logic that leveled the twin towers. Criminal political acts were thought out in a radicalized Islamic vocabulary, with distorted understandings of jihad (struggle for the faith) and jahilliyya (condemnation as un-Islamic, atheist, or pagan), traceable to Islamic thinkers such as the Pakistani Maulana Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979) and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966). ISIS calls itself the Islamic state for a reason. Such Islamic labels and rationalizations are intended to tap into the Islamic Renewal to win recruits, against the background of American and Israeli depredations. For that reason, it is all the more important to take note of the quite distinctive, distorted, and idiosyncratic character of these readings of the sacred texts by the extremists who draw on the work of these scholars in tendentious ways. The conclusions that contemporary extremists reach have only the most distant connection to the work of figures like Maududi and Qutb. The Wassatteyya has offered consistent, critical assessments of these radical thinkers. At the same time, they see clearly that the terrifying and indiscriminate violence of extremist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS cannot reasonably be attributed to these Islamic scholars, despite their disagreement with some of their views. As the midstream scholars see it, what we have are double distortions that heighten the potential damage to Islam. The midstream has criticized as distortions the interpretations of Qutb and Maududi of such concepts as jihad and jahilliyya. With far greater forcefulness, they have rejected out of hand their extensions to rationalizations of the sheer barbarism by groups like ISIS. Midstream Islamic scholars have been making both sets of arguments for years. Moreover, the fact that extremist ideology does not offer the major explanation for the rise of increasingly successful groups does not mean it plays no role at all.

With equal clarity, the midstream unapologetically endorses the legitimate violence of Islamic resistance movements that confront foreign occupation with bravery and impressive inventiveness, most often against overwhelming odds. New Islamic intellectuals argue forcefully that there is an obligation in Islam to actively resist occupation and colonization. It falls on both the collective shoulders of Muslim communities wherever Muslims are attacked (fard kifaya) and on the individual shoulders of all Muslims who directly suffer such injustices in their own homeland (fard al ‘ain). They insist that resort to armed resistance, as understood by leading centrist Islamic scholars like Ayatollah Fadlallah and Yusuf al Qaradawi, must always be both principled and practical. Violence is never defended theoretically as an end in itself or as a means to ease the pain of past wrongs. Resistance is not revenge. Campaigns of resistance must be conducted with a clear calculus of their likely effectiveness in achieving liberation, as weighed against their costs to the ummah in lives and treasure. Legitimate violence is also constrained by commitments to proportionality and to close examination of the morality of the actual means used to realize just ends. Certain groups, such as children, women, the aged, farmers, religious figures, and other innocent civilians, can never be deliberate targets. International law recognizes such a right of resistance for peoples under foreign occupation, subject to parallel restraints. These principles of Islamic legal reasoning and international law have force, whatever interested and arbitrary laws and motions the U.S. Congress or the Israeli Knesset enact.¹⁹

Extremism inevitably becomes the face of Islam for alarmed Westerner publics and wins their support for further military interventions. It also means that almost all of our efforts in the West to understand the Islamic world go into assessments of this Islamic threat. In this way, even the best Western work on Islam risks reinforcing a narrow security perspective that leaves the midstream in the shadows. The spotlight is cast on the extremists rather than the midstream intellectuals and activists who consistently and successfully contest their influence on the majority of Muslims. Scholarly efforts to lean against this unfortunate outcome have been far too modest in number and impact, although there are important exceptions.²⁰

Overlooking the Dreams of Ordinary Muslims

The aspirations of ordinary Muslims center on the prospect of living decent lives with adequate means, a measure of freedom, and a cultural environment of their own making. National battles for basic rights and freedoms across the region now draw inspiration from Islam. Islam, with its call to a righteous life in awareness of God, becomes an active participant in struggles against domestic tyrannies. Islam also enables millions to embrace modernity without the necessity of accepting Westernization. Islam inspires ordinary people to courageous and unpredictable actions in accord with these ways of thinking. Today, very little understanding of these shifts in attitude, inspired by Islam, is reaching the West, and not for the first time.

My generation of graduate students who began their careers in the early 1970s was trained by social science scholars convinced that history’s direction was set.²¹ Western secular experience was understood to provide a mapping of the future of the Islamic world. Ahistorical models were drawn from the West’s secular experience. Pathways to modernity on the Western model were mapped. The results were labeled economic and political development theory. With their gaze fixed on an imported and secular future for Muslim societies, most scholars missed the importance of the Islamic surge that was then just gathering strength. At that time, the very notion of Islam defining an alternative future was simply inconceivable. Today the Islamic Renewal shapes politics in much of the Islamic world. Unfortunately, Western analysts are fixated on the criminal, marginal Islamic minorities represented by al Qaeda and ISIS and on the mayhem they periodically cause. We are led to ignore the normalcy and decency of ordinary lives, lived in the embrace of Islam. We pay no attention to the everyday dreams of common people in the Islamic world who make faith central to their lives.

The area studies programs of the 1960s were motivated by the certitude that the United States had established itself as a superpower with worldwide responsibilities. The vastly overexaggerated challenge from the Soviet Union rationalized an unprecedented national effort to secure America’s “rightful” role in the world. These new, self-imposed burdens extended to the Islamic world. They required specialists with language and cultural competence. The competitive aim was to facilitate transformations along the modern lines that we, rather than the Soviets, had pioneered. We considered ourselves the vanguard of “the great global ascent,” to borrow Robert L. Heilbroner’s celebrated phrase.²² To be sure, the language of global responsibility provided nothing more than a screen for imperial assertiveness. Moreover, talk of underdeveloped Islamic societies slid easily into condescending assumptions about underdeveloped peoples. Very few at Harvard, or elsewhere, paid any mind to these unsavory implications of prevailing views.

Today, things are far worse. Now, the call is for terror specialists, fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and other regional languages, and with an understanding of asymmetrical warfare. The terror specialists, with their special focus on the Arab world and Iran, are preparing themselves to face a vast and nameless army of Islamic extremists that must be confronted abroad, we are told, with as much violence as is needed in order to avoid another 9/11 at home. The rhetoric defining America’s aim has shifted from the need to develop backward societies. Now, efforts are focused on demolishing conjured enemies and protecting the “homeland,” whatever the cost to peoples in the Islamic world. Little attention is given to the quite clear evidence that precisely such military efforts have been a major stimulus for the violent antipathies to the West that are a tremendous recruitment advantage for extremist groups. To make matters worse, the War on Terror has become extremely profitable for a whole complex of interests, centered on powerful corporations whose profits have come to depend on war, as well as the army of contractors and security consultants who circle around them. The complex is awash with taxpayer dollars. In the West, the old centers for development and modernization now take a back seat to a new wave of institutes for terror and security studies at some of the West’s most prestigious universities. When the corporate media look for experts to explain events in the Islamic world, they turn overwhelmingly to the terror and security specialists, who themselves are a part of the ever-expanding complex that profits from the War on Terror.

The Most Important Story from Islamic Lands

During all the decades of my life in Cairo, hardly a day has gone by without front-page coverage of two or three events, usually violent, in the Islamic world by the major global news outlets. American family, friends, and students repeatedly have commented on what a fascinating time it must be to live and work in the Middle East, referencing the latest disaster, upheaval, or war. They are responding less to what is happening in the Islamic world and more to the way it is imagined in the West. In fact, the most important story in the Arab Islamic world today makes no impression at all.

From my vantage point in Cairo, where I first settled into a personal and professional home some forty years ago, I would tell that epochal story something like this. Ordinary people throughout the region are struggling resolutely every day with whatever means available to them to create better lives for themselves and their children. They actively yearn for more just economic and political systems for their sons and daughters. They dream of making a decent and honest living that provides food, shelter, health, and education for their families. They seek to create just societies grounded in Islamic values and higher purposes but also more connected to the larger world, more secure, and with greater freedom and more justly shared prosperity. As the Lebanese journalist Rami al Khouri has pointed out, this is the “big story” yet to be told.²³

Circumstances of domestic tyranny and foreign invasions frame these everyday struggles and give them a truly remarkable character. In many parts of the Arab Islamic world, peoples are subject to the tyranny of authoritarian rulers, extremist terror, and periodic violent interventions from the West. The struggles for ordinary lives are waged under these quite extraordinary conditions. It is these exceptional circumstances, and not the very human dreams themselves, that make the lives of the peoples of the Islamic world seem so different. Perfectly understandable battles for normalcy foster resistance, including the forceful resistance that so many in the West find impossible to fathom. In these struggles there is little room for nonviolence. There is no constitution or even shared values to appeal to, as the occupiers, the extremists, and the local despots routinely ignore international human rights law and universal moral codes. Dreams of a normal life are all too often framed by crippling oppression and the constant threat of violence. It makes little sense to fault Arab citizens and the movements they support for the dualities of their commitments. They act at once to fulfill everyday dreams for themselves and their families, while at the same time supporting, when they can, resistance to local tyrants, violent extremists, and foreign occupiers, using force as circumstances require.

Nevertheless, these terrible complications do not mean that the shortcomings of Islamic resistance movements should be overlooked. The human rights violations by both Hizbullah and Hamas have been fulsomely documented by the most respected regional and international human rights organizations.²⁴ So, too, have the at times horrific violations by the Israeli and American occupation forces. The right of resistance, legitimated by international law, does not guarantee that the forms resistance takes will themselves always be legitimate. Those disadvantaged by a power imbalance often engage themselves in brutalities. They should not be rationalized away. Clearly, there have been excesses, at times criminal, by both Hamas and Hizbullah. The more recent decision of Hassan Nasrallah to send Hizbullah fighters into Syria to help defend the murderous Assad regime has brought all such criticisms to a new level. Definitive evaluative judgments, however, remain difficult. Clearly, the Western opposition to Bashar Assad has far less to do with the tyrannical nature of his rule and more to do with this unwillingness to comply with Western demands. A factor, too, is the Western desire to “end” yet another recalcitrant Arab state. Still, Hizbullah fighters battling to save a corrupt and tyrannical minority regime tarnish the cause of resistance that Hizbullah had come to embody. Yet, for all of these failings, both Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine have played historic roles as legitimate movements of national resistance, however their adversaries seek to label them.

These unlikely and unforeseen resistance movements, and the support they have won from ordinary people, have contributed to making Muslims once again independent players in world history. Unequal contests against local tyrants and foreign invaders have become part of the meaning of the Islamic Renewal, although they are by no means the heart of it. Its core lies elsewhere. The historic rethinking of Islam that has been under way since the early 1970s deserves greater weight and will have a longer-term impact on Dar al Islam. While resistance is part of the Awakening, its essence is rather renewal. The serious work to renew Islam and reform Islamic thinking and practices aims to shape the expanded role that Islam will play in the years to come of the twenty-first century, as the Islamic body continues to grow. Resistance movements of Islamic inspiration against occupation are a source of well-deserved pride throughout Islamic lands. Yet the advancement of the centrist agenda of reform and renewal of the heritage as a resource to address the challenges of the global has a still greater historic importance. The calculated exaggeration of the bloody work of the extremists obscures a very important truth for our time. The overwhelming majority of the world’s immense Muslim community has rejected the extremist ideology. The heart of Islam remains with the center.

The distinctive neoconservative tactical vision that drove the disastrous assertions of the Bush version of imperial America is now in ruins. However, it is crucial to remember that it represented simply an extremist variant of the underlying drive for full-spectrum dominance already in place as the Cold War got under way. These continuities explain the ease with which a president committed to ending wars could find himself in the fall of 2014 engaging America in yet another war in an Iraqi theater, now expanded to Syria.

By not looking back, America learned little from the disaster in Iraq. It is simply untrue that there were no signs that the invasion of Iraq would have horrific consequences, and not just for Iraqis. Nor is the assertion that we should have known better an instance of Monday-morning quarterbacking, although I must add that I have never quite understood this phrase as a way of blocking the criticism of misguided strategies. It has been my good fortune over the years to have professional coaches with world-class standing as close friends. I know from them that good coaches, even when they win, spend hours endlessly watching clips of the last game or match to understand mistakes made, even when those mistakes did not cost them the game. When they lose, the clips just don’t stop—and well past Monday morning. It is self-serving claptrap when elite policymakers and pundits whine that in the buildup to war “we were all fooled.” Demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the criminal invasion before it took place were not fooled.

Islam and the Alchemy of Resistance

The overwhelming military strength and technological advantage of the United States and Israel have not translated into unchallenged dominance of Islamic lands. Battles for dominance are regularly won, but not the war. That simple fact is the source of endless frustration for both Israeli and American planners. It also prompts an irrational commitment to the mindless repetition of failed policies. Strategic planners appear to reason that one more bout of repression or one more war will finally make the difference.

The Lebanese succeeded in expelling the Israeli army after an eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon. The Palestinians, in the face of the stunning brutalities of the American-armed Israeli army, continue their refusal to accept the status of a defeated people. They are occupied, but they are not defeated in spirit. Postinvasion Iraq could not be as easily molded and reshaped as American planners imagined. There is a strange alchemy at work in these anomalous outcomes. Islam translates the evident weaknesses of Muslims into the surprising and formidable strengths of Islamic resistance. How does this happen? The simple answer is the power of Islamic identity. It is a power enhanced by the spiritual awakening of al Tagdid al Islami. It is expressed in a resilience that cannot be defeated by military means.

At just this point, Western scholarship averts its eyes. Islam is always a proximate and never an ultimate explanation for Western analysts. Neo-conservative theorists of Islam, for example, argue that the forces that drive Islamic movements are rage and envy. Islamic movements in their view are purely reactive. The reactions always come in instinctual and nonthinking ways. The liberal midstream of Western opinion agrees, although the rise of what is called Islamism is attributed to uneven development, the disruptions of oil wealth, or simple poverty. Islamic movements are always understood in terms of some other more fundamental driver; Islam itself is never the prime mover.

Midstream Islamic scholars of the global order and its impact on the Middle East, in sharp contrast, place Islam itself at the center of their analyses. In their view, no event or movement in the Islamic world can possibly be understood without careful attention to the ways it reflects larger, inherited patterns of Islamic thought and action. Understandably, perhaps, Western scholars turn to Western social theory that is presumed to be secular and to have universal application. To explain the surprising resilience and strength of Islamic movements, most now lean heavily on the flourishing literature on social movements to make sense of these developments. They most often miss the very simple fact, clear to Islamic historians and social theorists, that resistance is best understood as part of a far more expansive and durable historical pattern whereby the ummah as a whole defends itself. In Dar al Islam such resistance to external intrusions is always tied to more fundamental internal efforts to rethink the heritage for new times and places. Resistance is part of the larger patterns of adaptation and absorption that have served the survival of the Islamic ummah through the centuries.

The Power of Islamic Identity in the Global Age

Islam has thrived in the new conditions of the post–Cold War period. This remarkable adaptation belies the persistent myth of Islam as “stubbornly resistant to change, except on its own terms.”²⁵ Even an incisive critic of U.S. imperial policies in the Islamic world, such as Andrew Bacevich, cannot shake this all-pervasive stereotype. Neither the assertion nor even the qualification is accurate. In fact, since the late eighteenth century Islam has undergone four successive waves of sweeping reform.²⁶ It has been in a constant state of change, often adopting ideas, concepts, and useful terms for understanding the world from others, always adapting them with great flexibility to its own environment and its own needs.

Both Israelis and Americans have, on occasion, made the painful discovery that Islam is not a force to be lightly dismissed. The power that flows from Islamic Renewal cannot be measured in the standard ways, they have learned. Nor is that power irrevocably linked to any particular individual, movement, organization, or state, although the Islamic midstream represents its deepest reservoir of strength. When assaulted, Islam is unpredictable in both locus and timing for riposte. When and where the Islamic response will come cannot easily be anticipated.

Islamic theorists explain Islam in the world as a living, rather than mechanical, entity. As a living organism, Islam has a remarkable capacity for self-organization, even in the absence of clear leadership or even a stable hierarchy. Islam has the capacity to take on extraordinarily variable forms. Yet, for all the variety of its colors, it remains recognizably Islam. Variable forms emerge from inventive adaptations to very different and changing circumstances that include domestic authoritarianism hostile to Islam, foreign occupation, and the special challenges of minority status in Western, Chinese, or Indian societies. Yet the imprint of these diverse circumstances never eclipses the Islamic character of what emerges. Islam reacts to but remains apart for all such environments to preserve the essentials of its own distinctive identity.

Islamic scholars see little that is new in these contemporary patterns of effective resistance. The 1,400-year history of Islam, as interpreted by midstream Islamic thinkers, demonstrates precisely these modalities of adaptation and absorption that, strangely, in no way diminish authenticity. Islam acts as a living organism to make sure, whatever the environment, that its essential needs are met. Only the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and a community are necessary to sustain Islam in any setting, no matter how hostile. As self-generated entities, Islamic communities always take on distinct colorations that blend into their environment. Islamic communities are self-generated and self-organized. Therefore, they inevitably have different features. All such communities consider themselves and are considered by others as part of the Islamic ummah. Struck in one place, Islam may well respond in another, physically quite far from the initial assault. The inability to predict where the response will come makes it all the more efficacious. Flexible timing adds to this advantage. The response may not be immediate, but there will be a response.

To explain these strengths, Western analysts have been reluctant to look at Islam itself. Avoidance of attention to Islam itself takes several forms. Some seek to read the character of a movement from the environment in which it arises. Others focus on the nature of the struggles in which the group engages. Both strategies fail. There is always an excess of meaning that transcends the environment and the struggles. Only Islam itself can explain that meaning.

Understanding of the Islamic world requires the study of Islam. The starting point for such understanding is always the Islamic midstream. Extremism commands the lion’s share of attention. Yet the simple reality is that it is the vital and living forms of Islam, inspired by the midstream, that have already reshaped the Islamic world in essential dimensions. By focusing on the extremists on the margins, the West has missed the momentous success that the midstream has registered in restricting Islamic extremism to the margins of the life of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. The various extremist ideologies have not captured the vast majority of Muslims. Islam’s 1,400-year history reveals a consistent pattern of the triumph of centrism. Through the centuries, when extremist movements are not supported by outside forces and manipulated as agents, they are in the end reabsorbed into the mainstream. Outside support can only delay the enactment of that historical pattern that has always defeated extremism.

The alternative of military means used against Islamic extremists by outside powers simply does not work. Not even the unmatched power of the world’s sole superpower, recklessly and brutally deployed under the last two American administrations, has succeeded in defeating extremism. The effect of the wars, particularly the wars against Iraq, has been the exact opposite: The more deeply American power is drawn into the contest, the more extremism flourishes. Islam of the center is really the only antidote to Islamic extremism.

By not paying attention to the Islamic Renewal and to Islam’s epoch story for our own time, we deny ourselves the opportunity to make better sense of the one Islam and the many worlds of Muslims. We also lose potential partners in the Islamic world. We cannot create them. We can, however, recognize them. We have consistently failed to do so, even when clear and explicit overtures are made, as in the case earlier of Iran under President Mohammad Khatami. The current opening under President Hassan Rouhani remains on hold. Our record, rather than the Iranian record, is not encouraging. To the limited degree that we have faced our own most recent failings, the focus has been on the shortfalls of the military and the intelligence efforts in the context of inept, ideologically driven political leadership.²⁷ These are all important beginnings. Yet it seems deeply regrettable that so little attention has been paid to the colossal intellectual failure to develop a reasonable understanding of Islam and the Islamic world that might actually guide our broad policy toward the world’s Muslims.

The Myth of the Moderates

The president’s denial notwithstanding, America is quite clearly “an interested empire.” Our interests, above all oil and Israel, draw us deeply into developments in the Islamic world in the most damaging ways. The United States has shown pernicious skill in developing ways of looking at the Islamic world that allow us to escape from any responsibility for our actions, through either demonizing Muslims or morphing them into incomplete copies of ourselves. These efforts have had painful consequences for the Islamic world and for America as well. Fears of Islamic terrorism channel American passions into the drive for cruel and unfeeling wars. It cannot be that hard to understand that the American destruction of Iraq, bombing cities, killing civilians by the uncounted hundreds of thousands, and failing to prevent the theft of its cultural treasures, has convinced ordinary people in the Islamic world that no place in Dar al Islam is safe from American self-righteous and always self-interested anger.

Endlessly, the United States searches for mythic Islamic “moderates” as local partners for the interested transformations it seeks to engineer.²⁸ Dialogues quickly become invidious indictments of putative moderates who inevitably fail to live up to the images we conjure for them. The efforts to “train” local partners really aim to remake them in the Western image. For the most part, such efforts fail miserably. Even when some success is registered, such clones of ourselves will be at best marginal in their own societies. They will be simply counterfeits, suitable only for the role of agents of a foreign power.

The greatest damage of such approaches to the question of Islam and the West is the way they steer us away from a critical look at what has gone wrong with our own policies. The evils of our adversaries overwhelm any impulse to self-reflection and criticism of American policies. Even more damaging is the way that both approaches blind us to the existence of genuine, autonomous Islamic centrists with whom we do share some important commitments, such as democracy and development, even though they may well consistently oppose American interventions and blind support for any and all Israeli policies. Such independent figures, when viewed realistically, do represent potential partners for joint projects of mutual interest.

The United States has only very rarely shown the maturity that such an orientation would require. Astonishingly, the calamities of the Bush and Obama years have not provoked massive inquiries, robust congressional hearings, painful Truth and Reconciliation commissions as to just how we got so much wrong in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond in Dar al Islam. Bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed a state. It also created an environment in which an estimated $11.7 billion in assistance could go missing, presumably to myriad forms of corruption and not all of it Iraqi. The U.S. destruction of the Iraqi state created a fertile field for a plethora of extremist groups, and not just ISIS. One would also expect some consideration of reparation for the damage done, massive assistance, and, at a minimum, recognition of the war crimes committed. Ordinary people in the West are ready to face these terrible realities of what America has done, although the political elite and their publicists in the media are not.

Everyday citizens have already registered their realism about the workings of empire. Millions of Americans and others around the world recognized that the unprovoked war on Iraq was a supreme war crime. They were unmoved by Colin Powell’s charade at the United Nations in presenting the “evidence” for Saddam’s link to al Qaeda terrorism and possession of weapons of mass destruction. They understood that they were being asked to pay for oil with the blood of their sons and daughters. They understood that those calling for war were bent on renting the children of the poor to do the dirty work and suffer the appalling wounds of war for those who made fortunes off the endless wars. They knew that war is never a cakewalk and that there would be neither flowers nor jobs nor even adequate health care for the returning troops.

When confidence in America and the West more generally falters, we should not forget that the world had never seen anything like it. America is not monolithic. Massive antiwar protests took place in Western capitals before the war was launched. In the end, ordinary citizens could not restrain an imperial president, an outsized American military machine, and a compliant “coalition of the willing.” Still, a great debt is owed to those millions of demonstrators for reminding the world that not all Westerners, not all Americans, are “warriors” and that, for many ordinary citizens, America still represents more than a besieged “homeland.” Neither the American punditry nor the political class has yet to express its gratitude for that message of truth from the demonstrators. Prominent Islamic intellectuals of the center have.²⁹

Despite the Soviet-style embedding of journalists with the American military and the deadening hand of the corporate news conglomerates, enough investigative journalism and real scholarship have been produced that we can now prove a good deal of what ordinary people in the West already knew. The American public was, indeed, systematically lied to in the buildup to the war of choice against Iraq. The arrogant architects of that catastrophe had no grasp of the realities of the world into which they recklessly plunged. Such ignorance of the powerful is no small matter. Clearly, the United States failed in the most flagrant ways to understand the Islamic world into which America blundered with such deadly violence. Yet there has been no radical rethinking of the underlying causes for our massive failings.

In summer of 2015 the American airwaves were flooded by the usual security and military analysts with their instant analyses of the fresh and always dire threats from Islamic extremists. It is always all about them and never about American and Western policies. Instead of a consideration of why American policies went so tragically wrong in the Islamic world, the United States has simply increased our “special ops” military budget, launched planning and weapons development programs for the new wars of counter-insurgency, ordered more weapons, and hired more consultants. Endless wars remain on the horizon. They will continue to target Islamic lands. We dare not look at Iraq in the rearview mirror. It is hard to see how things will turn out differently.

Humanistic Scholarship and the Promise of Cooperation

We can do better in both understanding and policies, although national political institutions have shown themselves to be incapable of generating any such new understanding and new ways of relating to the Islamic world.³⁰ It is time for the progressive movements that animate civil society and have been responsible for the most important democratic advances America has achieved to make the intellectual, moral, and political effort themselves to rethink America’s global role. Particular attention must be paid to the Islamic world, for it is there that our actions have done the greatest damage, both to others and to ourselves. Our returning troops and their families are shell-shocked by what they have seen and what they have done. Antiseptic, clinical terminology for what they have suffered only increases the harm. The only reasonable name for their “stress” is war. From the psychological wounds of war, there is no easy path to normalcy. America needs to face the reality that we sent them to war on a long train of secrets and lies. We sent them into a reality we did not bother to understand. In doing so, we did intolerable damage in the world. We did great damage to ourselves as well.

The fully developed intellectual and human resources for such a reorientation are not yet at hand. Empires inevitably generate some version of “the white man’s burden.” They also inevitably conjure up some horrific threat to the homeland, emanating from the irrational “natives.” There is no other way to understand the 24/7 hyping of the threat of ISIS. The combination of an appeal to high principle and fear is designed to bring home populations into line. It justifies the terrible violence, for the most part against civilians, empires use to achieve their ends. Yet, just as inevitably, empires also create waves of domestic critics. The rate of their appearance increases as losses in treasure and lives mount. Eventually, imperial overreach is understood to be the real threat to the nation, and opposition to war takes root first in nationalist soil. Invariably, however, there are also some from imperial capitals who see further. They come to recognize a common human interest in resistance to imperial and colonial expansions and the terrible material and human toll they take.

Such individuals and groups have succeeded in making themselves a presence in the West. They are open, in theory at least, to cooperation in resistance to empire and in common projects to build a somewhat more just world. Recent years, despite the failures to restrain imperial and colonial policies, have seen precisely such developments. There have been important beginnings in the United States and Israel. At the same time, in Islamic lands under assault, there have appeared individuals and groups who recognize that, while empire and colonization must be resisted, there are potential allies for those resistance struggles within the imperial and colonial centers. Not all Americans support endless war-making; not all Israelis support colonization of Palestinian lands. Possibilities of joint effort are less distant than they might appear.

Humanistic scholarship must aim to document these unlikely developments and to provide the knowledge base to help turn them into cooperative, activist efforts in the human interest. The creation of a body of positive, humanistic learning that can underwrite principled acts of cooperation across the separating walls that imperialism and colonialism build has hardly begun. A critical dimension of the work ahead is seeing more clearly how existing transnational movements that seek to transcend narrow nationalisms can find common ground and cooperative projects on behalf of a more just world system. The massive antiwar movements in the West represent one such resource. The Wassatteyya in the Islamic world is another. The growing number of critics within Israel and in Jewish diaspora communities of occupation is yet another. Anti-imperial and anticolonial commitments, often at variance with the diverse national settings out of which they each grow, are shared. At the same time, they confront critical differences, notably on social and cultural issues. Progressives in the West find Islamic notions of the unity of politics and faith difficult to fathom, although the midstream Islamic view of such matters is not nearly as far from progressive Western understandings as many imagine. Western humanists are also troubled by questions of the role of women and minorities in Islamic lands, although they recognize that much work remains to be done in the West on precisely these issues. What they often do not know is that Islamic centrist scholars have made important advances on Islamic ground on behalf of precisely these questions. For their part, Islamic intellectuals find rampant consumerism, and excesses of sexual freedom at variance with their convictions. Jewish activists confront nagging fears that somehow their criticisms of Israeli state policies may foster anti-Semitism. More damaging still to genuine cooperation is a generalized Western cultural arrogance that refuses to believe that advancements on issues in the human interest can be made on Islamic ground. Difficulties on both sides are compounded by the lack of a refined understanding of the respective positions on all sides of the prospective partnerships, as well as a limited understanding of the forgiving sophistication of their own traditions.

These barriers are not insurmountable. Not all differences have to be leveled; some can simply be dealt with at another time. What is needed is a pragmatic openness to cooperation on issues where the possibility of cooperation is real. There can then be agreement to simply set other contentious matters aside in the interest of what can be accomplished. Activists for global peace and justice have for many years cooperated with diverse groups across the globe on specific campaigns for social progress and against war, while fully aware that principled differences would almost certainly preclude joint action in other arenas. Midstream Islamic movements have a parallel tradition of overcoming conflicts on secondary matters while cooperating on primary issues. Centrist Islamic intellectuals have developed a sophisticated fiqh of priorities, which allows them to pay less attention to divisive and less important matters in the interest of the advancement of such large questions as spiritual renewal, peace, and social justice. If anything, the midstream Islamic moral universe has a far more highly developed notion of the importance of tolerating difference.

At times such possibilities of mutual understanding and cooperation flash before us. Yusuf al Qaradawi created one such moment when he addressed his audience of shaikhs, callers to Islam, and the massive Muslim publics that respond to his words. Qaradawi said not only that he rejected the unjust and illegitimate war of aggression against Iraq but that he did so with the recognition that millions of protestors on the streets of European and American capitals called for the same. He signaled that they deserved appreciative recognition.³¹ To underwrite such possibilities, only dimly glimpsed and almost never acted on, there is serious work ahead for that treasured tradition of humanistic scholarship to which both Islamic and Western civilization have contributed.

God at the Beginning and al Nas at the End

The Holy Qur’an begins with God and ends with al Nas. The first verse of the first surah opens: “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.”³² God in that verse is spoken of as “the Cherisher” of al Nas. The last surah of the Qur’an, entitled al Nas, completes its final verse with the word “al Nas.” The very last word in the Qur’an invokes the common people, just as the first invokes God.

The Islamic midstream knows that God did not bring Islam to the world to serve as a cloak for criminal extremism. Nor do midstream Islamic intellectuals and activists accept the notion that Islam should serve as an adornment for powerful royal families, the wealthy, or absolute rulers. Only by radical distortion can Islam be used to enhance the power of regimes or opposition forces that seek aggrandizement by draping themselves in the externalities of religion. Islam is not destined by God to serve authoritarian rulers or amirs who pronounce themselves the infallible interpreters of the Message and founders of a new caliphate. Islam is no plaything of empire, to be distorted and manipulated. Nor is it meant to be an adjunct for states that declare themselves the guardians of the faith. Islam has no need of such garrisons that in the end always turn their weapons against al Nas. It is to the people, ordinary people, that Islam is addressed, very clearly including the wretched of the Earth. Islam belongs to them. In Islam, the very poorest and the most vulnerable find refuge. Islam gives them not only dignity and comfort but also the opportunity to earn a place among the righteous.

Surely, Muhammad al Ghazzali was right to declare in book after book and sermon after sermon that those bent on capturing Islam for their own purposes, whether of power, wealth, or status, defile the faith and make Islam itself an orphan in the lands of Dar al Islam they dominate. Muslims who today willingly cooperate with tyrants, empire, and criminal extremists give Islam’s message a hollow ring. They gain only false identities and shallow values. As to the imperial American project for the Islamic world, with its total disregard for the needs of ordinary people in Islamic lands, it is enough to note that those with knowledge of Islam and the lands where it flourishes agree that today American influence stands at an all-time nadir. Those who manipulate and exploit Islam fall from grace. Tyrants are under siege. The empire weakens. The overwhelming majority of Muslims abhors and rejects the extremists. Islam itself continues to rise.

There is a startling simplicity to that which Islam asks of true believers. In a beautiful and greatly loved surah, God explains that the essence of righteousness has to do with more than the ritual practices of the faith, such as the body movements followed in prayer, more than the public display of religiosity. God placed “righteousness” within the reach of very ordinary people in their everyday lives, but they must not only believe but act to do good deeds in the world:

It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces Towards East or West; but it is righteousness to believe in God and the Last Day, and the Angels, and the Book, and the Messengers; to spend of your substance, out of love for Him, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in prayer, and practice regular zakat; to fulfil the contracts which ye have made; and to be firm and patient, in pain (or suffering) and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of truth, the God-fearing.³³

The promise of righteousness is the opportunity for al Nas to live a good life in consciousness of God. Al Nas in the Qur’an refers to all people, not just to Muslims. The promise of righteousness is a promise within reach for all humanity.