3

Guidance from the Center

Of those We have created are those

Who guide in truth and justice.

QUR’AN 7:181

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON Goethe warned that “the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.”¹ For four decades, al Tagdid al Islami (the Islamic Renewal) has fostered reform and renewal in Islamic communities across the globe, while supporting legitimate resistance. Yet its presence has barely registered in Western commentary. When we fail to see things right in front of our eyes, we are generally either looking at something else or simply do not have adequate ways of making sense of what stands before us. Both failings are at work with the Islamic Renewal. Apprehensively scanning the horizon for the threatening “political Islam” of movements, parties, and charismatic personalities, we look right through Islam itself. Yet Islam cannot be reduced to its political dimensions. There is politics. There is politicization of Islam. But there is no political Islam. There is just Islam itself.

The unhelpful focus on “political Islam” is only part of the story. The inability to see centrist Islam, with its distinctive understanding of deep spirituality and Islamic civilizational identity, as the heart of the Renewal represents, an intellectual failure. However, to reduce the problem to misperceptions or even the systemic distortions of an inherited Orientalist discourse underestimates the analytical challenge. Scholarship along these lines has made important contributions. Such work explains a great deal about how the West views the Islamic world that is important and especially relevant to Western policy considerations.² However, it tells us far less about Islam. Islam itself is quite simply not the main subject of such studies.

Islam has a comprehensive character that is knowable ultimately only from the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet and never transparently so. The Qur’an speaks clearly of Muslims as people of the center, an “ummah, justly centered and a witness over the nations.”³ To bring Islam into view, the focus must be on the midstream rather than the margins. The challenge is compounded by two factors. The first arises from the complexity of contemporary midstream Islam, now more fully articulated in the logic of what Manuel Castells has usefully called “the network society.”⁴ The second factor is the exhaustion of critical resources able to assess the innovative character of the network structures of the Islamic midstream. Those networks connect the oases of reform and resistance from which the Islamic Renewal has emerged. The philosopher Mark Taylor has aptly labeled this theoretical deficit a “critical emergency.”⁵ These two barriers to understanding the contemporary evolution of Islam are rarely considered in tandem. They should be.

The Islamic Renewal as Complex Cultural System

Complex systems, like the networks that constitute the Islamic Renewal as a cultural system, have their prototype in the dispersed mode of production and distribution of the global economy. The new structures are enabled by the technologies of the Information Revolution. Such systems are emergent and self-organizing. They have horizontal structures that interact so intensely with their environments that they are difficult to recognize as distinct from it. Not all such systems are economic. They are cultural as well. Midstream Islam today articulates itself in precisely this way. Such systems are usefully thought of as “difficult wholes.” They are “difficult” in the sense that as complex composites of disparate parts they are not easily seen as constituents of a larger whole. The dispersed points of origin and the very different character of the heralds of al Tagdid al Islami, and of the mass followings they generated, have consistently made it difficult to grasp the interconnected character of the Renewal as a cultural system of this kind. The extreme cultural diversity of Muslims compounds the issue. You have an interconnected Islamic Renewal with a common Islamic thread, coming in strikingly different cultural colors.

Systems such as the Islamic Renewal that take on these complex forms typically arise from circumstances of disruption when old structures have been hollowed out and come close to collapse. Such was the case with inherited Islamic structures, battered by imperial intrusions and secular attacks. In such challenging circumstances, such systems make collective action possible without fixed, hierarchical means. Their forms are always in process, rather than fully shaped. They are constantly remaking themselves to respond to new conditions and new demands.⁶ Their suppleness makes it virtually impossible for such systems to function as a means of containment and repression. They are simply too flexible and yielding for such purposes.

Complex adaptive systems belie the fears that have driven and ultimately paralyzed the most promising recent social and cultural criticism, such as Derrida’s deconstruction, Foucault’s social constructivism, and Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. Each of these innovative perspectives advanced the project of critical theory. They each sought to reveal the totalizing effects of all systems. Each left a direct imprint on Islamic studies. Each also contributed to the current theoretical impasse. They did so essentially for the same reason. These postmodern approaches are all reactions to a dominant and repressive system. The bipolar world system of the Cold War represented precisely such a system and fostered ways of thinking and cultural forms that took such an underlying system for granted. Postmodern thought seemed to capture key aspects of reality precisely because the theories mirrored the bipolar confrontations of the hierarchical world system. Critiques of that hegemonic world, despite their important differences, all shared a consuming opposition to the “system.” It made little difference if the system presented itself as American corporate capitalism, Soviet state capitalism, or postcolonial kleptocracies in the Islamic world. Ironically, the interest in freedom behind this visceral antipathy to these repressive formations produced a new dogmatism that endlessly generated the very same condemnation of the totalitarian character of all systems.

Yet, at precisely the moment when these despairing approaches were capturing the liveliest minds, the Information Revolution and the global market it enabled generated transformations that gave the lie to the essential premise of these reigning theories of cultural criticism. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the bipolar configuration of the world order. Old hierarchical structures yielded to new horizontal network structures that roamed across the globe, organizing themselves in entirely new ways. Theorizations of complex horizontal systems emerged as a central intellectual task to make sense of these new formations.

The relevance of this shift to the study of contemporary Islam has registered only slowly in the West. Clusters of theorists outside midstream currents, notably complexity theorists, began to argue bluntly that it is simply wrong to conclude that all systems and structures totalize and repress. In the self-organizing network structures that were transforming human social life could be found precisely those nontotalizing systems judged to be impossible. Applied work in complexity studies suggested that such systems were not merely theoretically conceivable. From the right angle of vision, they could be recognized as already operative in contemporary networks.

The examples of the new forms included cultural networks such as those of the Islamic midstream that guides the Islamic Renewal.⁷ Such complex, adaptive systems rest on flexible foundations—that is, they have foundations that move. These systems regularly assume the character of difficult wholes. What was not noticed in the work of complexity theorists was that Islamic civilization from its very earliest history had found its most suitable incarnation in flexible networks of this kind. Without a theoretical grasp of the nature of such systems, not only the Islamic Renewal but Islam itself remained largely unseen.

Islamic intellectuals did not share this dilemma. Our “critical emergency” was not theirs. They had developed a perfectly adequate understanding of the wellsprings and character of the Islamic Renewal as a flexible network. Unfortunately, their scholarship is largely unknown in the West. Their starting point is the work of interpretation of Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. Fixed texts are interpreted in flexible ways. Relying on an organic descriptive vocabulary and concepts drawn from the Islamic heritage, important Islamic theorists developed an approach well suited to characterizing midstream Islam as a complex system. They focused on centrist Islam as the outcome of an adaptive interpretive project. That project was at once responsive to the timeless truths of the Qur’an and to the concurrent demands to give meaning to those truths in exceptionally diverse environments and times. They understood that linkages between such dispersed communities of interpretation would be horizontal rather than hierarchical, given the absence of overarching political structures in the Islamic world. Unifying political and economic linkages had proven elusive for Dar al Islam (the Islamic world). Yet Islamic intellectuals were confident that the flexible unities of culture and civilization remained and could be strengthened in organic, nonrepressive ways.

Islamic midstream intellectuals are quite aware of the new trends in Western thought. They are broadly familiar, for example, with works that draw on complexity theory to understand globalization.⁸ It is not difficult to imagine their reaction to such explanatory frameworks. It is suggested in the scant attention they give them. There is a well-known historical parallel. Khedive Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), the founder of modern Egypt, is reported to have heard promising things about Machiavelli’s advice to Italian princes. Illiterate until age forty-five, he nevertheless regularly had books read to him at a pace of ten pages a night until he finished them. He never made it to the end of The Prince. Muhammad Ali concluded that the Italian thinker had little to say on power manipulations in the service of rule that he did not already know.⁹ It is almost certain that Islamic thinkers would have much the same reaction to a full-blown exposition of the work of complexity theorists. Complexity theory argues for an emphasis on the organic versus the mechanical. It emphasizes the advantages of horizontal and networked structures versus hierarchies and grids. It argues that complex adaptive systems represent those most suited to global conditions. Islamic intellectuals have a long-term familiarity with all of these ideas. They developed them independently out of their Islamic heritage, embraced them fully, and incorporated them into their understanding of Islam in God’s world.

A larger conclusion suggests itself. The unexpected success of the Islamic Renewal may well have a great deal to do with the aptness of these inherited ways of thinking and the kinds of structures they generate to the new conditions of the global age. This insight raises new and different questions: What are Islam’s prospects in a global age, given its inherited civilizational advantages? What can be learned from the experiments of Islamic intellectuals in drawing on their inherited tradition to project a transformative project identity in the face of the forces of globalization? What does the work of the New Islamic intellectuals tell us about the capacities of the new network structures that complex adaptive Islamic systems are now generating? Developments in the Islamic world, rather than confirming the soundness of past Western pathways, might just open new possibilities for organizing human communities of the future in a new era of accelerated change.

Islamic Renewal in a Global Age

It is no accident that the great successes of the Islamic Renewal began to register in the early 1970s, precisely the time of the dawning of the global age. Scholars of Islamic history, like the geographer Gamal Hamdan (1928–1993) and the contemporary historian Tareq al Bishri, have little to learn from complexity theory. In fact, their theoretical understandings of Islam have a great deal to teach, if the West were interested in learning. Bishri has produced deep historical studies that rely consistently on an organic image of Islam that has profoundly influenced my own thinking. Bishri does not consider Islam mechanistically as an isolate, a separate variable acting on other equally distinct factors and closed onto itself. Rather, Bishri sees Islam as a living organism. He explains the way it interacts with rather than acts on its diverse environments.¹⁰

Organic imagery is concretized in a variety of ways by Islamic intellectuals. A particularly insightful elaboration comes from Hamdan. He compares Islam to a coral reef. Coral is a living creature. Classified by scientists as an animal, coral assumes a wondrous variety of forms, some rigid and rocklike, others supple and vegetative. Coral does not live as an individual. It always establishes itself as a part of a complex colony of interconnected individuals that cooperate in ingenious ways to secure food for constituent elements, often vast in number. Coral also takes on a variety of splendid colors, thanks to the algae it ingests. That variety mimics the diverse forms of Islamic community. Like such communities, coral adapts to very different oceanic environments. It also shapes its marine settings in quite remarkable ways. Coral generally grows by extension. The extensions have a horizontal character that create living linkages among the interacting colonies as the coral procreate, increase in density, and populate new territories. Coral also expands when small buds, known as polyps, break off and establish themselves as the core of a new colony in a more distant setting. Coral may also fragment, with each of the pieces establishing itself as an independent colony.

In all such characteristics of coral, Hamdan sees mirrored essential features of Islam itself as a cultural system. To intellectuals with an Islamic formation, these organic parallels are so striking and so obvious that they require only the briefest commentary. They regularly use organic images like the coral reef to explain the ways that Islamic communities function. Islam lays strong communal foundations, yet those foundations move and adjust to very different settings, much as living coral would. Islam may take shape as a product of highly rational, legalistic thought and institutional processes that have a very solid, at times even rigid character. Such structures, like the great schools of fiqh (Islamic legal reasoning, based on interpretation of Qur’an and Sunnah) and the grand mosques that house them, endure through the ages much like the great coral barriers. Yet Islam also assumes ethereal and highly spiritual forms, suggested by those corals that take the plantlike forms of fronds, moving seductively in ocean waters. Sufi Islam has these very same characteristics. Throughout the history of the Islamic community (ummah), segments of the community have broken off, acquiring distinct characteristics while preserving certain essentials of an Islamic character. Shi’i Islam was the most notable of these diversifications. They include as well an enriching variety of small, break-off communities of both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims that acquire distinctive features that make them no less Islamic entities.

The core achievements of the Islamic Renewal all flow from the character of Islam as a living organism. Underground oases of reform and resistance fed al Tagdid al Islami. Dispersed heralds of the Renewal won support in their separate contexts for the Renewal. These pioneering figures differed greatly in character and the challenges they faced. Yet all were nurtured by the river of Islam. Their efforts advanced the Renewal across Dar al Islam. They did so without an overarching institutional structure or a unified leadership structure. Their coalescence was neither forced nor backed by power. Yet the collective work of the heralds of the Renewal flowed together in a great fourth surge of renewal and reform. They shared the centrist commitment to rethink Islam and to engage the modern world constructively in its new terms. Following the Qur’an, Islamic intellectuals who sought an understanding of contemporary Islam adequate to provide tarshid (guidance) to the ummah insistently looked to the center rather than the margins.

The aim here is to characterize the ways in which centrist intellectuals and activists have succeeded in providing guidance for the Islamic Renewal across Dar al Islam. The effort to do so will draw on the two alternative vocabularies that the analysis thus far has brought into view. The first is the Islamic vocabulary that originates with the work of centrist Islamic scholars. The second derives from Western efforts to theorize, notably by complexity theorists, the impact on human societies of the Information Revolution that reshaped the international order in the post–Cold War era. The parallels between the two vocabularies are hard to miss. They complement each other in useful ways.

The organic conceptions of the Islamic intellectual tradition deploy a mind–body analogy to capture the nature of leadership and followership in Islamic communities. The mind is understood as a collective one that enables coordination without coercion. The New Islamic thinkers understand their own scholarship as part of the workings of the collective mind of the Renewal. They welcome the tremendous growth in the last quarter of the twentieth century of the Islamic body. However, they understand as well the dangers of rapid expansion. They explain that a robust and growing body, without a mind that has also increased its capacity, lacks balance. At the same time, a mind detached from the energies of a strong collective body may well create elegant and sophisticated visions. However, if the mind remains detached or is overwhelmed by the body, such visions will be unable to provide guidance. This notion of “balance” between mind and body is inherently flexible. What is “balanced” in one set of historical circumstances might not be so in another. There is no set formula. The collective mind is open and avoids definitive formation. It resides in shifting sites. The mind lives comfortably with differences in decisions made for the community. There is no final arbiter. Competing and even contradictory outcomes remain authoritative.

Such fluid, moving, and noncoercive patterns characterize Islam. In Shari’ah (the provisions from Qur’an and Sunnah to regulate human behavior), for example, are four different schools of interpretation. They agree on many issues. They disagree on others, including very important social and political questions. There is no resolution of the differences in the abstract. The distinct interpretations are all authoritatively Islamic. Individual judges may draw on any of them in reaching verdicts in concrete cases, guided by reason and the evidence of particular circumstances.

The second descriptive vocabulary, notably complexity theory, affords an alternative way to express basically these same ideas. The collective mind is discussed in terms of distributed intelligence and parallel processing. Concepts from computer science help us understand how dispersed thinking and independent calculations by multiple actors can indeed achieve coherent outcomes that have the capacity to generate a shared general orientation. The parallels with contemporary Islamic thought are striking. There is nothing accidental in the fact that a noteworthy characteristic of Islamic schools across Dar al Islam is their attention to both English and computer science. Islamic intellectuals and activists have often been leaders in the use of the new forms of communication made possible by information technologies. Early on, they embraced the Information Revolution.

Muhammad Abduh and the Centrist Networks of the Wassatteyya

The Wassatteyya (the Islamic midstream) brought into view by these vocabularies today consists of a complex network of centrist Islamic scholars and activists. There is no room in the usual mapping of Islam in the West for such networks of “radicals of the center.” They are centrists but they are engaged in a transformative project. In a global age Muslims are our neighbors. With even minimal interaction, it soon becomes clear that very few of them are six foot six and committed to violent attacks on “the great Satan” or the beheadings of hapless innocents who fall into their hands. Centrist Muslims, living quite ordinary lives and occasionally doing quite extraordinary things, are all around us, although we do not always see them. The Islamic midstream now claims more than the lion’s share of the world’s 1.6 billion adherents to the faith. It is growing steadily. These Muslims are not obsessively concerned with the West or jealous of its achievements. They do not hate us. They do not seek our destruction.

The networks of midstream Islam do embrace a common orientation of resistance, peaceful when possible, to Western intrusions into the Islamic world. They reject subservience and oppose violent assaults and occupations. Such centrist groupings as the Egyptian New Islamic trend, and their counterparts across Dar al Islam, are open to principled accommodation to superior Western power on the global level. Counter-violence for the midstream is always a weapon of last resort. They do recognize, however, that the provocations of assault and occupation require no less. At the same time, the midstream everywhere pushes relentlessly for reforms of the inherited Islamic tradition. They seek reform to meet the needs of the new age.

For all of these commonalities, the midstream owes a deep debt of gratitude to the work of the nineteenth-century Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). His influence is pervasive. The commitment to reform of the heritage in no way contradicts the impulse, also widely shared, to articulate Islam’s timeless values for rapidly changing and exceptionally diverse circumstances.¹¹ Clusters of midstream intellectuals and activists across Dar al Islam arose independently to provide leadership to the Renewal. My travels over several decades across Dar al Islam allowed me to witness the unfolding of the Islamic Renewal under the guidance of midstream figures in all of these diverse settings.

For the Wassatteyya today, the single most important concept taken from Muhammad Abduh remains the guiding idea that while the strength of a nation has important economic and political dimensions, cultural independence provides the essential foundation for autonomy. It preserves the sense of a distinctive identity that is based on a valued common history and aspirations for a future of one’s own making and in line with one’s own Islamic values and collective purposes.¹² From Abduh, the intellectuals of the Renewal learned that the Islamic heritage as a civilization in all its richness provides the essential framework for this cultural autonomy. They assess the ways in which civilization identity can be articulated as a broad project to energize efforts of reform and social change. The New Islamic conception of the maslaha amma (common good) is directly related to the realization of an Islamic civilizational identity. The common good is thus understood in terms of a fluid conception of an identity to be realized rather than a particular public space, whether of politics or civil society, to be dominated or defended. This consistent privileging of the fluid and elusive over the rigid and fixed confers great advantage.

In making a civilizational identity the highest maslaha amma (common good) for Muslims worldwide, the students of Abduh clearly differentiated between an Islamic society with such a cultural foundation and one based on religious authority, narrowly understood, that would inevitably be restricted to Muslims and therefore exclusionary. Abduh insisted that the notion of a religious state, sanctified by divine authority, was the exact antithesis of what an Islamic order would mean.¹³ No other single idea was as important as this one in shaping the Islamic Wassatteyya and enhancing its appeal as a centrist force. Islam, Abduh explains, is “a world religion and a human system to guide people to do what is right and realize justice and spread peace and announce the common brotherhood of human beings without reference to skin color, gender, or language.” He continues that “this is the humane path to build the Earth and protect its goods and resources.”¹⁴ The inclusive character of Abduh’s vision found a particularly compelling statement during a visit to Europe, where the day-to-day moral behavior of ordinary people impressed him greatly. “I saw Islam without Muslims,” he pronounced.¹⁵

In their own time, however, the nineteenth-century pioneers like Abduh never attracted wide popular support beyond the intellectual classes. In part because of this failing, leadership of the cause of national resistance passed to nationalist forces, and reform came to mean the adoption of Western social models and even Western notions of independence. The legacy of Abduh was not lost. It was, however, eclipsed by the tangible achievements of the nationalist wave that won national independence and then launched initially promising social and economic development projects.

With time, however, it became clear that the national gains in political and economic terms brought only a circumscribed independence. More importantly, the imitative modernization strategy left a cultural void. From within the Islamic wave, a new kind of leader and a new kind of organization with linkages to a mass following emerged to counter rampant Western influences. New Islamic intellectuals and activists see Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in 1928, as an Islamic leader who carried forward the centrist project of Abduh and the pioneers. He did so in competition with extremist elements.

The Extremist Challenge

Once the Islamic midstream is brought into view, it becomes clear that the distorted and criminalized Islam of the networks of violent groups is not the Islam most important or most in need of sustained attention and analysis by scholars. This perspective can have a calming effect, in sharp contrast to the hysterical and interested overreaction in the West to the threat that extremists pose. Centrist Islamic intellectuals understand perfectly well the dangers of extremism. They know from the outset that they themselves would be a prime target of violent militants. “If Islam were to come to power by force,” explained Selim al Awa, “it would be far worse than the current situation. Those who are in power today are in dialogue with us, which is far better than being slaughtered in the name of Islam.”¹⁶ Yet midstream intellectuals also have an understanding of Islam’s 1,400-year-old history that told them quite clearly that extremists mattered far less than the center. They project confidence that extremist currents will eventually be reabsorbed into the midstream, although they might do damage from the margins in the interim. That damage, however, never rises to a level that warrants reducing Islam itself to the militants of the margin.

The Power of Islamic Civilizational Identity

Remarkably, alongside the denizens of caves, the Islamic world has produced these New Islamic radicals of the center who renounce aggressive violence and commit to a project of strengthening an assertive Islamic identity project, capable of flourishing in the global age. They look to profound but peaceful social transformation and deep reform of inherited traditions. They support armed resistance, in line with international and humanitarian law. They are building global networks for the exchange of ideas and joint actions in line with Islamic values and higher purposes. These centrists move with particular deftness through the new public spheres of our electronic age. They ignore old borders in the interest of sharing the lessons of successful resistance and constructive “building of the world.”

At the very heart of those lessons learned is deep appreciation for the power of Islamic identity. The New Islamic trend explains that in contemporary conditions of severe destabilization, the realization of the common good is tied not so much to particular arenas of civic and political action but rather to the strengthening of an Islamic civilizational identity. The midstream argues that this struggle cannot be reduced to a political struggle for power. Muhammad al Ghazzali warned that a focus on a political route to power, through whatever means, represented an unhelpful diversion of effort from the most compelling tasks at hand. Ghazzali noted, in particular, that groups like the Muslim Brothers that organized around political issues were mistaken in their conviction that the goal should be the establishment of an Islamic state. Ghazzali argued that “such political work should take no more than 1% of the effort of the Islamic trend, while 99% should go to the call for Islam and to efforts of Islamic education and upbringing to heal destroyed societies and broken people.” Ghazzali wrote presciently of his “suspicions” of those who call for an Islamic state and of his “fears for the future of Islam in their hands.”¹⁷

The heightened importance of identity is widely appreciated as a phenomenon of the global age everywhere.¹⁸ Critical distinctions are made between the restrictive politics of narrow, exclusive identities and the more expansive political possibilities of more inclusive project identities. This shift poses far more problems for Western theorists than it does for Islamic intellectuals. The idea of multiple identities that commingle as part of a defining project is intrinsic to the Islamic legacy. The Islamic Renewal has provided precisely such an inclusive project identity for millions of Muslims. The narrowing of political identities to the nation-state is a Western conception. It was only recently imposed on Islamic societies. Today, older Islamic identities almost always coexist with the more recent national attachments, at times creating tensions, at other times blending seamlessly. Such processes of synthesizing identities, and generating projects that express them, have long been under way in the Islamic world. These efforts find their most tangible expression in concrete efforts to rebuild societies in a self-directed way, despite extreme pressure from intrusive external forces. The turn to the heritage to provide inspiration for rebuilding can be observed in sites throughout Dar al Islam. Everywhere, there is a contest with the Islamic trend between those with inclusive and those with exclusive conceptions of identity. New Islamic intellectuals explicitly embraced the notion of multiple identities and deplored the narrowing down of identity to the Islamic dimension only. They affirmed, for example, the Coptic and African dimensions of Egypt’s personality, against the dangerously exclusivist and potentially violent conceptions of the extremists.

Muhammad al Ghazzali and the Renewal Incarnate

The heralds of the Renewal all adopted such strategies and cultivated such project identities. In the analysis that follows, the Egyptian New Islamic school will stand for the larger universe of centrist Islamic scholars and activists engaged in such work across the Islamic world. The decision to focus on the Egyptian New Islamic trend finds justification in the impressive body of scholarship and record of activism their school has produced. Moreover, as Islamic intellectuals they now have a presence that reaches throughout the Arab arena and deeply into the larger Islamic world beyond.

My life in Egypt also gave me an extraordinary opportunity to observe up close one of the greatest of the heralds, Muhammad al Ghazzali. My friend Kamel made sure that I didn’t miss it. For several decades Kamel and I were inseparable. Deeply religious, Kamel would guide my reading of the Qur’an. Quite literally, he would also drag me to public morning prayers, if he had learned that Ghazzali was presiding. Kamel adored Ghazzali. Of course, Ghazzali was perpetually out of favor with the Egyptian regime, and that complicated things. As a result of his official disfavor, Ghazzali’s public appearances had to be carefully managed. It was imperative that his assistants not announce publicly where he would speak. It was even more important that the event end quickly before there could be a confrontation. The rumor would circulate that Ghazzali would be speaking to commemorate some special Islamic holiday or one or another of the endless occasions that Egyptians love to celebrate. Until the very last moment the square where he would actually appear was not identified. Quite magically, often just hours before the prayer, hundreds of thousands of followers would converge to see and hear their beloved Shaikh.

Kamel always knew where Ghazzali would be, although I am still not quite sure how. Kamel often insisted that I come to his apartment the night before so we could get to the site early. There were many such occasions. One stands out. It was in August 1981. Kamel called me, absolutely sure that Ghazzali was speaking the next day in a square near his neighborhood. I spent the night at his place. Very early the next morning, Kamel announced that we were instead going to Abdin Square in downtown Cairo, actually a good distance from his suburban apartment and not too far from where I now live near Tahrir Square. The event had been moved in the last hours. We took a cab. Kamel wore a long white gallabeyya (a traditional Egyptian garment native to the Nile Valley). Once near the Abdin area, we proceeded on foot. We found ourselves a part of a mass of humanity, in purposeful motion. Egyptians by the thousands were moving, still before sunrise, toward the square at a distinctive pace, faster than normal walking but not running. Most dressed like Kamel, but the pace of their walking alone already signaled where they were headed. My estimate of the crowd at the time was about 250,000. To see them coming together to pray, hear Ghazzali’s message, and then quietly disperse and blend back into the city made the whole experience unforgettable. Ghazzali had filled a massive public square in Cairo.

To this day, when I walk through that square, I have the very same feeling of just how important was that occasion that I shared with a quarter of a million Egyptians. I had seen the Islamic Renewal and heard one of its most compelling centrist voices. In lectures, writings, and conversations, Yusuf al Qaradawi frequently referred to Ghazzali as a mugadid, one of those renewers of Islam who have appeared in every century throughout the fourteen centuries of Islamic history.

From the Qur’an, centrist Islamic scholars understand that God charged all of humanity with the task of building the world. To play their part, Muslims are called to draw guidance from the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Inevitably, there would be shortfalls in this great interpretive project to serve the ummah. Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali embraced a sense of the inexact character of the interpretive project, of the limitations of human knowledge that would inevitably plague all efforts to guide the ummah, and of the unknowable contingencies that circumstance would bring. There is nothing in his work of the hubris that regularly derailed mainstream Western thinkers. Western theories of economic and political development had fixed the endpoints of human history and struggles for progress. That kind of certitude, Ghazzali explained, belonged to God alone. Faced with the depredations of the West and the failure of practical plans for the defensive unification of the Islamic world, Muhammad al Ghazzali understood, more clearly than most, how critical a coherent intellectual framework was to the task of guiding the Islamic Renewal. He also understood that it would have to be accomplished in flexible, decentered ways, given the fragmentation that the ummah had suffered. He realized that great uncertainties would inevitably hover over all such efforts.

Ghazzali broke with the very traditional Muslim Brothers with their hierarchical leadership and conventional thinking that skirted such complexities. He also kept his distance from official Islamic institutions, like al Azhar. Ghazzali was, nevertheless, frequently mistaken as simply a traditional Islamic scholar in Egypt and in other parts of the Arab Islamic world. In the West, he was regularly denounced as a reactionary fundamentalist. He was neither. In fact, Ghazzali lived his life as an incarnation of the new kind of centrist intellectual that Islam would need not just to survive but to flourish in the new conditions of globalization in the post–Cold War world. Having moved out of the traditional structures of al Azhar and the movement institutions of the Brotherhood, Ghazzali sought to ground his intellectual project elsewhere. He turned to the Qur’an. He spent a lifetime in Qur’anic studies and established himself as a leading twentieth-century authority on the Qur’an, producing a score of influential and controversial Qur’anic studies. His reputation as a preeminent Qur’anic scholar was his passport to the entire Islamic world.

Ghazzali brought these impressive resources to the Egyptian New Islamic school, where he was a beloved figure in a circle of world-class Islamic intellectuals. Ghazzali himself consistently expressed extreme modesty in his own assessment of his capacities and achievements. He did not, for example, regard himself as a faqih (an Islamic scholar, specially trained and recognized by peers as qualified to contribute to Islamic legal reasoning). Ghazzali did not believe that he had the mind of a faqih, but judged that Yusuf al Qaradawi did. Qaradawi disagreed. Qaradawi said simply that he regarded Ghazzali as his teacher. Ghazzali, he explained, did not apply himself as an independent interpreter to secondary issues, as many faqih do. Rather, he directed his attention to the great questions of the day. On those issues, noted Qaradawi, he made substantial contributions, and he made them as a faqih. Ghazzali always demurred. Even on the question of his knowledge of the Qur’an, Ghazzali insisted that “I have accompanied Qur’an since my childhood. I memorized it by the age of ten, and I continue to read it in the eighth decade of my life.” Yet Ghazzali concluded that “it seems to me that what I know of it is little and does not rise above the direct meanings and repeated phrases.”¹⁹

Such an attitude carries an explicit openness to the collaborative work with others for reform that the collective mind of the Wassatteyya would enable. Ghazzali strived tirelessly to contribute to a unifying framework, modernist and based on the Qur’an, for the work of the school. He believed that such a framework would allow centrists across the globe to cooperate in informal networks. In this way, Ghazzali’s scholarly work contributed to a broad consensus that brought midstream Islamic centrists together through persuasion and the power of example. At the same time, he saw himself as a warrior for truth and never hesitated to take the most controversial positions or to tackle the most sensitive issues.²⁰ Truth for Ghazzali meant above all honesty about one’s own failings and shortcomings.

Ghazzali did not spare his beloved ummah from scathing criticisms. He bemoaned the ways in which Islamic intellectuals had failed to nurture and safeguard Islam itself. “Wounded Islam,” he wrote, “stumbled half dead, half alive through the tortured and violent decades of the twentieth century.”²¹ It was not until the last quarter of the century that the Islamic midstream found the right combination of intellectual and organizational resources to shield Islam from the terrible blows that rained down and begin the work of repair. Ghazzali was at the very center of that effort. Only with those resources in place could the ground be prepared for the impressive revival of Islam in our own time.

Islamic centrist intellectuals insistently took an accurate measure of the history of the ummah over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They recognized the external assaults it suffered. They also acknowledged the internal weaknesses that created such vulnerability. The Islamic Renewal was born in terrible pain and misery. Centrist Islamic intellectuals displayed a steely capacity to face directly the violence and denigration the Islamic world experienced. All the harbingers of the Renewal felt the blows sustained by Islam in the twentieth century. None expressed the painful impact more powerfully than Muhammad al Ghazzali. He did so in a voice that was profoundly personal yet intensely political, enriched with great Islamic learning yet expressed simply by a man who never forgot his own modest beginnings. Like so many in the Islamic world, Ghazzali felt the humiliation of foreign occupation and rule. He refused to be shamed by them or to use them as an excuse for inaction. He catalogued the terrible crimes of Western imperialism against the Islamic world. Yet the deepest anger welled up in his voice when he reviewed the ways contemporary Muslims had made their lands so vulnerable. He decried in particular the cruel and irresponsible tyrannies that littered the Islamic landscape. He complained bitterly of the deterioration of Islamic scholarship and culture. He ridiculed the useless books and tracts on Islam by the hundreds that demeaned the faith by the triviality and antiquated character of their preoccupations. He saw Islam as a worldly and spiritual force of great potential power. He called his fellow Muslims to think and act to realize that potential. Why waste time bemoaning suffering at the hands of powerful outsiders, he asked, when the responsibility for this terrible vulnerability rested in no small part in the hands of Muslims?

Inspiration for Ghazzali’s stern position came from the Qur’anic verse that pronounced “verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change it themselves (with their own souls).”²² To read Ghazzali’s most important work in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s is to understand just how unfounded are the Western claims, endlessly repeated, that Muslim peoples and Islamic intellectuals are in some mysterious way genetically programmed to blame others for their predicaments. Ghazzali spoke at once to the learned and the masses of ordinary people. He spared neither intellectuals nor the people a harsh recitation of their failures and a spirited insistence that they do better, much better.

Nor did he spare himself. Ghazzali said plainly that a new understanding of Islam was imperative. He charged that contemporary Islamic scholars like himself had failed to do the serious intellectual work required. Ghazzali set about doing it. He worked tirelessly to meet the challenge, producing a flood of articles and some fifty books. Still, Ghazzali recognized that scholarly production on the scale that al Tagdid al Islami required could not be the work of one person. He acknowledged that in the midst of the intellectual desert there were surprising exceptions in the writings of clusters of Iranian, Indian, and Turkish intellectuals across Dar al Islam. Ghazzali’s opening to cooperation and collaboration set the stage for his own lifework as a leading figure of the influential Egyptian New Islamic trend. That productive collaboration extended over four decades and immeasurably increased the depth and impact of his own scholarship.

In the classic mode of talab al ‘ilm (travel in search of knowledge), Ghazzali set about traveling in search of knowledge. He made major contributions to intellectual life not only in Egypt but also in the Gulf and North Africa. Before talk of networks became fashionable, Ghazzali had already updated the inherited tradition of meaningful connectivity through the writings of scholars. Ghazzali spoke in a voice that echoed the venerable Islamic sciences taught at al Azhar. He did so, however, with the distinctive modernist inflections of a figure for whom the nineteenth-century reformer Muhammad Abduh was a major inspiration. Membership in the Muslim Brothers provided the formative experience of his early work as an Islamic thinker and caller to the faith. Yet the Brotherhood displayed clear limitations of intellectual and organizational means to meet the new challenges of the late twentieth century. Those limitations became all too apparent when the Muslim Brothers came to power for just under a year following the Egyptian revolution of January 2011. The shortcomings of the leadership would not have surprised Ghazzali, although he would have deplored their overthrow by the military.

Out of the Brotherhood, and thanks precisely to its limitations, came a succession of Egyptian Islamic thinkers of world-class stature who found themselves unhelpfully constrained within the organization. Centrist Islam had found a way around the shortcomings of the inherited Islamic institutions like al Azhar that had lost its independence to the political rulers. The docile official Islam of Azhar was brought to heel by Egypt’s postrevolutionary military rulers. Centrist Islam moved out of the sphere of the Muslim Brothers as well. The politicized Islam of the Muslim Brothers undoubtedly suffered defeat in the year of Brotherhood rule in Egypt. Islam did not.

Collective Mind: The New Islamic School

The New Islamic intellectuals coalesced as an intellectual school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They aimed to establish a public intellectual presence to guide the Islamic Renewal without inviting repression. To this end, they constituted themselves loosely as an “intellectual school” of Islamic thinkers rather than a political party or social movement. The core group of diverse Islamic intellectuals, including both lay and religious figures, wrote the manifesto for the group in 1981. They initially circulated their statement informally among approximately 150 intellectuals with a variety of orientations. They did not actually publish the document until a full decade later. From the outset, the school has had the horizontal structure of a flexible network rather than a rigid vertical hierarchy. The boundaries of the network were never sharply demarcated, giving the school a permeable and open character. The group explicitly presented its manifesto as a statement of broad principles, rather than a precise working program. They advocated for a centrist Islam focused on the values of justice, freedom, and equality that had the greatest relevance to political and social issues. Their vision of nonviolent peaceful change advocated democracy and pluralism. The trend avoided tying the manifesto to a specific time and place. They aimed to invite like-minded centrists to recreate the school in their own environments, adapting the flexible format to their special circumstances. With this approach, they sought to foster a capacity for self-organization and reorganization and to foster extension of their model throughout Dar al Islam. The statement of inclusive principles, coupled with the flexibility of the forms in which they can be expressed, would give the emerging networks an infinitely adaptable character, while still remaining recognizable as articulations of centrist Islam.

Guiding intelligence for the school emerges through spontaneous intellectual exchange, dialogue, and debate, rather than by direction of a fixed leadership in any formal sense. In these ways, the intellectual school of the New Islamic thinkers contrasts sharply to the rigid organizational structure of the Muslim Brothers. Their approach avoids the common pitfall of leadership figures vulnerable to repression or to the temptations of authoritarian leadership. Both of these shortcomings have plagued the Muslim Brothers throughout their history. The school works through informal and spontaneous cooperative efforts that are very similar to the parallel processing of computer networks. Over several decades the school has evolved in this way as a guiding component of the broader phenomenon of Islamic Renewal, from which it could be distinguished only with considerable difficulty.

The New Islamic scholars consistently set their sights on the long term to better absorb inevitable setbacks under authoritarian conditions. They focused on education and culture, critiquing the shortcomings of national institutions and encouraging the development of alternatives in the interstices of official life. The New Islamic trend proved able to accommodate ruling power, without losing sight of long-term transformational goals. They paid attention to the experiments of the growing number of activists of the Islamic wave in the political arena and in civil society, notably in projects in the economic arena, elections of professional associations, and parliamentary alliances with non-Islamic political parties. They have quite frequently expressed sharp criticism of the shortcomings of these on-the-ground efforts. At the same time, the scope of their own work as a school has been much broader. In their scholarship and activist interventions in public life, they reach beyond politics and civil society, and beyond Egypt’s borders, to address the challenges of renewal that arise throughout the world. New Islamic scholars have pioneered new ways to accomplish these ambitious goals.

Islam Online

Historian Tareq al Bishri reasons that the task of reviving the sense of belonging to a shared Islamic world just needs patience and alertness the keys to bring people together in ways that empower them to influence states and the relations among states through infiltration just like water flows from one land to another. Quite unexpectedly, one example of just such a “coming together” took place in Qatar in the mid-1990s, and in a way that reflected the new opportunities of the global age. The original idea came from Maryam al Hajery, a student at Qatar University. A course assignment required that this young woman familiarize herself with the resources of the Internet.²³ As she became aware both of the misinformation among Muslims about their faith and the attacks on Islam by hostile external forces, particularly in the West, she wondered why Islamic thinkers had not established an Internet site to explain Islamic beliefs and correct inaccurate characterizations of Islam. Within months, the new transnational site Islam Online was operating from Qatar.

The presence of Yusuf al Qaradawi in Qatar gave the project both an anchor and a magnet. With Qaradawi at the helm, it proved possible to attract and coordinate resources from across the Islamic world. A staff in Cairo prepared the Arabic-language content, working with a group competent in English in the United States, and supported by a technical crew from Bahrain. The day-to-day collaborations on which the site relies fostered a computer-age sense of belonging to the Islamic world.

Qaradawi’s leadership also helped to infuse the effort with the New Islamic commitment to the Islamic Wassatteyya. This transnational, moderate Internet project succeeded because, in the idiom of the new age, the world of Islam was already hardwired by culture and history. The new technologies simply brought to the surface these submerged connections that had survived. With Yusuf al Qaradawi playing a leadership role, the new Internet site provided a midstream “software program” with a Wassatteyya vision that could be widely shared.

Distributed Intelligence and Networked Islamic Scholarship

The collective scholarly work of the New Islamic trend provided strong but supple intellectual foundations to undergird the Renewal not just in Egypt but throughout the Islamic world. New Islamic thinkers have most effectively advanced their claim to speak for centrist Islam and to guide the Renewal by boldly engaging the most controversial issues of the final decades of the twentieth century. Figures including Yusuf al Qaradawi, Tareq al Bishri, Selim al Awa, Kamal Abul Magd, and Fahmi Huwaidi combined their efforts to develop an innovative body of Islamic thought. Their scholarship inevitably has direct reference to the Egyptian context. However, it always carries implications for the Islamic world beyond. The New Islamic thinkers made themselves an important and durable presence in Egyptian public life with frequent and often very effective interventions in the affairs of the nation. At the same time, their scholarship elaborates centrist Islamic positions on broader questions with relevance throughout Dar al Islam, such as Ghazzali on social justice, Abul Magd on globalism, Bishri and Huwaidi on the rights of non-Muslims in an inclusive framework, Awa on the centrality of ijtihad (an effort of interpretation of the sacred texts), and Qaradawi and Huwaidi on democracy in Islam.²⁴ Huwaidi clearly stated the broad conclusion of the New Islamic trend that “no one can imagine the people being without Islam, just as today they cannot imagine a righteous nation without democracy. Without Islam, the spirit of the nation would die and without democracy the work of the nation would be frustrated. Consequently, it is understood that it is absolutely necessary for the two to be together.”²⁵ Centrist positions like these developed under the tarshid of the New Islamic thinkers were widely circulated throughout the Islamic world.

In developing this body of independent Islamic scholarship and supporting the activism it underwrote, Egypt’s New Islamic thinkers extended their circle to intellectuals across Dar al Islam. They did so through a complex network of networks that give a loose, overall coherence to the intellectual and activist work of the transnational Wassatteyya. No homogenizing unity is imposed on their efforts. Islam of the center is an active, positive force that aims to guide men and women in their struggles to be better human beings and to build a better world. It inspires the struggles of ordinary men and women for freedom and justice under an Islamic banner. Those struggles burst into international consciousness with the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab revolutions that swept through Arab lands in 2011. Everywhere, centrist Islamic inspiration braids easily with besieged local nationalisms and struggles for justice. Centrist Islamic intellectuals inspire resistance to tyrannical rule, including dictatorships cloaked in Islamic rhetoric and external forms of religiosity. Such commitments are never merely tactical and strategic. They arise naturally out of the moral universe of Islam, defined by the values and higher purposes of the Qur’an and elaborated by sound hadiths (sayings of the Prophet that illuminate his thoughts and actions) as the Islamic midstream has come to understand both. This moral grounding means, in practice, that centrist intellectuals do not hesitate to step forward as bold critics of the excesses of so-called Islamic regimes and movements. They have issued harshly critical assessments of conditions in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Pakistan. Fahmi Huwaidi pronounced, for example, that despite his great sympathy for the Iranian people and appreciation for the accomplishments of the first stages of their revolution against the regime of the Shah, Iran could in no way be considered a model of Islamic rule.²⁶

Egypt’s New Islamic thinkers coalesced as an intellectual school at a time when similar developments were taking place in various sites in the Islamic world, notably those around Necmettin Erbakan in Turkey, Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia, and Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia, to cite but three examples. The intellectuals and activists in these circles have also been profoundly influenced by the Brotherhood example. They also understood its limitations. They were open to New Islamic thinking.

The new thinking took the idea of a broad and inclusive project identity that was first put forward in the manifesto of the thinkers of the New Islamic school.²⁷ In the years that followed, their collective scholarship insistently advanced a synthesizing, theoretical thrust that argued for a pluralistic mainstream project. Islamic values and higher purposes would be central. However, they aimed to find points of connection and areas of agreement on the level of values and objectives between the major competing trends. They argued that future cooperation could be built on such a platform. The New Islamic school brought into clear view a civilizational Islam that projected a consensual vision of democracy and progress that would appeal to centrists across the political spectrum. Quite explicitly, the new thinking embraced the possibility of cooperation of moderates from both Islamic and secular trends for the common good. These creative thinkers never diluted their commitment to the idea that midstream Islam would make a major contribution to this effort. However, they insisted as well on the necessity of a broader coalition of all major social and political trends that were afoot in the land. The new thinking opened especially to the young across much of Dar al Islam, whose lives were clouded by despair and the sense that the future held little for them. The ability to reach disaffected Arab youth was of great importance to all trends. The inclusive and sophisticated approach of the New Islamic thinkers helped bring these insights within reach of all groups. Such inclusive thinking aimed to overcome divisions and enable moderates of all kinds to build coalitions and other forms of cooperation for their often courageous and always daunting efforts to act politically in an authoritarian political context. There was nothing automatic about these formulations. The New Islamic thinkers understood that there was no way around the uncertainties and tribulations of political engagement in very diverse and often dangerous national circumstances.²⁸

What Egypt’s New Islamic thinkers accomplished was the delicate task of building on the contributions of the Muslim Brothers in ways that, at the same time, indicated how their limitations might be bypassed. By the time of his death in 1996 Muhammad al Ghazzali, for example, had established himself as a far more influential Islamic intellectual and moral force than any of the Brotherhood guides who succeeded Hassan al Banna. Although a critic of the Brothers, Ghazzali never confused them with the destructive extremists. Ghazzali saw the extremists and their distorted interpretations of the faith as a threat even more deadly than the repressive security regimes for the damage they did to the souls of their youthful adherents. Beyond official Islam, movement Islam, and extremist Islam, Ghazzali understood that “Islam itself” defined an expansive centrist space of hope and untapped opportunity where the serious work of “building the world” could take place.

While Islam does lend itself to diverse interpretations, it does not lend itself to “hijacking” by extremists. Such an alien and interested formulation says nothing at all about Islam. It speaks rather to the interest of imperial powers in having an “enemy,” real or imagined, to rationalize to their domestic publics endless wars of expansion. The implausible idea that a small band of criminals could pose an existential threat to a superpower makes minimal sense only if those criminals have somehow managed to capture and manipulate the faith of millions. Islam is not a thing to be seized and held for ransom. Islam is transcendent. It is out of reach of all such purposes. Nevertheless, despite its patent absurdity, the idea of a hijacked Islam has its uses. Such an imagined Islam helps justify to frightened Western publics’ profitable imperial ventures and disciplinary restrictions on democracy at home.

There are lessons to be learned from the historical experience of the Wassatteyya, but at no point do the New Islamic thinkers mistake historical insight for rigid models that can be applied in all times and places. The Renewal contains a wide variety of groups, all of which differ from traditional expressions of religious belief in their active concern for the major issues of national life. Qaradawi also notes that these varied groups “differ on many issues.”²⁹ In this precise way, Qaradawi understands the environment of the New Islamic school in terms that a complexity theorist has described as “a seamy web that draws together and holds apart the elements of which it is constituted.”³⁰ Speaking for the New Islamic thinkers generally, Qaradawi explains that their school speaks in the name of “the largest of these currents, which I name that of Islamic Wassatteyya.” The Wassatteyya trend, as Qaradawi sees it, “comprises the broadest base, from which others branched off or separated.” Qaradawi expresses the belief of all the New Islamic thinkers that the Wassatteyya “is the ablest of the trends and the one we hope will survive and continue to grow because in our opinion, it is the correct current, representing the moderation of the Islamic method, path, and way.”³¹ In the New Islamic view, it is the tarshid of the Wassatteyya that would matter most.

Ijtihad for a Global Age

Underlying all such practical initiatives is the commitment of the intellectuals of the Wassatteyya to a creative and collective ijtihad in the interest of the common good. They act consciously and deliberately to recover and rejuvenate the roots in the faith for a bold interpretative project to renew Islam for our time. Islamic civilization reserves this kind of exceptional role for religious scholars.

Quite explicitly, the New Islamic thinkers explain that their interpretive efforts must address the priority challenges of the age rather than confine themselves to arcane matters of the faith. Tareq al Bishri, for example, asserts the necessity in the new globalized conditions of accelerating changes for an ijtihad that produces a new fiqh, consistent with these turbulent times.³² The Islamic world, Bishri adds, will be left at continued disadvantage unless the dramatic transformations that the world is experiencing are analyzed and understood within an Islamic framework. The new global realities must be addressed in the light of the core values and higher purposes of Islam. He argues that this essential work of ijtihad represents the highest priority of the Islamic world.³³

The New Islamic thinkers insist that the duty of ijtihad cannot be suspended. Here they stand firmly against the traditionalists, who argue that the possibility of ijtihad has been closed for centuries to protect the ummah and to preserve the heritage unchanged. In defiance of such views, they assert their collective right to exercise this function today. The school in general and Selim al Awa, Muhammad al Ghazzali, and Yusuf al Qaradawi in particular have achieved prominence and some measure of notoriety for their scholarly work on interpretive method, applied to a wide range of pressing societal issues. They emphasize the distinctive positions on ijtihad that defined their school just as strongly as the substantive conclusions on issues related to the common good. At the same time, they clearly recognize that no one, including themselves, has any monopoly right over ijtihad.³⁴

Islamic intellectuals never accepted the Western fantasy that history would end with a universal civilization based on Western forms and values. At the deepest level, they believed that certainty about the course of human history is reserved to God. They refused the notion that the West’s past defined the future of the ummah. They also rejected out of hand parallel fantasies of a unitary future of exclusionary dominance for Islam, advanced by Islamic extremists. Innovative groups like the New Islamic trend looked instead to a common future in a pluralistic, multipolar world. They understood such a world to be consistent with the Qur’anic vision for humankind. They believed that there was evidence all around us for the unfolding of just such a world that would enhance the sense of common humanity on, for the first time, a truly global scale.

Islamic intellectuals always knew that they would face the profound uncertainties of all manner of contingencies in a pluralistic world. They actively embraced the challenges these uncertainties posed. Islam from the outset shared God’s world with the non-Muslim Jews and Christians of Arabia. They were enjoined to respect and acknowledge these non-Muslims as the adherents, like themselves, of the Abrahamic tradition. The diverse world of the early Muslims extended to the Greeks, the Persians, and the Indians. These encounters translated into the grand philosophical tradition of medieval Islamic thought that is quite simply incomprehensible without attention to the Greek tradition with which the Islamic scholars entered into a dialogue from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Islamic scholars had been immunized against any illusions that the fate of human societies could be known with the precision of mathematics and the natural sciences. The great Islamic medieval philosophers, still read and studied today, had laid to rest such “scientific” illusions centuries ago.

The New Islamic thinkers as a school have produced important new theoretical and practical work on all spheres of social life, including pioneering work on such fundamental issues as social justice, human rights, the advancement of women and minorities, economic development, and democracy. Against the odds, in authoritarian landscapes disfigured by a dismal record of torture and other violations of basic human rights that have targeted Islamic activists in particular, these thinkers and public figures of the New Islamic school have also left a public record of speaking and acting on behalf of reason and science, democracy and human rights, and economic development strategies that aim to close the gap between the wealthy and the poor. While their support comes primarily from the lower middle classes, they position themselves to provide assistance to the disadvantaged in the name of Islamic justice. While women and non-Muslims still play only a limited role in their organizations, they project a self-critical vision of the need to fully include both in the new world that is coming into being. More to the point, the policy positions that the New Islamic thinkers take in existing public arenas emphatically aim to translate the promise of inclusion into emerging social realities. These accomplishments were possible in no small part because the New Islamic thinkers never constituted the kind of direct political threat to the regime that would provoke their suppression. Their stature as distinguished public figures to this day provides an important measure of protection as they undertake the tasks of guiding the Islamic wave toward their goal of much broader and more inclusive consensus.

The weight of the New Islamic thinkers of the fourth surge of renewal resides in their ability to articulate broadly inclusive projects that attract the attention and commitments of centrists throughout the Islamic world. They speak for Islam as a way of being in the world without fear. They do so in direct opposition to traditionalists and extremists, who project fearful representations of Islam that use the threat of hell to win the support of the young and to discipline followers of all ages. In the eyes of the New Islamic thinkers, Islam can never be so fearful for its own future that it turns to extremism for self-defense. The Islam they evoke is unafraid, even when faced with the hostile power and might of the most powerful empire on the planet. At the same time, the story of the Islamic Wassatteyya is always about more than fear and courageous defense. Islam of the center is a positive, active force that aims to build a better world, inspiring the struggles for freedom and justice. Such struggles arise naturally out of the moral universe of Islam, defined by the core values and purposes of the Qur’an as understood by the midstream. Battles for political freedom and economic and social justice, mounted by midstream forces, draw their strength throughout the Islamic lands from the power of Islamic identity, created and recreated through the networks of the Wassatteyya, to meet the needs of particular times and places.

For decades, Islam’s centrists have been raising their voices in condemnation of criminal political violence by extremists of all kinds, including those who hold abusive power as well as those who oppose them. They champion a model of gradual social transformation that aims to preserve the best of what has been accomplished worldwide, including in the West, while insisting that humankind can do better. They seek development with a strategy that begins with cultural and educational reform, based on reason and science. They speak out against the resort to un-Islamic violence in their own societies, whether by the regime or its opponents. They have been particularly effective in countering the distorted views that prompt militant assaults on the arts, women, and non-Muslims.

With the same forthrightness, the New Islamic thinkers have condemned the rise in violence around the world. In the face of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, Islamic intellectuals speaking for the Wassatteyya issued timely and unequivocal condemnations of the killers. On September 27, 2001, Shaikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, Tareq al Bishri, Muhammad Selim al Awa, and Fahmi Huwaidi issued a condemnation of “the terrorist acts … considered by Islamic law … to constitute, the crime of harabah, waging war against society.”³⁵ The influence of their views on this matter has expanded widely in the transnational Islamic centrist networks. Yet the actions of these New Islamic thinkers for the most part remain unseen and their words fall on deaf ears in the West. Despite its very public character, their record leaves little trace on Western understandings of Islam or developments in the Islamic world. The very existence of such Islamic centrists is openly and repeatedly denied.³⁶

This willful Western ignorance of the pursuit of peaceful remaking and repair in Islam’s name has a straightforward explanation. The centrists of the Islamic wave have one fatal flaw from the dominant Western perspective. All of the major figures of the Wassatteyya advocate a future for the peoples of the Islamic world of their own making. Moreover, their condemnation of the violence of the Islamic extremists does not translate into forgiveness for the violence of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.³⁷ On a whole range of foreign political and economic issues, the New Islamic thinkers directly criticize currently existing Arab regimes for their failure to protect the right of self-determination of Arab Islamic peoples. They seize whatever opportunities that public spheres provide to urge that, when ruling regimes fail them, the people themselves should act directly through boycotts and other peaceful means to refuse destructive plans made by others for their future.³⁸ They have not hesitated to criticize all such excesses of Western and particularly Russian, American, and Israeli power. Yet, as their total record indicates, the intellectuals of the Wassatteyya are neither pro- nor anti-Western. Rather, they stand emphatically for the peoples of the Arab Islamic world. They speak for a maslaha amma that is defined in Islamic civilizational terms. They vigorously defend their right to shape their own future in line with the higher purposes of Islam. These sentiments that steel opposition to the West thus have deeper roots and a rationale far more compelling than the prevailing explanations that emphasize irrational hatred and the slanderous notion of some inherent Islamic propensity to rage and violence. Even before 9/11 provided the domestic support for the direct U.S. assault on the Islamic world, beginning in Afghanistan and then Iraq and now extending to Syria, the centrists had recognized in American foreign policies a threat to the Islamic world and its right to an independent future. They consistently opposed an American-sponsored “peace process.” They judged reasonably that it was little more than a cover for the continued Israeli “settlement” of the West Bank and the collective imprisonment and punishment of the people of Gaza, in violation of international law and universal concepts of justice and decency. In their public commentaries, they asked all the hard questions: Wasn’t the American bombing in 1998 of the only pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan (which provided medicine for more than half the country) on the charge that it was making chemical weapons (later proven false) as much a “war on society” as the destruction of the World Trade Center?³⁹ Was the world right to grieve less for the children of Iraq who died by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the Western blockade than for the innocents slaughtered in New York? Isn’t the ongoing and U.S.-supported colonization of Palestine (i.e., the appropriation of land and water and the displacement and containment of an indigenous people) an act of violence? Should “moderation” mean acquiescence in the relentless Israeli settlement of land in the Occupied Territories and imprisonment of an entire people within so-called security walls on the West Bank and an open-air prison in Gaza? For opposing all forms of illegal and criminal violence, whether by the powerful or the weak, the New Islamic thinkers earn the active and dangerous enmity of the violent criminal groups in the Islamic world. For that same offense, compounded by their support for the self-determination of Arabs and Muslims, they are ignored, or worse, by the West.

The most impressive forces of resistance to this U.S. strategy are not coming from the expected quarters of power politics. Neither Europe, young or old, nor China nor Russia mattered much when it came to restraining George W. Bush from attacking Iraq. Rather, opposition is springing in unexpected ways from the new, worldwide networks of social forces, mobilized in flexible and adaptive ways. The place where these new forms of global political action appear is now emphatically the alternative media, originating in the Internet and enhanced by satellite transmissions. This new electronic public square, despite market and political encroachments, has become the most promising site of political creativity in the new conditions of the post–Cold War world. It is sometimes overlooked that the Information Revolution that made these electronic sites of opposition possible was itself a product of the same creative upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to the sexual liberation, anticonsumerism, and antiwar movements. Still, it would be a mistake to allow the nostalgia in some quarters for the return of the “movement” to cloud appreciation for the radically new forms and prospects of contemporary resistances. The old forms of social movements, beginning with labor and ending with the classic antiwar movements, are being hollowed out as effectively as the nation-state. The shells and the memories remain; however, it is already clear that vital functions are moving into the new network systems of the electronic age. The great Arab uprisings of 2011 made it perfectly clear that these processes are well under way and probably irreversible in the Arab Islamic world.

An essential charge to a free press is the ability to monitor the inner workings of power at home and record what power does in the name of America abroad, including acts of criminality that violate international and humanitarian law. Figures like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange have shined lights on criminal actions taken in the name of the American people. Important, too, are the contributions of investigative reporters like James Risen of the New York Times, who has reported on the constitutional violations that occurred in the wake of 9/11 and the massive corruption that accompanied the government practice of simply throwing money at terror.⁴⁰ Muslims have not failed to notice just how often they are the victims of the crimes that whistleblowers reveal. Americans need to know what the U.S. government is up to; so, too, do Muslims around the world. The revelations of these men have lifted the curtain on the terrible costs of American plans for the remaking of the Islamic world. The calculated destruction of Iraq stands not only as one of the great war crimes of the twenty-first century but as searing witness to the horrific means the American empire is willing to use to pursue them.⁴¹

The Challenge of Spirituality, Identity, and Resistance in a Global Age

The New Islamic school warns of the dangers that erupt from “the arrogance, tyranny and ignorance” of a flawed humankind that has abandoned the values of “justice, humane betterment and sense of balance.”⁴² The rebuilding of community and repair of the Earth is everywhere, not just in the Islamic world, the challenge of the age. The writings of the New Islamic thinkers also alert us to the fact that this time of dangerous transition has created the conditions for yet another threat every bit as ominous in its consequences for our species as divisive poverty and environmental degradation. In societies around the globe, they argue, we are now faced with a terrifying intellectual fundamentalism that leads inevitably to violence. Despite variations in its cultural forms and content, this deadly threat is recognizable for its futile longing to return to the formalistic values and rigid structures of an imagined past. They read effects of such thinking in the slaughter by a criminal minority of thousands of defenseless civilians of a rainbow of colors, ethnic origins, and beliefs in the most cosmopolitan of world cities; in the devastating consequences of a rigid and inhuman market fundamentalism imposed by global financial institutions on the wretched of the Earth and the poor in their own societies; and just as clearly in the numbing spectacle of the world’s only superpower waging war against an opportunistically defined “terrorism.”⁴³

On the ground of midstream Islam, the New Islamic thinkers join enlightened intellectuals and activists everywhere to stand squarely against these terrifying simplifications and the failure of moral and intellectual courage they represent. They insist on making distinctions and seeing nuance and contradiction, notably even in their thinking about the threatening policies of the United States. Recognizing that America has made itself the enemy of a scarcely understood Islamic world, Tareq al Bishri nevertheless insists that Islamic intellectuals and activists recognize and embrace those within the United States who struggle against the abuses of unconstrained American power. Even in militarized America, Bishri argues with compelling moral clarity, there are partners in the cause of peace and reconciliation.⁴⁴

The New Islamic thinkers urge “a leap into the time and space” of a world of accelerating change. They insist that the faith, understood through the nuanced prism of an ijtihad for a global age, calls on Muslims to learn to live creatively and humanely in the fluid circumstances created by the Information Revolution. The challenge is not new, although the conditions are. They are experimenting boldly to create new forms adapted to the changed conditions that the Information Revolution has brought. It makes no sense to ignore their efforts or predetermine their outcome. The New Islamic record of public activities provides important lessons that can contribute to our more general efforts to “provide an account of the distinctive operational rules and principles of networks.”⁴⁵ The products of an inherited culture built on the impressive worldwide networks for scholars, merchants, and travelers, these centrist Islamic intellectuals are uniquely well positioned to understand the codes that create cohesive identity out of difference. In doing so, it is likely that they will also help us better understand the mystery of Islam’s stunning adaptive capacities through the centuries.

The Wassatteyya guides the Islamic Renewal to speak for the pluralism and opening out of identity that is a critical dimension of the Islamic heritage. This openness contrasts sharply to the Western emphasis on nationalism that has historically narrowed and closed off identities. Just as forcefully, it argues against the sectarian and ethnic impulses that pulse through the ummah as polluting subterranean currents, pitting Sunni against Shi’a, Arab against Persian, Turk against Kurd. Pluralism, as Muhammad al Ghazzali emphasized in all his writings, holds a central place in Islamic political thinking. Indeed, Ghazzali wondered whether pluralism should not be considered an Islamic invention.⁴⁶ Those who live within the embrace of the ummah represent, by God’s deliberate design, a mosaic of cultures and ethnicities. They are bound together by a shared, inclusive Islamic sensibility that embraces difference. The Qur’an sees men and women as having the high calling of building a just community where even the poorest and the weakest are entitled to respect and the material means for a dignified existence. The struggle to realize such a human community and the experience of building and living in it are intended to transform and elevate. Islam takes the flawed character of humanity as a given. The al jihad al kabir (the great jihad or personal struggle to be a better person) of Islam thus calls humanity above all else to strive to rise above human weaknesses and aspire to a better self. The work of building community together aims to provide a practical and uplifting reminder of “those truths everyone already knows.”⁴⁷ Such truths, all too often dimmed by human limitations of circumstance and vision, attain in their view greatest clarity from the uncoerced experience of living together in the ways that reflect God’s intentions for humanity. The experience of struggling in the task of “building the world” provides a practical, worldly intimation of divine purpose.

The New Islamic thinkers reach back along inherited pathways to the Islam of timeless higher purposes and values. At the same time, the school reaches forward into the new economic, social, and cultural realities created by the Information Revolution and the global market. There are strange and extraordinarily productive loops in the historical experience of Dar al Islam. The irony, as we have seen, is that the ultramodern configurations that complexity theory identifies have characteristics that mirror those of the classical Islamic world. The vast and sudden expansion of Islam in its first centuries preserved its cultural and religious unity. However, politics and economics could not keep pace. Viewed from the vantage point of tawhid or unity, varying degrees of chaos in political and economic terms prevailed across Dar al Islam. Out of the chaos came self-organized economic and political structures. In their extreme diversity, they reflected local needs and circumstances. Flexible networks, based on religion and culture, provided just enough connectedness to preserve a sense of the shattered whole.

The Western imperial onslaught of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought fragmentation once again. Islam responded in much the same way. Political and economic schemes to achieve unification under pan-Arab or pan-Islamic banners faltered. Flexible ties of culture and faith held. From protected oases, watered by the river of Islam in Iran and Turkey, erupted creative assertions of renewal and reform. Despite their diversity, the contributions from Egypt, Turkey, and Iran flowed together to strengthen al Tagdid al Islami. Contemporary Arab journalist and Islamic intellectual Fahmi Huwaidi brings developments in these important nodes of the midstream networks into view as he navigates the tumultuous byways of the Islamic world today and records in countless articles what he has experienced. The heavy-duty intellectual work of ijtihad over four decades has produced an imaginative fiqh of text and a compelling fiqh of reality that charts the fate of the faith in a globalized world. The work of the Egyptian New Islamic thinkers makes it perfectly clear that Islamic civilization in general does have the resources to achieve civil, humane, and balanced social orders. More pointedly, the unexpected success of the Renewal suggests the ways that the new conditions of a globalized world enhance the prospects of such outcomes. The New Islamic reliance on both inherited pathways and evolving contemporary networks gives renewed substance to what Gamal Hamdan has called Islam’s “planetary” reach.