The Islamic world has been in a state of religious and intellectual crisis for centuries. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt sparked introspection: How can Islam be superior to Christianity and yet the Western world appears so much more powerful? European imperial might continued that trend into the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Muslim thinkers went in two directions: Some argued the problem was that other religions and ideologies polluted Islam. A return to Islam’s golden age, they believed, was to excise these influences. Those who became the Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood, and Khomeinists among others all followed this trend and embraced stridency and intolerance in the name of purity.
Too often, these groups turned their intolerance upon diversity in their own homelands. Pakistani Islamists use blasphemy laws to target and murder Christians. Islamist gangs used terror to repress any Lebanese Christians whom they could not coopt. Both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State targeted Iraqi Christians. Egypt repressed Copts with violence and discrimination. The Arab ethnic cleansing of Jews in the second half of the twentieth century was both systematic and sweeping. Baha’is, Ahmadis, and other heterodox movements fared as poorly or worse.
Not all Muslims, however, agreed in either the diagnosis or cure. Some reformists argued that the problem was not external, but internal, the result of Sunni jurists closing “the gates of ijtihad” more than a millennium ago, freezing key interpretations in a way that became impervious to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution. They doubled down on intellectual freedom, challenged orthodoxy, and often paid for their progressivism with their lives.
Still others eschewed organized religion. They turned their backs on Al Azhar, Najaf, and Qom and instead embraced religions as a personal compact between themselves and God. Such individual interpretations and practices made them targets for strident Islamists who saw their individualism as a challenge.
Not only the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities against Jewish women and children, but also the reaction to it among many Muslim groups in the West, has been a wake-up call to liberal society. Former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s moral confusion is the rule rather than exception at elite universities. On college campuses, many professors who came to the United States from across the Middle East bring the polemics and incitement with which autocrats and Islamists indoctrinated them. They come to the United States not to embrace its liberalism, but only to use it to further the ideologies, bigotry, and hatred that tore their home countries apart. The Middle East Studies Association is a case in point. Its political ideologues transformed it from an umbrella group promoting academic freedom into an advocacy organization promoting boycotts over free inquiry.
The problem today is broader. On January 13, 2024, a small group of pro-Hamas protestors sponsored by Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and the Islamic Circle of North American (ICNA) marched on the White House. They excused terrorism and denied the atrocities that Hamas perpetrated against Israeli women and children. One protestor waved an Iranian flag to celebrate Tehran’s support for Hamas, never mind that the State Department designates the Islamic Republic to be the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism. That was telling, especially after Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared just six months ago that an existential confrontation existed between “the front of the Islamic system” and “liberal democracy.”
Given the Trojan horse that Islamists who hold the US Constitution in disdain represent, would America be better if it accepted only Christian refugees from the Muslim world? So argues Raymond Ibrahim, the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
The problem with this argument, though, is it ignores friends and generalizes all Muslims as enemies. The ultimate defeat and delegitimization of Islamist ideologies will come from within Islam itself. Minorities suffer at the hands of Islamists, but Muslim reformers suffer even more. The Islamic State enslaved Yezidis and forced Christians to flee, but those whom they slaughtered for watching football or smoking cigarettes were Muslims who cared little for the Islamic State’s brand of Islamist totalitarianism. Likewise, 60,000 Afghans died fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda because they despised their Islamist, hateful vision. In Sudan, the Islamist Nimeiry regime executed scholar Mahmoud Taha Ahmad because he argued for reverse abrogation, prioritizing the more spiritual Meccan verses of the Quran over the later Medinan ones.
The United States is the true fertile ground for reformist exegesis precisely because of the individual and religious freedom the constitution grants. The problem then is not Muslim immigration, but rather unwillingness by US immigration authorities to differentiate between Muslims who value individualism, liberty, and uphold the primacy of the Constitution versus Islamists whose beliefs center upon imposing their vision upon others. Scholar Daniel Pipes shows how such “extreme vetting” can be done. He is right.
By all means, welcome religious minorities to America’s shores, but never forget: Muslim reformers are not only allies; they are ultimately the crucial element to the defeat of Islamism.
