As thousands celebrated the victory of the Freedom and Justice Party—part of the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood organization—in Tahrir Square, just a few blocks away a much more somber mood prevailed.

“Let me enjoy another bottle of beer,” said an old man as he plunked some coins on the counter at a local grocery store. “Soon the Jama’a (Muslim Brotherhood) will ban it.” The store owner, Mr. Ahmad, nodded. “Allah yastur al balad, [May god protect the country]—it will be like Sudan or Pakistan.” Clearly, anxiety and divisions still persist in Egypt. The pharmacists at the nearby El-Ezaby Pharmacy also looked disillusioned. This profession in Egypt is overwhelmingly dominated by the Coptic Christian community, who represent about 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, but 90 percent of whom voted for Shafik according to exit polls.

Early in June my colleague Bruce Lawrence and I took some of our students to the African And Arab Research Center of Cairo, where a group of Cairo University professors welcomed us to a round-table discussion on the Egyptian elections. A colleague from Cairo University asked the group to help him decide who to vote for. He said he found it difficult to choose between the Muslim Brotherhood, who he said would “cloak the democratic process,” and Shafik, whose victory “would enable a second and more decisive round of the revolution because of his connections to the unpopular ruling military junta, known as the Supreme Council for Army Forces (SCAF).”

Ironically, only Professor Lawrence and I argued for Morsi while the rest, including the visiting students and the left-leaning Cairene professors opted for Shafik. Professor Lawrence cited eloquently the historical significance and momentous need for change in Egypt, and said Egyptians would never know the real Muslim Brotherhood unless they elected him. My hypothetical vote for Morsi was grounded in my overall philosophical belief in risk-taking as the most genuine path to human progress. It was and is still my belief that the economic ills of Egypt warranted assuming that risk. But many people’s justification for voting for Shafik reflected fear of the unknown. Reverting to a pre-revolutionary Egypt seemed to them a safe bet.

There has been wide speculation on the root causes of Shafik’s popularity; namely, how he carried the governorate of Cairo during the election or manage to get 48.3 percent of the vote despite his leadership status during the Mubarak years. This is not a new phenomenon for societies that have experienced radical transformations. Dispatching a message of ‘fear’ in an atmosphere of uncertainty always pays off in attracting politically-excluded minorities and business elites, as well as a large segment of the middle class. Just look at the results of South Africa’s presidential election of 1994, the US presidential elections in 2004, and Russia’s 2012 presidential election.

Shafik mobilized voters with his charismatic personality, savvy communications skills, and assurances of security by variously stating in interviews, speeches, and advertisements:

“I will clear Tahrir from the wandering kids because I love the revolution.”

“Egypt needs a leader and certainly not a sheikh.”

“Mubarak is my ideal person, but I happen not to agree with him.”

“I will give the young Tahriri revolutionaries chocolates as I love their graffiti around the cities.”

“I will bring law and order back to the streets of Egypt in 24 hours.”

There is another dimension to the popularity of Shafik. It’s psychological. He is a general, and Egypt’s modern history is a history of military leadership and war memorials. The four leaders since 1952—Muhammad Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak are all military figures, and proudly tapped into their roles in Egypt’s wars against Israel to solidify their patriotism and legitimize their leadership. It is no surprise that many of modern Cairo’s bridges and monuments are named after generals and dates of these wars.

Currently, Egypt’s political divisions are particularly evident in Cairo’s public spaces—literally the public squares. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) persisted in occupying Tahrir following the conclusion of the run-off election and managed, in this way, to re-invent Morsi as the symbol of the revolution. Preceding the election on June 12, the headline in the MB’s official newspaper Freedom and Justice introduced Morsi’s win in overseas voting as the “candidate of the revolution [who] leads throughout the Continents of the Globe.” Various groups affiliated with the Occupy Tahrir movement, mostly organized and transported by the Muslim Brotherhood, have gathered in Tahrir since the last day of the run-off campaign on June 15 and are now calling for the removal of the military Amended Constitutional Declaration, re-establishment of the dissolved parliament, and the immediate release of all political detainees.

Meanwhile pro-Shafik groups are looking for alternative physical spaces to express their views and make their voices heard. On the day of Morsi’s swearing-in ceremony, they called for a million man march of ‘Egypt above all’ in Nasr City at the Minassa Podium—where President Sadat was gunned down in 1981 during an annual victory parade by an Islamist fanatic and military infiltrator. Gathering in the Minassa and sometimes numbering in the thousands, these groups are calling for a civilian state and dissolution of the MB organization—this latter demand is in the hands of the Egyptian courts. And following Morsi’s presidential decree to re-establish the Parliament on July 8, they accused him of treason for not upholding his oath of office. While fewer women than ever before are gathering in Tahrir Square, pro-Shafik groups have been putting women at the forefront, displaying nationalistic songs and pro-military signs.

I am glad that the Egyptian people have chosen courage over fear, progress over retreat; and in the words of the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany in Al-Misri Alyawm newspaper on June 25, “the Egyptian revolution has achieved a great victory in dropping Shafik and electing Morsi.” But Morsi’s victory cannot be seen as a total mandate. The difference was only 883 thousand votes. Votes from the Egyptian diaspora might have put Morsi over the top. While Egyptians at home feel the weight and the pain of the continued revolution, the increase of crime and perturbance in their daily life, those who emigrated overseas might have voted for Morsi for other reasons. It can be argued that many votes for Morsi (in Egypt and from the diaspora) were votes against Mubarak rather than votes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is a beautiful painting on the wall of the American University in Cairo (see above)—“Tahrir Square” by the Egyptian revolutionary artist Omar Picasso in which Mubarak’s face is merged with the face of Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of SCAF, alongside the faces of Amr Moussa, the former Presidential candidate and former secretary general of the Arab League, and Shafik. Written beneath their colorful faces are the words of an Egyptian proverb, “He who left son behind is not gone yet.”

Mustafa Kamel, an Egyptian writer whose book, The Final Exit, was seen as predicting the revolt against Mubarak, echoes this view in our discussion of the matter. He said, “Shafik’s victory would have been shameful for all Egyptians, erasing all sacrifices made in the name of the revolution.”

In analyzing Morsi’s victory, however, it is not an overstatement to say that the MB’s marginal victory is worrisome for its leadership. It reflects diminishing popularity, narrowing constituencies, and a problematic connection to the young liberal revolutionaries.  The MB won roughly over 10 million votes in the November parliamentary election, carrying 37.5 seats of the total 508 parliamentary seats. The more conservative Islamist Salafi-affiliated candidates won roughly over 7 million votes, accounting for 27.8 seats. During the first round of the presidential elections the MB garnered 5,553,097 votes; representing only 25.30 percent of the 49 percent of voters who turned out for the poll, and only roughly 300 thousand votes ahead of Shafik. The populist revolutionary Hamdeen Sabahi, the favored candidate of the young revolutionaries, came in third place with 21.60 percent of the votes. Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, a more liberal Islamist, came in fourth with 17.93 percent of the votes. Numerically speaking, this means the MB lost fifty percent of those who had supported them in the parliamentary elections. In the presidential run-off, the MB’s candidate Morsi got less than a million votes more than Shafik, despite the direct support they got from many revolutionary groups, Salafi party sympathizers, and Futuh supporters. In a July 5 interview with the editor of Egyptian daily al-Shrooq newspaper, the visiting spiritual leader of Tunisia’s ruling Islamist Nahda party, Rashid al-Ghannushi, reminded the Egyptian public that Morsi has not won a political mandate, and that he should therefore rule through a unity government.

Morsi’s fist week in office demonstrates his acceptance of this limited mandate, but also his disposition to challenge the military establishment. He has so far been navigating it well. He has tackled major obstacles between the MB and other segments of civil society groups as well as the military junta. While the military establishment insisted in the Amended Constitutional Declaration of July 17 that the elected president must take the oath before the High Constitutional Court, civil society groups and the MB insisted on bringing members of the dissolved parliament to Tahrir Square and having the President take the oath before them. He avoided a clash by visiting Tahrir on Friday, June 29 and giving a nationally televised speech in which he pledged to protect the Constitution, defend the country, and elevate the Egyptian people’s power above all institutions in society. On Saturday, June 30, he paid a visit to the High Constitutional Court (HCC), where he took the oath before 18 black-robed judges of the HCC, chaired by Farouk Sultan, who, a few days earlier, was depicted by the Freedom and Justice newspaper as “corrupt felool, a reminiscent of the Mubarak era.” Further, Morsi thanked the HCC judges for their “role in fostering democracy in the country.” Two hours later, he was at Cairo University, where he met with the leading military junta, thanking them for their sacrifices and dedication to Egypt. In a nationalistic setting, interrupted by an outpouring of statements that “the people and the army are one hand,” he promised to support the army against external enemies morally and financially, praising the armed forces. An hour later, he was part of a military parade, signaling the final transfer of power.

Beyond these official ceremonies, Morsi’s domestic political personality is emerging while his regional intentions are not completely clear. On the domestic front, he is presenting himself as a populist Muslim leader, not a revolutionary, and so far, not exactly a nationalist either.

His religious image also stands in clear contrast to the secular Mubarak. He has memorized the entire Quran, which is a highly respected trait in traditional Muslim societies. He cites Quranic verses in all his speeches, projecting Egypt as a Muslim nation, who will support “Palestine and the Syrian people.” He chose to attend Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar grand mosque, and didn’t allow his security guards to disturb the crowd.

He has requested that his photos not adorn government buildings, and encouraged his supporters to give money to charity instead of spending it on newspaper ads congratulating him on his victory.

He cried at imam Qusi’s Friday sermon on June 29, when the imam pointed out to him that he must fear God and act like Umar Ibn Khattab, the second Caliph after prophet Muhammad, who many Muslim scholars idealize as the symbol of a just ruler.

Many journalists have poked fun at Morsi’s way of talking as being too religiously oriented, far from the norm of the promised non-religious state. On July 2, Emad Abdullatif of the al Tahrir daily newspaper wrote that “Morsi’s Tahrir speech disenfranchised non-Muslim Egyptians.” In the speech, Morsi used a traditional Muslim figure of speech: “I have been elected over you, but I am not better than you.” He demonstrated that he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest as a sign of his connection to the people on the street. When confronted by a group Egypt’s newspaper editors on June 28 on the imperatives of resigning from the MB if he is to be the leader of all Egyptians, he responded to the veteran journalist, Amr Hamzawy, that his resignation “was already done.”

Not all Morsi’s days are so far consecrated in rhetorical speculations of his intention. There are systematic efforts to appear as a pragmatic and a get-the-job-done leader. On one hand, he has adopted a 100-day project of addressing the most pressing needs in ordinary people’s life: traffic problems, police and security issues, bread and fuel crises, etc. On the other hand, he has surprised the Egyptian public on July 8 by issuing a presidential decree ordering the return of the dissolved parliament, which is generally perceived by most Egyptian newspapers as defiant towards both HCC and SCAF. SCAF might not challenge the decree directly, but the HCC has, and the parliament, which has been very unpopular among Egyptians except with Islamist supporters, could become irrelevant as a respectful branch of government, and this could potentially weaken his presidency.

Regional figures see Morsi another way. Dubai’s top police chief Dahi Khalfan responded to his victory by tweeting that “the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood is a doom and disaster for the Egyptians, the Arab and the Muslim nation…and he will come to us crawling.”

In a June 30 statement, widely understood to be addressing his anxious Gulf neighbors, Morsi said “Egypt will not export its revolution” and “Arab national security is Egypt’s priority.” A more engaging step toward the monarchies of the Gulf was declared on July 8 that the President’s first international trip would be to Saudi Arabia. This is a clear contrast to President Nasser, whose presidency never masked his ambition in exporting his revolution.

Turkey’s foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, was the first non-Arab statesperson to visit the President. He informed many Egyptian newspapers on July 5 that, “he has a blank paper for the President to list his needs from Turkey.” Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan already contacted Morsi on Sunday, June 24 to express his congratulations. Islamists of the Arab Spring often speculate their eagerness to replicate the Turkish model of democracy. Morsi alluded to honoring the peace treaty with Israel, but refused to answer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call despite Netanyahu’s letter congratulating him on his historic victory. However, he accepted a phone call from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but made no promise to accept his invitation to visit Iran. This is a complete departure from the legacies of Sadat and Mubarak, whose leaning toward Washington and Israel was equally replicated in their aloofness from Tehran.

As Morsi settles into the presidency, major questions still lurk in the minds of many Egyptians: What type of leader will he be? What will be his relationship with the military establishment? How will he address the issues of poverty and corruption? Will Egypt duplicate Turkey’s Islamist model of business-oriented government? Will it look like Pakistan’s ever-failing state’s institutions? Or will it curve its own model of Islamo-democratic state? As the Arabs say, Allah a’alam—only God knows.

For more on the Egyptian elections, please read our recent off the cuff discussion.—ed.

—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

*   *   *

I have no doubt that freedom of religion or belief is attaining a prominence in international affairs unforeseen and unforeseeable even five, let alone ten years ago. The reasons are distressingly negative—based as it is on increasing levels of repression and violence against believers of many faiths.

—Malcolm Evans

The category of belief is not so easily transferred from one society to another, and…those who seek to do so are subject to the consequences of their deed.

—Donald Lopez, Jr.

Like a good movie, the story of international religious freedom offers something for everyone. It pits cowardly oppressors against heroic saviors. It is a story of the triumph of international law over those who fail to adhere to global norms and standards. It is a story of secular tolerance versus violent religion. And today especially, it is a story of the need for the U.S. government and its friends to “convince” others—particularly Muslims—that they should endorse a particular model of religious liberty as a template for organizing and democratizing their politics and societies. It is a story of human progress and emancipation, of transforming conditions of religious oppression to liberate individuals—particularly women—from their primitive, pre-modern, discriminatory ways. Working alone and in tandem, these narratives justify intervention to save, define, shape, and sanctify parts of people’s (religious and non-religious) individual and collective lives. The projects with which they are associated are diverse yet intertwined, at times supporting and at times vying with one another. It is a mixed bag.

One common feature of these accounts is the notion that belief is the defining feature of religion. Although occasionally paying respect to other aspects of religious life and belonging, belief as the core of religiosity is a powerful unifying trope to which religious freedom advocates return again and again. Rallying around religion as belief, and the assumption that there can be no religion without belief, plays a central role in international religious freedom campaigns. This post asks whether it would be possible to continue promoting religious freedom as a universalizable construct if this modern construct of belief were seen as a political discourse situated in history, rather than as the mark of the sacred. And if it isn’t possible, then what is religious freedom advocacy actually promoting?

In his contribution to the new Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Talal Asad questions the universality of the liberal democratic requirement that belief or conscience is what properly defines the individual and, for many liberals in particular, represents the essence of religiosity. His argument helps cast in a new light the position that belief is the defining moment of religion, underwriting protection of religious freedom as the right to believe by states as well as by various transnational actors and authorities.

Asad dates the requirement that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity to the religious psychology of seventeenth-century Europe. At that time belief came to be regarded as a privilege (a subject’s ability to choose her belief), a danger (belief’s likelihood of inciting violence), and something that cannot be coerced because it is located in the private space of the mind. Don Lopez has described this seventeenth-century notion as “an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths.” This discourse of belief was accompanied by a particular understanding of the secular state. “Although the insistence that beliefs cannot be changed from outside appeared to be saying something empirical about ‘personal belief’ (its singular, autonomous and inaccessible-to-others location), it was really part of a political discourse about ‘privacy,’” Asad explains, “a claim to civil immunity with regard to religious faith that reinforced the idea of a secular state and a particular conception of religion.”

Asad draws attention to the shifting and lived (rather than theorized) orientations through which belief has been experienced historically. Words translated as ‘belief’ are always embedded in concrete and distinctive social relationships and sensibilities, he suggests, as illustrated by Dorothea Weltecke’s description of a young peasant woman named Aude Fauré, who was brought before the Inquisition:

She was unable, she said, to credere in Deum. What she meant by this, Weltecke points out, emerges from the detailed context: She took the existence of a God for granted. It was because, in her desperation, she couldn’t see in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because she found herself struggling with disturbing thoughts about incarnation, that she had no hope of God’s mercy. It is not clear that the doctrine of God’s body appearing in the form of bread is being challenged here; what is certainly being expressed is her anguished relationship to him as a consequence of her own incapacity to see anything but bread. In short, it is not that our present concept of belief (that something is true) was absent in pre-modern society but that the words translated as such were usually embedded in distinctive social and political relationships, articulated distinctive sensibilities; they were first of all lived and only secondarily theorized.

If international religious freedom advocacy projects claim as their object the need to secure freedom to believe, Asad’s argument points to some of the complications attending these efforts. Inasmuch as the protection and enforcement of religious freedom hinges upon, and even sanctifies, a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them, such projects privilege particular kinds of religious subjectivity while disabling others. They contribute to the normalization of (religious) subjects for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad, is taken as the universal defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free, excluding other modes of living in the world, as bodies in communities to which they are obliged, without attention to individual “belief.”

Recent arguments by Malcolm Evans in favor of strengthening the framework of international legal protections for religious freedom illustrate the extent to which belief is taken as the essence of religiosity. Evans argues that legal protection for religious freedom should be seen no longer as “only an option, but it is fast becoming a necessity in order to prevent the further erosion of the position of religious believers in many countries.” The international community should start “developing a more precise understanding of what the freedom of religion as a human right actually entails, and … do so in a coherent and transparent fashion to which all interested parties can contribute” so that “we might then be better placed to develop the means by which it can be realised.” The idea is to settle on the norm, agree on a definition, and fix it in an international convention to move one step closer to ending violence. Such a convention would provide “a more detailed, comprehensive and rounded source of legal obligation concerning the freedom of religion or belief.” This reference to religion or belief explicitly includes non-religious belief as well. It is not only religionists but also non-religionists that are defined by belief. It is everyone. A convention would breathe new life into an anemic global consensus that to date has not offered the protection we all deserve, having “done little to combat the rising tide of restriction, hostility and violence experienced by many religious believers” by tackling “the overriding problem, which is how to hold States to account for their own failure to respect and protect the rights of all believers.”

This argument resonates powerfully in international legal and public policy circles.

Yet the historical particularities of the rise of a particular economy of belief and its close ties, and even constitutive relationship, to the modern notion of religion itself calls for a different reading of Evans’ ambitions. Perhaps contemporary international religious freedom projects should be seen as themselves engendering the formation of individual subjects and “faith communities” for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad and lionized by Evans, is seen as the universal defining characteristic of what it is to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief, belief in belief, as it were, across communities of belief (and non-belief), is what it means to have achieved religious freedom. As Evans testifies, “Faith communities must reject the superficial attractions of claiming or accepting such freedoms for themselves alone, and unhesitatingly support the freedom of religion or belief for all. Unless or until religious communities are prepared to champion for everyone the freedoms that they wish their own followers to enjoy, there is likely to be little opportunity for seriously furthering the freedom of religion or belief at all.”

This identification of religion and religious communities primarily with belief and believers writes out of the picture alternative spaces and practices, such as those described in a recent post by Simon During, in which religion is lived as ethics, culture, and even politics, but without, necessarily, belief. Questioning the presupposition that religion implies belief, During calls for atheists to take over Church institutions from the inside, replicating what he describes as “older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination.”

The foreclosure on religion without belief also leaves little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside those ‘faith communities’ described by Evans, whose voices tend to be subsumed or submerged by the institutions and authorities that speak in their name. It endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction. Asad remarks on the instability of the notion of religious belief that underlies Charles Taylor’s vindication of the promise of religion:

The difficulty is this: What are to count as religious beliefs? Should beliefs denounced by the medieval Latin church as superstitio (wrongheadedness) therefore be regarded as secular beliefs? Or should they be pronounced religious on the criteria provided by those Enlightenment critics for whom all religion was superstition? Is the intention to carry out a particular act crucial to its religiosity? If so, how and by whom is that to be judged? Clearly how the phenomenon of belief that historians write about should be understood is a complicated question.

It may be worth inquiring into the extent to which a particular secularized Christian notion of the believing or non-believing human is being disseminated through international institutions and practices associated with the promotion of religious freedom “so that it is, to some extent, everywhere—translated, resisted, vernacularized, invoked in political struggles, and made the standard language enforced by power.” To what extent is the autonomous subject defined by his or her belief (or non-belief) normalized not only by secular states and (their) religious freedom activists, but now, also, through a rapidly proliferating series of transnational legal regimes and administrative initiatives that have eagerly adopted this template and have as their objective to protect and enforce the right to religious freedom?

Consider the crisis in Syria. Calls for the protection of persecuted Christians in Syria and neighboring countries are a cornerstone of religious freedom advocacy in the wake of the uprisings. Joe Eibner of Christian Solidarity International has lobbied President Obama to urge UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to declare a genocide warning for Christians across the Middle East. Howard Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has stated that the future of minorities is “on our agenda as we figure out how to help these countries” and their treatment of Christians and other minorities is a “‘red line’ that will affect future aid.” Habib Malik of Lebanese American University calls for Western nations to stand up for the rights of Christians, who he says may be cleansed from lands where democratic elections are used to oppress minorities rather than empower them. While this must be done “in a way that is not misperceived on the other end,” Malik concludes, “the West should not be cowed.” USA Today reports that “Christians in Syria, where Muslims have risen up against President Bashar Assad, have been subjected to murder, rape and kidnappings in Damascus and rebellious towns, according to Christian rights groups, including Open Doors, which helps Christians facing persecution.”

The momentum builds, as persecution of Christians takes on a life of its own and may, in some cases, come to define the conflict on the ground. The logic of the story is clear: when “Muslims rise up against Assad,” the result is Christian persecution. Yet the Syrian protests are not captured by the notion of “Muslims rising up against Assad.” This is the regime’s narrative. For decades the Assad family has relied upon the purported threat of sectarian anarchy lurking just below the surface of society and politics to justify autocratic rule. Defining the revolt “less as a popular uprising against a secular autocracy and more as an armed sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Alawites and their Shiite allies: Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah” hardens lines of religious difference and makes sectarian violence more likely. In this case, advocacy in the name of protecting Christians’ freedom of belief is adding fuel to the fire of the very religious and sectarian conflict that religious freedom claims to be uniquely equipped to transcend. In Evans’ words, the conflict is understood as directly resulting from a refusal to acknowledge the rights of “believers,” concealing the ways in which divisions cut across sectarian divides and the ways forward that emerge when the focus is not on beliefs but on shared needs and visions. The crisis in Syria calls for an approach to protecting human life and dignity that goes beyond these calls for ‘freedom of belief,’ and that loosens the grip of this construct on the political imaginary of the conflict.

Asad concludes his chapter by observing that “the modern idea of religious belief (protected as an individual right) is a function of the secular state but not of democratic sensibility.” In its strongest forms, the story of international religious freedom globalizes the secular state’s power over the individual. Appearing as a guarantee of the worth of the individual’s own desires, it is actually a story of telling people who they are, what to do and how to be. It privileges particular ways of doing and being as deserving special protection by the state or associations thereof, leaving others behind. Like other categories, it singles out authorized representatives of believers (and less frequently non-believers) for legal protection, reinforcing divisions and hierarchies within and between communities. And in its most insistent moments, it is a story of the costs in human dignity and diversity associated with the attempt to make “belief the measure of what religion is understood to be,” and the freedom to believe the measure of what it means to be free. Aude Fauré was brought before the Inquisition at the beginning of this modern attempt at mind control. Today it has become a global enterprise.

For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network have been regarded from outside the region simply as immoral terrorists, much of their popularity within the Islamic world has been their moral appeal.

The jihadi ideology has had two dimensions, political and ethical. The political attraction was the alleged necessity of violence to end despotic regimes. Before the protests at Tahrir Square that toppled the Mubarak regime last month, many Egyptian activists were convinced that bloodshed was the only strategy that would work against such a ruthless dictator. They imagined that their acts of terrorism—against the regime and against the “far enemy” of America that they assumed was propping up the Mubarak system—would eventually lead to a massive revolt that would bring the dictatorship to an end.

They also thought that only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and  Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.

These assumptions have been proven wrong. The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world in recent weeks have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.

What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle-class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking. No doubt the passivity of the Egyptian military was also a critical factor; the army did not forcibly resist the protests, as the military has in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

Yet one cannot underestimate the importance of Tahrir Square, and similar protests in Alexandria and throughout Egypt. Clearly, they constituted the catalyst for change. Perhaps not since the peaceful overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines has the world seen such a dramatic demonstration of the power of nonviolent resistance. The protests were not the weapons of jihad, nor were the voices of opposition the strident language of Islamist extremism.

There was also a religious element to the protests. The peak moments came after Friday prayers, when sympathetic mullahs would urge the faithful into joining the protest as a religious duty. But theirs was not the divisive, hateful voice of jihadi rhetoric. In a remarkable moment when the Muslim protesters were trying to conduct their prayers in the Square and Mubarak’s thugs tried to attack them as they prayed, a cordon of Egyptian Coptic Christians who had joined the protests circled around their Muslim compatriots, shielding them. Later a phalanx of Muslim protesters protected their Christian comrades as they worshiped in the public square, an urban intersection that was for that time transformed into a massive interfaith sanctuary.

The religiosity of Tahrir Square is far from the religion of radical jihad. Rather than separating Muslim from non-Muslim, and Sunni from Shi’a, the symbols that were raised on impromptu placards in Tahrir Square were emblems of interfaith cooperation; they showed the cross of Coptic Christians together with the crescent of Egypt’s Muslims in a united religious front against autocracy.

Imagine what Osama bin Laden must have made of all of this as news trickled into the cave or cellar or whatever lair in which he is hiding. Imagine even more the puzzled chagrin of someone like bin Laden’s primary lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian medical doctor who joined the most extreme Islamist jihadi movement years ago, convinced that only violent guerrilla warfare would topple someone like Mubarak.

Tahrir Square clearly showed that Zawahiri was wrong. Does this mean that al Qaeda is finished, and the radical struggles of jihad will fizzle into history?

Perhaps, in part. It is unlikely, however, that the al Qaeda organization, such as it is, will be abandoned. The small group of people who comprise the inner circle of the bin Laden organization will no doubt harden its resolve. Like the followers of millenarian movements who become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs when the prophesied end of the world does not terminate on schedule, the true believers of al Qaeda will soldier on. They may become more extreme in their rhetoric, more desperate in using acts of terrorism to draw attention to themselves and their increasingly impossible view of the world. Yet the al Qaeda inner circle has never been large, and its organization—though capable of conducting horrible acts of terrorism—has never been a consistent and widespread threat.

So, although the hardened activists associated with al Qaeda will linger on, the fate of the global jihadi ideology—or rather the world view of cosmic war that the jihadi rhetoric promoted—is a different matter. This view of the world as a tangle of sacred warfare has been an exciting and alluring image among a large number of mostly young and largely male Muslims around the world for over a decade. It is an image that was brought to dramatic attention by the September 11, 2001, attacks, and stimulated by the perception that U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against Islam. This jihadi vision of sacred warfare was propagated by the internet, through postings in chat rooms and the dissemination of YouTube types of videos showing graphic acts of U.S. military destruction in Islamic countries and calling on the faithful to respond.

Some did respond, and the response was a series of attacks during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These global jihad attacks—in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, Mumbai, and elsewhere—were not orchestrated by any single terrorist command. Some were connected with sophisticated regional organizations, but they were not in any direct sense al Qaeda-conducted. But they were all united by the jihadi vision, a vision that provided the moral and strategic legitimation for the terrorist attacks. The jihadi image of warfare provided the moral justification by linking real acts of violence in the world with the divine struggle between the forces of good and evil, order and disorder, that lies within the mythology and symbolism of every religious tradition, including Islam. And the jihadi idea of cosmic war provided a strategic legimitization of violence by the implicit promise—as a leader of Hamas once told me—that if one is fighting God’s war, one can never lose. God always wins.

Yet, as Tahrir Square showed, God does not always have to fight, at least not in the terrorist ways that the jihadi warriors imagined. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not produced a single political change.

This is a profound anti-jihadi lesson, and the significance of Tahrir Square has quickly spread around the world. It has ignited similar nonviolent protests elsewhere in the Middle East, and it may also have altered the thinking of activists in other cultures as well. Intense discussion is underway in Palestine, where the Hamas-dominated strategy of strategic violence has been largely counterproductive; will a new nonviolent and non-extremist movement of young educated Palestinian professionals create a different kind of impetus for change in their region of the Middle East?

The rise of a new nonviolent populism in the Middle East may seriously undercut the viability of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resistance may lead to a violent backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolution in Iran, in 2009. The current protests in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya face an uncertain end. Failure of nonviolent revolution has, in the past, been the occasion for renewed acts of violence.

So the jihadi warriors may again have their day. For the moment, however, Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of nonviolence.

But it behooves us to think more deeply about what this regional stability is understood to consist in. It is clearly understood to include the maintenance of existing treaties and strategic military arrangements with Israel. And this is interesting, because Israel defines itself as a religious state. So, we have a situation in which Egypt’s becoming a secular democracy is thought to assure its continued diplomatic and military commitments to a religious state. One might object here that Israel is not a religious state and that it does not define itself in that way. This objection would be partly correct: Israel’s secular and religious identity constitutes a continual ambiguity, one with which it continues to struggle internally. Thus, although much of the population defines itself as secular, explicitly self-identified religious groups exert enormous power in government and society, well out of proportion to their actual numbers. This creates enormous controversy over central issues, such as the accepted criteria for deciding whether or not one is Jewish. Moreover, like Egypt, Israel’s personal status law is heavily rooted in religious law. Israeli religious authorities have so far successfully resisted the institution of civil marriage—a situation that forces non-religious couples in the country to choose options that provide them with fewer rights and guarantees. Unlike Egypt, however, Israel’s profound secular-religious ambiguities are not seen to threaten the existing treaties and security arrangements upon which regional stability is thought to rest. We might ask why this is so.

It is also unclear why it is assumed that if Egypt becomes a secular democratic state, it would be necessarily sympathetic to Israel. Egypt’s commitment to secular democratic ideals might well lead Egypt to distance itself from Israel on account of Israel’s ambiguous religious-secular character. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia maintain strategic relationships with Israel, but while Turkey is a country that imposes a particular brand of secularism on its people, Saudi Arabia is one in which a narrow version of Islam is imposed on the population. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic character is not seen as a threat to the region’s stability, even though its Wahhabism has been cast by some (largely lay) commentators as an ideological source of terror.

These are some of the ways in which our discourses on the secular and the religious so often twist and turn, get entangled in, and finally confound, each other. What gets lost, however, in all of the talk of regional stability and of secularity and religiosity is the crucial issue of Palestine. Few have emphasized this link in the regional chain, with the exception of Rashid Khalidi, who, thankfully, continues to remind us of it. What matters here is not whether Egypt, or even Israel, is a secular or a religious state. What matters is how Israel treats—or continually mistreats—the Palestinians, denying them their internationally agreed upon rights, and whether Egypt will continue to support this ongoing mistreatment. Here, it is important to note that the repression of the last thirty years in Egypt has been allowed to grow unhindered—both tolerated and supported—by the U.S., precisely because of its interest in maintaining those political and strategic arrangements with Israel that enable the continual and increasing violation of Palestinian rights. And it is this repression that Egyptians have so powerfully protested against.

In the end, it may be doubted whether the regional stability that so many are concerned about, and which Egypt is hoped to help sustain, can really be counted as stability. After all, this “stability” has allowed both Israel and the U.S. to conduct a number of aggressive wars throughout the region, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq. If commentators are genuinely concerned with democracy in Egypt and stability in the Middle East, they should fear less the Muslim Brothers and more the U.S. funding and regional alliances that aim to enact American foreign policy in the region, and which have choked off democratic possibilities for so long.

Having made these points, important for our considerations of the present moment, I would like now to turn to some more broadly theoretical reflections concerning what the events in Egypt might teach us about questions of secularity and religiosity more generally.

The question of whether Egypt is or will be a secular or a religious state has been asked for a long time, because of both the country’s strategic geopolitical location and the genuine religious-political ambiguities that it exhibits. It is therefore a question that I have not been able to avoid in my own research. However, I have tried to approach it not by looking at the norms that secularism imposes but rather the questions that it obliges us to ask and answer. That is, I do not assess the norms found in Egypt by judging whether or not they conform to secular standards, because those standards are seldom clear, highly contested, and often changing anyway. What I explore instead are the underlying, longstanding questions against which those norms are continually adduced, established, contested, and transformed as answers. I see secularism as a problem-space—a historical ensemble of questions and attached stakes; the question that anchors this historical ensemble is where to draw the line between religion and politics and what the limits of religion in society ought to be; the attached stakes are those rights and liberties typically identified with liberalism—such as equality, tolerance, and freedom of belief. That these questions and stakes are longstanding is evident; that the answers to them have been changing and contested is equally clear. What is important to note, however, is that though the problem-space of secularism is relatively recent historically (in medieval Christian and Muslim times, for example, a principled distinction between religion and politics was not typically seen to be connected to a range of fundamental rights and liberties)—it has now become indispensable to the practical intelligibility of our ways of life and to many of the ethical positions we take. It is difficult to remain indifferent to it.

It has been historically, and remains today, the case that the state has the right to ultimately decide the central questions that constitute the problem-space of secularism. This right of decision is, and has been, an expression of the principle and practice of the state’s sovereign power. We can therefore say that the power of secularism is not the power of the norm but of the question and of the sovereignty that decides it. The question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state is but one manifestation of this power; that it has been continually asked both in and outside of Egypt is just one indication that the country is fully subsumed within the problem-space of secularism, as are Israel, the United States, England, France, Germany, and many other states that continue to exhibit secular-religious ambiguities and that stake fundamental freedoms upon their clarification. And this will remain the case until the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics is no longer deemed necessary to ask in relation to the range and distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. (I have discussed these points in greater detail here.)

The approach to secularism as a historical problem-space, and the central role of the state’s sovereign power within it, has consequences for some of the critical claims of political theology. It may also help to frame the recent events in Egypt in a particularly revealing light. The fact that it is state sovereignty that ultimately decides where to draw a line between religion and politics means that it is a power that stands, importantly, prior to religion and politics. Since it stands prior to both, it cannot be pinned down to either. In other words, pace Carl Schmitt, some significant political concepts are not secularized theological concepts. This is especially the case with state sovereignty, because it stands prior to religion and politics and decides the distinction between them. Importantly, however, while state sovereign power stands prior to religion and politics, it is not indifferent to the question of how to distinguish and separate them.

This conception of state sovereignty contrasts with the manifestation of sovereignty that we saw in the protests. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, the protests were a manifestation of pure popular sovereignty. I will contrast this to state sovereignty by calling it “bare sovereignty.” Like state sovereignty, bare sovereignty stands prior to religion and politics. Unlike state sovereignty, however, this bare sovereignty is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them. It stands apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and does not partake of it. Not surprisingly, the protests expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none. In the sense that it stands prior to religion and politics, and that it is indifferent to the question of their distinction, the bare sovereignty manifested by the protest movement stands outside the problem-space of secularism. In that sense, it represents a genuinely asecular power.

(Bare sovereignty is therefore much more than, and significantly different from, the principle of “we the people” that is formally used to justify state sovereignty within the democratic tradition. That principle has been frequently used by the state to justify various impositions and exceptions upon the population it governs. Bare sovereignty, however, breaks through this principle of justification; indeed, bare sovereignty is not a principle at all, but an exceptional existential moment, an expression of power that arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode of life. For more on this point, see the remarks of legal and political theorist Samera Esmeir.)

Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these protests? The term “non-secular” is too easily confused with the notion of the religious. And unlike post-secularity, asecularity is not a temporal marker. It allows for the possibility that asecularity has, in different forms, always been with us, even from within the traditions from which state secularity arises. Explorations of post-secularity typically try to identify the emergence of new norms. Such attempts fail to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power. In contrast, the term asecularity specifies a situation not where norms are no longer secular, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are no longer seen as necessary. It is a situation where we can be genuinely indifferent to those questions, the ways that particular stakes are attached to them, and their seeming indispensability to our ways of life.  As a result, such moments open up spaces for us to think beyond our current predicaments. Here, it is worth noting that the condition of asecularity manifested by these protests was also associated with a genuine ethos of democratic sensibility.

In regard to this connection, Talal Asad makes some important remarks, with which I would like to end. In an article entitled “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics” (forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert Orsi, ed.), he distinguishes between “democratic sensibility as an ethos” and “democracy as the political system of the state,” and goes on to say that:

the former . . . involves the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity. The latter is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protects the subjective rights of its citizens (including their right to ‘religious freedom’), infuses them with nationalist fervor, invokes bureaucratic rationality in governing them justly; it is fundamentally exclusive. My point is not to make an invidious comparison between sensibility and politics, not to argue that the two are necessarily incompatible. I simply ask whether the latter undermines the former—and if it does, to what extent.

Following Asad, we might say that the problem-space of secularism falls within the purview of the state, its sovereignty, and its expanding regulatory capacities. But what this manifestation of asecular, bare sovereignty shows us is that it may not be necessary to have a principled distinction between religion and politics to express an ethos of democratic sensibility. Or, to put it more precisely, one may not be obliged to ask and answer the question of where to draw the line between religion and politics in order to foster the mutual care, attunement to pain and distress, concern for truth, non-judgmental disposition, and tendency toward inclusion by which Asad characterizes this ethos. Indeed, the only way to obtain it might be to be indifferent to the question of their distinction and the set of stakes historically attached to it. This might be one way to construe Asad’s statement at the end of the essay, where he writes: “One might suggest, finally, that the modern idea of religious belief (protected as a right in the individual and regulated institutionally) is a critical function of the liberal democratic nation-state but not of democratic sensibility.”

I thank Samera Esmeir and Saba Mahmood for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece. I also thank Talal Asad, especially for his help in clarifying my ideas on bare sovereignty.

Thomas Farr, in his recent post, links the mass protests in the Arab world, combined with the persecution of Christian minorities in the region, and what he called “the Obama administration’s striking indifference to America’s statutory policy of advancing international religious freedom.” In my view, if the Obama administration is to do anything with respect to the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), it should seek to repeal it and to dismantle the whole policy and institutional structure that it entails, because this statutory policy is an insult to and betrayal of victims of human rights violations throughout the world, including Christian minorities in the Arab world. As I argued earlier, “Religious freedom can neither be advanced in isolation of other fundamental human rights nor sustained by imperial imposition.” Farr recalls that I, among others, strongly oppose the IRFA, but he does not respond to the reasons I gave for my position.

In this post, I will attempt to clarify my position by offering a historical view of how our celebration of what we now call the American Revolution requires us to support the maturation of what are now “mass protests” into the Arab Revolutions. The primary role in that process must be that of Arabs themselves, with each society acting in its own context. But the role of citizens of the United States is a matter of individual personal responsibility, because it is immediately connected to our attitudes and behavior. To the question posed in Thomas Farr’s title—“Where lies wisdom, where folly?”—I say that the universal measure is always the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. My strong opposition to the IRFA reflects my opposition to the United States’ failure to uphold the Golden Rule in its foreign policies. If the United States wishes to preach to others the imperative of protecting human rights, it must first apply that injunction to itself. My point is not that civil rights are violated in the United States, though there is sufficient reason for concern on that count; rather, the point is that domestic respect for the civil rights of citizens is not the same as the protection of human rights for all human beings equally, by virtue of their humanity and not their status as citizens. The United States does not have the moral standing and political legitimacy to uphold human rights anywhere in the world, unless it is willing to be judged by the same standards that it claims to apply to others.

I speak here of the official and consistent policy, commonly referred to as the Bricker Amendment of 1953, of not ratifying any human rights treaty that would require changes in the laws and practices of the United States. The unmitigated folly of this policy is that the United States claims the right to tell other countries to change their laws and practices to conform with human rights standards when it has officially and publically declared that it will never do so itself. It is ironic, also, that the United States refuses to do so, when it has less reason to fear being found at fault than many states that have been willing to submit to judgment according to international human rights standards. Freedom of religion must be protected everywhere, not because it is “America’s ‘First Freedom,” as Thomas Farr calls it, but because it is one fundamental universal human right among others. Wisdom, for the United States, lies in being part a global joint venture to protect human rights, and folly lies in the pretension to dictate to others what it is not willing to apply to itself. It is this utterly untenable position that I called “the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to civilize the rest of humanity,” which Thomas Farr found to be a “highly provocative charge.” Incidentally, this phrase was coined by the English poet Rudyard Kipling in reference to the imperialist venture of the United States in the Philippine Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As to the title of this post, history is what individual people do or fail to do, especially in purportedly democratic states like the U.S. What the Obama administration or Congress do or fail to do cannot be disassociated from the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the United States. My title is meant to emphasize that it is because of the success of the American Revolution over time that citizens of the United States can now change the policies of their country to a greater extent than Arabs are able to, at least in the short term. My point is not that Arabs are helpless victims who must wait for the United States to save them from their regimes; rather, the issue for me is our responsibility in making or changing the policies of the United States here and now, regardless of what Arabs or any other people can do for themselves in their countries.

In my view, our failure to support the capacity of Arabs to do what we take for granted will doom the American Revolution to failure over time. To briefly explain what some readers may find too provocative an assertion, nothing human can be perfect, and all human achievements will diminish and eventually come to an end. Just as it has evolved since its inception, the United States, as the outcome of the American Revolution, will also end in time. There will be a time when there is no United States, though people will continue to live and, I hope, thrive in this part of the world. How soon and complete the decline and fall of the United States will be depends on our ability to uphold the values and actions that sustain this political experiment in its historical context. It is also important to recall here that both the rise and fall of the United States, like any other human process, unfolds over time, that is, in history. So, the fact that we don’t see the demise of the United States as imminent does not mean that it is not in the process of happening. In fact, it is bound to happen, as with all things human.

The Golden Rule is also instructive in regard to the obsession of political and opinion leaders, the media, and the U.S. public at large with the risk of the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and other countries in the Arab world. The unstated premise and conclusion of this obsession seems to be that we should not support democratization in the Arab world if the likely or even remotely possible outcome is the coming of “Islamists” to power in this strategically vital region for “American interests.” Although I am not able to prove my claim, I am confident that a very similar discourse was current in Britain at the time of the American Revolution. The imperial elite of Britain must have been worried about the negative impact of the American Revolution on their interests, without any consideration of what that Revolution meant for the freedom and well-being of the American revolutionaries and their society.

Let me try to explain further, in the hope of minimizing the risk of miscommunication, which is particularly serious when we deal with profound transformations that challenge our deeply held assumptions and prejudices. I personally am opposed to the Muslim Brothers and have struggled to challenge their views of Islam and politics since the 1960s. Their ideological confusion and devious politics have caused horrendous loss and pain in my home country, Sudan. I therefore have no illusions about the serious costs of their coming to power anywhere, especially in a country like Egypt. My concern, however, is how to effectively confront and combat that risk, because I realize how serious it is. This is not an attempt to downplay the drastic implications of the Muslims Brothers coming to power. But it is from this perspective that I call for unconditional commitment to equal liberty for myself and others, especially those who disagree with me. In fact, I am free only to the extent that my opponents are free. My friends do not need this commitment from me, because they have my love and support. It is my opponents who need my principled commitment. My primary focus here is on what Muslim societies need to do for themselves and for their own reasons, regardless of what the United States wants or needs.

The primary task of sustainable democratization and protection of human rights throughout the Muslim world is for local populations to expose and challenge the myth of an Islamic state—to realize that Sharia cannot, ever, be enforced by the state. When Sharia is enacted as state law, it becomes the secular political will of the state and not the religious law of Islam. Muslims must realize that a secular state is a necessary condition of the possibility of a Muslim person and society. It is equally clear, however, that only Muslims can do this by and for themselves, within their own societies. This is the only morally legitimate and politically viable source of democracy and self-determination. The failure of the United States to stand by this principle in the case of the Arab Revolution is a betrayal of the values of the American Revolution. It can also be reasonably argued that such “conditionality” of support for democratic transformation, dependent on the exclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a pretext for continuing neocolonial political domination and economic exploitation of the Middle East.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a coalition of social, religious, and political movements, which can assume a variety of organizational forms and operate through a range of strategies. Whether they operate openly and legally through “front” organizations or are forced to work underground, their religious and ideological appeal has several sources. One source, for instance, is their ability to present themselves as the “true voice” of their communities, the “authentic” expression of their people’s right to self-determination. More concretely, they have been able to present themselves, until very recently, as the legitimate and effective alternative to corrupt and oppressive regimes, like that of Mubarak in Egypt or bin Ali in Tunisia. Another source of legitimacy is their appeal to romantic and simplistic notions of Islamic history, as if it were a computer “software” program that present-day Muslims could simply “install and run” as a panacea to all of the social, political, and economic problems of the post-colonial condition. Moreover, Islamists thrive under conditions of political repression, because of their ability to operate through mosques and “Islamic centers,” while benefiting from popular sympathy as “victims” of secular oppressive regimes. As we have seen through decades of experience, in the Arab world in particular, Islamists tend to blame the lack of democratic freedoms for their failure to explain clear and specific programs for socio-economic and political reform.

In other words, having to operate under oppressive conditions enables them to continue to speak in vague, emotional terms about their being the “obvious and natural” alternative, without having to explain what they intend to do and how. As these and other possible factors clearly show, the response to the risk of Islamists coming to power in the Arab world must begin by allowing all Islamists, including the Muslim Brothers of Egypt, to operate legally and openly, in free and fair competition with all other political forces in the country. Ensuring democratic governance and protection of human rights for Islamists is the only way to expose and defeat their confused ideology and dangerous politics. As we have seen in the case of Hamas in Gaza, conditional support for democratic transition is counterproductive, because it enhances the perceived legitimacy and political efficacy of Islamists in their own societies.

It is therefore clear that both principled and pragmatic reasons unite in urging unconditional support for democratization, regardless of narrow, short-term calculations of the risks it may pose to our interests. After all, Muslims are by far the primary victims of Islamist violence and authoritarianism. Terrorism is a human problem, not an American or Western problem. In the same way that Israel remains democratic under constant threats to its very existence, Arabs states can and should be democratic despite the risks of Islamist politics. If Islamists come to power in any country, we will deal with that reality, just like the people of the country have to deal with it, though with fewer resources than we have and greater potential cost to their societies than we will have to cope with. In the final analysis, this is the only way to individual freedom, social justice, and sustainable political stability.

However, another wall is still standing: the widely perceived threat of the “Islamic state.” Observers in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East worry that these revolutions could morph into “religious revolutions” and lead to “Islamic states.” They invariably ask: “What is the role of the Islamists?” “Will they take over the state?” These fears are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the popular mobilizations in Tunisia and Egypt, of the relation between Islam and politics in the modern Arab Middle East, and on a narrow political imagination. These observers believe that Tunisia and Egypt can be one of only two things: a “secular” dictatorship or an Islamic republic on the Iranian model. This paradigm is plain wrong.

Firstly, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were based on demands that were deeply political—in a context of high unemployment, widespread corruption, and great economic plight—and that had little to do with the alternative between secularism and Islamism. Few if any slogans echoing Islamist, leftist, or secularist projects were heard during the demonstrations, even if members of the Islamist, liberal, and leftist oppositions participated. Like the rest of the world, Islamist movements were taken by surprise by the youth’s strong engagement in the streets. Islamists in both countries kept a low profile at the beginning of the demonstrations, partly for strategic reasons: they did not want to be cited as a pretext for the repression of the movement. “Work, freedom and national dignity” (shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniyya) was the slogan most repeated by protesters in Tunisia. Draped in national flags, the Tunisians, like the Egyptians, chanted their national anthem in the streets: “if one day the people desire life, destiny must answer the call.” Sung by men and women marching in the streets of Tunisian cities, the national anthem contributed to a widely shared narrative in which the people were both the subject and the object of a new national liberation, this time not from a foreign occupier but from internal oppression.

This narrative of liberation from oppression resonates deeply with the classical political vocabulary of Islam as well as with liberal views about freedom. The Islamic vocabulary of resistance to oppression uses the concept of nasiha, advice or admonition to the sovereign. Nasiha demands courage and determination for those who use it against an oppressive tyrant. The demands of the Tunisians and Egyptians can also be read in terms of the European conception of democracy, which recognizes the political significance of “the people” (al-sha‘b) as a sum of individual preferences. Tunisians and Egyptians have been living under the weight of authoritarian, inefficient, and corrupt modern state bureaucracies endowed with a pervasive and often brutal power over people’s private lives and bodies. In both countries, the hallmark institutions of liberal democracy—elections and political parties, in particular—have been emptied of their true meaning. Despite their chambers of representatives and frequent elections, which are all tailored for the continuity of authoritarianism, the only counter-power left in Egypt and Tunisia today is that of the people. Tunisians and Egyptians demand the end of oppression and corruption, and an ethical political life, but during the uprisings, they did not take pains to explicitly use one genealogy of freedom—Islamic or liberal—over the other, because, for them, resistance to oppression is not defined by its cultural origins. It is not that “secularists” and “Islamists”—who are typically seen as the two main political camps in Tunisia and Egypt—have built a temporary alliance for the sake of revolutionary success. Rather, a new generation has taken the lead of political protest and has directly confronted the state with narratives that transcend those usually used by these two camps. This does not mean that members of the secularist and Islamist constituencies will not emerge and re-articulate their old discourses. They have already done so. However, a younger generation has opened up the possibility of a new political order in which these two constituencies will be less salient.

Secondly, contrary to what is often assumed, the Egyptian and Tunisian states are not “secular.” Their constitutions (since 1923, for Egypt, and 1959, for Tunisia) state that “Islam is the religion of the state.” In Egypt, since 1980, Article 2 has also stated that “the principles of Islamic sharia” are “the main source of legislation.” These post-colonial regimes have always engaged with religion, producing and trying to impose on their people their own interpretations of Islam. They have controlled and reformed religious institutions and built their own religious establishments. The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes have accomplished this in different ways, according to their specific histories. However, both have used Islam as a tool for social engineering, and they have, at the same time, attempted to separate political dissent from religious inspiration, forbidding “the use of Islam for political aims,” in spite of their own instrumentalization of Islamic narratives and institutions. Nonetheless, these regimes are commonly seen as “secular.” Why? Because they have waged a war against Islamist movements who also seek to define politics on the basis of Islam but stand against the religious monopoly exerted by their authoritarian states. However, these states are not “secular”: they deeply and systematically engage with Islam and build an overlap between the structure of the state and religious authority. In a way, the famous formula devised by the Muslim Brotherhood, that Islam is “Din wa dawla” (religion and state), has actually been implemented at a practical level by the post-colonial state from its inception. The state is actually ahead of the Islamists in this domain. The difference, however, between the Muslim Brothers’ ideal vision of Islamic politics and the practical operations of state and religion in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the fact that these states have also organized specific regimes of secularity. They have delimited the domains that Islam is authorized to occupy, most often the “social” arena, while they have excluded Islam from the sphere of political competition—for instance, by making “religious parties” illegal. It is within and under the constraints of this regime of secularity—which instrumentalizes Islam, limits its reach and shapes its interpretations—that Islamist movements operate and express their political concepts. To give only one example, Rashid al-Ghannushi, the historical leader of the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda, declared that his movement would not be a “religious party,” but a party whose reference (marja‘iyya) is Islam, using a language similar to the Turkish AKP or the Moroccan PJD. He has underlined his acceptance of the Tunisian Personal Status Code, imposed by President Bourguiba in 1956. This legal code makes polygamy and divorce by repudiation illegal, and Bourguiba took pains at the time of its drafting to articulate its content with an Islamic justification. Embedded in this general regime of secularity, the mainstreamed Islamists have shown their desire to be authorized as a political party and to take part in the electoral game in order to eventually participate in policy making. They are eager to take part in the political process, as evidenced by their cautious and ambivalent participation in the “negotiations” with the Egyptian regime before Mubarak stepped down, and by their current demands for a truly transparent and fair political system in Tunisia. This does not mean that the Islamists are necessarily willing to sacrifice their Islamic ideals in order to gain power—eventually experiencing their own “secularization”—or that their commitment to democracy is inauthentic.  Their desire for participation means that the post-colonial state’s regime of secularity, which includes Islam, has forcibly shaped the Islamists’ narratives and repertoires of action. Hence, in Tunisia and Egypt, the debate will not be one opposing a “secularist” camp advocating for separation of state and religion and an “Islamist” camp in favor of their overlap. Rather than being about whether the state can engage with Islam, the debate will be about how the state will continue to define its relationship with religion.

Thirdly, the hegemony of the state’s regime of secularity also explains why Islamists do not provide a clear description of what an “Islamic” state would be, in addition to the fact that their ruthless repression by the regimes in power has forced them to focus on strategies for survival. Sunni Islamist movements, unlike the Shi‘i mullahs who took over the state in Iran after the 1979 revolution, have not devised a precise description of Islamic governance. Based on the notion of the emulation of the religious reference (marja’ al-taqlid), Khomeini invented the concept of government by the jurist (wilayat al-faqih). In contrast, nothing resembling a clear theory of Islamic government appears in the writings of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers or the Tunisian Islamist movement (al-Nahda). They do not spell out precisely the operations that would be at play in an Islamic state. Admittedly, the elusiveness of the concept of an “Islamic state” in Sunni Islamist narratives does not mean that Islamists will be absent from the political scene in the near future. They form a strong political and social current and will participate in political competition if given the opportunity. However, they will have to come to terms with this new political power that has emerged in the region—the youth—organized on a totally different structure and focused on a critique and fundamental distrust of the authoritarian modern state. The indeterminacy of their vision for the state—when confronted with the youth’s fundamental distrust for the previous regimes—may create greater political potential than is currently imagined.

The youth’s critique of the state denounces the confiscation of all opportunities: the opportunity to work, to participate in politics, to freely and fully express political opinions, as well as to express religious piety privately and publicly, and, more broadly, the opportunity to make their own choices. It is worth stressing that these demands go beyond Tunisia, Egypt, or Iran—some of the countries that have been recently swept by protests.  Indeed, it is not just authoritarian regimes that attract these critiques throughout the world, but also liberal democracies, whose states do not always allow all types of freedoms—such as the freedom of religious expression in the public sphere—and do not ensure political and economic opportunities for all their citizens without discrimination. In that sense, Muhammad Bouazizi is more than just Tunisian.

Professor Ramadan’s most recent publication is entitled What I Believe (Oxford University Press, 2009). His other books include Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation; The Messenger: the Meanings of the Life of Muhammad; To Be a European Muslim: a Study of Islamic Sources in the European Context; and Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St Antony’s College). He also teaches at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford and is, at the same time, a Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

In July 2004, Professor Ramadan, under contract to teach at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, had his work visa revoked by the U.S. Department of State, under a provision of the Patriot Act. The ACLU and various academic organizations contested the government’s refusal to issue Ramadan a visa. In January 2010, the Obama State Department reversed the earlier decision, issuing an order allowing Ramadan to enter the country.

Professor Ramadan grew up as a practicing Muslim in Geneva, Switzerland, in a family with a widely known and—for many—controversial history of Egyptian religious and political leadership. Before we began the formal part of our conversation, Ramadan indicated that in nearly a dozen interviews during his visit to Montreal, he had repeatedly been asked to respond to various controversies surrounding statements he had made in regard to the Middle East and about his grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rather than recapitulate these issues, forcing Ramadan to reiterate a series of refutations that he was clearly tired of making, I began by asking about his immediate family and his relationship with his parents. I wanted to know whether and how his parents had cultivated his identity as a Muslim. In a somewhat surprising turn, Ramadan told me of a childhood marked less by an insistence on becoming and being Muslim than by the instilling of the fundamental value of love. We begin the conversation below with a discussion of Ramadan’s education and his ongoing work as an advocate for Islam in the West.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

* * *

DKK: I’m fascinated by your attraction to Nietzsche as a student. You wrote your dissertation on him, and I can certainly understand the appeal of his engagement with suffering, as well as the eventual affirmation that you find in his work. But what attraction was there for you in Nietzsche’s wrestling with nihilism and his characterization of the implosion of Christianity?

TR: You know, many people misunderstand this, because they think that I was coming to Nietzsche because he was very critical towards Christianity, and that, as a Muslim, I was very happy when he said, “God is dead.” It’s exactly the opposite, in fact. I read Nietzsche for other reasons. I read everything that was published. I had to do this. I wanted to add to the concept of suffering in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which was Nietzsche as a historian of philosophy. Because he was, as Heidegger said, the last metaphysician. And he took a very strong and critical look at everything which was coming out of the Western tradition. But he was distorting Socrates, Hegel, and even Schopenhauer and other scholars.

DKK: Sure.

TR: But this was very important. I wanted to read what they said, and to read what he said about what they said, and how he was interpreting them. And then there was a point that was quite critical for me, which was that Nietzsche, when he was young, was a believer; and then at one point, he asked the question: “Does your faith help you to avoid the very essence of who you are? Is it, at the end of the day, a question of a power struggle with others?”

So, from where do you get your power? From where do you get your confidence? And, more importantly, from where do you get your answers? Is it, per se, an answer that you are getting out of your own quest? Or is it a power struggle and a relationship with the Other? He was asking a very critical question for me that was…

DKK: Deeply existential!

TR: Exactly! This was an existential question. But, in the end, it’s really saying, “Tell me what you are doing with your suffering, and I will tell you who you are.” So, are you using the suffering to transform it into a sense of guilt? Or are you using the suffering to be a better human being? And this was the very question, because he said that we are innocent—so use your suffering to be an artist, and not to be someone who is deeply obsessed with the sense of guilt.

DKK: Ressentiment.

TR: Exactly: le ressentiment and le mépris, and this power struggle. So I would say that this is essential, because in the name of religious love, in the name of this connection with God, we can translate this quest for meaning into a power relationship, and I don’t like that. But I think that he was asking the critical question, and the central one as well, which was about innocence. What is innocence in our lives? And this is a very deep question for the Christian tradition.

DKK: Yes, of course.

TR: What is innocence? And in the Muslim tradition, the classical Islamic tradition, we say, “the starting point is all about innocence and permission,” but it’s very often distorted by people of power, by people of rules, and I think that Nietzsche is philosophically asking the right question to people dealing with the legal dimensions of religions.

DKK: You see the kind of agonistic struggle that Nietzsche was advocating, in the Islamic context, as a challenge to the literalists. But Nietzsche was contrasting strong notions of good and evil, inflexible conceptions, and the ways in which those over-determine the self and over-determine possibility.

TR: Yes.

DKK: So that, on the one hand, there’s the romantic Nietzsche, who, as you just said, would proclaim. “I am free to make myself who I am and who I want to be!” But then, on the other hand, there’s a grounded Nietzchean reading that says, “I only read myself over and against these traditions that I have to resist,” which is to say that the death of God moment is a temporary moment, that the nihilistic moment is a temporary moment of freedom, and that there has to be a kind of strenuousness to one’s resistance and one’s criticism.

TR: Yes, but I think that this is disputable, because Nietzsche had many stages. And I think that this power of will and the will to power—everything that he was connecting to art and to this dimension of…

DKK: Music.

TR: Yes, music, being something which is beyond human being and beyond morality. And even beyond this are the jails and prisons of human conscience and consciousness. I think that this is not only a matter of resisting, or of indicating a tension within Christianity. Nietzsche was really asking, “What is the essence of a human being?” It’s ultimately about who we are.

You know, when he came back to the Greek tradition, he was looking for innocence beyond anything else. If the Olympian gods are acting or behaving like this, it means that we are innocents. We do what they do, and they cannot blame us for doing what they are doing. So, this innocence is something you find at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, in the French poet Rimbaud. It was exactly the same for him.  He was looking at coming back to Greece—the classical Greek and Hellenistic traditions—to avoid nurturing a sense of guilt. But I would say that it’s not only against tradition. It’s really the deep question of who we are in this being and how do we deal with life, since life means suffering.

This interview has been edited and condensed. To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

President Obama’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world in Cairo last Thursday demonstrated once again that he is an extraordinarily skilled orator working with fantastic speech writers.  The speech also underscored the distinctly different approach his administration plans to take in handling U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.  Quoting the Koran, the Bible, and the Torah, President Obama laid out a plan that basically came down to a simple message: “We’re all in this together and we must all do our part.”

But what exactly did he mean by “do our part”?  In the context of the economic downturn in the U.S., this same message has translated into spending more wisely, living more responsibly, and working together as a community to balance the inequities between the haves and the have-nots.  In a more diverse global context, similarly marred by economic uncertainty, the translation is not so clear.  With respect to what the president labeled as the number one task at hand—ending violent extremism—he pointed out that one solution is to acknowledge that Islam and Muslims are not part of the problem, but rather part of the solution.  To that end, he called on all Muslims to join in the effort to end the violence that has wreaked havoc on their religion and the global community.  As for the second most important task—resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—he acknowledged the unbreakable bond between Israel and the U.S. but remained steadfast in his message that everyone must do his share in reaching a sustainable future in the Middle East, including the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and the other Arab states.

The president’s speech was even-handed, addressing issues that are important for Muslims, for Christians, and for Jews; for men and for women; for those living abroad and for those in the United States.  His tenor was one of fairness and progress.

His message was packed with ideas and objectives, but it was much less generous in offering explicit action. Maybe offering action items was not the point. Maybe the point was to lay a comprehensive agenda for the future, a conceptual framework if you will, from which to draw well-conceived action.  Maybe the speech was intentionally geared to motivate people to see the bigger picture beyond the individual circumstances and issues that affect their daily lives—in essence, to motivate the global community to look beyond the trees and see the forest of issues that impacts us all.  There were a lot of important issues on the table, ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, to gender equality in the Middle East and the United States.  And there were millions of people around the world listening to the president’s thoughts on these issues.

Reactions from these listeners were somewhat mixed, maybe due to the even-handedness off the speech—some wanted to hear less talk and see more walk.  Some wanted to hear more (or less) favoritism toward Israel.  Some went in as strong supporters of the president and some went in as strong detractors.  Nonetheless, most agree that the president’s speech showed movement in the right direction, particularly in relation to the past eight years.

In the end, only time will tell if the president’s issue-laden agenda will translate into real change.  He should start by focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If he can make some headway there, other issues in the Middle East will start to fall into place.

It’s just that a random search I recently conducted on Google brought up close to nothing. To be quite exact, there does appear to be a “Christian Lobby,” but it is found all the way down under, in Australia. The first item of local news that belatedly comes up in the subsidized search, addressing such a non-phenomenal phenomenon in the United States of America, goes back to 1996 (the piece is written in London, to be sure, published in The Independent, and it is about the Christian Coalition—the Christian Right, you know, as if there were no other kind). And you should see the marked difference between the entries on Wikipedia. The Christian Coalition does not even receive half the space the Israel Lobby seems to deserve there. You would think Christians are not engaged in lobbying this country or in the other Holy Land. You would think Christians are not engaged in ruling in this country. You would think Christians are not engaged, period.

You see, the interview on Al Arabiya (the transcript of which I will be quoting from can be found here) confirms that the politics of fear can safely endure, barely disguised as the politics of love. It’s (Christian) politics as usual, in other words. The extended hand of love and friendship—for the enemy—continues to veil the indisputable fact that there is only one iron fist in “the region as a whole.” No, not Iran, which continues nonetheless to be portrayed, of all things, as the lone danger to the region and—why not?—to the entire world (it controls OPEC, you see, and the WTO, the UN, the EEC, the World Bank and the IMF too!). Quoting Obama, who helpfully spells out the veiled references he had left in (or out) on January 20th, “and as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” Let’s just say that when it comes to being “helpful,” I am not entirely clear on the lessons the United States (or its new communicator-in-chief) has to deliver. What the U.S.of A. has delivered (showing no signs of abetting) are billions of dollars, megatons of weapons, the latest technology in concrete wall building, and numerous military superbases, government contracts all of them, to the region as a whole, and to its great peoples. Now that’s an extended hand for the love of love.

Says the prez:

The Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that’s not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past—none of these things have been helpful.

Yes, let us try “helpful.” That sounds like change. But wait a minute. Isn’t there one particular state that has been attentively helpful in deploying more than “threats,” that has behaved otherwise than through the mere “pursuit of a nuclear weapon,” and whose take on the arms race has had little to do with setting off things “potentially”? Actually (precisely), make that two states. And I am not speaking about the “solution” by that name (the infamous “two-state solution”). What then? “I think the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” Engaged? Right away? You mean weapons and money and consistent diplomatic shielding at the UN and then some more money, not to mention the “pursuit” of war politics when it comes to “the Muslim World”—all this did not qualify as sufficient, or suitably speedy, “engagement”? You mean that the screams to “end the occupation” are not something that both Israel and the United States (or at least George Mitchell) should listen to—and right away too?

But I am helpfully told to be patient, that real change takes time. Just look at how long it took to set up the whole “war on terror” thing, from the devastation of Afghanistan and the massive remaking of major and notoriously flexible government agencies in the name of Homeland security to the drastic rearrangement of our glocal travel habits, not to mention private liberties and the children left behind (before the children, there were the Afghanis of old and the Kurds. They were left behind in a jiffy, too. Watch the Iraqis and the Gazans go). Think of how long it took to abandon our collective airwaves to the phone companies and to CCTV, to build up and beef up the borders of the free world—change you can fast believe in—and redesign the new and improved global apartheid (have you traveled on a Pakistani passport lately?). Think Keanu Reeves in (and on) “Speed.” Only in Gaza. And please understand that I do understand that here and there, there’s going to have to be “somebody with extraordinary patience as well as extraordinary skill” since “that’s what’s going to be necessary.”  Lots of extraordinary patience.

I also want to embrace our collective exercise in diplomatic restraint. I do not wish for the president to upset sensitive constituencies either. He might therefore consider doing, diplomatically, something the corporate media (and the other security apparatuses) obviously won’t. In fact, is it not a matter of responsibility for the leader of the free world to use his official mega-Blackberry and kindly remind his constituencies that the United States has been more than actively “engaged,” more than enough and fast enough, to say the least? Incidentally, it would also be a matter of responsibility for the commander-in-chief to announce that fear does not constitute a political program (on either side, since we like our “sides” balanced), which is to say, that he himself and we, the people over which he presides, will not extend any more arms to the fists of terror we have long wielded (in our media and military-industrial incarnations), the corporate extension of hands (the extension of corporate hands) we ourselves have been practicing for a little over eight years (but try one hundred and fifty, in another conservative estimate). He should say, in his turn, that we shall not pursue the politics of fear we have been lovingly sowing in ourselves and, with equal if not surpassed efficiency, in others. All in the name of love and friendship. Let me put this otherwise. If, as has recently been acknowledged by David Miliband, the U.K. Foreign Secretary, “the war on terror was a mistake,” this might indicate that it is time for a local political figure to rise to the same occasion and finally state the obvious: fear is bad politics (but I rusticize, functioning as I do according to a scheme whereby good corporate business is not, still not, good politics). Put yet another way, the president should inform us that we all don’t have to blame smokers anymore (starting with himself), that we don’t have to take off our shoes, except when peacefully entering the mosque, ‘cause it’s not really bringing security to our airports or to our shores. It’s only bringing more fear into our collective habitus. And you should see the other guy—I mean, the rest of the smoking, trembling, and smoldering world.

No more shoelessness at airports. And see how fear, the wicked witch of the West, might just be melting. Now that would be zippy change you wouldn’t even have to believe in! And think of the savings on the latest biometric iMachines!

This, on the other hand, is not a pipe (nor a pipedream), nor is it a political statement:

Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.

Political statements do not, or at least, should not, strictly speaking, commit to such a foreclosed future. Which does not mean, of course, that they have nothing to offer by way of reading. Just consider that, in this otherwise fascinating statement, Barack Hussein Obama mentions that there is an Israel peace camp—change you can believe in—but introduces it as if it were in contradiction (“but”) with that other fact, namely, that Israel and its mighty right to security will always be supported by the U.S.A.  No statement could be clearer that the “serious partnership on the other side” in the hunt for peace—some people still call it “support”—should be searched for in a more proximate neighborhood watch. Let’s give ourselves a collective hint: if we want peace, we shouldn’t sign weapon contracts that top all other international “peace” dealers. But that would be democracy you can believe in.

So why on earth did I start with the Christian Lobby? Because as massive as the Israel Lobby is (believe me, I know, I teach at Birzeit-on-the-Hudson, I mean, Columbia University in the city of New York), as important as the new focus on “the region as a whole” and the extended hand to “the Muslim world,” nothing has changed about the “balance” of which we Americans are so fond. Obama is perfectly clear. There are two sides, in his narrative, and two sides only:

Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.

This, in a nutshell, is how the Christian Lobby works. It is not a side. Nor does it take sides. It doesn’t even engage unless it has to, poor thing. That is how it can make its loving stakes, and its own role—indeed, its engagement—in the region as a whole invisible. The United States of America is God’s country. It is a Christian country because of its politics of love. Check out 1 Corinthians 13:11, and ask yourself who is the adult and who the child, who the loving paternalist. The United States is the Christian Lobby, and it proves it every day (on Al Arabiya even) by continuing to present itself as a mediator for peace, as the subject of infinite love (God protect its object!) that will bring conflict resolution to perennially troubled, Semitic adversaries (one of which recently proclaimed itself, according to its senior leaders, “mad”—and proceeded convincingly to demonstrate). Like the Aryan Jesus, of which Susannah Heschel just described the intricacies, the Christian Lobby wants us to believe that it can whitewash—yes, whitewash—the damage it itself inflicts and start anew, New Testament style. This peculiar situation, in which the judge is the offender and there’s no other court to turn to, Jean-François Lyotard called a “differend” in an important book by that name. Difference could be another word for change. “Differend” here just means more of the same.

In Gaza.

And at a glocal airport near you.

In the Muslim world, as in Europe and much of the world, Obama is welcomed as an internationalist president. His Kenyan father, early schooling in Indonesia, race and name symbolize for many a unique internationalist presidential profile, one that contrasts sharply with his predecessor. Indeed, he is seen as the antithesis of George W. Bush-internationally informed, experienced, aware and sensitive, a measured and articulate statesman-not, as Bush is often regarded, as a swaggering Texas cowboy.

Obama’s foreign policy will be expected to be all the things that many in the Muslim world saw as lacking in the Bush administration, which was viewed as neo-colonial, unilateral, arrogant, militant and interventionist. Therefore, an Obama administration will be expected to be multilateral, favor diplomacy first over military threats and intervention, and avoid what many believe was a neo-colonialist American foreign policy whose verbal commitment to democracy promotion and human rights was hypocritical. Obama’s administration cannot, like Bush’s, fail to walk the way it talks.

Despite its democratic rhetoric, the Bush administration continued to look the other way in its relations with authoritarian Muslim allies. It refused to accept the election of HAMAS. America condemned Hizbollah, but sat on the sidelines as Israel carpet-bombed Lebanon, destroying much of its infrastructure in a war whose victims were overwhelmingly Lebanon’s civilian population. Many Muslims today expect Obama to live up to the principles of self-determination, justice and human rights that they associate with America and break with the Bush administration’s (and for that matter, previous administrations’) double standard in not promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

Given the legacy of past American policies that engaged in what Ambassador Richard Haass, a senior State Department official in George W. Bush’s first term, called “Democratic Exceptionalism”-its equation of America’s national interest in security, stability and access to oil with uncritical support for authoritarian regimes and Israel-Obama will face a formidable challenge of sharply rising expectations. It will be further complicated by the fact that some Muslim rulers, in contrast to their populations, preferred McCain, believing that he would continue the Bush policy (and indeed that of Bush’s predecessors) of supporting their regimes in exchange for their cooperation and what were regarded as America’s national interests.

Both America/Europe and Muslim societies need to pursue a joint effort in marginalizing the extremist fringe and building bridges between members of the mainstream. Data from the Gallup World Poll (see John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think?), the most comprehensive and systematic poll of the Muslim world-representing the voices of 90% of the world’s Muslims in more that 35 countries stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia-provides critical insights into the components for a new direction in American foreign policy and relations with the Muslim world. Majorities of Muslims, like Westerners, are deeply concerned about religious extremism and terrorism, not surprising since the majority of attacks and victims have been in the Muslim world. For majorities of Muslims, who admire the West’s freedoms, technologies, and rule of law, the major issues are respect for Islam and Muslims and Western, especially American, foreign policies. Many will be looking for an American administration that emphasizes diplomacy and dialogue. They will expect co-existence and constructive engagement rather than interference, intervention or dominance in America’s relations with the Muslim world; the promotion of democratization as self-determination; economic and educational assistance rather than the transfer of substantial military arms and equipment to authoritative regimes; and a more balanced policy in its approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

While agreement on a withdrawal policy for Iraq will not be easy, devising a new policy to address deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan that does not require major multi-year American military involvement will prove difficult. However, the most intractable issue will continue to be the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The obstacles seem insurmountable: the failed leadership in Israel and Palestine, prospects of a new Netanyahu-led government facing off with HAMAS, and formidable American domestic pressure  from the Israel lobby and Zionist Christian Right leaders. There seems little reason to believe that an Obama administration or the new Congress will alter a long-established tradition of American presidents (Democrat or Republican) and Congresses to equate the existence, safety and security of Israel but be gun-shy in providing comparable support for Palestinian Muslims and Christians. A review of Obama’s campaign advisers on foreign policy and community affairs as well as the list of those rumored to be appointed in his new administration do not bring an initial optimism for significant change.

The policies and legacy of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama and his new administration with many formidable political and economic challenges, some seemingly intractable. However, in relations with the Muslim world and in our joint fight against global terrorism, Obama does have a singular opportunity to signal a new era and send a new message of hope and constructive engagement across the Muslim world.