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The Muslims of Dearborn and Hamtramck are indeed increasing their participation in political life, but that isn't a plot to turn the towns into little Shariahvilles—it's an effort to assimilate into American life.

only 30 percent of Detroit's Arab Muslims go to mosque every month, compared to 66 percent of Arab Christians who attend church that often. Just 18 percent of the area's Muslims were active in their mosques, far less than the 47 percent of Arab Christians who were active in their churches. This is not what an incubator of zealotry looks like

Hamtramck's 15,000-strong Muslim population dates back only about two decades, and it consists of everyone from blue-eyed, light-skinned Bosnians to swarthy Bangladeshis. By contrast, Dearborn's community has 100-year-old roots and hails predominantly from the Middle East. Its Muslim population is almost three times bigger than Hamtramck's—more if you count Dearborn Heights, its companion city. Because the Hamtramck community is newer, it has an air of innocence, as if it hasn't fully comprehended how much post-9/11 hostility there is toward Muslims in America. Its politics are primarily driven by economic security and ties to the old world. Dearborn's community is more settled, savvy, and middle-class, and it is acutely aware of the harsh national Klieg lights pointed at it. Its political participation is a complicated coping dance motivated not just by its economic interests but also the need to cooperate with anti-terrorism efforts without ceding civil or religious rights.

The most striking finding, going against decades of received wisdom, is that young Muslims are as fundamentalist as older Muslims. This is particularly surprising because, unlike the old Muslims, who are the original ‘guest workers’ who immigrated from Morocco and Turkey, the vast majority of young Muslims are born and raised in Western Europe. This finding goes against the received wisdom that ‘immigrants’ have assimilated by the third generation; a process that used to hold up for most of the 20th century, but seems to have changed in the current interconnected world. That said, recent research on French immigrants showed that the fourth generation (which they call ‘2.5 generation’) is much more integrated than the third.

The most problematic part of the report is the, undoubtedly unintentional but nevertheless unfortunate, distinction between “Muslim immigrants” and “Christian natives.” As said, today most Muslims are not ‘immigrants’ but ‘natives,’ who were born and raised in the particular West European country. Moreover, many (non-Muslim) natives are not Christians. In fact, this is the only questionable part of the data of the survey: 70 percent of the ‘native respondents’ indicated that they were Christians. That seems an incredibly high proportion for a largely secular region. While numbers differ widely, mostly according to how it is measured, a comparative Ipsos-MORI survey of 2011 found much lower percentages. Using the inclusive question “What, if any, is your faith or religion even if you are not currently practising?,” they found that 49 percent of Belgians, 45 percent of the French, 50 percent of the Germans and just 35 percent of the Swedes mentioned Christianity. In the Netherlands, which wasn’t included in the study, the percentage is 44. While a more accurate representation of Christian ‘natives’ would probably narrow the gap with the Muslim ‘immigrants,’ it wouldn’t change the (much more) widespread fundamentalism among Muslims.

Not surprisingly, the media focuses almost exclusively on the Muslim exceptionalism aspect, which is the dominant media frame in reports on Islam and Muslims. The main difference is how strong the findings are reported. For example, whereas the German version of The Huffington Post headlines “Are the Rules of Islam More Important Than the German Laws?”, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt titles “Muslims: Religion is More Important than Law.” Only a few media reports ask questions about the findings; most notably, the Dutch (Protestant) newspaper Trouw headlines “Survey Proves That Many Muslims Are Fundis. Or Not?,” interviewing Arabist Jan Jaap de Ruiter, who questions the equivalence of the statements across religions. For instance, he argues that religious laws are much more important for Muslims than for Christians, because they are very different (“The Sharia is really something completely different than, say, the Ten Commandments”).

For much of the last decade, most have digested the narrative of a Muslim-West divide. It was so pervasive that newly elected US President Barack Obama, portrayed as a symbolic messiah bridging two worlds, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize before even completing a year of his term. Twelve years after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, much of the discussion about the "Muslim world" has internalized this language, and why not? The conflict between the Palestinians and US-supported Israel remains unresolved, US drone strikes continue unabated in Pakistan and Yemen and terrorist attacks like the Boston Marathon bombing are still occurring in deadly fashion.

Al-Qaeda’s own ideology was based heavily on the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood leader executed in 1960s Egypt. Qutb had, in turn, borrowed heavily from the 14th-century theologian Ibn Taymiyyah, both of whom promoted intra-Muslim violence. The basis of the call to jihad was not against the West, but rather against "un-Islamic" regimes, even if they were helmed by Muslims. Embedded in al-Qaeda’s fight was a rejection (takfir) of regimes within the Muslim world. The United States and its Western allies were targeted for being the guarantors of these governments in the eyes of al-Qaeda

The battle lines have shifted from Islam versus the West to Muslim versus Muslim, and it is time for politicians and pundits in the United States and the Middle East alike to catch up

a major new survey by Pew Research Center also finds deep divisions in Israeli society – not only between Israeli Jews and the country’s Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.

Nearly all Israeli Jews identify with one of four categories: Haredi (commonly translated as “ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”), Masorti (“traditional”) or Hiloni (“secular”)

secular Jews in Israel are more uncomfortable with the notion that a child of theirs might someday marry an ultra-Orthodox Jew than they are with the prospect of their child marrying a Christian

In his important new book, Cemil Aydın asserts “the ‘Muslim world,’ as a catchall description of people recognizing themselves as Muslims, has never been more than an illusion.” The idea of the Muslim world, Aydın argues, emerged through an exchange between European imperialists and Muslim intellectuals during the late-nineteenth century, and has enjoyed a cyclical revival post-WWII. What Aydın identifies as “the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness” was met with “Muslim resistance to this racialized identity,” thereby producing a notion of Muslim civilizational and geopolitical difference distinct from the West.

Aydın suggests that pan-Islamist ideology today “relies on an ahistorical caricature of the caliphate, one that seems derived more from Islamophobic stereotypes than from Abbasid or Ottoman practices.” What Aydın refers to as historical amnesia also afflicts American and European proponents of anti-Muslim policies, which compel Muslim solidarity and thereby foment pan-Islamist responses.

Is it possible to refute a claim as expansive as global Muslim unity without proposing a similarly totalizing theory?

Across the Western world, it is liberal politicians and activists who back Muslim groups and support Muslim community issues.Indeed, Islamophobia, surveillance, and the securitization of Muslim communities has firmly become an issue of the political left, which sees parallels between the experience of ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Muslim communities. There’s an international aspect to it, of course, as evidenced by the “Muslim ban,” which is why liberals have taken a leading role opposing the Iraq War and supporting the Palestinian cause.

The left has historically been opposed to organized religion, believing its conservatism entrenches and justifies inequality and its communalism is a threat to individual liberty.On that basis, one could expect that liberals would oppose religious identity. And indeed, they seem to do so when the groups espousing faith are part of the dominant power structure, or, to say it starkly, when those talking about religion are white men. The faith of brown men and Black women is less of an issue.

a hierarchy of liberal values, which sees undoing structural inequality and injustice today as a more vital political task than creating a liberal society tomorrow

challenge the deep-seated and widely held assumption, held across the political spectrum, that Muslims are naturally, even preternaturally, violent. While seemingly easy to oppose, this notion draws sustenance from a much broader and deeper well of support than is often acknowledged by North American critics of far-right anti-Muslim politics. It enjoys the tacit support of a range of constituencies, including many liberal internationalists. It is not uncommon for critics of the Trump administration’s toxic religious politics, including from the progressive left, to repeat and reinforce the basic presumption that religion, particularly Islam, can be either good or bad, with the former lending itself to peaceful existence and the latter to oppression and violence

religious affiliation does not predict political behavior

It apparently no longer seems at all strange that the government—not just the present administration but any government, anywhere—would be vested with the legal and religious authority to determine who counts as Christian or Muslim

Throughout what is commonly known as the West, there has been a slew of books, articles, and public interventions calling attention to the notion of a cultural crisis within. Such a phenomenon ought to be followed by self-reflection, self-interrogation, and retrospection. By and large, however, the past decade has seen far more of the opposite: The alarm surrounding crisis has been more of a call for “us” to attack and problematize “them,” which invariably leads to propositions such as “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board,” as Douglas Murray, a hardcore right-wing pundit, once argued—not to mention conspiracy theories that blame all the ills of the modern world on those who look different than “us,” meaning white Europeans, or, worse, pray differently than “we” do.

Ryan identifies the West as an intellectual space, rather than solely a geographical one. His model of what the West entails has three pillars: “the belief in a moral endpoint; the trio of republican values (liberty, equality, solidarity); and universalism.” Ryan correctly points out that all of these pillars are in crisis—and yet, the situation is, he argues, “not entirely hopeless.”

When it comes to conceptualizing themselves as a Western “us,” European Christendom has historically done so by positioning itself against the Muslims of the Mediterranean, be they Ottomans or Arabs

In the 19th and early 20th century, the civilising mission through which colonialism was justified was supported by western feminists who spoke in the name of a ‘global sisterhood of women’ and aimed to ‘save’ their brown sisters from the shackles of tradition and barbarity. Today, this imperialist feminism has re-emerged in a new form, but its function remains much the same – to justify war and occupation in the name of ‘women’s rights’ . Unlike before, this imperialist feminist project includes feminists from the ‘Global South’. Take, for example, the case of American feminists, Afghan women and the global war on terror (GWoT).

there was one claim that proved instrumental in securing the consent of the liberals (and, to some extent, of the Left) in the US – the need to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. This justification for the attack on Afghanistan seemed to have been relegated to the dustbin of history in the years of occupation that followed, reviled for what it was, a shameless attempt to use Afghan women as pawns in a new Great Game.  As the United States draws down its troops in Afghanistan, however, we have begun to see this ‘imperialist feminism’ emerge once again from a variety of constituencies both within the United States and internationally

how easily liberal (and left-liberal) guilt can be used to authorise terrible deeds

The West does, of course, face challenges in an age when movements of people happen far more quickly across vast distances than ever before; an age in which the notions of meaning and virtue are more contested; an age where technological advancements and their corresponding impacts on society develop more rapidly. All of that has understandable impacts on how communities and societies think of themselves and conceptualize their common bonds. The question is, how do societies address these challenges and find answers that are likely to heal the rifts that exist rather than exacerbate them on the altar of “saving ourselves,” when the notion of “ourselves” is a wholly mythical construct?

When it comes to conceptualizing themselves as a Western “us,” European Christendom has historically done so by positioning itself against the Muslims of the Mediterranean, be they Ottomans or Arabs

a form of Christianity that focuses on solidarity with the oppressed, rather than promoting tribalistic hate against the “other,” is precisely what Europe needs more of

Over the Obama years, right-wing websites spread  an abundance of absurd conspiracy theories and lies, targeting some American Muslim organizations and individuals––even those of us serving in government. They called us “terrorists,” Sharia-law whisperers, or Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Little did I realize that some of these conspiracy theorists would someday end up in the White House.

The incoming and now departed national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had said things like “fear of Muslims is rational.” Some colleagues and community leaders encouraged me to stay, while others expressed concern for my safety. Cautiously optimistic, and feeling a responsibility to try to help them continue our work and be heard, I decided that Trump's NSC could benefit from a colored, female, hijab-wearing, American Muslim patriot.

On Monday, January 23, I walked into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with the new staffers there. Rather than the excitement I encountered when I first came to the White House under Obama, the new staff looked at me with a cold surprise. The diverse White House I had worked in became a monochromatic and male bastion.

There is misogyny in the Arab world. But if we want progress for Arab women, we must hack at the roots of evil, not at its branches.

what we need are sustained, nationwide campaigns to raise awareness and dissociate religion from repression of women

Economic security for women is as essential as political and cultural change

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”

Throughout the Arab world, and in the Muslim world beyond it, the 21st century — and particularly its second decade — will be remembered for the litany of catastrophes that devastated entire nations and struck at the very idea of the moral arc of the universe.

The emergence of ISIS and the horrors it wrought will likely spell the end of ideologically driven political Islamist movements in the Middle East, much like the crushing defeats of the 1967 war undermined pan-Arab nationalism.

A nine-year civil war in Syria with half a million dead undermined every international norm in warfare, from the targeted bombing of hospitals to the use of chemical weapons. It fueled the largest mass migration since World War II, and the rising tide of right-wing populism across the globe, whose uniting force is anti-Muslim hatred.

What is the “Muslim world?” Is it solely a descriptive term employed in the social sciences and humanities to name a shifting geographical boundary of Muslim-majority countries? Or, as its critics argue, is it a term that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a strategy to imagine a new transnational, religious unity at the end of empire?

precolonial forms of communal difference and interaction did not directly correspond to the kinds of intra- and inter-imperial claims concerning citizenship and belonging that were at stake in the formulation of the idea of the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Citizenship under British, French, or Dutch rule often came with the promise of integration into the “civilized” political order, yet with varying degrees of fulfillment and often dependent on whether the colonial subject had been sufficiently “educated” into Europe’s civilizational order

Being a Muslim does not automatically grant him the nationality of all the 56 countries that claim allegiance to Islam.The moment he wants to travel, even from one Muslim country to another, he or she ceases to be a Muslim and becomes an Egyptian or an Iranian. No Islamic country allows a Muslim to enter its territory on the basis of his or her faith only. And this is where the national identity, which provides the traveler with a passport and a visa, becomes more important than the religious identity.

Sometimes one identity takes precedence over the other. Thus some Muslims living in the West, where they now confront a gradually increasing hostility after 9/11, often get more comfort from their Islamic identity than from their nationality, acquired or native.Others, particularly Pakistanis, re-discover their regional affiliation too. The first people Pakistanis living in the West often befriend are Indians.But a Pakistani living in the Gulf finds it more useful to be a Pakistani before a Muslim. Here his Pakistani identity comes before his religious identity. It also comes before his regional identities as a Punjabi or a Pashtun because it provides him strength in dealing with the Arabs who often look down upon him as a Pakistani, whichever province of Pakistan he is from.However, back in Pakistan his Pakistani identity becomes less important. Now he is more cautious of being a Pashtun, a Punjabi, a Mohajir, a Baloch or a Sindhi. And when he goes to his ancestral district, he has to further divide his identity on ethnic and tribal lines thus becoming a Seraiki speaking Sindhi or a Sindhi speaking Sindhi, a Pashto speaking Baloch or a Balochi speaking Baloch

Saudi Arabia hosted Arab Muslim Brotherhood exiles during the repression of the 1950 and 1960s. They came not only from Egypt but also from Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries where they had been prosecuted. Brotherhood cadres played a pivotal role in Saudi educational institutions and later the transnational organizations set up by King Faisal to counter the spread of Arab nationalism and leftist movements. Saudis used the exiled Islamists as tools to weaken such movements and undermine their credibility, while emphasizing their un-Islamic character. During the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, Saudis used the worldwide networks established by the Brotherhood to inflame the imagination of its youth and channel aid and weapons. Yet Saudi Arabia never allowed the Brotherhood to establish branches there as they did in other Arab countries and in the West.

Educated urban Saudis were attracted to the Brotherhood discourse and impressed by its ability to form civil society organizations, posing as charitable and welfare services. Individuals frustrated with the Wahhabi-Salafist tradition that forbids political action and unconditionally obeys rulers, found in the Brotherhood an authentic discourse capable of mobilizing society. The ideological vacuum that resulted from the death of Arab nationalism and socialism after 1967 was quickly filled by political Islam. To counter the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi religious establishment condemned it as a divisive force and accused it of undermining people’s creeds. Saudi Arabia began to curb the activities of the Brotherhood after the latter condemned the Saudis for inviting foreign troops to expel then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990.

After 9/11, suspicion of the Brotherhood evolved into outright hostility. Prince Nayif accused the Brotherhood of radicalizing Saudi youth and held it responsible for the terrorism wave that swept the country from 2003 to 2008. Such accusations were unfounded, as most jihadis operating in Saudi Arabia grounded their actions in the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century preacher whose tradition has been dominant in Saudi Arabia up to the present.

Hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over live in democracies of some shape or form, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims live in — and participate in — Western democratic societies. The country that is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next couple of decades is India, which also happens to be the world’s biggest democracy. Yet a narrative persists, particularly in the West, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Islam is often associated with dictatorship, totalitarianism, and a lack of freedom, and many analysts and pundits claim that Muslims are philosophically opposed to the idea of democracy. On this week’s show, Mehdi Hasan is joined by the man expected to become Malaysia’s next prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and by Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, to discuss Islam, Muslims, and democracy.

What is the ecumenical frame and how does it revise Orientalist understandings of sectarianism?

My book seeks to offer a critical and empathetic story of coexistence without defensiveness—that is, to write a history that neither glorifies the Arab past nor denigrates the present and that explores the grim significance of sectarian tensions in the modern Middle East without being seduced by their sensationalism

I wanted to understand how they sought to imagine and build a world greater than the sum of their religious or ethnic parts—commitments that remain evident, if one is prepared to recognize them, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and beyond. I call this modern iteration of coexistence the “ecumenical frame” to underscore the modern active attempt on the part of individuals and communities in the region to both recognize the salience of religious pluralism and yet also to try and transcend sectarian difference into a secular, unifying political community

culture wars are even having an effect on the left. The Muslim Democrats Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have both openly supported LGBTQ causes, yet Omar and Tlaib’s most steadfast backer, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (arguably the largest and most influential Muslim organization in America), has recently shifted to the right on these causes. Previously supportive of LGBTQ rights, CAIR has expressed concern over proposed legislation strengthening these rights, stating that new amendments to the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act could “jeopardize religious freedom.” In the state of Michigan, CAIR is working with Catholic and Protestant groups challenging the amendments.

The alliances may seem improbable, but the foundations of these anti-LGBTQ and pro-traditional family movements are firm and likely not only to endure but also reshape the political landscape. In the West, the social conservatism of the traditional Muslim way of life offers a prototype for what a “woke-free” society might look like. For a sizable reactionary contingent, conservative Islam’s patriarchal structures and gender and family norms seem vastly preferable to the direction the West is heading, thanks to feminism, “cultural Marxism” and liberalism. In turn, conservative Muslims have been embracing expressions like “red pill” and “the matrix” to describe the rejection of liberalism and feminism, while expressing solidarity with the West’s manosphere. The misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism and anti-liberal sentiments of both cultures are thus being bolstered and are in turn supporting and influencing the political expression of the new radical right, represented by Trump, DeSantis and other populists. The new right may only be a splinter group, but with allies among extreme conservatives of all stripes, its power to potentially change societies and geopolitics is undeniable.