And God calls to the abode of peace; And guides anyone, at will, to a straight path.
qur’an 10:25
E
Victims of aggression are given license because they have been done injustice; and God is well able to help them— those evicted from their homes without reason except that they say, “Our Lord is God.” For if God did not parry people by means of one another, then monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques wherein the name of God is much recited will surely be demolished. And God will surely defend those who defend God—for God is powerful, almighty.
q ur’an 22:39 – 40
Nationalism as Idolatry
Why We Must Choose Between Elevating Religion or Country
william t. cavanaugh
in recent american politics, there has been mounting concern over the rise of Christian nationalism, the belief that the United States has been an essentially Christian country since its founding and therefore has a providential role to play in history. Christian nationalists advocate for laws, funding, and public symbols that promote Christian practice and Christian morality. In the US today, Christian nationalism is almost exclusively associated with right-wing causes, including opposition to immigrants and to racial, religious, and sexual minorities. Religious nationalism is not exclusive to Christianity or America, and our country’s version of it is generally seen as one instance of a broader worldwide phenomenon: we can readily find variations of religious nationalism in India, Israel, Turkey, Myanmar, and so on.1
In most analyses of Christian or religious nationalism, the emphasis is on the “Christian” or “religious”: we assume there is something peculiarly dangerous about mixing religion with politics. But here I want to focus instead on the second term in these phrases: nationalism. The problem is not just Christian nationalism, but nationalism, as practiced by Christians and non-Christians alike. The solution to the problem of religious nationalism is not secular nationalism. In fact, nationalism, whether religious or secular, is a form of idolatry, though it is a form of splendid idolatry that is dangerous precisely because it appeals to genuine virtues such as love for one’s
S“I am opposed to [nationalism] because I see in it the germs of atheistic materialism which I look upon as the greatest danger to modern humanity. Patriotism is a perfectly natural virtue and has a place in the moral life of man. Yet that which really matters is a man’s faith, his culture, his historical tradition. These are the things which in my eyes are worth living for and dying for, and not the piece of earth with which the spirit of man happens to be temporarily associated.”
The Misunderstood Muhammad Iqbal
Contrary to Popular Belief, the Poet-Philosopher Was a Fervent Critic of Nationalism
Hina K H alid
as H uman beings , we are embedded in multiple relational fabrics and social ecosystems—beginning with our immediate ties of kinship, extending to our cultivated bonds of friendship, stretching to our fellow neighbors and townsfolk, and ramifying further to embrace those with whom we share a religious affiliation. Indeed, we derive and sustain our senses of selfhood and modes of meaning-making from these intricate webs of belonging. Thus, my family imparts moral values to me that I may one day appropriate as my own; my interactions with neighbors teach me what it is to be neighbor-ly; and, if I’m Muslim, the horizon of the ummah can provide a stable and sacred milieu of global fellowship. A relatively recent configuration of such patterns of human belonging is the nation-state—a model of territorial sovereignty that, over the course of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, became the reigning political paradigm.
By the twentieth century, the status quo of trans-regional kingdoms and empires had been displaced by the tenet that each nation, or “peoples,” was entitled to its own autonomously governed territory. Recalling this history underscores the contingency of our modern cartographies: while many nation-states today cleave to a myth of timelessness (as though their geographic borderlines were providentially arrayed in the cosmic order of things), in actuality, they emerged at particular moments as the culmination of particular projects of self-determination and particular dissolutions of imperial structures.
Many of today’s nation-states, including Muslim-majority ones, were forged from the postwar erosions of empire. After WWI, the victorious Allies (the UK and France) apportioned the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and thus states including Iraq and Syria were born. In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan, marking the end of almost two centuries of British colonial rule. Since their inception, many of these nation-states have sought to articulate and advance a robust nationalist consciousness in order to elevate the community of the so-called nation above other affective ties of belonging (be they regional, religious, or otherwise).
Think, for instance, of the brutal state suppressions of various separatist movements around the world, or indeed of the proscription of public displays of religious identity in certain European countries. How might Islamic teachings engage with such nationalist sensibilities, anxieties, and mobilizations? Put differently, does the Islamic vision of a hospitable community align with the majoritarian logic of the nation-state? Is nationalism merely an iteration of our natural urge toward sociality? Is it a benign capitulation to the politically dominant order? Or does it betoken something more sinister? One Muslim figure who gave these questions serious and sustained attention is
The elephant clock from al-Jazarī’s manuscript, 1315
Islamic Science and the West: A Case of Collective Amnesia
jonathan lyons
Thus do We expound the signs for a people who know.
qur’an 7:32
For now we see through a glass, darkly. 1 corinthians 13:12
more than twenty years ago, with my first book, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran, already at the printer, my editor suggested a new project: an exploration of the links between medieval troubadours and the Arabic poetry of courtly love, as well as the lingering presence of Islamic culture in the iconic works of Dante and Cervantes. The working title? How the Arabs Invented the West.
After some initial research, it became apparent that scattered literary influences seeping across the borders of Muslim al-Andalus into the borderlands of Christian Spain and France were merely symptoms of a much broader and more significant knowledge transfer from Muslim societies to European ones—a bequest that was as pervasive as it was largely ignored in mainstream historiography.
Six years later, I completed The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (the working title did not survive the marketing department). The book interweaves the enormous intellectual and practical achievements of the medieval Islamic world with accounts of the restless Europeans who went in search of Muslim learning—learning that helped lay the foundation for the Renaissance and, ultimately, for the West’s global supremacy. The House of Wisdom was well received, gets regularly cited by writers, and features in college and university reading lists. It also appeared in translation in a dozen foreign editions. All of this is, of course, gratifying for any author.
And yet, one mystery troubled me: Why was this even a book? Why did I, and many educated readers, not already know of the deep cultural and intellectual debt the West owes to Islamic civilization? Why was this news?
After all, the unmistakable traces of Muslim learning were not hard to find, lying about like so many priceless nuggets in a mysteriously abandoned field of gold. By the thirteenth century, a wealth of philosophical and scientific texts emanating from such centers as Toledo, Sicily, and the Near East had been translated from Arabic into Latin. These tracts explained the seminal works of the classical authorities and introduced innovative Arab thinking to a Europe that had lost its intellectual moorings in the centuries of political and social disorder that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. As it turned out, few areas of medieval and early modern European life went untouched by Muslim influence.
Our scientific and technical vocabulary is strewn with terms and concepts of Arabic origin: from alembic, algorithm, and azimuth to zenith and zero. Nautical and commercial borrowings include admiral, sloop, arsenal, and tariff. And the heavens sparkle with a
An Arab protest gathering (against British policy) in session at an elementary school in Jerusalem’s Old City, 1929
The Imaginary Narrative Distorting the History of Palestine
Khalid yahya Blan K inship and h amza y usuf
Nur Masalha’s book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History examines Palestine’s millennia-old multicultural heritage, which has been distorted and mythologized. That work was the subject of Zaytuna College’s First Command Book Club session in August 2024, hosted by Hamza Yusuf with historian extraordinaire Khalid Yahya Blankinship. Their enlightening conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hamza Yusuf: I’m excited today because we’re joined by Dr. Khalid Blankinship, one of the great intellects and historians of our time. His knowledge is encyclopedic in many subjects, including Palestine. He is a professor in the Religion Department at Temple University, and his early academic work focused on the end of the jihad state and the decline of the Umayyad state. We are honored to have him here today.
One thing that really struck me about Nur Masalha’s book is that he makes an extraordinary case that “Palestine” was the name of the region long before Muslims arrived there. He also showed that the idea of an ethnostate in that region is an imaginary construct; it has always been a multiethnic environment. As a historian, how do you view this kind of erasure of history?
Khalid Yahya Blankinship: The erasure of history has been carried on all the time. People edit their own personal histories to benefit themselves. The idea that one alters and transforms history is not surprising. But the historian wants truth and accuracy. When you have period-piece films that portray this or that era of history, a historian might say, well, it did not happen that way, or they added this, and that did not occur. An example is Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where because Malcolm X’s brothers and sisters, and another person, did not cooperate, Lee created a fictional character to replace them. One might say that’s of no consequence because it’s a little point, but little points add up. As a historian, one tries to amass all the sources that are available to arrive at the complete history, at least as far as history can be complete.
HY: In light of that, how is it that this narrative surrounding Palestine has been thrust upon the Western world? If you look at the support for the Palestinians, almost the entire Global South and consistent UN votes reflect that. But then you have Europe and Anglophone countries—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and America— that consistently sustain, as is evident in this book, this other imaginary narrative that these are Indigenous people returning to their homeland, and the Palestinians are somehow an insignificant element and need not be given any consideration. How did this narrative come about?
KYB: Well, I could write a book about that. Today, we think of the Palestinian case as being truly extraordinary, because there is nothing like that—a great imperial power
Rumi and Shakespeare On Forgiveness and Reconciliation
j uan Cole
jalaluddin rumi (d. 1273) has sometimes been called “the Shakespeare of the East.” The comparison is just: Both authors powerfully shaped the languages in which they wrote— Persian and English, respectively—and both explored the full dimensions of the human experience. Both also showed a particular interest in how seemingly intractable conflicts can be resolved through forms of reconciliation.
We can learn a lot by comparing and contrasting two tales from each of these authors on the themes of regret, forgiveness, and reunion. Both authors appeal to marvels—Rumi to a magical parrot and Shakespeare to an Italian wizard. Both examine the motives of the powerful, whether the general Othello or the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law ¢Alī. Themes of unthinking violence and profound repentance, of unforgivable trespass and principled clemency, animate the tales of both. And both complicate the ancient definitions of tragedy and comedy, wherein the former is a bleak story where things fall apart at the end and the latter is a humorous story where things come together at the end.
Rumi’s tale of the greengrocer and his parrot is a warning both against an angry rush to judgment and against overconfidence that the framework of our own lives can be generalized to the lives of others.1 The scene opens in a vegetable shop, the proprietor of which owns a parrot with a dulcimer-like voice. The bird can converse with the customers in human language but can also call like a parrot. It even keeps an eye on the shop when the
What Muslims Should Know about Intellectual Conservatism
Jacob Williams
W ho are the enemies of religious freedom and who are its friends? Suppose a young man, thinking he might be gay, asks an imam, priest, or rabbi for advice and the religious leader counsels celibacy. In the UK, giving such advice could one day mean the religious leader has committed a crime, a view that enjoys very widespread support on the political left, revealing that, despite their ostensible sympathy for Muslims, many on the political left appear to have little respect for actual Islamic beliefs when they conflict with liberal commitments.1
As an often vulnerable religious minority in Western societies, Muslims often interpret politics through a hermeneutic of fear, making little distinction between theory and practice and assuming that the hostility of many right-wing actors reflects an underlying intellectual problem with conservative thought. In highly threatening contexts, this politics of distrust may sometimes be necessary, but it is a deeply flawed approach to political theorizing. Western Muslims must adopt a richer hermeneutic and mine the resources of their surrounding political traditions to ground a principled and stable commitment to religious freedom rather than judge their political future on the basis of the pundits’ overt (even if ignorantly invoked) prejudices.
Thinking more carefully about politics will deliver a surprising conclusion: the conservative intellectual tradition contains the West’s richest resources for the task of protecting religious liberty for believers from all faith traditions. In a religiously diverse society such as the modern West, it is not enough for a viable rationale for religious freedom to be rationally compelling: it must also appeal to citizens of all faiths and no faith, and it must be stable. In other words, it must not presuppose the truth of any one religion or the falsity of atheism. And its implementation must not produce consequences that eventually undermine religious freedom, a notable characteristic of the most prominent liberal rationales.
This essay concerns Western political philosophy. This is not because I assume that no resources exist in other traditions, including the Islamic tradition, that can contribute to our understanding. Nor is it because I assume any specific position on whether Muslims should do more than tolerate a politics that does not presuppose any religious truth. Finding a stable, respectful, and tolerable modus vivendi in the West is an important enough challenge. Rather, to be of practical relevance to Western societies, our political philosophy will have to mine the intellectual resources already present within them. We cannot ignore political practice, particularly the obvious fact that the political right often unjustly projects hostility toward Muslims. Indeed, the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton and the American legal scholar Robert P. George, whose ideas animate my reflections on conservatism and religious freedom, have variously taken political positions that Muslims might find objectionable (even as they
