Human Trustees

From one angle, human history is an unbroken chain of strong nations invading, abusing and controlling weaker nations. With time they lose their grip, weaken and fall prey to other rising powers; and the cycle goes on.

Empires rise and fall, and as young male lions compete, sometimes to the death, for the honor of leading a “pride” of mostly females, so ascending nations vie for a greater share of economic, strategic and political power at the expense of surrounding nations. Today this process is unfolding before our eyes in ominous ways.

The prophet Jeremiah had the most challenging and tragic calling of all the Hebrew prophets. He spent his whole life transmitting God’s message of judgment to the remaining southern tribes of Israel (Judah and Benjamin), after the northern kingdom had been carried away into exile by the Assyrians two centuries before – yet all in vain it would seem.

Because of the violent oppression of the poor by the rich and because of their idolatrous ways, God’s wrath, as Jeremiah and others had predicted, swept over Judah in the form of a Babylonian invasion in 586 BCE. Jerusalem and its temple were razed, most people were slaughtered, while the elites were taken into captivity and a few hundred common people were allowed to stay under a governor chosen by Babylon. Jeremiah stayed too, now an old man, but soon the governor revolted and had to flee to Egypt, where Jeremiah soon died.

We now have a whole, separate book by Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem, five chapters long, entitled “Lamentations.” But I believe God laments every single act of conquest and dispossession. Here are a few excerpts to give you an idea:

Judah has been led into captivity,

oppressed with cruel slavery.

She lives among foreign nations

and has no place to rest.

Her enemies have chased her down,

and she has nowhere to turn.

The roads to Jerusalem are in mourning,

for crowds no longer come to celebrate the festivals.

The city gates are silent,

her priests groan,

her young women are crying –

how bitter is her fate!

Her oppressors have become her master,

and her enemies prosper,

for the Lord has punished Jerusalem for her many sins.

Her children have been captured

and taken to distant lands. (Lamentations 1:3-5)

Algeria, French colonialism, and the Church

As I convalesce from a total hip replacement last week, I’ve had more time to think, pray, and read outside my usual box. For some reason, Algeria has been on my mind. I did live there between 1978 and 1987, but also I’ve been meaning for a while to read the above book and write a couple of blogs on it. After all, I knew the Cardinal personally and many of the priests who worked under him. What is more, he came to our wedding in Algiers! Yet more significantly, he was the single most influential Christian leader in Algeria in the 20^th century and his legacy has much to do with the values of this website.

Then our son just finished writing his Masters’ thesis in history at the University of California at Santa Cruz and I read it this week. It was about a French colonial education administrator in Tunisia. He did a great job untangling some of the complexities of colonial rule using some recent racial theory. He also passed on another goldmine of a book: Darcie Fontaine’s Decolonizing Christianity: Religion at the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge UP, 2016).

Finally, this afternoon I watched a French film by David Oelhoffens (starring Viggo Mortensen who speaks both excellent French and Algerian Arabic!), Far from Men, which won three awards at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. It was set in the beginning of the Algerian war (1954) and is loosely based on Albert Camus’ short story, “The Host.” It was an excellent portrayal of the dilemmas of war and human friendship across cultural and religious boundaries.

But none of this makes sense without at least a bare-bone knowledge of the history of French colonialism in Algeria. The story begins in 1830 when the French invaded Algeria under the pretext of destroying the Barbary pirates who over decades had enslaved thousands of Europeans (and some Americans along the way, see my blog on this) and their nominal overlords, the Ottomans. Because this campaign started under the weak ruler Charles X, it was couched in lofty religious language, “crusading” even.

Yet within the interior of the country, the Algerians offered fierce resistance, which the French in turn stamped out with resolve and cruelty over two decades. French settlers were immediately brought in, who were followed in time by Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese. Much of the northern lands were quite fertile and the settlers took over the best parts. Then in 1848, under the Second Empire, France annexed the three northern provinces. But even if this wealthiest part of the land was now “France,” Algerian Muslims could not be French citizens and therefore had no political rights. It was apartheid on steroids, as I like to put it.

So by the 1940s, at least six generations later, you had over 800,000 colonists and about ten million Algerian Muslims. It was not hard to predict that the situation would explode, especially after World War II when so many other colonial nations were achieving their independence. Keep in mind too the brutality with which the French stamped out the Algerian uprising and the continual warfare that the Algerian nationalists managed to keep up between 1954 and 1962.

Yes, torture and atrocities were committed by both sides, but if you take into account the huge discrepancy between war casualties (somewhere between 30,000 French deaths and 700,000 Algerian deaths), you see that the ragtag Algerian fighters were no match for a world class army arrayed against them. There is no doubt that the French committed war crimes, most notably when they wiped out whole villages in acts of reprisal. In the end, that is what created the most international pressure for them to come to the negotiating table. And though the colonial terrorist organization (the OAS) killed many Algerians as well as fellow Frenchmen both in France and Algeria, victims of Algerian infighting numbered in the tens of thousands and post-war revenge killings likely surpassed 100,000.

This was not the Babylonians sweeping into sixth-century BCE Judah as in the beginning of this blog, but it certainly follows the same pattern. Then the civil war of the 1990s produced another 200,000 victims, most of which were civilians. There is so much to lament in this one nation’s history.

So how did Christian leaders react to all of this? Were they simply churning out religious rhetoric in support of the colonial rulers’ policies and the colonial ideology of the French state? Or did they voice any opposition to it in the name of the gospel?

There was certainly plenty of the former, though not in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church (Protestants were very few in Algeria). Many of the colonists held on to a very conservative Catholic ideology and were primarily motivated by a “defense of Christian civilization.” But there were plenty of “progressive” voices too at all levels in the latter category, as Darcie Fontaine amply documents in her first chapter. Then in 1947 the pope sent Léon-Etienne Duval from the Haute-Savoie region of France (the Alps south of Geneva, Switzerland) as the new bishop of Constantine and Hippo (St. Augustine’s original bishopric). In Fontaine’s words,

[Duval] “became the symbol of the Catholic Church during the Algerian War. His mythic status derived from his public statements against the use of torture and other forms of what he called “injustice”; his vocal and tangible support of peace and reconciliation among the Algerian population, especially across religious lines; and his eventual words and actions at Algerian independence” (62).

Cardinal Duval’s convictions before Algeria

The book photographed above came out in 1984. My copy was a gift from a priest in his administration. A couple of years before, a well-known French journalist, Marie-Christine Ray, interviewed Cardinal Duval over several months and the book reports those conversations. Le Centurion is one of France’s oldest and most popular publishers and I’m guessing it sold over a million copies, only because the Algerian War remains a gaping wound in the French psyche. The Vietnam War was traumatic for Americans on many levels, but it was in a land far away. In France’s case, close to a million “pieds noirs” returned to France fearing for their safety after independence. France has yet to heal from this trauma and process it in a healthy way.

I have to interject a personal note here. I grew up in the Paris suburbs and remember as a child being fascinated and troubled by gory pictures of bombings in France or Algeria in the popular weekly magazine Paris Match which came to our home. In France alone several thousand people were killed in terror attacks during this period either by the FLN or the OAS. Still in elementary school I would read a good part of those articles. Little did I know I would be living there nine years.

Now back to the Cardinal. From a young age Léon Etienne Duval knew God was calling him into the priesthood. At eighteen his bishop in Annecy sent him to do theological studies in Rome, where he came out with a specialty in philosophy. After briefly serving as parish priest he taught from 1930 to 1938 in the Catholic seminary at Annecy. Then he was named as the bishop’s top administrator as the war seemed imminent. This put him in touch with lots of Catholic social activists who by 1940 were organizing discussion groups about how to push back against the Vichy government, resist German forced labor, and manage the hiding and care of Jewish children pouring in from Germany and Switzerland. Then Duval reflects on how crucial this emphasis of mobilizing lay people for this work turned out to be:

“By inviting the laity to deepen their faith and review their lives in the light of the gospel, chaplains and lay leaders were admirably preparing them to exercise their own responsibility and to act ‘politically,’ in the best sense of this word, that is, in the service of the community’s common good. The events that followed largely bore this out. I often came to realize that to erect a wall between the political and the religious spheres is just as harmful for politics as it is for the Church. I fondly and vividly remember this time spent with those activists. I saw the Holy Spirit moving in the conscience of most members of that diocese” (38).

His bishop had clearly led the way by visibly supporting the Resistance and making sure no Catholic would be tempted by the ideology of Nazi Germany. This applied to the Vichy government as well. Duval himself states how he quickly he came to realize how nefarious their policies were. He knew people who joined the Resistance and those who chose not to. But his concern was “to lead Christians to rise above partisan views and to take a stand for justice and solidarity between all French people” (39).

It is not surprising, then, that before the pope sent him to Algeria as bishop he had already come to his own conclusion with regard to the French colonial project in Algeria. Here’s how he puts it:

“I recall that one day at the seminary where I was teaching we were having a conversation as colleagues and I had come to the conclusion that the Second World War had shaken the nations so deeply that it must mark the end of the colonial empires. By what means and in what form this change would take place, I was far from guessing. But I thought it inevitable.”

I will begin the second half of this blog with the Cardinal’s role during the war.

Founded by Rick Love around 2010, this is the organization with which I work most closely. They have grown very rapidly and have now hired a consultant to enable them to take their operations to the next level. They are have ongoing projects in at least nine US metropolitan areas and continue to expand their partnering with local and national Muslim organizations.

I recently did a webinar for them, and we collaborate in other ways as well. I feel very privileged to be so closely associated with them. We are very much "on the same page."

https://www.peacecatalyst.org/

This is a recent venture (started in 2014) with a great deal of promise. Grayson Robertson is the founder and executive director, and Dina Malki, who together with him completed Masters degrees at the Hartford Seminary, have put together some interesting projects. Another sign that this project is going to bear fruit is that they have Joseph Montville on their board of advisors. Montville is an experienced US diplomat, a highly respected academic, and the director of the Abrahamic Family Reunion. Perhaps another indication of potential reach is that Robertson is located in Washington, DC.

http://www.emeproject.org/

In a sequence now all too familiar in Europe, a truck careened down a busy shopping street in Stockholm last Friday afternoon killing four people and seriously injuring nine others before going up in flames as it rammed into a department store. The driver, as was later discovered, was a 39-year-old Uzbek, a Muslim likely radicalized through ISIS propaganda.

An article in The Guardian carries a likely title, “Swedish truck attack: shock gives way to fear of open society.” Sweden and Germany, after all, are the two nations that by far have welcomed the most migrants and asylum seekers since the 2011 “Arab Spring.” Last year alone, Sweden resettled 130,000 more refugees. Understandably, “compassion fatigue” has set in, as the Economist puts it. In addition, right wing parties are leveraging these rising fears of terrorism to attract people to their populist cause.

Please take a deep breath

I named the last part of my library lecture on the risk of terrorism “Why take a deep breath.” As I said in the the first half of this blog, the fear of Islamic related terrorism is greatly overblown. I mentioned Harvard’s Steven M. Walt’s Foreign Policy article, “Five ways Donald Trump is wrong about Islam.” In particular he writes,

“… based on the evidence since 9/11 (and including that attack), the likelihood an American will be killed by a terrorist is less than 1 in 3 million per year, and the lifetime risk is about 1 in 45,000.”

The incredible discrepancy between the fear level of the average American and the actual risk of becoming a victim of terrorism (which is practically nil) is in itself a telling sign of the terrorists’ success. They do succeed in terrorizing! And ironically, this is in a country plagued with by far the highest rate of gun violence among Western nations (there are at least 10,000 gun-related homicides in the US every year).

Those facts led two terrorism experts, John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, to write a book together: Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Jack Anderson on the Homeland Security Community website reviewed the book. The authors, he noted, remind the reader …

“that according to the START Global Terrorism Database, all Islamic extremism, globally, claims some 200-300 lives per year, roughly equivalent to bathtub drownings in the U.S. Bathtub drownings do not take up such a significant portion of the U.S. discretionary budget, and Mueller and Stewart consider this imbalance to be a deeply irrational use of public money, betraying public trust by chasing inconceivable and unlikely contingencies.”

In the first half I also mentioned leading terrorism expert, Jessica Stern. This is from her piece on Boston University’s website in September 2016, “Is the war on terrorism really winnable?”:

“The United States is generally far less prone to terrorism than is Europe, and even less prone to terrorism than the rest of the world. This is true even with respect to attacks inspired by ISIS. On average, terrorism kills about as many Americans per year as lightning strikes do. (Several organizations collect data on terrorism, and figures differ, but only slightly for terrorism inside the United States.)”

Right-wing terrorism is a greater threat

These figures on terrorism include attacks by right wing movements, which from 2002 until the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting killed more Americans than Muslim terrorists did (48 compared with 45). Newsweek ran a cover article in February 2016 entitled, “Right-wing extremists are a bigger threat to America than ISIS.” This is certainly the belief of most law enforcement agencies in this country, it notes. But notice the political incitement that feeds these hundreds of groups bent on hatred and violence:

“These Americans thrive on hate and conspiracy theories, many fed to them by politicians and commentators who blithely blather about government concentration camps and impending martial law and plans to seize guns and other dystopian gibberish, apparently unaware there are people listening who don’t know it’s all lies. These extremists turn to violence—against minorities, non-Christians, abortion providers, government officials—in what they believe is a fight to save America. And that potential for violence is escalating every day.”

This is why the Trump administration’s sole focus on Islamic-related terrorism is so out of line with reality. This is the message that three authors in a joint article published in Foreign Policy wanted to convey: “The Trump administration’s focus on fighting ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ could not only hamper counterterrorism efforts, but it could even embolden right-wing and anti-government extremists, experts and former government officials say.”

Part of the problem is that if these policies are actually implemented in the Department of Homeland security (DHS), they would seriously jeopardize the ongoing collaboration between the DHS and the Muslim community to counter radicalization. Further, it would reinforce the dangerous perception that the US is at war with Islam. Of course, that’s precisely the message that ISIS, al-Qaeda and their ilk are using to recruit more foot soldiers.

The other problem is that they are underestimating the threat of right-wing extremism. Another article cites figures from the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) funded by the DHS and the Justice Department. If you discount both the Oklahoma bombing and the 9/11 attacks, between 1990 and 2017 far-right violence killed 272 Americans, while Muslim terrorists killed 136. Between 2015 and 2017, Muslim extremists staged five homicide events killing 74 people, while right-wing extremists staged eight such events and killed 27. If you exclude the Pulse nightclub attack (49 dead), then the number on the islamist side is 25.

That is the general pattern: “far-right extremists tend to be more active in committing homicides, yet Islamist extremists tend to be more deadly.” But terrorist experts, as mentioned above, are predicting an uptick of non-Muslim terror in the US. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “Far-right and anti-government groups plan and carry out domestic attacks at a greater frequency than foreign terrorist groups.” Have a look at their recent “Hate Map” and you will notice a 197% rise in anti-Muslim hate groups since 2015. Part of that can be attributed to the emboldening of white supremacy groups during and after the electoral campaign.

What you and I can do

I have to end on a better note. You took a deep breath and now you’re stressed once again!

First, the overall threat of terrorism in the US is very marginal. Whether it’s inspired by islamists or right-wing militants, remember, you are more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by one of them.

Second, I don’t want to convey the impression that because Islamic-related terrorism marginally affects us in the US we have a license to remain unconcerned about it. Especially if you add the sectarian violence in the Middle East and South Asia, general political instability, and the participation of jihadi organizations in the Syrian civil war, the number of victims climbs astronomically. Then too, just this morning (Palm Sunday) ISIS militants bombed two Egyptian churches killing well over forty people. Last December in a Cairo church they killed 29. This is an ideology of hatred, and though the victims of ISIS have been mostly Muslims, they have clearly targeted other minorities, and in Iraq above all Yazidis. This should move us to prayer, advocacy, and certainly a large dose of compassion!

Third, I believe that with all this information in hand there is much you and I can do to allay people’s fears about Islamic-inspired terrorism. More than that, I believe we have a God-given responsibility to build bridges, first between Muslims and Christians in order to foster greater understanding and empathy within our communities; and second as non-Muslim Americans or Europeans to stand with our Muslim friends, who more than any other group these days live in fear (to better understand why, look at this SPLC page).

Many groups in the US have come together to stand with Muslims in fighting Islamophobia. Some are interfaith groups, like Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core, or the Abrahamic Alliance; some are Jewish, like Jewish Voice for Peace; some are Catholic, like the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University; some are evangelicals like my friend Rick Love and his Peace Catalyst International.

Finally, you can lobby for the US to welcome many more refugees than it has in the past. They are the first victims of our irrational fears. Polls show that 76% of white evangelicals approve of President Trump's "Muslim ban." Other white Protestants are around 50 percent, whereas 84% of black Protestants, 62% of Catholics, and 74% of the religious "nones" disapprove of it. We have lots of work to do!

I write this as a Christian at the beginning of Holy Week. “God is love,” repeats the Apostle John in his first New Testament letter. He then adds, “perfect love expels all fear” (I John 4:18, NLT). As those who follow the one who sacrificed his life for all on Good Friday, Christians should be the first to cast off fear and love their enemies as their Lord did.

Keep in mind that the Coptic Orthodox, who suffered these brutal Palm Sunday attacks, said prayers not only for the victims and their families but for the perpetrators too. Their souls are in grave danger, they said.

Sadly, most Christians attend churches where Islamophobia is, if not rampant, at least tolerated.

This you and I, from any angle and in whatever measure, can help to change.

Addendum (Nov. 2018): a comprehensive study was just completed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on terrorism. There are nearly four times as many Sunni salafi-jihadis operating now than did in 2001. Counting all al-Qaeda and ISIS-related fighters and potential fighters, and including all other independent groups on various agencies cooperating around the world, there might be as many as 230,000 in 70 different countries. So the threat is real. But this NYTimes article on the study shows that miltary counter-offensive is only a very small part of combatting this ideology which has metasthetized over the last couple of decades. In its conclusion it says that the following objectives are the most important: “Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian and other grievances.” Finally, a long article in Politico by a top-level Justice Department official under Obama traces the fascinating story of how they were able to disable (at least the first wave of) the virulent combination of jihadism and cyber warfare in the person of Junaid Hussain, a Pakistani British youth who managed to mount a huge campaign of recruitment of youths in the US and elsewhere.

It’s no secret that stoking the fear of “Islamic terrorism” was one element of candidate Trump’s successful campaign and the prime motivation behind his attempt (so far unsuccessful) to ban travel to the US from six Muslim nations.

That fear is real. In the 2016 Survey of American Fears, Chapman University found that people’s top fear was “government corruption” (60.6%). Next came a terrorist attack on the nation (41%); then “not enough money” (39.9%); then “victim of terrorism” (38.5%).

Spoiler alert: leading US terrorism expert Jessica Stern (Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University) estimates that your chances of being killed by a Muslim terrorist are about the same as being killed by lightning. Harvard’s Stephen M. Walt wrote in January 2017 that your chances of being killed by a terrorist in one year are one in three million. By comparison, your chances of dying of cancer this year are one in 600.

Naturally, there is a lot more to say about this topic. But at least you can breathe a sigh of relief before you read on :-).

This blog post is the result of my local library doing a series of talks entitled “Making Sense of Current Events.” I was privileged to kick off the series with this topic and it was well attended. This then is a shortened version of what I presented via Powerpoint.

A/ Islamic-related terrorism will continue

Since 2015 there has been a string of attacks in the West:

• Charlie Hebdo, Jan. 2015, 17 killed
• Paris attacks, Nov. 2015, 137
• San Bernardino attack, Dec. 2015, 14
• Brussels attacks, March 2016, 34
• Orlando night club shooting, June 2016, 49
  
• Nice truck attack, July 2016, 84
• Berlin Christmas market attack, Dec. 2016, 12
• London car & knife attack, March 22, 5

But this shouldn’t keep us from seeing the big picture: since the 9/11/2001 attacks the vast majority of victims have been Muslims themselves (easily 9 out of 10), with the following breakdown:

• 75% in 25 Muslim-majority nations (126,016)
• 2.2% in US & Western Europe (3, 689)
• 22.4% in rest of the world (37, 516)
• Total: 167, 221 dead

Also, it helps to gain some historical perspective. Post-WWII there have been three waves of terrorism:

a) 1960s & 1970s: the epicenter was in Europe and less in US (wars in Algeria, Vietnam, Northern Ireland); during that period 5,000 people died from terror attacks in France, and around 3,000 in Ireland/UK

b) 1980s: a shift to Latin America w/ insurgencies in Peru, El Salvador and Columbia

c) 1990s till now: Muslim-majority nations of the MENA region and South Asia; it all started in the 1980s with the Afghan mujhadeen's successful guerilla warfare against the USSR in part thanks to US money and arms

Furthermore, according to Massod Farivar, writing for the Voice of America, the distribution of terror attacks shows that it is much more about political instability than about religion. The authors of the 2015 Global Terrorism Index Report indicate that “less than 0.6 per cent of all terrorist attacks have occurred in countries without any ongoing conflict and any form of political terror.” Consider too that whereas over 50,000 died from terrorism in Iraq since 2001, only six died in Malaysia.

Right now from Iraq to Pakistan it’s mostly a sectarian war. Sunnis are killing Shiites and one of the driving forces in the region is the Saudi-Iranian rivalry being played out in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. But locally, it’s also about political power. Farivar quotes Columbia University’s ME historian Richard Bulliet:

“At its core, the violence is part of a broader struggle over power in predominantly Sunni societies where questions over political and religious authority as well as the relationship between religion and modernity linger unsettled decades after European colonial rule and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. With Sunnism collapsing as a unifying state institution, Islamists have turned to religion to combat authoritarian regimes…. Sunni Islam… is falling apart drastically, and I think this is the source of a great deal of the violence. Ultimately, that’s the problem: If you have an entrenched state, can you get rid of it without violence? If you don’t believe that’s a possibility, then violence becomes the alternative option.”

At the same time, al-Qaeda and ISIS (after its territory is gone) will go on targeting the US, according to the December 2016 report, “The Jihadi Threat: ISIS, al-Qaeda and Beyond.” Published by the US Institute of Peace, this was a work of collaboration among twenty top academics and specialists in this field. They begin with this general statement:

“The United States alone has spent trillions of dollars—in military campaigns, intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, and diplomacy—to counter jihadism. Progress has been made; fewer than a hundred people were killed inside the United States between 2001 and late 2016—in stark contrast to the death toll on 9/11. Yet the threat endures.”

Regarding ISIS, the report states that even with the loss of its actual caliphate, it will still retain some appeal. It likely will “endure for years to come as a pure insurgency using terrorist tactics. It revolutionized mobilization of supporters and sympathizers in the West, a lasting legacy as well as a future threat.”

More ominously, al-Qaeda retains its particular brand and has expanded as a network of affiliated organizations in North Africa, the ME, West Africa, South Asia and the Caucasus. Additionally, it is well entrenched in Yemen. The report adds, “Al-Qaeda has played the long game, and it may prove to be a more enduring model than the Islamic State.”

Do not think that the rivalry between the two organizations will undermine the jihadi cause in the world. Though it’s possible they will skirmish here and there, it’s more likely that they will divide up the task, if only by default:

“The two movements have complementary effects on the global jihadi Salafist network, however. They are both exploiting disenfranchised or disillusioned Sunni youth in the Middle East and abroad. They are both undermining the existing state system and contributing to expanding wars in the region. They are both normalizing the belief that violent jihad is necessary in order to defend the Sunni community globally.”

[If you are unsure about what the Salafi movement represents, read this blog of mine, “The Global Salafi Phenomenon.” It is mostly an apolitical movement which does not engage in violence and which is distinct, yet ideologically very similar to Saudi Wahhabism. Yet as the attacks of 9/11 showed, the leap from peaceful Salafism to Salafi-jihadism is not a great one. Fifteen of the nineteen attackers were Saudi.]

Here are some bullet points I will give you from their section on how to defeat jihadism:

1) It’s a complex phenomenon shaped by “a confluence of trends”: “ideological, geostrategic, sectarian, demographic, economic, and social”

2) “Military means can disrupt, but they can’t permanently dismantle or reverse a trend initially spawned by deep political discontent.”

3) International cooperation and local partnerships are needed, but often require compromises (think of working with a quasi-dictatorship in Egypt)

4) “Marginalizing extremism requires creating a political environment in which jihadism has less and less appeal over time.” Some form of democracy support is crucial.

5) Jihadist movements do everything to entrap foreign powers fighting a futile battle on their own turf. Don’t take the bait! The greater the violence the greater their ability to recruit!

6) Much of the strategy will have to work on reconciling the sectarian divide. But I add: what do you do with the Iran/Saudi grand game in the ME?

7) Pay attention to the human factors: spend money on aid with a long-term strategy, like attending to social dislocation and internally displaced persons in war zones (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen).

8) Be aware of ISIS’ propaganda at home. If Muslim youth feel battered by discriminatory policies and prejudice, they may be more vulnerable to this propaganda.

In their conclusion (“Future Jihads”) we read:

“The pace of change in the Middle East is unprecedented. So is the range of possible future jihadi threats. No single analytical framework or model suffices to predict the future. Anticipating the next conflict zone—and particularly the next phase of jihadi extremism—is difficult. Extremist organizations quickly morph and adapt tactics—often faster than large bureaucracies and major armies. The reality is that jihadis may always be one step ahead.”

B/ The risk of CBRN terrorism

There is a wealth of writings on terrorism, from books to hundreds of articles in specialized journals. I wanted to give you at least a taste of a 2011 article written by Gregory D. Koblentz (George Mason U.), “Predicting Peril or the Peril of Prediction?”, published in Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (pp. 501-520).

CBRN stands for “chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear” weapons. Concern for the proliferation of these weapons blasted to the top of national security priorities in 1995 after three incidents occurred in close proximity:

1) The Aum Shinrikyo cult used the nerve agent sarin in the Tokyo subway (11 killed, 1,000s injured)

2) Oklahoma bombing (3 weeks later), 168 killed

3) A white supremacist arrested for fraudulently ordering samples of Yersinia pestis (the bacteria that causes the plague) through the mail

Next, Koblentz uses the Department of Defense definition of terrorism, “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

How is "risk" defined when it comes to CBRN terrorism? Koblentz says risk is the convergence of three factors:

“In the study of terrorism, risk is commonly conceived of as the function of the threat posed by a terrorist group, a chosen target’s vulnerability to attack, and the consequences of a successful attack on the target.”

Among specialists, you find roughly three camps, he says. The “optimists” emphasize the low probability of this kind of attack occurring. The “pessimists” aver that the risk is low, but growing in terms of its probability and the grievous nature of its consequences. Finally, the pragmatists refrain from making any kind of judgment and simply follow the evidence one way or the other.

Most of the article is about evaluating the role of human judgment, “the influence of mental shortcuts (called heuristics) and the systemic errors they create (called biases) on the risk assessment process.” But you ask, “why can’t you just follow the evidence? Don’t facts speak for themselves?” Actually they do not, at least not very clearly. Look at the following examples based on mathematical models:

a) Matthew Bunn asserts that there’s a 3% risk of CBRN terrorism per year

b) John Mueller concludes that it’s one in a million!

Plainly, Koblentz opines, “Different experts using the same model can come up with radically different estimates of the threat. Despite the use of mathematical formula and statistical analyses, these types of quantitative risk assessments remain reliant on the judgment of experts. As a result, they remain susceptible to the biases discussed above.”

But these wildly different conclusions greatly impact the real world. In the decade between 2001 and 2011, the US spent $60 billion on building defenses against biological terrorism. Many critics noted that this expenditure took funds away from the necessary research on immediate health threats. Then too, it’s a matter of priorities. In 2009 Homeland Security spent $9 billion on CBRN terror, but only $1.3 to counter IEDs. With hindsight of course, that wasn’t so wise.

Admittedly, terrorism studies are a work in progress. In another 2011 article, this time for the University of Virginia Law School, John Monahan evaluates the state of research on radicalization (is there a profile for people who radicalize? “The Individual Risk Assessment of Terrorism”). As it turns out, acts of “common violence” are quite different from acts of terrorism. The four characteristics generally accepted (in some combination) as predictors of common violence (“criminal history, an irresponsible lifestyle, psychopathy and criminal attitudes, and substance abuse”) generally do not apply to terrorists. Monahan continues,

“In addition, there is little empirical evidence supporting the validity of other putative risk factors for terrorism beyond what is already obvious (i.e., age, gender, and perhaps marital status). Indeed, the strongest empirical findings are entirely negative: terrorists in general tend not to be impoverished or mentally ill or substance abusers or psychopaths or otherwise criminal; suicidal terrorists tend not to be clinically suicidal. In no society studied to date have personality traits been found to distinguish those who engage in terrorism from those who refrain from it.”

Monahan concludes that further research must focus on identifying “robust individual risk factors.” In his opinion, there are four promising ones: ideology, affiliations, moral emotions, and grievances. But ideology by itself says virtually nothing about a person. He quotes the authors of another study:

“Polls in Muslim countries indicate that millions sympathize with jihadist goals or justify terrorist attacks. But Muslim terrorists number only in the thousands. The challenge is to explain how only one in a thousand with radical beliefs is involved in radical action.”

Between 2014-2015 there may have been up to 80,000 jihadis worldwide. But the fight against ISIS since then has killed over 60,000 ISIS fighters. And this is not counting the relative drying up of recruits due to their crushing defeat. So yes, “Muslim terrorists number only in the thousands.”

Herein ends the first part of this blog. I begin the second half of this blog on the threat of Islamic terrorism with the advice, “take a deep breath!” Just as I began here with the “spoiler alert,” the chances of you and I being victims of terrorism are very minute indeed.

When President Donald Trump announced his first refugee ban, Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz fired back that his company would hire 10,000 refugees. In turn, this ignited a social media firestorm from conservatives vowing to boycott the brand. Though Starbucks disputes this will have any effect on its bottom line, it does underscore in graphic terms what we all know – our nation is deeply polarized these days!

This blog reflects what I have learned in the last couple of months from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounce “height”). First I showed my Comparative Religion classes a TED talk Haidt did in 2008 that seemed very prescient relative to what’s happening today. Then I read a long article he wrote that was published in July 2016 after Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party – hence the title for the blog post: “Nationalism Rising: When and Why Nationalism beats globalism.”

Haidt forced me to think outside of my own comfort zone. I hope you find this helpful too.

The 5 moral foundations of the human mind

There’s nothing remotely religious about Haidt and his colleagues’ research on the social dimensions of morality. It’s all based on evolutionary psychology with data comparisons from all parts of the world. In his 2008 TED talk Haidt approvingly quotes Stephen Pinker’s thesis in developmental psychology that human beings at birth come into the world not as a “blank slate” but with many ingrained moral dispositions. He calls this “the first draft of the moral mind.” Naturally, that first draft gets modified as the child grows up in a particular family, goes to school, and moves around in various social contexts over time.

But at bottom, and all across cultures and disciplines, he and his colleagues found that there were five moral foundations of morality, or sources of intuition and emotions:

1) Harm/care: our brains as mammals cause us to feel compassion for those most vulnerable, compel us to care about them, and castigate those who cause them harm

2) Fairness/reciprocity: we’re also programmed to believe in people’s equality, and hence in justice, and additionally in some form of the “golden rule”

3) In-group/ loyalty: only humans create large groups that cooperate, first and foremost to fight any competitors; schools or sport teams’ loyalty are also good examples of this

4) Authority/respect: hierarchy comes naturally in human society, but respect for authority can also manifest as love, and not just fear of a greater power

5) Purity/sanctity: any ideology that says that virtue can be cultivated by controlling our body; it could be about abstaining from sex, but also about controlling what we eat

Then they gave out questionnaires to about 30,000 Americans that measured the relative strength of these values for each respondent. Also part of the questionnaire was whether the person self-identified as “liberal” or “conservative” politically. The result was astounding. Everyone scored high on the first two moral values, harm and fairness, but that was the extent of the liberals’ moral scope – just a two-foundation morality. By contrast, the more conservative a person is, the more the next three values grow in importance. As Haidt puts it, “conservatives have more of a five-channel, or five-foundation morality.”

Surprisingly perhaps, this same kind of result holds for questionnaires given out in many other countries around the world. Whether in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia or Eastern Europe, everyone agrees about the importance of care and fairness, but it is around issues of in-group, authority and purity that the moral arguments become heated.

The rest of his talk, then, is focused on the two facts of 1) social entropy (left to their own devices, human groups degenerate over time because of in-fighting and chaos); 2) fruitful cooperation entails putting all five moral tools to use. At this point he brings in religion. It is a controversial finding, he admits, but much research points to the emergence of religion as a means of bringing societies together and be able to move forward. Look at all the great civilizations of the past, he says. There was usually some kind of religious component that united people and energized them to achieve the common good.

This research led to the writing of his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. But here I’m more concerned with what he wrote during the 2016 electoral campaign.

The rise of the globalists

In Haidt’s “Nationalism Rising” he point to the World Values Survey that in six waves since the early 1980s has charted people’s values and beliefs around the globe. Just about all of these nations have grown more prosperous in the meantime, with some transitioning from communism to capitalism, from autocracy to democracy. How have their values changed in this time period?

Despite all the variations from one country to the next, there are nevertheless common trends that emerge. They move forward according to two axes. He explains:

“[F]irst, as they industrialize, they move away from ‘traditional values’ in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward ‘secular rational’ values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from ‘survival values’ emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward ‘self-expression’ or ‘emancipative values’ that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.”

When the rule of law is established to some extent and corruption in government is at least curtailed, societies tend to see people live more comfortably; and as they feel safer and more prosperous, they tend to become “more open and tolerant.” Along with the internet and access to movies and other aspects of global culture worldwide, they gradually develop a “cosmopolitan” worldview – literally becoming “citizens of the world.”

Perhaps the best way to describe this “vision of heaven for multicultural globalists” is to quote from John Lennon’s song:

Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

But as Haidt notes, “it’s naïveté, sacrilege, and treason for nationalists.”

How globalists trigger the nationalist reaction

Some forms of nationalism can be illiberal and outright racist – think of the extreme represented by Hitler’s National Socialism, or even white supremacy groups in contemporary America. But at core, it’s a reemphasis on the in-group, authority and purity values mentioned above. It’s really about a social contract, contends Haidt:

“Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.”

But what has fed the conflicts between the globalists and nationalists of late has been the flood of immigrants pouring onto Europe’s shores. There had been a steady stream of economic and political refugees crossing from Africa into Spain, but things have accelerated by multiple digits since the Arab uprisings in 2011, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of ISIS in 2014. In 2016 around 5,000 migrants died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. I dealt with this issue in two blogs about inequality (the first, and the second).

Haidt captures some of these feelings on both sides as these events unfolded:

“But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa….

By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting ‘enough is enough, close the tap,’ when the globalists proclaimed, ‘let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.’ Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?

Yet in this conversation, the word “racism” is too imprecise to be helpful. What the nationalists are objecting to, in fact, is what they perceive as the immigrants’ different values and abhorrent practices, which represent a threat to their way of life. Of course, there are politicians who exploit and amplify those fears for their own gain.

Enter here Karen Stenner’s classic book on political psychology, The Authoritarian Dynamic. This is how Haidt describes her thesis:

“Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.”

What “pushes that button” is what she calls a “normative threat,” when leaders are not worthy of respect, when society is fraying at the seams and threatening chaos. As Haidt puts it, “it’s the perception that ‘we’ are falling apart.” Most nationalists, he adds, are just trying to protect the homeland, not just their income or family.

Stenner conducted some studies in a variety of national settings and when a scenario came up showing that Americans were becoming more similar, “authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others.” But change the direction in which society is moving and something gets triggered:

“But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the ‘authoritarian dynamic’ kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant. For example, ‘maintaining order in the nation’ became a higher national priority while ‘protecting freedom of speech’ became a lower priority. They became more critical of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce.”

Not surprisingly, when asked about what values should be emphasized above others in raising one’s children, authoritarians put “obedience” above “tolerance and respect for other people” or “independence.”

Haidt also likes Stenner’s distinction between “status-quo conservatives” (those wary about any radical change) and authoritarians. This was graphically demonstrated by the quasi-unanimous opposition to Donald Trump by the Republican establishment during most of the 2016 presidential campaign. At the same time, Stenner gives the reason most Republican leaders rallied behind him once it was clear he would be the party’s nominee (though writing years before):

“But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling 'Stop!' Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.”

This dynamic also explains why Muslim immigrants pose a greater threat than immigrants from anywhere else. But it’s not so much about security as it is about what Stenner calls a “normative” threat. Muslims generally do not assimilate as easily as immigrants from other backgrounds. They require high maintenance – building mosques, seeking special treatment for prayer spaces at work, insisting on halal meat, having their women wear hijabs and in some cases even niqabs (full face veils). This represents a threat to western secular civilization. Many in the US would add “a threat to Christian civilization.” Besides, Europe has been discussing for at least two decades the ins and outs of “reasonable accommodation” for Muslim immigrants. In Sweden, for instance, public swimming pools now offer specific times reserved for female swimmers in order to accommodate Muslims.

What do we take away from this?

I offer three takeaways:

1. Start listening to one another: If globalists are in power, they need to think how best not to trigger an authoritarian reaction. Angela Merkel, after welcoming over a million mostly Muslim refugees in Germany in the last two years, has a great challenge before her. That would be like if the US had let four million Muslims!

On the micro level, let’s learn to reach out to people on the other side of the political divide, wherever we happen to be. Building a healthy democratic society will mean paying attention to all five foundational values mentioned above: fairness and care; but too, group loyalty, respect for authority (including religious authority), and moral uprightness (sanctity/purity). Many times, bridge-building starts within our families!

2. Assimilation versus multiculturalism? I have no space to deal with this here, but I want to push back just a bit against this Haidt conclusion:

“If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.”

The classic contrast here would be between France (staunchly assimilationist) and the UK (multiculturalist, including Sharia courts!). I believe France’s hardline stance against Muslim expression will only invite more terror attacks. Further, it seems to me that Britain has managed its multiculturalism rather well. But so much more could be said …

3. Be loyal to your nation, but remember the big picture. If you know anything about this website, you know that my lifelong commitment is to building bridges between adherents of different faith traditions in the name of Jesus, most notably between Muslims and Christians. This endeavor knows no national boundaries. In fact, its objective is to raise awareness of and commitment to our calling to care for our fellow human beings and for our planet as God’s trustees on earth. With the privilege of a trust comes responsibility and accountability. And that means moving forward with sensitivity, wisdom and love in these troubled times. Reconciliation and peacebuilding are the order of the day!

In the second half of this blog post I make three points. After an introduction to Christian mission (and Islamic da’wa), I first argue that Pope Francis in his first encyclical is intentionally engaging in Christian mission. In fact, by addressing all humanity on an issue that impacts the whole planet with potentially disastrous consequences, he is leveraging his influence to promote dialogue for the common good. This for him is to shine the light of Jesus’ gospel.

My second point is to briefly show how evangelical mission thinking has been evolving in similar directions. I will illustrate this by looking at the most important recent evangelical global document on mission, the Lausanne Cape Town Commitment.

Finally – with even fewer words – I will contend that despite the troubling history of Muslim-Christian interaction in this area of mission, environmental education and activism, which goes hand in hand with poverty reduction, represents a fertile field of common witness today.

Christian mission and Muslim da’wa

Unlike other faiths, Islam and Christianity are “missionary” traditions, that is, both call on their adherents to spread their faith and bring others into the fold. The gospel of Matthew ends with Jesus giving his last charge to the disciples before ascending into heaven, including this central command, “go and make disciples of all the nations” (Mat. 28:19). In Luke-Acts, and in parallel fashion, before his ascension Jesus tells them,

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere – in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the world” (Acts 1:8).

Many mosques in the English-speaking world are called “Islamic Dawah Center,” like this one in Houston, TX. The Arabic word da’wa (or dawah, or da’wah), means “to invite” and is used in several Qur’anic verses, notably:

“[Prophet] call [people] to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good teaching. Argue with them in the most courteous way …” (Q. 16:125)

“Who speaks better than someone who calls people to God, does what is right, and says, ‘I am one of the those devoted to God’?” (Q. 41:33).

Thus Muslims consider that da’wa is a duty, if not of every individual, at least of the ummah as a whole (Muslim community worldwide). The Texan convert to Islam, Yusuf Estes, in his answer to a query about this on his website (islamtomorrow.com) includes advice that Christians often use on this topic. First, he mentions that “Islam has the proof for everything that it teaches. Our sources [Qur’an and Sunna] are authentic and original.” Then this advice:

"Your actions are observed by others through your behavior and manners. You become the role model for what Islam is all about.

Both methods (dawah by words and actions) were used by the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) when delivering the message of Islam. He was the perfect example of what he was calling the people to do. Ayesah, may Allah be pleased with her, said that if you would like to see a living example of the Quran walking, then simply look to Muhammad, peace be upon him. His life was the best example of the noble teachings and principles set forth in the Quran."

Muslims are supposed to advise everyone by using a gentle and simple approach to attract the hungry souls to the Way of Allah. For sure today more than ever, people need to know about Islam and be able to put it into practice. We all need an example to follow.

The shaykh here was beginning to engage in “a theology of mission.” Christian scholars of mission are called “missiologists.” One of the greatests in the last century was the South African David Bosch. As quoted by Scott Sunquist in his 2014 groundbreaking work, Understanding Christian Mission: Participating in Suffering and Glory (p. 11), Bosch described the Christian mission in these words:

“Mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belie. It is the good news of God’s love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world” (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, p. 518).

For the uninitiated, allow me to highlight several points:

1. This is God’s mission – Jesus continues his “liberating mission” through his followers today. The Latin phrase is often used to capture this work of God: mission dei.
2. God seeks to “liberate” people; first from sin (hence Christ’s redemption through the cross); but too, in following Jesus’ example in his healings and ministry to the poor and marginalized, this involves care for the poor and an effort to dismantle the unjust structures that keep them oppressed.
3. Mission involves both proclamation (articulating the “good news”) and acts of mercy and justice
4. It is the witness of a community, not just individuals
5. It is global in scope (“all the nations,” in Jesus’ words). Today, we have come to realize that mission also involves action to protect the environment from human degradation, because all are affected by this “bad news.”

In the very beginning of his encyclical, Pope Francis wrote this:

“In my Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home” (3).

I made clear in my commentary on his Apostolic Exhortation that Pope Francis was calling his people (all Christians, actually) to be joyful missionaries (joy was in the title and throughout the text), heralds of good news for the world. So after spelling out in his first chapter all the dangers and devastation visited by humankind on their common planet, he turns to “The Gospel of Creation” in his next chapter. In his own words:

“Why should this document, addressed to all people of good will, include a chapter dealing with the convictions of believers? I am well aware that in the areas of politics and philosophy there are those who firmly reject the idea of a Creator, or consider it irrelevant, and consequently dismiss as irrational the rich contribution which religions can make towards an integral ecology and the full development of humanity. Others view religions simply as a subculture to be tolerated. Nonetheless, science and religion, with their distinctive approaches to understanding reality, can enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both” (45).

This pope is keenly aware of his great responsibility as the leader of about half of all the 2.2 billion Christians on earth and it is significant that he has chosen creation care as the topic of his first major document. For one thing, it is the first encyclical (the most official and weighty of all papal pronouncements) on this topic. For another, scientific evidence from all over the globe has been pouring in about the potentially catastrophic consequences of the rate at which the earth is heating up.

I believe a third reason is present here. Pope Francis wants Christians as Christians to make such a statement before the whole world. In other words, after calling his people to joyful witness, he leads by example by addressing all people of good will and by exhorting them to unite in caring for their common home. This also allows him to tie in some of the consistent themes of Catholic social doctrine, and in particular the dangers of a culture of consumerism that increases in many ways the oppression of the poor.

Who is he addressing in particular? People of faith of all stripes, and particularly the followers of the three monotheistic traditions, who believe in a Creator – in fact, in a Creator who calls his people to manage well the bounty with which he has blessed them. He also talks about the necessary dialog between science and religion, of which his encyclical is a great example. He takes all the sciences seriously, quoting scientists throughout, including also the social sciences. People of faith must be clear-eyed and informed about the latest research on all the issues that bear upon our life together on this Earth.

Here is a good summary of his position:

“Neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself. When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected. Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for “instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature” (87-8).

Having discussed the issues of environmental, economic, social, and cultural ecology, Pope Francis wants to emphasize the interconnected nature of all these aspects of human existence. What is more, they also connect all of Earth's inhabitants in an increasingly globalized world. So the theme of solidarity comes up again, and with it the theme of the “common good”:

“In the present condition of global society, where injustices abound and growing numbers of people are deprived of basic human rights and considered expendable, the principle of the common good immediately becomes, logically and inevitably, a summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters. This option entails recog­nizing the implications of the universal destination of the world’s goods, but, as I mentioned in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, it demands before all else an appreciation of the immense dignity of the poor in the light of our deepest convictions as believers” (117).

If social justice is at the core of loving our neighbor, then so is environmental justice, which disproportionately impacts the poor as well as future generations -- the most powerless of all in this area. What kind of a planet will we pass on to them?

I have no space to detail all the practical prescriptions and suggestions the pope offers to his readers. But perhaps they can best be summarized in the word “dialog” – continuing dialog among the international community (so let’s strengthen the process agreed upon in the Paris Agreement); but also dialog about local, national and international politics, so as to eradicate the corruption of money and power and to foster a more just economic system that works for all. Politics matter too, but they begin and finally depend on conversations and solidarities at the grassroots. This will necessarily involve robust environmental education, and who is better equipped for this than religious institutions? In the first quote, Pope Francis targets education across the board; in the second, Christians, who need a “conversion” in this area:

“Environmental education should facilitate making the leap towards the transcendent which gives ecological ethics its deepest meaning. It needs educators capable of developing an ethics of ecology, and helping people, through effective pedagogy, to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care” (154).

“It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience” (158-9).

This last statement about “ecological conversion” provides an apt transition to our section on the Lausanne Cape Town Commitment.

Evangelical mission: the Lausanne Cape Town Commitment

Founded in 1846, the World Evangelical Alliance is the oldest and most influential of organizations seeking to represent over 600 million evangelicals around the world. And because it is in the “evangelical tradition,” “it looks to the future with vision to accomplish God’s purposes in discipling the nations for Jesus Christ.” But the most influential evangelical organization seeking to coordinate specifically missional concerns is the Lausanne Movement.

The evangelist Billy Graham, whose passion was to “unite all evangelicals in the common task of the total evangelization of the world,” convened a world congress in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974. Over 2,400 leaders came from 150 nations to the first International Congress on World Evangelization. Since then, many other international congresses, regional gatherings, and more specialized conferences have taken place. The last great congress was the one held in Cape Town, South Africa in 2010. The Lausanne Movement website calls it “the widest and most ethnically diverse gathering of evangelical Christian leaders ever … carefully assembled to depict an accurate demographic of the global church, giving particular voice to the church in the majority world.”

The result was a broad and rich document, the first part of which serves as a kind of creed entitled, “For the Lord we love,” and the word “love” appears in each of the subsection titles. The last one is “We love the mission of God.” It lays out the mission to which God calls the church in two dimensions. Notice here the word “call,” similar to the Islamic da’wa (my emphasis):

• • God commands us to make known to all nations the truth of God’s revelation and the gospel of God’s saving grace through Jesus Christ, calling all people to repentance, faith, baptism and obedient discipleship.
  • God commands us to reflect his own character through compassionate care for the needy, and to demonstrate the values and the power of the kingdom of God in striving for justice and peace and in caring for God’s creation.

The second half of the Commitment is entitled, “For the World we serve: the Cape Town call to action.” The second of six sections is entitled, “Building the peace of Christ in our divided and broken world.” In effect, the theme of reconciliation covers individual redemption, peace in ethnic conflict, Christ for the poor and oppressed (dealing also with slavery and human trafficking, and people with disabilities and with HIV), and then “Christ’s peace for a suffering creation.” This is where we read:

“All human beings are to be stewards of the rich abundance of God’s good creation. We are authorized to exercise godly dominion in using it for the sake of human welfare and needs, for example in farming, fishing, mining, energy generation, engineering, construction, trade, medicine. As we do so, we are also commanded to care for the earth and all its creatures, because the earth belongs to God, not to us. We do this for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the creator, owner, sustainer, redeemer and heir of all creation.”

The three recommendations dovetail nicely with Pope Francis’ Laudate Si, including the first one: “Adopt lifestyles that renounce habits of consumption that are destructive or polluting.” Moreover, as a follow-up to the Cape Town Congress, the Lausanne Movement called a special conference on creation care which was held in Jamaica in 2012 and out of which came the edited book, Creation Care and the Gospel (2016).

Muslims and Christians as trustees of creation

I know from experience that just bringing up the topic of Christian mission is painful for my Muslim readers. It conjures up the image of arrogant and oppressive colonial powers, or more recently the use of relief aid to target the poor and powerless with Christian literature and proselytizing efforts. This is not to ignore the Saudis’ similar use of their petrodollars in Africa and elsewhere, but it is to emphasize that after many Muslim-Christian dialog events over the last forty years or so there is now a recognition on both sides that faithful witness to one’s faith must follow ethical guidelines. The Cape Town Commitment recognizes this:

“We are called to share good news in evangelism, but not to engage in unworthy proselytizing. Evangelism, which includes persuasive rational argument following the example of the Apostle Paul, is ‘to make an honest and open statement of the gospel which leaves the hearers entirely free to make up their own minds about it. We wish to be sensitive to those of other faiths, and we reject any approach that seeks to force conversion on them.’[67] Proselytizing, by contrast, is the attempt to compel others to become ‘one of us’, to ‘accept our religion’, or indeed to ‘join our denomination’.”

So my conclusion to this two-part blog on Pope Francis’ Laudate Si encyclical is the following. The pope has channeled his 13^th-century mentor St. Francis of Assisi in a most commendable way for this 21^st-century context. He has made amply clear that to follow the mission of Jesus today is to participate in his work of redeeming the whole of creation – people and their social and physical environment. Caring for the poor and dispossessed is also to preach against consumerism, fight causes of pollution and the spewing of greenhouse gases; and it is to increase global solidarity for these cause at the grassroots and international levels.

More than anything, for me this is to reaffirm the mission of this blog – to galvanize common action among Christians and Muslims especially, because they recognize each other respectively as trustees of God’s good creation, for the purpose of fostering justice and love for our common home and all of the people that inhabit it.

*** For the last five months a combination of projects, teaching, and family affairs have forced me to neglect my blog. I hope to get back to at least a monthly post by January, once the first draft of the Ghannouchi book translation is finally completed.

Like many others, I’ve been reeling under the shock of a Trump presidency and its potential impact on a host of issues, and the Paris Agreement in particular – in essence “the first international climate agreement” (see some of the dire consequence should the Trump administration choose to walk away from it in this Atlantic article). World peace is intimately connected to both to healthy trade practices and a global effort to mitigate the environmental crisis already bearing down on us as citizens of this planet Earth. Just today I read that sea and air temperatures in the Arctic portend a dramatic loss of sea ice next year

In this post I turn to a topic high on my “to-write about list.” It concerns Pope Francis’ first encyclical Laudate Si (“Praise be to you”). It is all about what Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, call “creation care.” His own subtitle is similar: “On care for our common home,” but the Latin “laudate si” is part of a prayer/canticle penned by St. Francis, whom this pope has chosen as his “guide and inspiration”:

“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”

The earth’s condition is in urgent need of repair and we are the culprits. This is a call to all of humanity to repent and change their ways, as the next paragraph makes clear:

“This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22).

I have written on faith and ecology at some length before. This blog post is one of two on this topic. Here I’ll briefly present the encyclical and comment particularly on Pope Francis’ theological framework. The second and last installment will go more in depth on the issue of mission – how this pope sees the missionary role of the Roman Catholic Church in the second decade of this new millennium. I will compare this to the 2010 evangelical document, the “Lausanne Cape Town Commitment,” and show that Christians are more united on these issues than might first appear. Naturally, since this blog is about increasing Muslim-Christian understanding, I will also comment on Muslim da’wa, the qur’anic imperative for Muslims to call others to their faith in much the same way as Christians.

Francis’ theology of planet care

What does Saint Francis have to teach us, the pope asks? “He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity, and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace” (9-10). He leads us beyond the categories of mathematics and biology, Pope Francis says, to an integrated, holistic ecology, because it embraces communion with all of creation with an attitude of constant awe and gratitude to the Creator.

This is an embodied theology, a way of being in the world which led him to name every creature, however big or small, “brother” or “sister.” No romanticism was this. Rather, by choosing the posture and discourse of “fraternity and beauty” in our relationship with the world, we too deliberately refuse to be “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on [our] immediate needs” (11). “By contrast,” he adds, “if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.” Yes, Saint Francis lived intentionally as a pauper, but this was more radical than simply choosing asceticism. It was “a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled” (11).

Additionally, the beloved friar saw this through the lens of scripture. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wisdom13:5). And as Saint Paul noted, “[God’s] eternal power and divinity have been made known through his words through the creation of the world” (Rom. 1:20).

Then the pope makes his “appeal” to humanity as a whole:

“The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral [a better translation, I think, is “holistic”] development, for we know that things can change. The Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home … Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded” (12).

Pope Francis sees this document as a call for all to engage in a “new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet” (12). He expresses gratitude for the global environmental movement in its many forms. Many groups and organization forge ahead, despite the indifference of many and the opposition of vested interests. All of us everywhere are needed “as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her culture, experience, involvement and talents” (12).

His first chapter then lists some of the damages we humans are inflicting on our common home: pollution of all kinds and even more alarming, the sudden acceleration of global warming caused to a large extent by human selfishness and unbridled greed. Climate change represents “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day,” (20) and its affects the world’s poor disproportionately. Coupled with the disaster caused by wanton deforestation, a changing climate is multiplying refugees whose status is not yet recognized by international conventions. Symptoms can be tackled here and there, but the root cause needs to be squarely addressed: “our current models of production and consumption.” We must substitute renewable energy for that of fossil fuels, and make these new technologies available to those most impoverished.

The other urgent issue of our day is the depletion of the planet’s resources, with water as the forefront, and especially clean drinking water for the poor. Yet with water becoming more and more scarce, in some instances it has been turned into a commodity ruled by the laws of the market. Notice here Pope Francis’ use of the discourse of rights:

“Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, it is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity” (23, his emphasis).

There is much more in this first chapter (loss of biodiversity, declining quality of life in human society, global inequality, and the weak responses), but allow me to offer a couple of comments on the next chapter, “The Gospel of Creation.”

Starting with a substantial section on “The wisdom of the biblical accounts” (9 pages), Francis develops a theology of creation according to which the Holy Spirit seeks to guide all people in the task of protecting and creatively developing their common heritage (“The mystery of the universe”). Then follows a meditation on God’s love as the force behind all that exists. “Every creature is thus the object of the Father’s tenderness” (56). In that sense too, creation as a whole and each part of it is the receptacle of the divine. Therefore, its very fragility reminds us that as trustees of this awesome gift, we are challenged “to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing, and limiting our power” (57).

From this perspective, then, we cannot view nature “solely as a source of profit and gain”:

“This vision of ‘might is right’ has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all. Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus. As he said of the powers of his own age, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant’” (Mat. 20: 25-26).

The next section returns to the theme of awe and wonder, but this time in praise of the Creator (“The message of each creature in the harmony of creation”). Every rock, hill, lake, seashore and flower speaks to the boundless love of the Father of all. Special places in our own experience remind us of his meeting us there in the past. But it’s not just about us. This is about our connection to everything that lives and has being, because it was breathed by the God of love, and because each piece depends on the other and the whole forms a breathtaking tapestry in praise of his holy name.

Now for the last two sections of this chapter on the theology of creation and of ecology. The first, “The common destination of goods,” was a central theme of his pastoral letter of 2013, Gaudium Evangelii (“The Joy of the Gospel,” see my own blog on this). In Catholic social doctrine (and certainly in the prophetic stream of the Bible) the “golden rule of social conduct is this: “the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods” (69). Therefore, “The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of all” (70). He offers this forceful illustration:

“That is why the New Zealand bishops asked what the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ means when ‘twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive” (71).

Jesus and a theology of ecology

Pope Francis ends the chapter with “The gaze of Jesus.” Jesus, after all, worked with his hands a good fifteen to twenty years, most likely chiseling wood, cutting stone and laying brick for the booming construction industry in nearby Sepphoris. He obviously loved to admire the beauty of creation, as his Sermon on the Mount attests, “Look at the birds of the air … See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon was dressed like one of these” (Mat. 6:26, 28). His parables too often drew the attention of his listeners to mustard seeds, the farmer sowing his field, the reapers at harvest time, the fig tree and more.

Jesus also was a man in tune with people around him, one who could enjoy with others the pleasant things of life. He said of himself, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard!’” (Mat. 11:19). But his connection to nature was also at times a source of wonder and even terror for his disciples, “What sort of man is this, when even the winds and sea obey him?” (Mat. 8:27).

For the Christian, “the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ, present from the beginning: ‘All things were created by him and for him’” (Col. 1:16). He is the eternal Word of God (the logos in John’s prologue), who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). And when in the presence of his disciples he had just ascended to heaven after his resurrection, an angel appeared saying to them, “This same Jesus … will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Jesus had just risen up to heaven in his human, resurrected body, to rejoin the Father once again. We know from several gospel narratives that this new body had new properties, like going through walls and appearing anywhere at will. Most of all, it is the prototype of the bodies we will inhabit when he returns. As the Apostle Paul wrote,

"For our dying bodies must be tranformed into bodies that will never die, and our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies" (I Cor. 15:53).

Thus the ascension of Jesus and his resurrection gloriously linked heaven with earth, and the age to come stepped into our present age, guaranteeing that at his second coming he would usher in the New Heavens and the New Earth (Rev. 21:1). This has manifest implications for our natural environment, as Pope Francis concludes,

“Thus, the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the Risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence” (74).

We now come full circle in this trilogy on the “impossible Islamic state.” Two months have elapsed since the second installment and only a couple of weeks ago a dramatic event took place that “puts the icing on the cake” in a way that I could never have anticipated. Ghannouchi himself in his opening speech to his party’s (Ennahda) Tenth Congress declared that political Islam was no longer needed for their party to contribute to the welfare of Tunisia. Ennahda was no longer a religious party but a democratic party among others, whose members nevertheless found inspiration in the ethical values of their Islamic faith.

The dream of an Islamic state seems to have come and gone.

So was Wael Hallaq right in arguing that the traditional Islamic state was conceptually and practically impossible to establish today (see blog 1)? No he was not, we argued, and following Andrew March’s critique we decided that Hallaq’s view of the “Islamic state” was more theoretical and ideological than connected with the actual facts of history. In particular, the various kinds of state powers (from imperial dynasties, to kings, to warlords) inevitably interfered to some extent between the ulama (scholars/jurists) and the people. Politics and religion invariably intermingled, but in many different configurations, depending on local conditions.

Reality is always messier than ideology.

 Then in the second blog, while reviewing Jocelyne Césari’s The Awakening of Muslim Democracy, we discovered that “political Islam” started with postcolonial Muslim states imposing their own form of institutionalized Islam. Despite all the posturing of these “secular” regimes (pan-Arab, socialist, and often in the hands of the military), they well knew to what extent Islam was an integral part of their peoples’ identity. So in order to keep it at bay, they decided to regiment the religious sphere. Each nation had some form of Ministry of Religious Affairs and the state mostly took over the religious endowments that had hitherto been owned privately. Nasser nationalized the Al-Azhar University, and I remember well from my nine years in Algeria (1978-87) that the ruling party (FLN) had three pillars: Arabic, Islam and socialism.

Starting with the blistering Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, however, the genie which had been indelicately shoved into the bottle had now slipped out. From just about every mosque in the Arab, Persian and Turkish mosques the refrain began to arise, “God has punished Islam’s umma with humiliation. He’s calling us back to Islam, and if we repent and obey, he will restore us to greatness once again.”

Egypt’s Nasser, the father of socialist pan-Arabism, died in 1970, leaving behind a vacuum that the growing wave of Islamic revivalism soon came to fill. So with a tight lid in place over the institutions of Islam, it was only natural that political opposition adopted the mantle, symbols and fervor of religion. As Césari demonstrated, this was not about belonging to Islam or even believing in it – everyone did, at least in principle. It was about how to “practice” it. Members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood were now coming into their own again, but this time on college campuses and in the professional syndicates, where they were now winning election after election. Societies all over the region were adopting this more conservative, and in some cases puritanical (in the case of Salafism) form of religiosity, and creating “political battles over Islamically correct behaviors.”

This is where Césari’s concept of secularity is so helpful. Whereas with the Enlightenment in Europe religious institutions detached from the political sphere, that kind of secularism is not likely to form in Muslim-majority nations, at least in the near future. So she chooses the term “secularity,” defining it thus: (1) “equality of all religions in public spaces” and (2) “political neutrality of the state vis-à-vis all religions.”

This is precisely the direction Ghannouchi’s thought has taken him. Let me offer you a very short synopsis of this trajectory, in three main installments.

Ghannouchi’s The Public Freedoms of the Islamic State

In this volume, started in prison and finished in 1993 in the second year of his London exile, Ghannouchi's view of the Islamic state, for all of its progressive democratic features, still fits into what Césari calls the traditional “hegemonic form of Islam.”

Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, conducted a series of interviews with Ennahda cadres in Tunis, which fed into a chapter of his 2014 book, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East. His overall thesis is that, contrary to popular belief, islamist parties moderate under political oppression and gravitate toward the more conservative positions of the rank and file members when in power. This is certainly what happened to the Muslim Brotherhood parties in Egypt and Jordan since the 1980s, as he so aptly documents his case. The title for his chapter on Tunisia tellingly reads, “A Tunisian Exception?”

In essence, Hamid uses the same caution Césari does about Ghanouchi in her book of the same year. Both see the Tunisian experiment with Ennahda as the most promising Islamic project in the wake of the “Arab Spring.” And both, while noting two contending currents within Ennahda, expect its version of political Islam to remain somewhat “hegemonic,” or “illiberal.”

Hamid offers a valuable précis of Ghannouchi in this context:

“In Rachid Ghannouchi, Ennahda had a towering figure, an intellectual, a strategist, and a symbol, all wrapped into one. But what held the party together more than an individual was an ideology. This – along with a commitment to democracy – is what allowed Ennahda, unlike some of its counterparts, to remain a truly big-tent party.”

As I said, then, The Public Freedoms of the Islamic State presents the most moderate version of a government that is “Islamic.” Here in his last chapter, “The Basic Principles for Combatting Injustice in the Islamic State” (over 200 double-spaced pages in my translation!), he deals with the thorny questions of citizenship. The bottom line is this: non-Muslims do not have the same rights as Muslims and the state is not politically neutral vis-à-vis all religions. In his words,

“As previously stated, no matter what a person’s religious or ethnic background, each person in the Islamic state possesses inalienable rights for leading a dignified life. But he also has the right to choose whether to believe or not in the purposes of the state, in the foundations on which it is built, and in Islam which is its backbone. If he believes in these, he’s a Muslim, and there is nothing that sets him apart from his Muslim brethren, except for his qualifications. If he chooses not to believe, then in order for him to receive citizenship, he must support the state, recognize its legitimacy, and not threaten its public organization either by raising a weapon against it or by his loyalty to its enemies.

Still, his citizenship remains at a lower status, unless he converts to Islam. Yet he continues to enjoy more freedom than his Muslim counterpart in his private life, like in what he eats or drinks, or in his marital life. Further, he is stripped of some of the rights owned by Muslims, like being able to hold the highest offices in the state, wherein the identity of the holder is particularly sensitive (especially the head of state). But from another angle he is excused from some of the duties incumbent upon Muslims, like abstaining from forbidden things. Those represent a few exceptions and do not infringe upon the principle of equality, which is the principal value observed by the Islamic state”

Ghannouchi after Ennahda had ceded power

While Mohamed Morsi was president of Egypt (June 2012-July 3, 2012), he backed the meeting of a surprisingly diverse spectrum of Arab intellectuals, islamists and secularists, in Alexandria. The proceedings of this conference was published in Arabic the next year under the title, Religion and the State in the Arab Homeland: Research and Debates from the Conference Organized by the Center for the Studies on Arab Unity at the Suwaydi Institute in Alexandria.

Ghannouchi’s contribution takes up only ten of the more than 700 pages in this hefty volume (pp. 100-10), but it’s an extremely valuable indication of how his thought on the Islamic state was evolving. His title is, “Religion and State in the Islamic Sources and Contemporary Interpretation.” In fact, he is beginning to deconstruct the traditional “religion and state” synthesis (din wa-dawla) at the heart of political Islam.

The context is clear from the first sentence. Ghannouchi has managed to coax his party to leave power in 2013 and join other political forces – and mostly, the civil society “Quartet” which was to be awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize:

“The topic of the relationship between religion and the state is among the most important challenges we face now in Tunisia, as we are in the process of drawing up a new constitution and political system. Our wish is that it be a democratic system that respects human rights.”

It’s a thorny and complex issue, Ghannouchi writes, which raises the relationship between Islam and secularism – Islam and political power, Islam and the law (qaanuun). There is nothing clear-cut here, as there are several “secularisms” and several “Islams.” Though Europe’s version of secularism arose because of the Protestant Reformation and the resulting religious wars in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, it nonetheless developed organizational measures that favored the emergence of a neutral state.

This is a mechanism we need as well, intimates Ghannouchi, “the neutrality of the state, that is, the state must remain neutral in the face of various religious traditions [diyaanaat] and not intervene in the conscience of its people. The state’s orbit is the ‘public’ sphere, whereas religion’s orbit is the ‘private’ sphere” (p. 102).

The key word in Ghannouchi’s argument is the “distinction” [tamaayuz] between the religious and public spheres. Obviously, he’s not comfortable with the word “separation.” But that is the point about the American system, he remarks approvingly. Religion impacts politics a great deal, and never more obviously than in political campaigns. Issues like prayer in the schools and abortion touch on religion, and this is because the US was founded by English immigrants who had come to escape Catholic persecution in Europe. They were coming to “the Promised Land, where the dreams found in the Torah and Gospel could be fulfilled” (102).

Quoting from De Tocqueville, he avers that “The biggest party in America is the church, because of the great influence it enjoys among the American people.” Yet secularism looks different in Europe and within various European countries. France and Britain operate quite differently in this respect. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the British Queen has both political and religious authority. In France, by contrast, its fiercely anti-clerical tradition inherited from revolutionary days polices a total separation between church and state. There are other forms of secularism in the West as well.

French colonialism left its mark on Tunisia, he adds, in that the Tunisian political elites have endeavored to rid the public sphere of all religious symbols. Then he comes back to the idea of secularism as a useful political mechanism:

“Perhaps the most important element pioneered by the secular perspective on this level is the neutrality of the state, in that the state is the guarantor of all religious and political freedoms, and it may not intervene on behalf of this or that group. We ask ourselves whether Islam is in need of this kind of measure, that is, the neutrality of the state with regard to religious traditions [diyaanaat].”

I have no space here to go into the details of his argument. Some of them are present in The Public freedoms (like the Prophet’s “distinction” between his political work in Medina and his religious calling) and some are new, like in his sixth and last section. Throughout, however, the one theme that seems to bring all the various strands together is his assertion that in Islam there is no “state church,” as was the case in Europe, which led to so much bloodshed. This is so, he argues, because religion and politics have different goals. He explains,

“Religion’s basic domain is personal contentment, not the instruments of state. As for the state, its mission is above all to provide services to people as citizens, like employment, good health, and quality education, whereas God’s domain is people’s hearts and religious practice, since the highest value in Islam is freedom” (p. 109)

Then in a footnote explaining why there should be no civil punishment for apostasy (someone choosing to leave Islam), he asserts the following (the bold is in his text):

“Therefore the state belongs to Islam to the extent that it is vigilant in its adoption of Islamic values without any supervision from a religious institution, since there is nothing like this in Islam, but only a people and an umma that both decide for themselves by means of their institutions what religion is.”

This is my first time to witness in his writing a distinction between people [sha’ab] and umma. I take it he means by "people" all the citizens, assuming that not all are actually Muslim. This seems to leave room for people of other faiths to determine how to regulate their own religious lives. He is clear too that there are many “Islams” – this has never been more obvious than today. A state may not step in and decide what the “true Islam” is.

I’ll close this section with the last paragraph of his essay, which he has all in bold. I will try to pursue this thought in a separate academic article, but it seems to me this is exactly what the Sudanese American scholar Ahmed An-Na’im was arguing in his 2008 book, Islam and the Secular State:

“We must therefore accept the concept of citizenship and the fact that the country is not the private possession of Zayd or Amr (Paul or John), nor of this or that political party, but it belongs to all of its citizens. Islam grants to each one of them, whatever their religious convictions or ethnicity, male or female, the right to be citizens who enjoy the same rights. One of those rights is for them to believe whatever they choose to believe as long as they respect one another and they behave in accordance with the law that they have enacted through their representatives in parliament.”

Ghannouchi’s speech and reelection at Ennahda’s Tenth Congress

The above photo shows the two men who co-founded Ennahda (though with a different name at that stage) in 1981, Abdelfattah Mourou and Rached Ghannouchi. You witness a teary-eyed Ghannouchi acknowledging the crowd of party faithful and their overwhelming support by just reelecting him as their party leader. The New York Times writes that Ghannouchi was vindicated “for his effort to move the party away from its Islamist roots and stay in tune with the country’s five-year-old democratic revolution.” In an interview with the French paper Le Monde, Ghannouchi surmised, “There is no more justification for political Islam in Tunisia.”

Why is this so? The answers are clear in his opening speech to the Tenth Congress of his party. First, he salutes the Tunisian state and its winning battle against the forces of terrorism: “As we reaffirm Nahdha's absolute support for the state in its war against ISIS and takfiri extremists, we say to them that Tunisia, despite all the sacrifices, is stronger than their hatred, and it will, God willing, defeat them.” Then this proud revolutionary manifesto:

“The path of the revolution, therefore, is one of political successes, re-establishing security, and strengthening international solidarity, culminating in Tunisia being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the National Dialogue Quartet. Tunisia remains the shining candle among countries of the Arab Spring, having sparked the revolutions, demonstrating that democracy in the Arab world is possible.”

The second reason is that Ghannouchi is plainly advocating the “neutral state” and making sure that Ennahda is committed first and foremost to the stability and prosperity of the Tunisian state: “Tunisia’s ship can only sail safely if carries all Tunisians.” Then this crucial statement, which underscores again the necessity of a state being for all of its citizens:

“Thus we have said repeatedly, we are for a comprehensive national reconciliation and for cooperation and consensus-building with all those who recognize the revolution and its martyrs and respect the Constitution, a partnership with all those who regard the revolution as an opportunity for all of us - islamists, destourians, leftists, and all intellectual and political trends, so we can all go forward steadily towards a future that is free from grudges and exclusion.

Nor is it a 'deal under the table' but rather a national vision of reconciliation between the state and citizens, between the state and deprived regions, between opposing political elites, between the past and the present - because Nahdha is a force of unification not one of division.”

Then finally, political Islam has no more role to play in Tunisia because as a result of the revolution civil liberties and human rights are now guaranteed for all citizens. Religion when manipulated by politics becomes divisive, whereas its main vocation is to unite its followers. So I end with this earlier part of his speech, which seeks to explain this “distinction” between the religious and political spheres to the party rank and file:

“The specialization and distinction between the political and other religious or social activities is not a sudden decision or a capitulation to temporary pressures, but rather the culmination of a historical evolution in which the political field and the social, cultural and religious fields were distinct in practice in our movement.

We are keen to keep religion far from political struggles and conflicts, and we call for the complete neutrality of mosques away from political disputes and partisan utilization, so that they play a role of unification rather than division.”

In the end, we can only join Ghannouchi with our own wishes and prayers that Tunisia’s democratic experiment succeeds, and that it be emulated by all the surrounding states of the region, for the peace and prosperity of all its people, Muslims, Shia and Sunni, Christians of many stripes, Yazidis and other religious minorities. Let our faith in the One Creator God truly inspire and translate into action our conviction that each and every human being is worthy of our respect and love. On that basis, then, each nation can forge its own path of democratic governance.

And yes, maybe today an Islamic (or Christian, or Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist) state is an impossibility.

Shadi Hamid is senior fellow a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and regularly contributes to The Atlantic. The book I review here was named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2014:

Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

This review will appear in the next issue of Sociology of Islam (Brill) 4, 3-4, 2016. This text is a bit longer than the published version.