Islam, liberal democracy, and the challenge of reform

The other day I was thinking about the armed security guard at my grandchildren’s Jewish day school. He stands there every morning, part of the routine now. Something that feels both normal and not.

It made me wonder how we got here, and what underlying forces are driving it. Questions that are harder to ask than they should be.

Think about the worst terrorist attacks you remember from your lifetime.

September 11 (2001) — nearly 3,000 killed in coordinated attacks in the United States.

London (2005) — 52 killed in the subway and bus bombings.

Mumbai (2008) — over 160 killed in attacks across the city.

Paris (2015) — 130 killed in coordinated attacks across the city.

Manchester (2017) — 22 killed at a concert bombing.

October 7 (2023) — over 1,200 killed in the Hamas attacks in Israel.

Many of these attacks were carried out by extremists who explicitly invoked Islam as their justification. Others occurred in Muslim-majority regions themselves, where the victims were overwhelmingly Muslim civilians. The scale of suffering has been global. The most recent Global Terrorism Index report shows that of the top 15 terrorist organizations considered the “most deadly and most active” in the world, 13 of them identify with Islamist ideologies.

Yet the conversation about what that means, intellectually, politically, or morally, often shuts down before it even begins. In some cases the difficulty runs deeper still: political movements can form not around building societies, but around negating the legitimacy of another people’s sovereignty.

I’m not a scholar of Islamic theology or Middle Eastern politics. I’m just trying to think honestly about a set of ideas that increasingly shape the world my grandchildren will grow up in. That means being clear about a distinction that often gets lost: the difference between a religion practiced by billions of people and the political ideologies built in its name.

Islam possesses extraordinary spiritual depth and a vast intellectual heritage. During the Islamic Golden Age, Muslim scholars helped develop algebra and advanced astronomy, preserved classical philosophy, and built some of the world’s earliest hospitals and universities. Its architecture, from the domes of Istanbul to the intricate beauty of the Alhambra, continues to shape global aesthetics. Its poetry, especially that of Rumi, remains among the most widely read in the world today. This is not a minor tradition. It is one of humanity’s great civilizational forces.

Precisely because Islam is such a powerful civilizational tradition, the........

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