Two prominent Muslim clerics recently issued fatwas, or religious edicts, forbidding Arab Muslims from voting in secular electoral processes. One is an Iraqi Shiite, Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Hairi, and another is a jihadist theoretician, Sheikh Abu al-Mundhir al-Shinqiti, who is struggling to provide guidance to Sunni Arabs embracing elections and democracy from Tunisia to Egypt. Read more »

The emir of Qatar and the president of Pakistan were both in India this week. Both leaders hail from Muslim-majority countries in which literalist interpretations of Islam have enjoyed outsize influence on government. In different ways, both Pakistan and Qatar have allowed literalist Islamism of different hues to attempt to obliterate more mainstream expressions of, say, Sufi-influenced, popular Islam. Read more »

Egypt’s Salafi Islamists are a parting gift from the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime. He had bred Salafis as a counterweight to the more politically minded Muslim Brotherhood, but also as a means of fostering better relations with Saudi Arabia. Little wonder, then, that in the initial days of the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak the Salafi leaders followed the quintessential Saudi Wahhabi line that popular protests were “un-Islamic” and helped spread fitnah or dissension. Read more »

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists from Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Libya are in Washington, DC, this week. Having advocated for over a year for issues-based engagement with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, I was delighted to host a delegation from their Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) for meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and Washington. Read more »

The debate inside global Islam about the relevance of religion in politics remains forever vibrant. In a new book written by Oxford University professor Tariq Ramadan, he responds to important questions being asked in Arab capitals by Islamists of different hues and their critics. Ramadan’s book is a timely but problematic contribution to this international conversation. I reviewed his book for the Financial Times here: Read more »

“God forbid that the recent killer of Jewish children and a rabbi in France be a Muslim or of Arab descent,” I tweeted a day before the French authorities named Mohamed Merah as the prime suspect in last week’s terrorist atrocity. People on Twitter responded to me saying: “He also killed Muslims.” And yes, he did—but it does not take away from the severity of the killer’s anti-Semitism that led to him target Ozar Hatorah school and kill Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and the blessed children he was trying to protect. Read more »

I am a Muslim, yet I sometimes visit Shabbat services in London and New York. Why? Because there is something deeply instructive about being among descendants of Abraham while they worship and recall lives of their ancestors, the ancient prophets of the Old Testament. Muslims also venerate Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Solomon, Moses, Aaron, and others. Yet the abiding Arab-Israeli conflict continues to consume the children of Abraham: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Read more »

Last week, King Abdullah of Jordan met a prominent Muslim scholar from Yemen, al-Habib Umar bin Hafez, alongside another renowned Muslim leader, al-Habib Ali al-Jifry. All three men are descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. Their meeting had a special significance for ordinary Muslims, and reminded Jordan and young Arabs that Islam and secular government need not be at odds. Read more »