Digital Islam and the New Sheikhs

Technology and Religion.

Yet, and more significantly for our purposes, the video feud highlights a relationship between technology and religious authority, and indeed how changes in the former can serve to transform the latter. An early 20^th Century Dawah Man certainly would not have been able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and speak directly to the masses at the scale enabled by the Internet. There are, of course, many precedents: from the printing presses that produced Martin Luther’s vernacular Bible to the local access channels that nurtured the Moral Majority; there is nothing static about the nature of religious authority. And while we often associate technological innovations with some form of democratization — as individuals gain the ability to access holy texts in an unmediated fashion, to do their own research, and to theoretically reach their own conclusions — this emancipatory narrative does not capture the complexity of these transformations.

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Suzanne Schneider — The Revealer

The Ideological Threat to Islam

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a refugee from Somalia. Through sheer grit she has transformed herself into a forceful critic of what is wrong with Islam.

In her latest book, Hirsi Ali urges the governments of the West—and the Trump Administration in particular—to take sides in this battle for the soul of Islam. She wants Washington to develop, with some urgency, an ‘anti-dawa strategy’ that will ‘tackle the menace of dawa’. Since the ultimate goal of dawa is ‘to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with sharia’, should we not, she asks, neutralise the dawa activists first? She invokes Karl Popper, the philosopher, who wrote in 1945: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ America has the right, she says, to be intolerant of the intolerant in order to safeguard its primordial tolerance.

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Tunku Varadarajan — OPEN

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Religious Freedom in the Muslim World: A Nuanced Appraisal

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What is the status of religious freedom in Islam, and what are its prospects? An answer to this question must begin with a nuanced appraisal of the political theologies that govern different Muslim nations. The first in a two-part series.

Many scholars have proposed democracy as the most proper criterion for assessing Islam. Yet democracy’s elections and popular rule often coexist with intolerance toward religious minorities and dissenters—the tyranny of the majority. Religious freedom adds respect for human rights to rule by the demos. It is principled and permanent: a universally valid principle that manifests human dignity. In this essay, I consider the state of religious freedom in the Muslim world—in particular, in Muslim-majority countries. Muslims, of course, are scattered throughout the world, but such states valuably reveal how Muslims treat dissenters and religious minorities when political power is at their disposal.

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Daniel Philpott — Public Discourse

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