The Challenge of Modernizing Islam: Reformers Speak Out and the Obstacles They Face

By Christine Douglass-Williams, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer

The entire foreign policy and much of the domestic policy of the United States and other Western governments is based on the proposition that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and peaceful, including those who are emigrating in large numbers to Europe and North America. But as Islamist groups and many mosques radicalize peaceful Muslims and appeal to the teachings of the Koran, Hadith, and Sunnah, it is imperative for moderates and reformists to articulate a vision of Islam and an exegesis of Islamic texts that can withstand the challenge of Islamists and the ulema who have declared the sanctity and immutability of the text. Instead, they must reestablish a firm foundation of Islam that is modernized, genuinely peaceful, tolerant, pluralistic, and compatible with secular governance, the freedom of speech, human rights, and equality.

The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is the first major effort to provide that foundation. Veteran journalist Christine Douglass-Williams interviews foremost moderate and reformist Muslims in the Western world. She asks them tough questions about how they deal with problematic Koran passages, how they intend to get their message across to the Muslim world, and more.

Their answers are revelatory, even in the ways in which they disagree with one another. Douglass-Williams has captured the Islamic Reformist movement in its full intellectual ferment, laying bare the tensions and triumphs of the Reformers. In the book's second half, she adds a crucial series of searingly honest and illuminating reflections on the challenges the reformers face, the chances they have of succeeding, and the implications of their struggle for the future of the Western world and of all free people.

Illuminating, engaging, and thought-provoking, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is an essential text for understanding the future of the United States and the West, and the implications of Muslim moderates' struggle for the free world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781641770217

Book preview

Praise for The Challenge of Modernizing Islam

This well-written book should not be ignored. With elegance and determination, Christine Douglass-Williams documents a variety of Muslim reformers, of a wide range of backgrounds and persuasions. These courageous men and women should be as well-known as human rights dissidents Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were during the Cold War. Through a series of probing interviews and careful reflection, Douglass-Williams draws out the nature of reformers’ inner struggles and ideals, contrasting them with the beliefs of Islamists. This book is highly recommended for those wishing to learn more about Muslim reformers, and it is a must-read for U.S. policymakers who wish to understand the challenge of Islamism in America and the world today.

—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Founder of the AHA Foundation

"Incisive and informed, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam by Christine Douglass-Williams offers us the powerful insight needed to launch a new conversation about Islam. It fills the mind with deep knowledge and urgent necessity."

—Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust and The Farhud

My library contains a wall of books about modern Islam. But hardly a one of them covers the topic of this important study by Christine Douglass-Williams.…She also helps establish this movement as a serious intellectual endeavor, putting contemporary modernizers on the map as never before, thereby boosting their cause. Given the global threat of Islamism, that is a constructive, indeed a great, achievement.

—From the Foreword by Daniel Pipes

"The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is extraordinary, refreshing, and much needed. The interviews that Christine Douglass-Williams conducts with some of the leading moderate Muslim spokesmen in the United States and Canada are unique in their probing honesty. Douglass-Williams also provides illuminating ways for readers to avoid hazards that have misled numerous analysts of Islam and its prospects for reform. The Challenge of Modernizing Islam uniquely equips readers to make an informed and intelligent evaluation of how peaceful the future of non-Muslim countries is likely to be."

—From the Foreword by Robert Spencer

© 2017, 2019 by Christine Douglass-Williams

Forewords © 2017 by Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer

Preface © 2019 by Christine Douglass-Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601,

New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2017 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

First paperback edition published in 2019.

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-64177-020-0

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Douglass-Williams, Christine, author.

Title: The challenge of modernizing Islam : reformers speak out and the obstacles they face / by Christine Douglass-Williams ; with forewords by Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.

Description: New York : Encounter Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017017617 (print) | LCCN 2016058766 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039393 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781594039409 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Reformers—Islamic countries—Interviews. | Islamic renewal. | Islam and politics.

Classification: LCC BP70 .D69 2017 (ebook) | LCC BP70 (print) | DDC 297.09/051—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017617

Interior page design and composition: BooksByBruce.com

This book is dedicated to my joy and my heart, my daughter Natasha Leigh Williams

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Foreword by Dr. Daniel Pipes

Foreword by Robert Spencer

Glossary

A Timeline History of Islam

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

July 31, 2018

Since The Challenge of Modernizing Islam first appeared, I have been targeted by the Liberal Government of Canada for doing what the Muslims I profile in the book are doing: standing up against Islamic jihad violence, Muslim Brotherhood stratagems, and the oppression that is justified by the Sharia.

On December 19, 2017, I was terminated from the Board of Directors of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) by the Queen’s Privy Council, on the advice of the Heritage Minister of Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada, Melanie Joly, who was moved to a Tourism portfolio in July 2018 during a cabinet shuffle.

My termination came four months after I received a threatening letter from Joly about my writings on political Islam for the online publication Jihad Watch, directed by Robert Spencer and a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in California.

I was appointed to the CRRF in 2012 under the Conservative Stephen Harper government, and reappointed in 2015. The CRRF was switched from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration over to the Department of Heritage after Justin Trudeau was elected as Prime Minister of Canada in 2015. Trudeau also immediately shut down the Office of Religious Freedom of which I served as an external advisor. The office, which denounced draconian blasphemy laws globally, was deemed by the Liberals to have favored one religion over another. It was originally dedicated to Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who was minister of minorities in Pakistan who openly opposed Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and was assassinated for doing so by Islamic extremists.

My role on the CRRF was an active one as I served on the CRRF’s Executive Committee, Human Resources Committee, Nominations Committee, and was the Chair of the Investment Committee. Joly made good on her written threat to have me removed as a Director with the CRRF under fabricated accusations of Islamophobia. My performance had nothing to do with my termination and that fact was reflected in CRRF Chairman Albert Lo’s statement to the Toronto Star, following my dismissal: We always appreciated her positive contributions. She’s always supportive of positive race relations. Lo added that, Douglass-Williams has been involved with a number of foundation initiatives involving Muslim issues. I saw quite a number of participants in the Muslim community say they were very warm to her and always positive and friendly.¹

I personally make a distinction between those Muslims who choose to practice Islam in peace and with respect for the separation from mosque and state, and those with their agenda to usurp democratic constitutions, demand special privileges over other creeds, and attack innocent people as a supremacist entitlement. I make this distinction clear in the pages of this book.

It is odd to be removed from a race-relations foundation for my private work in criticizing the intolerance, supremacism, and range of abuses that are characteristic of political Islam, particularly in light of the fact that Islam is not a race. I was made a public example as Canada marches to the orders of Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Canada’s Motion M103 was passed, just as action against my position with the CRRF was unfolding.

On March 23, 2017, Canada passed Motion M103 in Canadian Parliament, a motion that called on the government of Canada to recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear and to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.²

Canadian member of Parliament Iqra Khalid tabled M103, a document that caused division and valid concern about the merits and lack of a definition of the term Islamophobia, the latter of which the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has dedicated an Islamophobia Observatory to battle Islamophobia on a global scale.³

The only firm definition of Islamophobia which showed up in Canada was contained in an official guidebook published by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) that condemned Islamophobia and defined the term as fear, prejudice, hatred or dislike directed against Islam or Muslims, or towards Islamic politics or culture.⁴ This guidebook was prepared with the support of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, which strongly campaigned for M103.⁵

The Jewish lobby group, B’nai Brith Canada, complained that the reference to politics could lead to students or staff being punished for expressing dislike for the Republic of Iran’s persecution of LGBTQ people or restrictions placed on women in Saudi Arabia.⁶ B’nai Brith also expressed concern that banning or even discouraging any ‘dislike’ of ‘Islamic politics’ would pose a severe problem in combatting the virulent Jew hatred that we have seen emanating from some Muslim institutions in Canada.⁷ The TDSB subsequently amended its definition of Islamophobia to be in line with the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s, which omits the reference to politics, but includes dread, hatred, hostility towards Islam.⁸,⁹ This implies that those who have a dread for Islamic Sharia practices like wife-beating, female genital mutilation, honor violence, and the inferiority of women will be labeled Islamophobic.

While delivering testimony before M103 Committee hearings in October 2017, celebrated human rights lawyer David Matas urged members of Parliament to be careful in their use of the term Islamophobia, saying fear of some elements of Islam is mere prudence.¹⁰

Iqra Khalid—the face behind M103—has a noteworthy history. She is a former president of the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Muslim Student Association (MSA) at York University. MSA chapters are linked to the Muslim World League, which is a Muslim Brotherhood operation funded by the Saudis.¹¹ The Muslim Student Association is also well-known for its aggressive Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions drives on campus to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel, and for its members’ intimidation of Jewish students. Behind Khalid’s anti-Islamophobia initiative were muscular Muslim Brotherhood lobbies.¹²

M103 was built on petition e-411 by Samer Majzoub, who managed a Muslim Brotherhood–linked Montreal high school, and is a leader of the self-described Muslim Brotherhood–linked Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). Majzoub even accused Conservative MPs of stoking a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in opposing M103.¹³

The passage of Motion M103 was a manifestation of the fact that the anti-racism industry has been overshadowed by the anti-Islamophobia victimology narrative. The chapter The Islamophobia Deception explains this narrative.

As a follow-up to M103—which was described by its proponents as benign and nonbinding—the government of Canada vowed to take action against those whom it deems to be exhibiting Islamophobia.

On June 1, 2018, the Liberal Government released a document titled Government Response to the Tenth Report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage Entitled: Taking Action Against Systemic Racism and Religious Discrimination Including Islamophobia. The document was signed by Melany Joly and addressed to Julie Dabrusin, Chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.¹⁴

Twenty-three million dollars of taxpayer money was designated by the Liberal Government over two years to provide increased funds for the Multiculturalism Program administered by Canadian Heritage, of which fighting Islamophobia is included.¹⁵

Iqra Khalid held a press conference at the end of June 2018 in which she openly admitted that the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) and International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy Canada (IRFAN) will be receiving funds from the $23 million. Khalid boldly stated:

We don’t need support as Canadians, we need a foundation and that is what the government is doing with this funding, with these $23 million that will go a long way toward helping organizations like The Boys and Girls Club…NCCM that does a lot of data collecting on hate crimes and pushing that advocacy needle forward in our country or like Islamic Relief…that does not only work within Canada, across Canada but across the world in removing those stereotypes and there are so many more.…"¹⁶

The Council on American Islamic Relations Canada (CAIR-CAN) was renamed NCCM, and the group’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood are described in the chapter Who Speaks for Muslims. There are also connections between IRFAN and the self-described Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). IRFAN was designated as a banned terrorist organization by the Conservative Stephen Harper government in 2014.¹⁷

In 2015, it was uncovered that a RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) search warrant linked the MAC headquarters in Mississauga (near Toronto) to IRFAN. A Canada Revenue Agency document showed that between 2001 and 2010, MAC provided $296,514 to IRFAN-Canada. Within that period, from 2005 and 2009, IRFAN-Canada transferred approximately $14.6 million worth of resources to various organizations associated with Hamas, according to the Federal Department of Public Safety.¹⁸

In the debate surrounding the introduction of Motion M103, its proponents frequently argued that the motion was not law, but a benign motion that would be passed in Parliament for further study by the Heritage Committee. It subsequently proved to be as dangerous as opponents had warned. Now, action against Islamophobia has bypassed the legislature to be fully incorporated into a government action plan that would affect Canadian society. One of the features of Melanie Joly’s document indicated:

As part of the Islamophobia initiative, Canadian citizens will be monitored for compliance: the Public Service Commission of Canada offers standardized assessment instruments through its Personnel Psychology Center for use by public service organizations. These tests are developed with diverse groups and are monitored and maintained with diversity in mind.¹⁹

It has already been established as Iqra Khalid mentioned that the NCCM and IRFAN are groups that the Liberal Government of Canada takes seriously in its partnership to help fight Islamophobia. According to the NCCM website, the organization also provides education to government departments, law enforcement officers, media agencies, and private organizations through workshops and full day Bootcamps.²⁰

The National Council of Canadian Muslims also influenced my termination from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. According to the Toronto Star article Board member of anti-racism agency fired amid accusations of Islamophobic commentary:

The NCCM expressed concerns and sent a formal letter to the government in October. Executive director Ihsaan Gardee said Douglass-Williams’ removal is an appropriate corrective measure taken by government to address (her) disturbing public record…The removal of Ms. Douglass-Williams is long overdue in light of her known Islamophobic commentary and her public association with purveyors of hateful propaganda, such as Robert Spencer who has long been identified by human rights institutions as a leading figure of the Islamophobia movement in North America, he said in an emailed statement.²¹

As Dr. Sheikh Subhy Mansour, founder of the Quranist sect in Egypt, states of his own experience in the pages ahead of this book:

I stood against the Saudi influence and suffered…When I came here to the U.S., I had dreams and ideas, because this was America. But when I went to mosque, I found the same people, advocating the same Sharia. I escaped from there and found them here, so I said to myself, what could I do after that? Escape to the moon?

With regard to Muslim Brotherhood organizations on American soil, he warns that they

exploit the American values of freedom of expression and freedom of religion to brainwash American Muslims to prevent their integration into the American society. They even try to turn them into enemies of their country and their fellow citizens.

It was once impossible to envisage that Canada would become a country where punitive measures would be levied against those who criticized the advance of political Islam, its expansionary ambitions, and the global scourge of jihad and barbaric practices that have entered Western countries. Anti-islamophobia Motion M103 and my firing for writing for Jihad Watch were wakeup calls.

Whether intentionally or not—and like it or not—I was used by the Trudeau government to send a message to all Canadians that Canada now ascribes to a two-tier system of government, in which the Islamic fiqh is prioritized, and in which European culture has had its day.

My firing manifested the present Canadian government’s unfortunate decision not to heed the voices of the moderate and reformist Muslims who are depicted in this book, but rather to do the bidding of Muslim Brotherhood forces that have no interest in protecting and defending the foundational principles of every free society—most importantly, the freedom of speech.

If it is now beyond the parameters of acceptable discourse to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression, it will not be only I who will ultimately be targeted by the Canadian government (and other like-minded governments in the West), but other defenders of democracy, including the voices of pluralism and tolerance within Islam as well.

In the pages ahead, the moderates and reformists reveal their commitment to: the separation of mosque and state, pluralism, democracy, their personal faith beliefs, warnings about the malignant and covert nature of stealth jihadists, and their personal travails against Islamism of which I can now identify with. I count it a privilege to be among those who have borne the persecutions in standing up for human rights in the face of political correctness and Islamist intimidation.

FOREWORD BY DR. DANIEL PIPES

My library contains a wall of books about modern Islam. But hardly a one of them covers the topic of this important study by Christine Douglass-Williams. With all the attention paid to Islamists, who has the time or energy to devote to modernizing Muslims?

Indeed, the paucity of books on anti-Islamist Muslims symbolizes their larger predicament: They are threatened, marginalized, and dismissed as frauds.

Threats come from the Islamists, the advocates of applying Islamic law in its entirety and severity as a means to regain the medieval glory of Islam. Islamists attack modernizers with words and weapons, rightly sensing that these liberal Muslims pose a profound challenge to the current Islamist hegemony. However much they dominate today, Islamist reactionaries fully understand modernity’s great appeal, not to speak of its victories over two other modern radical utopian movements, fascism and communism. They know their movement is doomed because Muslims will opt for the benefits of modern life, so they fight modernizers tooth and nail.

The Left marginalizes. One might expect that the many differences between socialism and Islamism would make the two camps enemies. One would be wrong. The intensity of their common hostility toward the liberal order brings them together. Leftists overwhelmingly prefer the Islamist program to the modernizing one and so reject the modernizers, going so far to revile them as anti-Islamic, a truly choice insult.

The anti-Islamic Right dismisses. Ironically, it endorses the Islamist claim that Islamists alone are true Muslims, while waving away the modernizers as outliers, fabulists, and frauds. The anti-Islamic Right does so despite sharing the same enemy with modernizing Muslims—the Islamists. Instead of joining forces, it perversely keeps its distance from them, muttering about their taqiyya (dissimulation), finding only fault with their analysis, and lobbing colorful slurs at their leaders.

Thus do modernizing Muslims face the problems of establishing current credibility and future potential. Islamists dominate the news with their carnage and cultural aggression; Leftists turn reality on its head, and the anti-Islam types fumble on. Worse, as these detractors flail away at them, modernizers have few opportunities to respond, what with the establishment (what I call the 6 P’s: politicians, press, police, prosecutors, professors, and priests) studiously ignoring them. As a result, the public hardly knows an effort to modernize Islam exists and few respect its small but hardy band of leaders. How many of you have heard of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR)? And how many the Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP)?

Here, Christine Douglass-Williams, a Canadian journalist and civil rights activist, enters the picture. She took the time to find eight leading North American modernizers and gave them the opportunity to present themselves and their views. Each has a distinctive outlook.

•  Ahmed Subhy Mansour founded a new and flexible school of thought, the Koranists.

•  Shireen Qudosi challenges the near-worship of Muhammad and wrestles with problematic Koranic passages.

•  Jalal Zuberi reveals the Islamists’ textual rigidity and celebrates pluralism.

•  Tawfik Hamid highlights the Islamists’ deceit and their intent to conquer the West.

•  Qanta Ahmed rejects Islamic law and argues for Muslims to live as modern citizens.

•  Zuhdi Jasser exposes the Islamists’ narrative of victimology and emphasizes the need for patriotism.

•  Raheel Raza focuses on immigration’s mutual demands, arguing that the West must stand by its values, which Muslims must adapt to.

After laying out these interestingly divergent viewpoints, Douglass-Williams devotes the second half of her book to their commonalities. She focuses on the modernizers’ efforts to: create an alternative vision to the Islamist one; re-interpret the Koran and other problematic Islamic texts; respond to accusations of Islamophobia directed against them; formulate a humane position on Israel; and challenge the Islamist hegemony.

Her careful analysis shows how the modernizing Islamic movement benefits from the freedoms found in the United States and Canada (as opposed to the intellectual repression found in every Muslim-majority country). She also helps establish this movement as a serious intellectual endeavor, putting contemporary modernizers on the map as never before, thereby boosting their cause. Given the global threat of Islamism, that is a constructive, indeed a great, achievement.

DR. PIPES (DANIELPIPES.ORG, @DANIELPIPES) IS AN AMERICAN HISTORIAN, president of the Middle East Forum, author of 16 books, named among Harvard’s 100 most influential living graduates, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

FOREWORD BY ROBERT SPENCER

This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed my favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion.

So says Allah in the Qur’an (5:3), in words that have vexed Islamic reformers and would-be reformers throughout the history of the religion. Traditional and mainstream Islamic theology holds that Islam is perfect, bestowed from above by the supreme being, and hence not only is reform unnecessary, it is heresy that makes the reformer worthy of death if he departs from anything Islamic authorities believe to be divinely revealed.

On the other hand, the cognitive dissonance created by having to believe that the one and only God mandates death for apostasy (Bukhari 6922), stoning for adultery (Bukhari 6829), and amputation of the hand for theft (Qur’an 5:38), and sanctions the sexual enslavement of infidel women (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 23:1–6, 33:50, 70:30), the devaluation of a woman’s testimony (Qur’an 2:282) and inheritance rights (Qur’an 4:11), and above all, warfare against and the subjugation of non-Muslims (Qur’an 9:29), has led, particularly in modern times, to attempts by believing Muslims to reconcile Islamic morality with contemporary perspectives and mores.

These attempts are fraught with peril. As Christine Douglass-Williams notes in this book, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese Muslim theologian who argued that the Meccan passages, which are generally more peaceful, should take precedence over the Medinan, which call for warfare against non-Muslims, instead of the reverse, was executed in 1985 by the Sudanese government for heresy and apostasy. Some of those profiled in this book know these perils firsthand: Sheikh Subhy Mansour recounted, ‘If these Muslim Brotherhood people had the chance, they would have killed me according to their punishment for apostasy, plus they claim I’ll go to hell.’ Tawfik Hamid noted, The reformists were killed throughout history, including those who rejected the Sunnah.

Death threats aren’t the only dangers either. Europe and North America are full of Muslim spokesmen who present themselves as moderate, Westernized reformers, but are actually just the opposite. Foremost among these is Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, who has been widely hailed as the Muslim Martin Luther but has likewise been accused by French journalist Caroline Fourest, who has published a book-length study of Ramadan’s sly duplicity, Brother Tariq, of remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy mapped out by his grandfather, a strategy of advance stage by stage toward the imposition of Islamic law in the West.¹

Douglass-Williams notes this duplicity: In an example of the distinction to be made between moderates and crypto-moderates, after the brutal riots following the release of the Danish cartoons insulting to Muhammad in 2006, Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born theologian and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ramadan explained that the reaction of his co-religionists was ‘a principle of faith … that God and the prophets never be represented.’ One of her interview subjects, Salim Mansur, observes dryly that non-Muslims went to the wrong Muslim for an understanding of the faith.

The dominant presence of duplicitous pseudo-reformers, such as Ramadan, considerably muddies the waters. This confusion couldn’t possibly come at a worse time, when the governments of the West are doing nothing less than staking the very futures of their nations not only upon the existence of Muslim moderates and reformers, but upon their eventual victory within the Islamic community. This gamble has been made despite the fact that there is no general agreement either inside the Muslim community or outside it, of what Islamic moderation actually means, and what Islamic reform would really look like.

Against this backdrop, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is extraordinary, refreshing, and much needed in numerous ways. The interviews that Christine Douglass-Williams conducts with some of the leading moderate Muslim spokesmen in the United States and Canada are unique in their probing honesty. While most interviewers from all points of the political spectrum generally are so happy and honored to be in the presence of a Muslim who repudiates Jihad terror that they serve up only softball questions and are content with vague generalities in response, in this book Douglass-Williams asks the questions that need to be asked, and yet are asked only infrequently: How do you explain the various Qur’an verses that call for violence, or are misogynistic or problematic in other ways? How do you propose to convince the vast majority of your co-religionists of the correctness of your position? How is reform possible when the mainstream schools of Islamic jurisprudence mandate death for heresy and apostasy?

The answers vary from thought provoking and searchingly honest to cagey and deflective. And that in itself is illuminating. Not every person interviewed in this book is in agreement with every other, and not every attentive and informed reader will come away from these pages convinced that every person here interviewed is being in every instance entirely forthright. Many believe that the resistance to the global Jihad in all its forms has no legitimacy, or cannot be successful, if Muslim reformers are not on board with it. I do not share that view, but the need for Islamic reform is undeniable, and the people here interviewed are among its foremost exponents in the West. We owe them a fair hearing as much as they owe us honest answers to the questions posed here.

In the second half of the book, Douglass-Williams offers a probing analysis of what her interview subjects told her, and provides illuminating ways for readers to navigate through the thickets and avoid hazards that have captured and misled numerous analysts of Islam and prospects for reform. One of the cardinal services she provides here is the drawing of distinctions in numerous areas where crucial differences and delineations have long been obscured, often deliberately. Her discussions of Islam versus Islamism and Islamic moderation versus Islamic reform are a welcome antidote to the sloppy thinking and cant that dominate the public discourse today. Her examination of problematic Islamic texts is all the more welcome for being even rarer. Her discussions of the controversial and manipulative concept of Islamophobia and its relationship to the problems of genuine Islamic reform, and to the role of Israel and how it can help distinguish genuine Islamic reformers from pretenders, are the crown and centerpiece of the book, and examples of the kind of searching analysis that is all too often absent from the public square today, and for that all the more needed.

The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is, therefore, an extremely illuminating book, and not always in the ways that its interview subjects may have intended. That is, as is said these days, not a bug, but a feature. It’s crucial today that genuine reformers be distinguished from insincere deceivers, and naïve idealists from those with genuine plans. Here is a solid beginning in that effort. This book should be read while bearing in mind how the governments of the West are assuming that their newly accepted Muslim refugees will sooner or later accept the values and mores of the secular West and settle down to become loyal and productive citizens, and how the recent experience of European countries, particularly Sweden, Germany, and France, as well as the United Kingdom, offers abundant reason for concern that this may not be the case.

That same tension between high hopes and harsh realities runs through these interviews, and doubtless through the souls of many of the interviewees. For better or worse, however, any chance for Western countries, as well as non-Muslim countries in the Far East and elsewhere, to enjoy a peaceful future now depends, courtesy of a series of decisions our political leaders have made, upon the victory of Islamic reform. The Challenge of Modernizing Islam uniquely equips readers to make an informed and intelligent evaluation of how peaceful the future of non-Muslim countries is likely to be.

ROBERT SPENCER IS THE DIRECTOR OF Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of sixteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. Spencer has led seminars on Islam and Jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the US Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint