Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The Trump administration’s “travel ban” imposed on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, coupled with the former POTUS’s openly anti-Muslim, xenophobic rhetoric, has added much urgency to a critical question that now confronts both Muslims and non-Muslims: How should we talk about Islam today? This question has immediate bearing on a subject that gained prominence lately, political correctness. A number of prominent Muslim and ex-Muslim intellectuals and activists have been calling for an open and responsible conversation about Islam, particularly the sensitive subject regarding links between Islamic/Islamist doctrines and violence or human rights abuses. These voices stress that this conversation is long overdue, and should not be suppressed—notwithstanding the rise of white supremacy and Trumpism and their anti-Muslim rhetoric. They underscore that avoiding this conversation is detrimental, in the long run, to Muslims themselves because it hampers a much-needed debate about religious reform in Islam (broadly conceived), while exacerbating the state of crisis besetting several majority-Muslim societies, which in turn affects the Muslim diaspora. This paper surveys various voices, individuals and groups, that have attempted to wrestle with the debate over religiously-inspired violence and the state of perceived civilizational crisis in the Muslim world today. What all these voices seem to agree on is the conviction that the way out of this crisis is an acceptance of democracy and secular politics and institutions in the Muslim world—despite their dissimilar stances on whether Islam, or its myriad interpretations, is compatible with the notions of democracy and secularity.