TERESA CLEMENTS, RN: Who or what helps you when you face serious challenges in your life?

CURTIS NELSON: I always get comfort from Audrey, my wife.

CLEMENTS: Of 61 years.

CURTIS NELSON: Yes, of 61 years, yes. And then our pastors.

CLEMENTS: So your faith is important?

NELSON: Yes, very important.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Conversations like this at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin, are what set off the nationwide outcry over the so-called “death panels.” This is Curtis Nelson, connected to a dialysis machine, with his wife Audrey and his son Dennis. Teresa Clements is a nurse guiding the discussion.

CLEMENTS: With your particular illnesses, and you’ve got the multiple myeloma, the heart failure, and now the kidney disease, it’s difficult to predict when a complication can occur, and it can happen suddenly, and you might not be able or aware to make those decisions.

SEVERSON: These end-of-life conversations began in the 1980s at the urging of the hospital’s medical ethicist, Bernard Hammes. He had grown alarmed after listening to staff doctors distressed about how to treat incapacitated terminally ill patients.

BERNARD HAMMES (Clinical Ethicist, Gundersen Lutheran Health System): What does the patient want me to do? The patient now is too sick to ask, the family, when we ask the family, had no idea what the patient would or would not want, and so we were really faced with this moral or ethical dilemma.

SEVERSON: And when the doctors don’t know what the patient or the family wants, Hammes says there’s only one thing to do.

HAMMES: Here, anywhere in the world quite honestly, when you have a patient coming into a hospital who’s very ill, maybe dying if we don’t treat them, our assumption is that treating, attempting to prolong life is the right thing to do. And that, indeed, from an ethical, professional perspective is the right thing to do, but is it what the patient would want?

CLEMENTS: You have a serious complication from your kidney disease, you have a good chance of living through the complication, but it’s expected you will never be able to either walk or talk or both, and you would require 24-hour nursing care. You would choose the following: to continue all treatment because living as long as possible is most important; you would stop all efforts, including dialysis to keep you alive because your quality of life is more important than your quantity; or you are not sure.

NELSON: That would be terrible. I wouldn’t want to have that.

CLEMENTS: So to stop all efforts then.

NELSON: Yes, if I got into a position like that, yes.

SEVERSON: In La Crosse, Wisconsin, 96 percent of the patients who die have gone through these advance directive discussions and designated how they would prefer to spend their last days.

HAMMES (lecturing): This program is not trying to talk people out of treatment. This program is trying to help patients make informed decisions so that we know what they would want even in a crisis, and we can deliver the services that match their preferences.

SEVERSON: The program has been so successful representatives from around the country now attend seminars at Gundersen Lutheran. The success is due, in part, to the backing of the Catholic and Lutheran churches. A similar program is underway in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is supported by the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Pastor Leith Anderson of the Wooddale Church outside Minneapolis. He says he witnessed too many families going through emotional turmoil when their loved one was dying.

REV. LEITH ANDERSON (President, National Association of Evangelicals): For the family, that there are processes in place is wonderfully helpful because often children and spouses, they’re frightened, they don’t want to make a mistake, they don’t want to give up too soon, they don’t want to hold on too long, and if it’s been discussed, and especially if it’s been documented in writing, that is really a gift to family.

SEVERSON: Pastor Anderson says both he and his wife have filled out advance directives, and he’s encouraged members of his congregation to do the same. The directives, he says, are biblically based, and he uses as an example the story of Jacob when he knows he is about to die.

ANDERSON: And it tells about him bringing all of his sons around him, and he gave a prepared statement to every one of them, and it was different for each one. But the Bible line in Genesis 49 says that he gave instructions. Now that’s marvelous. Here long ago was a man who knew he was going to die and gave final instructions.

SEVERSON: Advance directives today detail individual treatment, assign power of attorney, and are available electronically. Hammes says they are not “death panels,” a description he says is “simply a lie.” He says some people choose to stay alive with any technology medical science can offer. A majority request less invasive treatments. Some, because of their religious views, are ready to meet their maker.

CLEMENTS: If those hopes don’t come true, what else would you hope for, Curtis?

NELSON: That the good Lord says I can come in.

CLEMENTS: That the Lord says you can come in?

NELSON: Yeah.

SEVERSON: The hospital now trains social workers, nurses, and pastors to conduct these discussions. Bernard Hammes has filled out his own.

HAMMES: I’m not making a judgment for you or for anyone else, but I think we live in a world in which we have to share resources. That’s a spiritual value for me. So if I receive medical care, and it reaches a certain stage, and it’s not going to change the outcome for me, but a lot more money could be spent, I would say, you know, the cost of this care has reached a point that I no longer feel is ethical, because other people don’t even have basic needs being met.

SEVERSON: Although it wasn’t the original intent of Gundersen’s advance health-care planning program, there has been an additional benefit. It saves money. Typically, hospital costs for a patient’s last 6 months of life nationwide average about $31,500. At some hospitals it’s twice that amount or more. At Gundersen Lutheran it’s $22,000 because the patient spends fewer days in the hospital.

HAMMES: Where would you rather spend your time if you had two years left to live, in the hospital going through tests and procedures? We’re putting many, many patients in this country through a lot of additional suffering and expense, some of which they’re going to have to pay for. It’s the fourth most frequent reason for families to go bankrupt.

SEVERSON: There’s another reason hospital costs are less. Doctors here are paid a salary. Dr. Jeff Thompson is CEO of the Gundersen Lutheran Health System.

DR. JEFF THOMPSON: In our organization and others like us, a physician gets no extra money because they do a CT scan or lab work. There’s no added incentive to put patients in the hospital.

SEVERSON: Dr. Greg Thompson, a pulmonary critical care specialist, says these days the intensive care ward mostly treats patients who have a better chance of long-term survival.

DR. GREG THOMPSON: Many of those patients who have the underlying terminal disease don’t even come to the intensive unit, because they have already decided that at this point in their life that’s not the level of care that they want. They want care, but not the critical care that they would receive in a critical care unit.

ANDERSON: I think that there’s a growing number of people who do not want to have a lot of tubes connected to them. I would say that increasingly I am hearing people say, “I want to die at home.” So they’re making a choice that dignity is more important than more days.

CLEMENTS: Any other hopes for you guys?

DENNIS NELSON: Oh, I would hope that he would get off from this, and if it is eventually going to happen, that it wouldn’t be a long, drawn out process in passing so.

CURTIS NELSON: That’s the biggest thing. I don’t want it to have it dragged out.

TERESA NELSON: So this is a good conversation to have.

SEVERSON: In these discussions, talk is about practical things but often turns deeply personal.

HAMMES: People don’t like talking about death. It’s a taboo in our society. This is a very intimate conversation. When you talk about these issues, you’re really talking, if you will, about the meaning of life, about your religious beliefs and faith, and ultimately about who you are, and that’s a little frightening to most of us.

SEVERSON: At the end of these discussions, Hammes says he often hears the same thing from the nurses and facilitators who conduct them.

HAMMES: What they will report to me is that what they experienced was a sacred space. What happens in families when they really get into the meaning of this conversation is they tell each other how important they are to each other.

SEVERSON: The idea of advance directives appears to be gaining traction. Intimate discussions about the end of life are now starting to take place in hospitals around the country.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Start with an irony not yet sufficiently noted: We’ve been here before.

The first overseas military action conducted by the infant United States was what we might call a “humanitarian intervention” on the Libyan coast to disrupt the Barbary pirates then terrorizing the Mediterranean shipping lines. It was a unilateral action, as none of our potential allies at the time—specifically the “Great Powers” of Europe or even the Ottoman Empire, whose purported territory was being used as a base for piracy—were willing to act. Instead, they all considered it in their interest to pay a certain amount of tribute—basically, protection money—to ensure their ships were off-limits to the pirates.

Under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s direction, the US refused to pay the tribute, and its ships were considered fair game by the pirates. The end result was two wars. The first, from 1801 to 1805, ended with a treaty the pirates soon scorned. During the second, in 1815, immediately after the War of 1812, a stronger US naval force reminded the Bey of Tripoli of the earlier treaty.

From this the US gained a line for the Marine Corps Hymn (”to the shores of Tripoli”) and a sense of what was required for combat with Islamic forces on their soil—conflict that did not easily end. It took two wars—sharp, nasty little conflicts—and it really only ended when the North African possessions of the Ottoman Empire began to be carved up as colonies by the European powers.

No one should think that this will be easy or simple. Obama’s message to the nation was a reminder that he surely doesn’t.

The president was fierce last night. One of the people watching the speech with me thought he seemed “exasperated.” Certainly he was frustrated at the hysterical comments of left and right. It’s going too fast! It’s going too slow! More needs to be done! Too much is being done already! Obama seemed like nothing less than the parent, thin-lipped with barely suppressed anger, trying to deliberately, if a bit over-loudly, explain to the teenagers why they couldn’t have everything they wanted.

But I think “fierce” is a better word for his mood. He was not just communicating exasperation at the caterwauling of American politicians of the moral fiber of Newt Gingrich and the strategic profundity of Michele Bachmann. He was also communicating a deeper fury and profounder purpose to three other audiences: Muammar Qaddafi himself, who surely watched the speech; those people in Libya and elsewhere who want to know what the United States will do and what it won’t; and finally the US population as a whole whom, it seems, Obama wanted to reach with a somber and serious message—that United States military power, and its power as a whole, must be exercised with serious deliberation and never flippantly or through glib soundbites. But exercised it must be, and for aims that are overlappingly moral and political.

The lineaments of an Obama Doctrine—if that is what it is—were crisply sketched out. Work to prevent humanitarian catastrophes, for such catastrophes inevitably create further problems in the region and globally. But do so with a cold eye to the costs and consequences of varying degrees of US involvement, and always, always work to seek collaboration with allies wherever such collaboration is possible, both to strengthen the action and diminish the costs.

Such a vision recognizes concentric rings of responsibility: first, to protect the nation, then to use the work of America’s diplomats, and when necessary the US military, to secure the best conditions to advance American interests abroad, and then to ensure that the costs of any such action, in blood and treasure, are sustainable for the strategic purpose involved. Safety, sufficient force, economy. These are the basic obligations of a US president when foreign affairs are at issue.

This can sound cold-blooded, but it is not, or need not be. Consider how deeply the president suggested morality enters into things, albeit in complicated ways. Here he made two arguments—first, against those who argue for doing nothing, and second, against those who argue for doing much more.

Against those who don’t think the US has any vital interests involved in Libya: Why is a humanitarian crisis a problem for the United States? Well, certainly because the US doesn’t want to see atrocities done. They’re bad, after all. But why exactly are they bad? Here Obama spelled out the consequences in detail, explaining how much a cold-hearted realist and a warm-blooded moralist can share:

A humanitarian crisis could cause the movement of refugees across borders to Tunisia and Egypt, countries already struggling to move past their own recent revolutions and rebuild their political orders. (The president didn’t mention it, but some no doubt will recall that the bloody Rwandan genocide of 1994, which killed 800,000, led to the even-bloodier Central African wars of the remainder of the 1990s, with the two Congo wars alone killing over five, maybe six million more people.)

A Qaddafi sack of Benghazi and destruction of the rebellion would deal a severe blow for democratic movements across the region, just when many of them are showing some real energy in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria (perhaps even in Italy, but that may be going a bit too far). Not all of these movements are pro-US, and we would be naïve to think they are forces that would eventuate in new political situations to our liking, clearly in Bahrain and arguably in Yemen as well. But over time, democratic nations are our best bet in the region and the best bet of the world. When such democratic nations are possible, we should not act to obstruct their birth, and we should do all we can to enable their emergence.

Finally, inaction would have led to the further humiliation—that is, delegitimation—of the United Nations Security Council and also the Arab League, both of whom had authorized military force to stop Qaddafi’s troops from entering Benghazi. Such delegitimation is no light thing. It is arguable that the Bush Administration’s glib dismissal of NATO’s offers of help in Afghanistan in 2001, and its near-mockery of the UN in 2003, derived from Bush and his allies’ perception that NATO was ineffectual at best, and the UN actively harmful, in the Yugoslav crises of the previous decade. However you want to contest those perceptions, as I do, you must admit that those institutions were not exemplars of institutional accomplishment in that decade. If the US wants an international order in which some forms of justice are at least occasionally acknowledged and acted upon, then when those forms of international order are—almost miraculously—effective, we should do all in our power to support them.

So for immediate “on the ground” reasons relative to Libya’s fragile neighbors to the burgeoning drive for democracy in the Arab world as a whole, and for reasons related to cultivating a genuine international order, intervention at that level is both the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do.

But why not go further? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, we hear, so why not simply overthrow Qaddafi? Here is Obama’s second argument, against those who would have him do much more now than he wants.

Well, why don’t we oppose injustice equally everywhere? The answer is we should, but not in the same way. To have gone to war with China after Tianamen Square would have led to catastrophic global consequences. To have struck back at Russia in the Georgian war would have been worse (and arguably, after the dust settled, we would have been in the wrong there). Was there something more the US could have done in Iran in the summer of 2009? Not all the Iranian activists think so even now. Prospects must be weighed against possibilities, and opportunities must be measured by the odds of success.

Here Obama shows himself to be a fairly chastened realist. Were the US to aim directly at overthrow, Obama says, we would not be within the ambit of the UN or the Arab League, and probably we’d have lost NATO as well. (Note, by the way, the delicate doughnut he danced around Germany in listing “our closest allies” in this cause.) It is unclear, furthermore, that the Libyan forces aligned against Qaddafi want the US to go this extra step. They seem committed to defeating the tyrant on their own, and if they are, Obama thinks the US should let them.

So we would lose a great deal of support. But we could still do it, yes? That is unclear, as Obama pointed out by appealing to Iraq, where, as he put it, “regime change…took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.” Even if the US could do it, would it be wise?

Impatience is only very rarely a virtue in international affairs. Surely we could end this conflict right now, in some sense, simply by dropping a ten kiloton weapon on Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli and turning much of Tripoli’s sand to glass. Probably we could dial that back to a one kiloton “microburst” and only obliterate the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the compound as well, keeping the casualties, at least in the short-term, to under 100,000 dead from the blast and immediate radiation sickness. But who would want that?

Were the US to go further than Obama has suggested at present, it would do so at a cost of international legitimacy and pragmatic investment that would be vast and longlasting. Instead, Obama argues, let’s see how the next ten days play out—as our military risks and expenses decrease, as our allies carry more of the burden, and as the military balance of power in Libya continues to shift, for continue to shift it will. Qaddafi’s forces will not get any stronger, isolated as they are geographically and financially, while the rebel forces really have nowhere to go but up in effectiveness and scale. And then see how the ten days after that go. Let’s be a bit more patient.

Emotional screeching on the part of American wonks and politicians that Obama is not showing enough “strength” must be hard to bear for a man who regularly meets with the wounded from wars he did not start but now must fight, a man who regularly visits Arlington National Cemetery and meets with the families—parents, husbands and wives, sons and daughters—of American servicemen and women, his servicemen and women, who have been killed in those wars. Part of me wants to think there is a special place in hell for all those people who are morally glib enough to use a president’s caution with human life as a rhetorical cudgel to beat him over the head as “weak” or “vacillating.” It’s not the part of me that I endorse in cool reflection, but it’s there.

And I think it’s there for Obama, too. I think he simply cannot understand how people can take themselves seriously when they get up on their moral hobbyhorses, put the pots of ludicrous, hysterical pseudo-patriotism backwards on their heads, and imagine that they are charging against Evil Forces Aligned Against America. I strongly suspect history won’t take those people seriously either. In any event, they are not taking morality’s traction on reality seriously in this case. They are, in effect, sentimental moralists who think just because something seems like it ought to be to their way of thinking that it can be.

This kind of moralism is just as immoral as the amoral nihilism of those so-called “realists” who would have the US do nothing in situations like Libya. Both lack the patience to see how complicatedly intertwined the political and moral realities are.

Patience is hard, and in this case it may well be difficult to tell patience from uncertainty. After all, Obama offered no easy way out. He did not tell us, as General Petraeus famously asked during the invasion of Iraq, how this ends. But I think that was wise, for two reasons.

First, he simply doesn’t know. No one does. Will it take one more day for Qaddafi to quit or be forced out by others or simply be in the right place at the right time? (The wrong place at the wrong time for him.) It could be that quick. It could take a week. Maybe a month. It could be a long, hard slog. Perhaps Libya will split into Cyrenacia and Tripolitania. It’s not the worst that could happen.

Second, Obama secured what is called strategic ambiguity on this matter. That is, he did not pre-commit himself to any particular path going forward. That is wise as well. Who knows what the future will bring? There is no need for the US to telegraph to its rivals what it will do in all possible contingencies.

It may be difficult, I say again, in coming days to tell patience from uncertainty. But Obama’s speech does give some clues. If the rebel forces continue to grow in strength; if our allies stay with the mission; if international support does not collapse—and none of these are implausible hopes, though each of them carries with it its own substantial possibilities of disappointment—then there should come some resolution of the Libyan intervention in the direction of our favored conclusion. Ten days in, there is much reason to hope for this. Nothing is guaranteed, of course. Chance enters into everything, especially war.

In Libya, Obama said, the nation’s “safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are.” Interests and values. This is not a president given to expressivism in foreign policy or diplomacy enacted by grand moral gesture. Acts are calibrated not for their “moral clarity” but for their precision in anticipated consequences. Such further clarity as is necessary can come from the exegesis given to the nation’s actions by its diplomats and president. But soldiers and civilians are not semaphores to be used in the geopolitical version of a Cecil B. DeMille—or worse, Jerry Bruckheimer—movie. Views that imply anything approaching that are best met with contempt.

Certainly a president, entrusted with the nation’s interests, among which are its values, cannot share those views, and we are fortunate that this one, at least, does not.

Charles Mathewes is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville and the author, most recently, of “The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times” (Eerdmans, 2011).

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: There was jubilation in the streets of Egypt Friday (February 11) after President Hosni Mubarak finally decided to step down. He handed power to the military’s Supreme Council. The Council pledged to meet protestors’ demands for a peaceful transfer of authority that will lead to a free democracy. Meanwhile, debate continues over the role religion could play in a new government. Kim Lawton and I examine the week’s dramatic developments in Egypt with Geneive Abdo. She’s a longtime Middle East reporter and author of the book “No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam.” She’s a fellow and analyst at the Century Foundation and National Security Network. Welcome to you.

GENEIVE ABDO: Thank you very much.

ABERNETHY: Geneive, one way or another there’s going to be a new government in Egypt. What can we say about the degree of religious influence that we can expect in that government?

ABDO: Well that, of course, Bob, is the question everyone’s been asking, and I think that there’s no doubt, I mean as everyone has been reading about this big organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, that they will have a role in the government. I mean there’s no doubt about that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: And that’s different, right? I mean, they’ve been not having an influence, and so this would be a change?

ABDO: Yes, I mean, they’ve been a banned party, so this is a huge, huge change in Egyptian history, and they’ve been in Egypt since the 1920s, so this will be their first time to actually enter government.

ABERNETHY: There was a poll that came out this week taken by phone in Cairo and Alexandria asking questions about these things, and a very low percentage, 15 percent, said they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood. Has there been a change since years ago in that as a new generation has come up?

ABDO: Well, I think that the statistic that people that have used is 20 percent generally—that if there were free elections today, 20 percent of Egyptians would vote for Brotherhood candidates, but I think that could be sort of an underestimation.

ABERNETHY: But so what would that mean in a government if the Muslim Brotherhood or any strongly Islamist group had influence?

ABDO: Well, there are a lot of parties in Egypt. There are a lot of political parties, as we all know. Some of them are secular, some are nationalist. The Brotherhood is only one of them. However, the Brotherhood is very well organized, and they’ve been around for a long time. They’re a social, also, organization. They run hospitals. They do a lot of sort of social work in Egypt. So they are very, very influential.

ABERNETHY: But in terms of policies, what would it mean—a policy, for instance, of Egypt toward Israel or toward the United States?

ABDO: The Brotherhood’s position today—and actually one of their leaders has been on television answering that question and he’s been reluctant to answer. He says we don’t know yet. Let’s not talk about foreign policy. But historically, the position of the movement has been against the peace agreement with Israel.

LAWTON: One of the issues I’ve been interested to watch is different representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood this week were sort of doing a Western PR campaign, and many of them said we want to have democracy but we don’t want it to look like American democracy per se, and they said they do want to see Islamic values somehow incorporated into a new government. But I think that’s what has people wondering, well, what does that mean in terms of everyday life in Egypt?

ABDO: Yes, and I think that this is something—I mean, if you can imagine, even for the Brotherhood I don’t know how they could answer this question, because they’ve never been in power. But I think that what they want—and they’ve been very clear they are for democracy, but as you say, not a Western–style democracy, and they want—whatever government the new government comes to be in Egypt they want it to reflect the values of the society.

ABERNEHTY: What does that mean, “the values of society”? Does that mean the same as strongly Islamic values?

ABDO: Well, I’ll just give you an example, okay? When the Brotherhood wrote a draft party platform three years ago, they said that they wanted a group of scholars to vet laws passed by the parliament to make sure that they conformed with Islamic values, so that’s one thing they have proposed.

ABERNETHY: For instance, relating to women?

ABDO: Relating to women, relating maybe even to, you know, what students learn in school, relating to whether women wear headscarves. They have said they won’t make veiling mandatory. They have said this.

ABERNETHY: Would an Islamist government or a government with strong influence from the Muslim Brotherhood—would it be different as far as attitudes towards the United States are concerned?

ABDO: I do think so. I think that we have to be very careful not to be alarmist at this point, but I do think that not only the Brotherhood but many Egyptians actually believe that they should be sort of not so reliant on the aid that they receive from the United States, and they want to be more in charge of their own destiny.

LAWTON: There’s been a lot of different countries that have tried to incorporate Islamic values and democracy. What are the challenges? You know, some people say, is democracy compatible with Islam? Is this a new experimental point?

ABDO: I think it really is, and if we, even though this has been written about so much this week, I think if we take the two models we know of now, right, Iran and Turkey, I think that we are looking at a future Egypt that resembles Turkey much more than it resembles Iran. And Turkey, let’s face it, I mean Turkey’s been very successful. They have a vibrant economy, and they have so far been able to walk this tightrope, and I know that that’s something—

ABERNETHY: So we would not be looking at a theocracy.

ABDO: Definitely not. I don’t think—that is definitely not coming to Egypt.

ABERNETHY: What about the other religions in Egypt—the Copts, for instance, ten million of them? What’s the outlook for them in a new kind of government?

ABDO: The Copts, as we all know from reading the papers, have been the target of a lot of violence in Egypt, and I think that we know also that some of this violence has come from the state security services and the forces. So if there is a new state presumably there will more religious tolerance, I mean, we can only hope so. Just today, for example, there was a report that the current interior minister may have been involved in the attack on a church in Alexandria.

ABERNETHY: We have to leave it there. Geneive Abdo, many thanks.

ABDO: Thank you, nice to be here.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: As the crisis in Egypt continued to unfold this week, many questions emerged about the religious implications. What role will religion play in a new government, and in particular, what role will the Muslim Brotherhood play? How will the new situation in Egypt affect the rest of the Middle East, including Israel and the peace process, and how will Egypt’s Christian minority fare? We explore all this with Qamar-ul Huda, a senior program officer at the US Institute of Peace. He’s a consultant in many parts of the Middle East on conflict resolution. Dr. Huda, welcome.

QAMAR-UL HUDA (Senior Program Officer, US Institute of Peace): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: In the demonstrations in the streets there wasn’t much evidence of a religious influence. It seemed pretty secular, but lots of people expect that in a new government there will be strong religious representation. Is that fair to say?

HUDA: That’s a fair assessment. We know that the mass protest in Egypt is a mass public crossing all ideologies. This is a national issue for Egypt, and it’s not contained to any one group. The new government or the transitional government that will be formed in the near future—I think the religious voices or the religious parties will be at the table but will not dominate the party.

ABERNETHY: Now there’s a lot of fear around, as you know and have read, about the Muslim Brotherhood—what it is, what it means, what its place might be in a new government, and what the implications of that are.

HUDA: Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is almost seven decades old, and it’s basically a group that reacted to a secular nationalist movement in Egypt. It’s—right now it’s been regulated to do mainly social welfare and social services.

ABERNETHY: Is it what you would call a radical Islamic group?

HUDA: I think there are fringes of the Brotherhood that had radical groups and voices. They’ve been, I think, mostly eliminated under Mubarak in the ’90s. Right now it’s a very small group that’s mismanaged but also has very little influence as we speak today.

ABERNETHY: And in a new government, whatever the name of it, you would expect there to be religious representation, and what does that mean? What does that imply?

HUDA: I think that what that means is that the religious representatives will try to push for more Islamic values in the government, perhaps more Islamic teachings and ethics in schools, and perhaps have law to represent more Islamic values, but I don’t think they’ll have any real influence in the beginning, because the concern is now constitutional reform and unemployment.

ABERNETHY: And what about the religious minorities, especially the Christians, the Copts? There are ten million, about, of those?

HUDA: Yes.

ABERNETHY: What would be the outlook for them?

HUDA: Well, at this time we know they are participating with the protests. They are looking for a change in Egypt. I think right now they are most likely positioned to take part in the government, and we’re hoping and many people are hoping there will be a more pluralistic government that will embrace the Christian Copts.

ABERNETHY: They might even have a place in the government?

HUDA: I think they will.

ABERNETHY: Well, what about Israel and the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians? What are the implications of that whoever makes up the government, the new government in Egypt?

HUDA: Yes, I think this is the big question and the big concern for many of the Western thinkers and analysts. What will happen to the treaty signed with Israel? What is the security risk for Egypt? But for what it seems like that right now the government, the transitional government will take care of internal matters but also may be—stay with international treaties that it signed with Israel. There’s no indication that radical Islam will come to the forefront, and there’s no indication that it will abdicate with current treaties.

ABERNETHY: And what about between Egypt and the US?

HUDA: Well, it’s looking like on the streets there’s some discontent with Western forces and American influence in terms of its delay in moving the regime out. But I think Egyptians are very positive with their alliances with the West, and I think they will continue with those alliances.

ABERNETHY: Dr. Qamar-ul Huda from the US Institute of Peace. Thank you.

HUDA: Thank you for having me.

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Can Islam make its peace with modernity and democracy? We highlight from the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly archive some comments over the years from scholars and experts on the compatibility of democratic values and Islam:

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies, George Washington University:

The Muslim people do not like freedom and democracy any less than anybody else. It is in the nature of human beings to like freedom. The problem is sometimes these terms are defined exclusively upon the basis of the Western experience, which is culturally bound and has taken many historical transformations to become what it is. The question isn’t whether Islam can live with modernism. There’s a much more profound battle afoot. It isn’t that modernism has won the day and now everybody has to conform to it. Modernism itself is floundering. Islam as a value system, not only as a religion, has to be thought about as a contending way of looking at the universe. Islam can live with modernism on a practical level. But there has to be an intellectual exchange. The idea that modernism is reality and everything else has to conform to it—that has to be challenged.

Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History:

Muslims have to modernize their societies, and they’ve only just begun. It’s a long, painful, difficult process. They are having to do it far too quickly, and they are experiencing many of the same traumas we did in Europe: wars of religion, revolutions, reigns of terror, exploitation of women and children, despotisms, basic alienation and anomie as conditions change and nothing new takes their place. We are watching people in some parts of the Islamic world going through a process that we went through ourselves but have forgotten. We think that anybody can just create a democracy in no time at all, forgetting that it took us hundreds of years to develop our secular and democratic institutions.

Omid Safi, professor of religious studies, University of North Carolina:

The Qur’an is clearly not a political constitution as we understand the term today. Nonetheless, it envisions a society devoted to justice for all and to aiding the oppressed in light of a collective responsibility before God. Historically, Muslims have relied on monarchies (whether in secular sultanates or religious caliphates) that have been open to abuses of power. Today Muslims are seeking newer models of government that offer the greatest possibility of self-determination and living a life free from injustice. The question for any society trying to reconcile religion and liberal democracy is whether it will ensure for women and religious minorities the same civil liberties it would mandate for its own male members. This is not an abstract, theoretical question for Muslims. It is timely and urgent, and it will need to be answered in the affirmative.

Roy Mottahedeh, professor of Islamic history, Harvard University:

What is the place of Islam in the travails the world is going through? Sometimes I’m inclined to agree with a sentence Mary McCarthy wrote in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—that religion makes good people better and bad people worse. Perhaps religion has added intensity to many of the struggles that are going on, but I don’t believe the actual struggles are primarily caused by religion. They have all almost naturally attained a religious flavor because the majority of the world’s people are now engaging in some way in politics, and their identity is more religious than nationalistic. It is popular to say that the Muslim world has not had a reformation, which is not quite correct. Some forms of Islam are very Protestant in character. Some are more Catholic in character. But Islam has not seen the elements of Enlightenment that passed from the West into the Muslim world fully absorbed into religious learning. That’s a revolution that is taking place now. It’s a gradual revolution, but I have no doubt that, 25 years from now, it will be a revolution that is largely accomplished.

Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle East politics and international relations, London School of Economics:

The genius of the West lies in sustaining an open society with constitutional checks and balances that protect individual rights, freedoms, and obligations. But the Enlightenment was not a coincidence. It occurred as a result of trade and cross-fertilization of cultures, particularly with the world of Islam. History shows that Islam’s decentralized institutions carry within them the seeds of democracy. The challenge is to rejuvenate Islam’s previous forms of local autonomy and decentralized authority—to limit the reach of the tyrannical state, empower the individual, and free the creative spirit. This ambitious project requires cross-cultural fertilization and receptiveness to universal currents.

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