Author Archives: Fred Yi

Religion in a Changing Egypt

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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?

post0b1-changingegyptABDO: 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.

post0b2-changingegyptABERNETHY: 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.

post0b3-changingegyptABERNETHY: 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.

WikiLeaks Ethics

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It was the disclosure of this classified video in 2010 of a US military helicopter shooting civilians and journalists in Baghdad that drew the world’s attention to the anti-secrecy organization called WikiLeaks. It was an embarrassment for the Pentagon, followed by the leak of thousand of cables about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there was the release of US diplomatic cables amounting to 250,000 documents containing 240 million words. The reaction in Washington echoed the view of former Ambassador Ed Rowell.

AMBASSADOR EDWARD ROWELL: Horror, horror, and I can tell you a lot of my colleagues—I’m retired, but currently colleagues in the State Department felt the same sense of horror, and it was a feeling that was shared from the top to the bottom.

SEVERSON: The general feeling was that national security interests outweighed the public’s right to know and that what WikiLeaks did was morally and ethically wrong and maybe illegal. The attorney general launched an investigation, one that deeply troubles Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center.

post02-wikileaksSTEPHEN KOHN: I think the prosecution of WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act would be completely irresponsible and a violation of First Amendment rights.

SEVERSON: Kohn says it would be unethical for government employees to keep some things secret—that it’s their duty to report wrong-doing.

KOHN: If you’re looking at, say, the name of a confidential informant, there’s really no public need to know that. If you’re looking at, say, the military’s shooting down a journalist, well, there’s tremendous public need to know about that.

ROWELL: One of the questions is who is going to decide what ought to be released? Is it somebody who is familiar with all the arguments back and forth about how this relationship is going to play out, or is it somebody who is a self-appointed observer sitting in some remote place?

SEVERSON: Steven Aftergood heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

STEVEN AFTERGOOD: If there is a problem with WikiLeaks, in my mind, it’s that they are not sufficiently responsible in what they put out, and they do not distinguish between what serves the public interest and what does not.

post03-wikileaksSEVERSON: New York Times officials say they felt an enormous ethical obligation to report the WikiLeaks cables responsibly. David Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for the paper. He was one of as many as 30 staffers who sifted through the WikiLeaks documents before the Times published excerpts.

DAVID SANGER: We made judgments about which ones of those we thought were legitimate and which ones were not. For example, we were perfectly willing and thought it was very important that we remove from the cables the name of dissidents, the name of sources, the name of mid-level officials who had talked to the United States and who might suffer some punishment in their home countries for that.

SEVERSON: Steven Aftergood says even though his mission is to promote transparency in government, he thinks WikiLeaks has gone too far.

AFTERGOOD: There is no certain knowledge that anyone has been physically harmed by the leaks. At the same time, if you or I were one of those individuals named in the documents, I think we would be looking over our shoulder for many years to come.

post04-wikileaksROWELL: The issue is: Are there things which are justifiably secret and ought to be kept secret? And there are.

SEVERSON: Rowell has served as ambassador to Bolivia, Portugal, and Luxembourg. He says one danger is that the consequences of leaks are often difficult to predict.

ROWELL: In South Africa, when F.W. deKlerk declared the end of apartheid, Mandela was released and everything changed. The preamble to that was more than two years of negotiations between the ANC [African National Congress] and representatives of the president’s office, and if those negotiations had ever become known publicly the whole thing would have collapsed.

SEVERSON: But Times correspondent Sanger says some leaks may have beneficial results.

SANGER: The publication of those cables, not largely in the Times but elsewhere, helped—by the accounting of some American diplomats—spark the uprisings in Tunisia, which have then led to others around the Middle East.

SEVERSON: He says WikiLeaks disclosures have shed light on China’s attitude toward the US, on North Korea’s secret exportation of missile technology, and on Arab leaders’ views of Iran.

post07-wikileaksSANGER: In our coverage you read about the king of Saudi Arabia telling the United States to cut off the head of the snake when it came to dealing with Iran and its nuclear program. By getting that information out about Iran, you’ve now seen the Arab press become more willing to write about the Iranian nuclear program, which previously they wouldn’t do.

AFTERGOOD: I think leaks in general and WikiLeaks in particular are a response to a real problem. The problem is that the government keeps too much information secret without a valid reason.

KOHN: Since 9/11 and even before, they have grossly abused secrecy, first off by making many employees and contractors have clearances when they really don’t need it, and second, by stamping anything and everything classified, secret, top secret, whatever. It’s very simple for any agency just to stamp something confidential or secret and prevent public disclosure.

SEVERSON: Not only is there all that classified information, there are now approximately two-and-a-half-million people who have security clearances to access to those secret documents, including thousands of new private contractors hired by the government. Add it all together and it is very difficult to keep a secret in Washington.

post06-wikileaksAFTERGOOD: The policy lesson I would like to see drawn from the whole episode is that we need to be more much discriminating. Only those things that are genuinely sensitive ought to be protected as such, and everything else should more or less be out there.

SEVERSON: Stephen Kohn says there is no protection for national security whistle blowers, and there needs to be. He questions the morality of the government’s focus on the messenger while seemingly ignoring the message.

KOHN: There were no prosecutions for the people who lied about the intelligence that caused the war in Iraq. They just gave them a pass. The people who did torture they gave a pass. But people who want to blow the whistle on those incidents—they’re coming down hard on and throwing the book.

SEVERSON: The individual suspected of pilfering classified information and passing it on to WikiLeaks is Private First Class Bradley Manning who has been held apparently in solitary confinement for several months in pretrial detention.

KOHN: At the end of the day, when the hysteria calms down, they must apply the First Amendment to their investigation or prosecution of Mr. Manning or their investigation and prosecution of WikiLeaks itself.

SEVERSON: Many agree it will be very difficult to prosecute WikiLeaks if it acted only as a publisher. Few expect that organizations like WikiLeaks are going away.

AFTERGOOD: There is a void that has formed as a result of the downsizing, so to speak, of journalism. Where there were relationships between government officials and beat reporters, there is now a vacuum. Wikileaks is one of the things that has stepped in to fill that vacuum.

SEVERSON: The person who founded Wikileaks, Julian Assange, says his goal is to expose unethical behavior by governments and organizations. Others question his motives.

SANGER: He believed that the publication of this material would embarrass the United States and make public a huge gap between what America says it is doing and what it is doing around the world. In fact, I think it had the opposite effect. I think that we learned from this that American diplomats by and large are doing what they say they are doing.

SEVERSON: For now the investigation of WikiLeaks continues, and so do the leaks.

George Beverly Shea Grammy

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: At this weekend’s 53rd annual Grammy awards, the Recording Academy honors the best in the music industry. Among this year’s recipients is legendary gospel singer George Beverly Shea, who is receiving a lifetime achievement award. Beginning in 1947, Shea was the featured soloist at Billy Graham crusades. Last week, he turned 102. Kim Lawton spoke with him.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At 102, George Beverly Shea still sings as often as he can. He says singing is an important part of his spiritual practice.

GEORGE BEVERLY SHEA: You know, you keep tuned up with the Lord when you love the songs that are written about Him.

LAWTON: Shea and his wife, Karlene, live in Montreat, North Carolina, near their longtime friend, Billy Graham. A Canadian pastor’s son, Shea says music was always part of his life. He was working at a Christian radio station in Chicago in the 1940s when his baritone voice caught Graham’s attention.

post01-georgebeverlysheaSHEA: Mr. Graham phoned me and then wrote me and asked me in 1947 to become a part of his team: “Sing a little quiet song before I speak.”

LAWTON: That began a relationship that has lasted more than 60 years. Shea sang at almost every Graham crusade. Shea says it was a privilege to be on the Graham team. He says his favorite part of the crusades was watching all the people stream forward after Graham gave the altar call.

SHEA: Your head is supposed to be bowed in prayer, but I like to say I peeked a little bit, and I saw those thousands of people all during those 63 years coming forward.

LAWTON: According to Guinness World Records, Shea has sung before more people than anyone else—an estimated combined live audience of 220 million people.

SHEA: They didn’t come to hear me. They came to hear Billy Graham.

LAWTON: During his 80-year career, Shea recorded more than 70 albums and wrote several popular worship songs. He was nominated 10 times for a Grammy and won in 1965. He’ll accept the Lifetime Achievement Award along with several other music greats, including Julie Andrews, Dolly Parton, and the Ramones.

SHEA: Someone said, “Why have you been doing this all these years?” I put my thumb up to the air toward heaven, and I said I’ve been doing it for Him.

LAWTON: Shea says his faith keeps him going, and he sees every day as a gift.

SHEA: I don’t know when heaven will loom up for me, but we have to look forward to it. I hope there will be an organ up there to play. Oh, boy, I love organ music.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Protests in Egypt

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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?

post01-protestsegyptHUDA: 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?

post02-protestsegyptHUDA: 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?

post03-protestsegyptHUDA: 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.

Pakistan Microfinance

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ROSHANEH ZAFAR (Founder, Kashf Foundation): I think poverty is definitely an issue that we need to resolve, and second is education.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Fifteen years ago, Roshaneh Zafar began trying to understand and attack the roots of Pakistan’s poverty. It’s been aggravated in recent years by civil unrest, religious militancy, and natural disasters. Yet Zafar says she’s seen progress in some places, like this neighborhood in her native Lahore.

ZAFAR: So you’ll see a little slightly better infrastructure. You’ll see that their homes have improved over the years. You may not see the same poverty that we saw over a decade ago.

DE SAM LAZARO: And you may not see any women, at least outdoors. That’s not uncommon in a conservative Muslim society. But Zafar says it creates the mistaken impression that women don’t contribute to economic activity. So in 1995 she started a nonprofit organization called Kashf or “revelation.” It makes small-business loans to women to increase the impact and visibility of their work.

post01-pakfinanceZAFAR: The women businesses are home-based businesses.

DE SAM LAZARO: And so behind a lot of these storefronts are homes and families run by women, and those are the targets of your loan program.

ZAFAR: Absolutely. There’s a whole, you know, back end that’s being run by women and managed by women, and that’s really the target.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the narrow by-ways and alleys of this ancient city are thousands of small family businesses financed with loans from Kashf. The group now has 150 branches across Pakistan and has loaned the equivalent of $200 million so far to more than 300,000 women. She took us to visit Ruquia Boota, who borrowed about $120 eight years ago and grew her business in embroidered textiles with the help of two more loans. She now employs her two daughters and occasionally up to 10 other women from the neighborhood.

ZAFAR: How do you know what is selling and how much material to buy?

RUQUIA BOOTA: We get orders and then buy accordingly, and we also know what the trends are.

ZAFAR: Where do you get your materials from?

DE SAM LAZARO: The questions are more than pleasant conversation. Loan officers from Kashf pay close attention to the affairs of borrowers. The relationship begins early with financial education.

post02-pakfinanceTeacher speaking to a class for potential borrowers: I’m going to show you this chart. It has four kinds of expenses: necessary, unnecessary, emergency, and wish list.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prospective borrowers get basic tips on how to budget their expenses and rank their priorities.

Teacher to class: Where would you put the cell phone?

DE SAM LAZARO: Kashf gets most of its fund by borrowing from commercial and national banks, and it disperses loans—an average of $150—after rigorous evaluation, and every day young loan officers, most of them female, fan out to visit clients like Sobia Saeed. She has steadily expanded her salon business with three loans.

SOBIA SAEED: I’ve been doing these kids’ hair today. One more left to do.

Mother: How much do you charge for each?

SAEED: Thirty rupees.

DE SAM LAZARO: That’s about 40 US cents. This 27-year-old entrepreneur is doing a lot better than before, but like most borrowers is hardly well off. It’s one reason Zafar says her group makes sure that loan proceeds are put to their intended business purpose, not to household or even emergency use.

ZAFAR: If the money is misutilized—let’s say they spent half of it to fix the roof in the house—then the loan officer goes and informs the branch manager, and we tag that loan, and we will then monitor it. Ninety-seven percent of our loans are spent on the businesses that were agreed on. Three percent may be used on other—may be misutilized.

post03-pakfinanceDE SAM LAZARO: The vigilance comes at a time when microfinance has become a highly competitive business in several countries—often a for-profit business. In India, where it became a multi-billion-dollar industry, an epidemic of nonperforming loans caused a near standstill in lending, hurting many deserving clients, Zafar says.

ZAFAR: As competition is increasing, the microfinance institutions are targeting the same client. So one client may have two to three or four loans, and what that leads is to pyramiding and over-indebtedness, and ultimately the client is stuck with debt and can’t repay it back. The idea is really to add value to the clients’ lives. It’s not to force the credit on them.

DE SAM LAZARO: The idea of giving small loans to poor women was popularized by Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize-winning and nonprofit Grameen Bank. A chance meeting with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, inspired Zafar to leave her job as a World Bank economist and start a similar social enterprise in Pakistan. Zafar says microfinance is a particularly good fit in Pakistan, officially an Islamic republic, since it complies with Sharia law, which has strict rules on lending.

ZAFAR: There’s a lot of compatibility between the notion of Islamic finance and microfinance. That’s how I see it, very simply. The first is you only do productive lending. In Islamic finance you cannot do consumer lending, for example. Similarly, in microfinance we are not really in the business of consumer lending. The second thing is you support the business itself, so you have to do a very detailed analysis of returns from the business.

post04-pakfinanceDE SAM LAZARO: You’re sharing the risk.

ZAFAR: You’re sharing the risk.

DE SAM LAZARO: They also must share the high administrative costs. Borrowers pay an effective interest rate of about 35 percent. Zafar says it’s the only way to sustain the model, because Kashf has to pay between 14 and 16 percent on the money it borrows to make loans. From clients like Sadhiya Aijaz, there are no complaints. She and her husband, Mohammed, worked for years cutting metal manually into short strips to be bent into chain links. Their loan from Kashf has brought them machines and a much improved standard of living for this couple and their five daughters.

SADHIYA AIJAZ: We’re able to produce a lot more now, and the work is much easier. Previously life was very tough, but now with money coming in life has become much easier. We can send our children to be educated, give them clothes, books, food. I want my children to become officers, to be educated like you people. When you have an education your life is much improved.

DE SAM LAZARO: Roshaneh Zafar, raised in an affluent family, with degrees from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, agrees that education must go hand in hand with economic opportunity if endemic poverty is to end. For now she’s working to expand a new savings bank at Kashf, hoping to lend more money and to larger enterprises. One type that’s in solid demand, she says, is small private schools.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Lahore, Pakistan.

Islam and Democracy

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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.

State of the Union

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: President Obama explicitly singled out US Muslims in his State of the Union address Tuesday (January 25), saying they are part of the American family. Throughout his speech, the president called for a new era of cooperation. Several times, he noted the nation’s religious diversity:

President Obama: “We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed.”

ABERNETHY: Our managing editor, Kim Lawton, has been following religious reaction to the president’s address.

post01-stateoftheunionKIM LAWTON, managing editor: I actually moderated a conversation for our Web site with religious people giving their reactions to the address. I’ve heard from and talked to many others, and a lot of their reaction did split in predictable partisan lines. Those who support the president were more positive; those who don’t weren’t. That was predictable. But one thing that struck me was among conservatives and liberals I heard disappointment that there wasn’t more attention on the poor. The president never actually said “the poor,” but when he was talking about all of the budget problems and possible cuts, he did mention he didn’t want to do that on the backs of the most vulnerable in the nation. But this is an area that a lot of faith-based groups are concerned about when we’re talking about making big cuts and dealing with that. How is that going to affect the poor and the marginalized? And so those are going to be some big battles coming.

ABERNEHTY: “The least of these.”

LAWTON: Exactly.

ABERNETHY: And what about the language?

LAWTON: Well, I heard some disappointment from many fronts, again both liberals and conservatives, that the president didn’t use more moral language, spiritual and moral terms, even when he was talking about some of the problems facing the nation. He didn’t say it’s the right thing to do to balance the budget or to be accountable or responsible for your money. He didn’t talk about that when he was talking about clean energy. He didn’t say “caring for the environment,” which is language a lot of faith groups like to hear. Some people say, well, this is a State of the Union address. It’s a legislative package, and that’s not the place for that kind of language. Certainly the president used a lot of theological language in his Tucson speech, but for many faith people, they like to hear that kind of language in every speech, and they did find that missing.

ABERNETHY: And beyond language, important as that is, is a kind of point of view. Yes, we need a lot more attention to math and science, but no less attention to poetry and preaching and art—all the arts and all the humanities part of it.

LAWTON: Well, a lot of faith communities do talk about some of those intangible things. What makes America great? Is it just economy or military? Is there something else, something deeper, something that more perhaps reflects the soul of the nation? And I do think that for a lot of faith-based groups they think that those kinds of things should be included in a State of the Union.

ABERNETHY: More than what just can be measured. Kim Lawton, many thanks.