Much of the current discourse on Islam, by both Muslims and non-Muslims, “does not refl ect or even come close to reflecting the full depth and complexity of the Islamic tradition,” lamented Khaled Abou El Fadl of UCLA Law School at a November 12 Center seminar on “Islamic Political Thought and Democracy.” He pointed out that his investment in a huge Islamic law library would have been insane if every Muslim jurist had said exactly the same thing. But most Muslims today are ignorant of this rich heritage, hostile to the pluralism it embodies, or both.

Abou El Fadl divided Muslims responsible for the contemporary “caricature” of Islam, especially in regard to what it says about democracy, into two camps. The first he called the “apologists,” who cite various Islamic concepts that are similar to those informing functioning democracies “without regard to predominant historical practices, intellectual orientations, or doctrinal biases.” They allude to these concepts, declare that there is no problem with Islamic democracy, and completely neglect “the serious obstacles that confront modern Muslims in developing a true democratic commitment or democratic ethic.” The “essentialists” or fundamentalists in the second camp, meanwhile, dogmatically assert that “Islam is fundamentally inconsistent with democracy” because people are not sovereign—only God is sovereign. In adopting this position, they ignore the medieval Islamic debates over where sovereignty belongs.

Most Muslims simply “do not know about the doctrinal tension that exists in the Islamic tradition,” Abou El Fadl said, and are not likely to learn. American  Muslim organizations devote all their energies to defensive activism, when they should be creating educational institutions for the serious study of Islamic law. The Islamic tradition, he argued, is neither anti-democratic nor prodemocratic: “Democracy was not in the moral universe of the medieval jurists who constructed what we call Islam today.” But Muslims in the modern age must “engage that tradition critically.” Before they are likely to accept wholly the

pluralistic democratic tradition of the West, American Muslims “must become convinced of the moral worthiness of the pluralistic ethic within Islam itself.” Center president Hillel Fradkin moderated the lively exchange that followed. Among those joining in were Nir Boms of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Tom Farr of the U.S. Department of State, Jim Guirard of TrueSpeak Institute, Michelle Jeffries of The Fund for American Studies, Kenneth Jensen of the American Committees on Foreign Relations, Azar Nafisi of Johns Hopkins SAIS, Melissa Ozpinar of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mark Rogers of the Senate Republican Conference, Jay Tolson of U.S. News & World Report, John Wilson of Books & Culture, Diane Winston of the Pew Charitable Trusts.