Building Muslim–Buddhist Understanding

This chapter suggests a new approach for building Muslim–Buddhist understanding through the methodology of parallelism. Recognizing that Islam and Buddhism share the common ground of being directed toward liberation from suffering and hardship caused by inequality, injustice, and oppression, this chapter compares two of their respective teachings to achieve that goal, namely through understanding and applying the Qur’anic teaching of Taqwa—Allah consciousness, that is, recognizing the presence of Divine breath as a means to develop virtuous behavior in a Muslim, and cognizance of Satipatthana/mindfulness, as taught in the Anapanasati Sutta, for development of virtuous behavior in a Buddhist.

“After Enlightenment, Return to the Marketplace”

Ever since John Locke argued that religion was essentially a “private search” and must be radically excluded from political life, we have prided ourselves in the West on the separation of church and state. John Esposito, of course, has famously ignored this shibboleth. In the past, students were not content to acquire a purely academic understanding of their faith; their aim was not to earn a doctorate or a professorship. Instead, they expected to be spiritually transformed by their studies—an experience that propelled them out of the classroom and back into the mundane, messy, and tragic world of politics. This essay traces this theme in Indian and Chinese traditions as well as in the three monotheistic faiths. All insist that poverty, inequity, cruelty, and exploitation are matters of sacred import and that after achieving Enlightenment one must, as the Buddha insisted, “return to the marketplace” and work practically and creatively to heal the suffering of humanity—a message that is sorely needed in our tragically broken world.

Pluralism, Authority, and Islamophobia

One of the aims of Professor Esposito’s scholarship has been to emphasize the pluralistic nature of Islamic thought. The North American Muslim community presents a vivid example of Islam’s pluralism, with almost all major trends in global Islam represented. Ironically, the very pluralism of North American Islam undermines North American Muslims’ ability to speak collectively in the public square regarding the place of Islam in democratic life. The fragmentation of the Muslim public sphere effectively cedes control over the discourse about Islam to much better funded and better organized groups with a long history of anti-Muslim sentiments, especially Evangelical Christianity, for whom Islam and Muslims are demonic actors who must be defeated in order to usher in universal salvation. Until Muslims create institutions of sufficient scale to allow them to speak with one voice on matters of public concern, it is unlikely that scholarly endeavors alone can succeed in dispelling Islamophobia.

How Islamic Is ISIS?

The emergence of ISIS has again unleashed a debate on how “Islamic” a terrorist group is, with some analysts claiming its ideology is rooted in Islamic sources and history and others denying any connections to Islam. This chapter argues that ISIS should be viewed as a religious cult that has an apparent but slight connection with Islam. Through its ideology and actions, it has placed itself outside the broad mainstream of the Islamic tradition. Analysis of its claims regarding two key concepts, the caliphate and jihad, demonstrates just how extreme its positions are. ISIS claims it is fulfilling a religious mandate by establishing a caliphate, but this institution does not have its origins in the Qur’an or the teachings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad. As for ISIS’s claims on jihad, mainstream Muslim thought rejects ISIS’s expansive list of enemies and the indiscriminate means it uses to fight them.

The Islamic Reformist Mosaic in Muslim Southeast Asia

This chapter amplifies John Esposito’s emphasis on the rich diversity of approaches to Islamic thought, focusing attention on Southeast Asia, often considered marginal to Islam’s Arab heartlands but which is in reality the home of the most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. It argues that several Muslim intellectuals have been especially influential in giving rise to what the author terms the “Islamic reformist mosaic” in twentieth-century Muslim Southeast Asia. The term captures the various strands of reformist thinking in Muslim Southeast Asia, each viewing its message of reform as most urgent and important. Even though these strands are diverse, they have coexisted, sometimes in a state of tension, and at other times in dialogue and mutual agreement. Put differently, while differing in their visions and aims, when viewed as a whole, these strands of Islamic reformism form a unified and coherent frame of thought that distinguishes itself from the ultra-traditionalist and ultra-secularist leanings in Southeast Asian Islam. From this vantage point, Islamic reformism is thus a sum of seemingly discordant parts that in its entirety has shaped and pushed the boundaries of Islamic thought in Muslim Southeast Asia in novel directions.

Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy in the United States

This essay applies an intersectional approach to the analysis of the history of anti-Catholicism and Islamophobia in the United States as manifestations of White supremacy. It offers a comparative analysis of these two phenomena in an attempt to suggest that a certain intersection exists between each and the social construction of Whiteness and the maintenance of White power and privilege in US American history. It concludes with observations on progress in the development of Catholic–Muslim relations through concerted efforts by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and various US Muslim organizations, noting that the majority of Catholics in the United States have benefited from White privilege.

Orientalism, Empire, and The Racial Muslim

To protect the security of all, we must curtail the liberty of Muslims. That is the narrative the US government has peddled to the American public since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As a result, national security has effectively served as the pretext for myriad forms of discrimination against Muslims by public and private actors. This overt targeting of a religious minority reveals a glaring contradiction: Muslims are being treated with open hostility by government and private actors alike despite America’s foundational embrace of religious freedom. The author argues that the reason for this lies in the social construction of Muslims as a racial minority, rather than or in addition to being a religious minority—what the author calls The Racial Muslim. This chapter explores the role of Orientalism (European and American) and American imperialism in the Middle East in the racialization of Muslims in the United States.

Islam and Exceptionalism in the Western Policy Imagination

During the twentieth century, US foreign policy, as pursued by administrations of both major political parties, regarded Islam as a useful force for advancing US strategic interests in certain world regions. More recently Islam has come to be associated in both American policy discourse and the US public sphere with instability, violence, and terrorism. This chapter argues that recent US foreign policy has treated Islam fundamentally differently from how it regards other world religions. More specifically, the United States has created diplomatic positions and a wide array of outreach programs that single out Muslims and Muslim-ness in ways that differ significantly from the way America treats the members of other world religions (who tend to be engaged as citizens of particular nation-states rather than as the holders of particular religious identities).

The Secular Bias and the Study of Religious Politics

This chapter focuses on the problem of misunderstanding religious politics in the Arab-Islamic world. The goal is to advance an objective historical and comparative framework for interpreting this subject. Two key themes that have been central to John Esposito’s scholarship are examined: the secular bias in modernization theory and the need for a historical and contextual understanding of the many faces of political Islam. To advance this argument, Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions will be utilized, focusing on his discussion of Algeria and political Islam. It is argued that Walzer offers a typical liberal reading of this topic that upon examination is ideologically biased and analytically distorting. Ironically, his earlier writings on religion and politics provide a more useful interpretive framework for understanding the rise of religious politics in our contemporary world.

Introduction

If Edward Said is known for identifying the political implications of negative stereotypes of Islam, John L. Esposito is known for correcting them. This chapter summarizes the significance of Esposito’s contributions to the study of Islam and his leadership in inspiring other scholars around the world. The best-known scholar of Islam in North America, Esposito has published more than seventy books, as well as handbooks, encyclopedias, and other sources that have become standard academic references. He has served as president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Academy of Religion. This chapter also introduces the chapters contained in this volume, which extend his work in four areas: the secular bias of Orientalism, its failure to recognize both the enormous diversity within Islam and profound similarities between Islam and other religions, and the current iteration of Orientalism: Islamophobia.