This blog post was originally published here on Medium and was adapted from this keynote speech.
Amid controversy surrounding his comments that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case, has a conflict of interest because "he's a Mexican," this past Sunday, Donald Trump picked up where he left off, suggesting on CBS' Face the Nation that it's also possible a Muslim judge would be unable to serve impartially in the case given Trump's suggested Muslim ban.
Throughout this election cycle we've heard much about "political correctness" and the supposed perils of using precise language -- ostensibly the consequence of Trump's unorthodox candidacy. In response, when it comes to his rhetoric on Muslims in particular, many have been quick to point out the legitimate danger of Trump's theatrics. Namely, that they play right into the narrative pushed by ISIS and other radical groups that there is in fact an ongoing clash of civilizations between America and Islam.
Even top former military and national security officials, including Gen. David Patraeus and Michael Hayden, have expressed concerns that anti-Muslim rhetoric makes us less safe -- the implication being that such reckless language enhances the ability of radical elements to recruit.
But increased recruitment isn't the only reason we ought to avoid buying into the "Islam versus the West" paradigm, nor is it the most important. After all, the majority of Muslims (adherents of a religion that makes up almost a quarter of the global population) are not a bunch of ticking time bombs just waiting to be radicalized at the sound of bigoted policy gibberish.
The true danger of accepting the premise that Islam is wholly incompatible with America is that it all but assures that the Middle East and North Africa will continue to be unstable. Why? Because contrary to conventional wisdom in both the West and the East, it's actually America that has what the Muslim world needs the most right now.
The great irony of the narrative of Islam versus America is that much of the Muslim world is in an intense struggle precisely because its people lack that basic freedom and liberty that does not just exist in America, but indeed is the hallmark of the American political tradition -- that man has God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
While seldom discussed in popular media, academics generally agree that there is a stark and significant difference between the way the Middle East and North Africa is governed today and the way it was governed for centuries after the rise of Islam. Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School has perhaps most clearly illustrated this dichotomy in his book The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, in which he points out the differences between premodern Islamic rule and modern government, with the approximate dividing line being the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
In the premodern Muslim world, a ruler did not make the law, only God did (through scripture and prophetic teachings). God's law or the sharia was interpreted by a class of religious legal scholars that had emerged and existed outside of government, known as the ulama. The ulama's role had two critical implications on governing. First, as Feldman underscores, its positioning outside of government constrained the power of the ruler. Because a ruler could not simply shape the law to fit whatever it was he wished to do, it was far more difficult for a ruler to become a tyrant (though it did happen on occasion). In order to have legitimacy, a ruler needed to at least broadly keep his actions within the bounds of the sharia.
Second, because the ulama was initially made up of members of different socioeconomic backgrounds, many of whom exerted regional influence (this is why, for example, certain parts of South Asia subscribe to one school of Islamic thought while the Gulf states use another), it had the ability to be mildly responsive to the needs of local populations, providing the most basic level of a governing concept seldom seen in today's Middle East -- representation. While premodern Islamic law is by no means acceptable by contemporary standards, in a structural sense it provided the people some semblance of control over how they were governed.
Contrast that with today's Middle East, where it could hardly be said that people have any say over how they are governed. As the new nation-states that were born after the fall of the Ottoman Empire sought to replicate the then-successful bureaucracies of Europe, they began to centralize administration of the law and placed it in the hands of government. On its own, this is not necessarily problematic. Consider the United States, which addresses the potential conflict of interest the executive branch may have in shaping the law by including a system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and legislative and judicial institutions, which help diffuse and balance power.
Yet, in the Middle East, the transition to modern government did not include such institutions, or where it did, they were quickly undone by ruling elites. And little can be expected of a population that had been governed under an entirely different form of government for centuries to realize the consequences of not having such institutions.
So the result? A region with governments that have had more power than ever before and populations with the least amount of freedom and representation they've had in centuries. It's not an accident that the region has had so many authoritarian regimes. And these regimes have limited, even discarded, individual freedom when needed to preserve power, a fact that seems to be severely underestimated when evaluating the reasons for the region's instability.
Why would one participate in the political process or vote in an election if the entire enterprise is a charade? I suspect people who have no faith in their government may turn to other means in an effort to find a voice. Like, say, setting themselves on fire in protest. Or taking up arms against a corrupt regime. Or perhaps turning to the one institution they believe is incorruptible -- religion.
You'll notice Islamist extremists like to describe America as a bastion of moral decay and oppression. But what they don't say when discussing America is just as telling. You'll never hear about America's freedom and liberty. You'll never hear about how a Sunni Muslim and a Shia Muslim can pray side by side. You'll never hear about how you can start a business today that will be there tomorrow, regardless of whether a government official has taken their bribe or not. And you'll never hear about America's Muslims, who've been able to live with more freedom and privilege than Muslims in any other part of the world.
Instead of drawing a line in the sand between America and Islam, we should endeavor to highlight these attributes of America to the people of the Middle East and North Africa. Instead of being constantly suspicious of American Muslims, we should be elevating them as an example for the Muslim world. And instead of spending all of our time focused on near-term, often military based solutions (which are undoubtedly important), we should also carefully evaluate the best ways to provide the people in that region with tools for sustainable self-governance.
If there is one benefit of the failed governing structure of the region, it's that whoever tries to govern over populations in the Middle East, even ISIS, will likely face the same challenges in their quest to maintain stable and sustained rule. But unfortunately that hasn't stopped them from trying.
And tragically, their attempts at doing so come at an enormous cost to the region -- the life, liberty and happiness of its people.