Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, Hudson InstituteA war of ideas and more is underway within the Muslim world over its future direction. Will the Muslim world follow the guidance of Islamist or radical Islamic ideology and its known hostility to a moderate accommodation with modernity and democracy? Or will there emerge an alternative and potent view which combines fidelity to Islam with respect and appreciation for democracy?
This struggle is relatively new. For the past thirty years or more, radical Islam has dominated the realm of ideas in the Muslim world. It has met with little ideological as opposed to political opposition. It has served, not coincidentally, as the background out of which terrorism has emerged. In the absence of moderate and democratic alternatives, sympathy for and the appeal of radical Islamist ideology will only continue and possibly increase-especially among youth, a fact that makes the war on terrorism a potentially multi-generational conflict, rather than one of limited duration.
Since 9/11, however, there has been a small but growing theological and intellectual challenge to radical Islam within the Muslim community-and hence, a war of ideas. Where do matters stand today, and what might one say about the future? What is the strength of radical ideology relative to its moderate alternatives? What are the key ideas, the major actors, and the crucial theatres? What institutions, both intellectual and practical, need the Muslim world develop to secure a free and peaceful future? The United States has a clear stake in the outcome of this struggle-but does America have any role to play in it?
To address these and related questions, the Hudson Institute has established the Center for Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. The Center's purpose is to research and analyze the ideological dimension of radical Islam, and to encourage and support moderate and democratic alternatives within the Muslim world.
As part of this effort, the Center has launched the Islam and Democracy Project, a series of seminars and conferences with Muslim scholars on the present and future relationship between Islam and democracy. The first speaker in this series will be Husain Haqqani. In addition to serving as co-chair of the Center's seminar series, Mr. Haqqani is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston University. A distinguished journalist and commentator on political and cultural affairs in the Muslim world, Mr. Haqqani is a syndicated columnist for The Indian Express and The Nation (of Pakistan), and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Arab News. Mr. Haqqani previously served as Pakistan's ambassador to Sri Lanka, and as a political advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Nawaz Sharif, and Benazir Bhutto.
A PDF version of the transcript is available here.
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