Academic Thinking

This goes for wisdom written by David Kyuman Kim and John L. Jackson, Jr.:

For all of the anxious murmurings about the Muslim Brotherhood filling the void left in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s oligarchic regime, it was not religious extremism that unequivocally won the day but rather an ethos as much in sync with the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi as in dialogue with the reformist efforts of Muslim civil rights groups.

Source: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2011 vol. 637 no. 1

Luckily, they do realize that

democracy, race, and religion [are] not...“problems” to be solved but rather as a set of inextricably interconnected social, cultural, moral, and political forces that are to be taken up without the illusion that they represent mutually exclusive alternatives...For the political pragmatist, race and religion are causes of concern that enervate democracies. As should be clear by now, we think otherwise. Race and religion can be (though certainly are not always) sources for humanizing democratic possibilities, particularly when giving due consideration to the ways that race and religion serve as sites for the public life of love.

The issue is, as they note, has:

the return of repressed imperial and racial pasts...created conditions for the racialization of religions (including the religions of Abraham — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) and for their conceptualization as perceived threats to democratic order.

We reply: no.

But Islam is something else.

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