Decius wrote:

This is interesting but I think its unfair. Can I trust anyone who talks about "real faith" to present an objective view of a competing philosophy?

No one re-recommended my post on George Packer's article, The Moderate Martyr, in a September issue of The New Yorker.

This article is predominantly a study of Islam from the inside, from the point of view of would-be reformers, past and present.

This is how the article ends (abridged slightly):

The hollowness at the core of Sudan, and the widespread cynicism about Islamist rule, with its enforced ideology and rituals, is reminiscent of Eastern Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you spend time in an Islamic country you soon realize that the Communism analogy runs dry. For Islam, unlike Marxism, is deeply rooted and still present in everyday life in profound ways. ... The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther ...

... Ever since the night Naim attended Taha’s lecture as a young law student, he has believed that Muslims must find a way out of the predicament in which their own history has placed them—if not by accepting Taha’s vision, then by working toward another.

"I don’t really have high hopes for change in the Arab region, because it is too self-absorbed in its own sense of superiority and victimhood," he said. His hope lies in the periphery—West Africa, the Sahel, Central and Southeast Asia: "They are not noticed, but that’s where the hope is." The damage done to Muslim lives under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” and Islamism’s failure to solve their daily problems and answer people’s deepest needs, has forced younger Muslims in countries like Indonesia, Turkey, and Morocco to approach religion and politics in a more sophisticated way. ... "The Future of Sharia" amounts to a kind of secularism: it proposes not a rigid separation of politics and religion, as in Turkey, but, rather, a scheme in which Islam informs political life but cannot be introduced into law by an appeal to any religious authority. Otherwise, Muslims would not be free. "I need a secular state to be a Muslim," Naim said. "If I don’t have the freedom to disbelieve, I cannot believe."

Two days after we spoke, Naim flew to Nigeria to give a series of lectures, based on the new book, in the northern states that have imposed a particularly harsh form of Sharia. He plans to travel next year to Indonesia and, if possible, to Iran. Two years ago, when he lectured in northern Nigeria, a quarter of his audience of eight hundred people walked out on him, and he had to slip away through a side door. He acknowledged that violence, even murder, might be the response this time. But Naim believes that, despite the evidence of the headlines, Islamic history is moving in his direction.

...

Coming back to the New English Review essay, there is something to this part of it:

The idea that God would actually desire human happiness is utterly foreign to Islam, for according to its doctrine, Allah does not value the individual except for his contribution to the collective. The idea that the individual personality has value in and of itself is non-existent.

Linking up with Packer's observation that the Islamic revival is more like the 16th century, one can see that the struggle here is as much about the role of the individual in Islam, as it is about the relationship between the state and the religion.

Also, if you haven't yet read The Metaphysical Club, I highly recommend it.

Islam has something to learn from Christianity's struggle (and America's struggle, separately) with modernity. What we need are not confrontations between ideologies, but a mutual exchange between Western historians and contemporary Islamic leaders.

RE: Freedom: True and False - New English Review