The Value of Reasoned Voices Over Wrenching Images
What matters about the discussion this week is that it exposes important, leading figures from throughout the Islamic world to the American public (and I assume to a wider world audience as well). Thus, we have the opportunity to sit down and read at leisure the thinking of the scholar Tariq Ramadan, to browse the pithy responses of Murad Hofmann and to reflect on former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid's thoughts about Islam's internal struggle against its own fundamentalists. This is an opportunity that affords us a vital introduction into Islam's internal intellectual and spiritual diversity. (Overall, it seems to validate what a colleague of mine says when she refers to "Islams," rather than Islam, a formulation that might as easily be applied to world Christianity.)


