{"id":175761,"date":"2026-03-16T10:56:38","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T18:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175761"},"modified":"2026-03-16T10:59:44","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T18:59:44","slug":"the-battle-for-the-soul-of-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175761","title":{"rendered":"‘The battle for the soul of Islam’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moshe Dann is credited by the Jerusalem Post as a “PhD historian, writer, and journalist.”
\nHe writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Without an alternative to Islamism and Palestinianism, we will drown in what Hamas calls \u201cThe Al-Aqsa Flood,\u201d the Islamification of the West, and the end of Western Civilization. The threat is real, and therefore, it is existential.
\nFor those of us who seek tikkun olam (repairing the world), we ask, \u201cHow can I help?\u201d We live for the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is stupid for many reasons. One, there is no soul of Islam or soul of Judaism or soul of Christianity. Like every other group, Muslims adapt to their situation. There is no essential form of any religion. There are only the traditions carried on by people in different circumstances about their story of interacting with the divine.
\nFor example, the more religious the Jew, the less he talks about Judaism or religion. He has a way of life. He has Yiddishkeit. He has a connection to his people who carry the burden of God in history.
\nThe more religious the Christian, the less likely he is to regard himself as religious. Instead, he feels connected to God (either through his individual relationship or through the Church).
\nIslam has 1.4 billion adherents spread across dozens of cultures, languages, political systems, and centuries of competing legal and theological traditions. Sunni farmers in Mali and Shia merchants in Tehran and secular Muslims in Sarajevo do not share a single Islam waiting to be saved. The religion adapts to circumstance, as all living traditions do. Wahhabism grew powerful not because it captured some essential Islamic truth but because Saudi petrodollars funded its spread during a specific historical window. That is a story about money and geopolitics, not about souls.
\nThe author calls on Muslim moderates to speak up, which sounds reasonable until you ask: speak up to whom, and to what effect? The history of outside powers trying to cultivate “moderate Islam” as a strategic asset runs from the British Empire through the Cold War to the post-9\/11 era, and the record is poor. Muslims who get branded as Western-approved moderates often lose credibility in their own communities for exactly that reason. The endorsement poisons the well. Outsiders do not get to pick which interpretation of a religion wins its internal arguments. Those arguments get settled by history, politics, economics, and war, not by op-eds in the Jerusalem Post.
\nThe piece also collapses a genuinely complicated internal Muslim debate, which does exist and matters, into a civilizational war narrative that serves a particular political agenda. That flattening is not analysis. It is advocacy dressed in the language of concern.
\nThe more intense the in-group identity, the more likely one is to have negative feelings about out-groups. The more intense the Muslim or Christian or Jew, the more likely he is to have negative feelings about other religions.
\nThe author is right about one thing. Everything we do affects other people. How we affect others however is not sufficiently knowable that we can strategically plan as outsiders to reshape Islam.
\nYes, we exist in relation to one another and that indifference to suffering elsewhere is not a neutral position. Tikkun olam, whatever one thinks of how the author deploys it, points to a genuine moral intuition that what happens in Sudan or Gaza or Tehran is not someone else’s problem entirely.
\nBut the leap from that intuition to a strategic program for reshaping Islam is enormous, and the author never reckons with the gap. Moral concern does not translate into effective intervention, especially when the intervention requires outsiders to pick winners in a theological and political struggle they do not fully understand and cannot control. The history of exactly that kind of project, from colonial-era missionary reform efforts to Cold War moderate Muslim programs to post-2003 nation building in Iraq, suggests that outside actors routinely misread what drives religious and political change from within a community.
\nThere is also an epistemological problem the author ignores entirely. We cannot trace the full consequences of what we do even in our immediate lives, let alone at the scale of a civilization. The feedback loops are too long, the variables too many, and the unintended consequences too common. That does not argue for doing nothing. It argues for humility about what any outside actor can actually engineer, and skepticism toward anyone who writes as though the path forward is obvious if only the right people would act.
\nThe author’s moral instinct and his strategic confidence are two very different things. The first deserves respect. The second deserves scrutiny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moshe Dann is credited by the Jerusalem Post as a “PhD historian, writer, and journalist.” He writes: Without an alternative to Islamism and Palestinianism, we will drown in what Hamas calls \u201cThe Al-Aqsa Flood,\u201d the Islamification of the West, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t