The Islamist Elephant in the Room
Islam, liberal democracy, and the challenge of reform
The other day I was thinking about the armed security guard at my grandchildren’s Jewish day school. He stands there every morning, part of the routine now. Something that feels both normal and not.
It made me wonder how we got here, and what underlying forces are driving it. Questions that are harder to ask than they should be.
Think about the worst terrorist attacks you remember from your lifetime.
September 11 (2001) — nearly 3,000 killed in coordinated attacks in the United States.
London (2005) — 52 killed in the subway and bus bombings.
Mumbai (2008) — over 160 killed in attacks across the city.
Paris (2015) — 130 killed in coordinated attacks across the city.
Manchester (2017) — 22 killed at a concert bombing.
October 7 (2023) — over 1,200 killed in the Hamas attacks in Israel.
Many of these attacks were carried out by extremists who explicitly invoked Islam as their justification. Others occurred in Muslim-majority regions themselves, where the victims were overwhelmingly Muslim civilians. The scale of suffering has been global. The most recent Global Terrorism Index report shows that of the top 15 terrorist organizations considered the “most deadly and most active” in the world, 13 of them identify with Islamist ideologies.
Yet the conversation about what that means, intellectually, politically, or morally, often shuts down before it even begins. In some cases the difficulty runs deeper still: political movements can form not around building societies, but around negating the legitimacy of another people’s sovereignty.
I’m not a scholar of Islamic theology or Middle Eastern politics. I’m just trying to think honestly about a set of ideas that increasingly shape the world my grandchildren will grow up in. That means being clear about a distinction that often gets lost: the difference between a religion practiced by billions of people and the political ideologies built in its name.
Islam possesses extraordinary spiritual depth and a vast intellectual heritage. During the Islamic Golden Age, Muslim scholars helped develop algebra and advanced astronomy, preserved classical philosophy, and built some of the world’s earliest hospitals and universities. Its architecture, from the domes of Istanbul to the intricate beauty of the Alhambra, continues to shape global aesthetics. Its poetry, especially that of Rumi, remains among the most widely read in the world today. This is not a minor tradition. It is one of humanity’s great civilizational forces.
Precisely because Islam is such a powerful civilizational tradition, the question becomes unavoidable: why do so many societies in which Islamic law or Islamist movements shape political power struggle with principles that modern liberal democracies now consider fundamental?
To raise that question is not to accuse Muslims collectively of violence or intolerance. Most Muslims live ordinary lives, seeking stability, prosperity, and dignity for their families just as people everywhere do. But it is to acknowledge that the political ideologies built around Islam in many parts of the world, often called Islamism, have produced systems that frequently stand in tension with liberal democratic values.
Islamism is not simply a matter of private faith. It is a political ideology that seeks to organize law, governance, and social order according to particular interpretations of Islamic doctrine. In places where Islamist movements or Islamic law shape political power, significant tensions often emerge with core liberal principles: freedom of speech, equality before the law, religious pluralism, and the rights of women.
These tensions are not theoretical. In some countries governed by Islamic law, leaving the religion (“apostasy”) remains punishable by death. In others, blasphemy laws criminalize criticism of religion itself. In still others, women live under systems of legal guardianship that treat them as dependents rather than equal citizens affecting their ability to travel, work, marry, or live independently. In some cases, legal frameworks still permit child marriage, allowing girls to be married at ages that would be unthinkable in most liberal democracies. These are not edge cases. They are enforced in practice and shape the boundaries of everyday life.
These realities are not merely the product of fringe extremists. They reflect legal systems, social norms, and political movements that carry real influence across significant parts of the Muslim world.
It is true that every major religion contains extremist fringes. Judaism, Christianity, and others are not immune to fanaticism or distortion. But in the modern era, those fringes do not define state systems, legal codes, or broad social norms in the way that Islamist interpretations do across multiple countries and movements. The difference is not the existence of extremism. It is whether it remains marginal or becomes institutional.
And yet discussing these patterns openly often proves remarkably difficult in Western societies. Criticism of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism is considered normal in liberal democracies. But criticism of Islam, even when directed at political ideologies rather than personal belief, is often treated as uniquely taboo. Scholars, journalists, and public figures who raise difficult questions frequently face accusations of bigotry, professional risk, or in rare but real cases, threats of violence.
The memory of fatwas, assassinations, and terrorist attacks against critics of Islam is not imaginary. Writers such as Salman Rushdie lived under death sentences for decades. The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were murdered for satirizing religious figures. Teachers such as Samuel Paty were killed for discussing those cartoons in a classroom about free speech.
These events create an atmosphere in which many people conclude that silence is the safest option. But silence does not solve problems. If anything, it makes reform harder, particularly for Muslims themselves who are attempting to challenge authoritarian religious interpretations from within their communities.
These tensions are not confined to distant regions. In parts of Europe, large immigrant communities from Muslim-majority countries have brought new cultural and political dynamics into liberal democracies. Many have integrated successfully and contribute meaningfully to their societies. But in some cases, illiberal ideas — including hostility toward Jews and open support for extremist movements — have taken root within segments of these communities. Liberal societies now face a difficult challenge: how to uphold free expression and openness while responding to ideologies that reject those very principles.
There is another reality that complicates the picture further: many Muslims themselves have been among the bravest critics of Islamist rule.
In Iran, waves of mass protest over the past decade, most prominently the uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, have revealed extraordinary courage among ordinary citizens. The protesters are overwhelmingly Iranian, many from Muslim backgrounds, but often pushing back against the religious authority imposed in its name. Women removed compulsory hijabs in public squares. Students marched against clerical authority. Workers and families demanded dignity and freedom. The regime responded with brutal repression. Human rights organizations estimate that more than 500 protesters were killed and tens of thousands detained, with executions and crackdowns continuing in the years since.
These protests have not disappeared. They have resurfaced in periodic waves despite the risks, most recently in 2026 which led to thousands killed or imprisoned, a sign that the demand for freedom inside Iranian society remains both real and resilient. What makes these protests especially significant is that they are not driven by outsiders. They are led by Iranians themselves, often women and young people, challenging the system from within.
Those protests matter. They demonstrate that the desire for freedom inside Muslim societies is real and powerful. They also illustrate how difficult reform becomes when religious authority is fused with state power.
The question, then, is whether meaningful reform is possible.
One challenge is structural. Unlike other major religions, Islam lacks a centralized authority capable of driving doctrinal change across the broader community. Reform tends to emerge unevenly, shaped by local politics and power structures rather than a unified theological shift.
And yet there are signs of movement. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, governments have begun to loosen certain social restrictions and limit the influence of religious authorities. These changes are incomplete and often top-down, but they suggest that evolution is possible.
At the same time, other ideological forces pull in the opposite direction. Some political movements remain defined less by what they seek to build than by what they seek to undo — particularly in the context of Israel and Jewish sovereignty. When political identity is organized around negation rather than construction, compromise becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Reform, in that sense, is not just a theological challenge. It is a political one.
The question, then, is not whether Muslims deserve the same freedoms as everyone else. Of course they do. The question is whether the political ideologies built around Islam today allow those freedoms to flourish.
This is not an argument against Muslims. It is an argument against denial — and in favor of the kind of reformation that has allowed other great religious traditions to coexist with modern freedom.
Because history suggests something important: great religious traditions are capable of change. Christianity underwent its Reformation and Enlightenment confrontations with power and doctrine. Judaism transformed itself repeatedly across centuries of diaspora and modernity.
Islam, like any living faith, contains within it multiple intellectual traditions and interpretive possibilities. The question is whether those traditions can evolve in ways that reconcile faith with the political freedoms that define modern pluralistic societies.
Ideas do not stay on paper. They become laws. They shape lives. And eventually, they shape the world we all have to live in. The question is whether we are willing to confront them before they shape the future in ways we can no longer ignore.
Today’s Cultural Coda:
Here is a powerful cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence”.
