Egyptian military claims it has killed the head of Daesh in Sinai.

Zachary Kaufman has a piece in Foreign Policy  arguing that Capt. Humayun Khan’s Islamic identity is crucial to understanding his heroism, as well as the heroism of countless other Muslims who have come to the aid of others, even at great risk to themselves.

The Washington Post today has an interesting article about the life of Mohammed al-Masri, the only person, the story claims, to have had spent significant time both with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and ISIS in Raqqa.  There is no way to avoid recognizing that our indifference to the coup in Egypt played an important role in catalyzing the rise of Daesh (ISIS/ISIL), both by vindicating Bashshar al-Asad’s bet that no amount of violence against “Islamists” would be likely to trigger international intervention against him, and by allowing Daesh to claim that it is the only genuine “champion” available for Sunni Arabs.  The sad reality is that US policy in the Middle East under Obama has only succeeded in making al-Qaeda the “reasonable” option. That doesn’t mean that Obama was not right to pursue the policies he chose: it’s hardly the duty of the US to save the Arabs from themselves, but it would have been nice had the US chosen to support the imperfect democratic regime in Egypt in 2013 rather than being indifferent to its fate, and it would have been nice had the US listened to Turkey and established a no-fly zone in Syria prior to Russian intervention.  At a minimum, that would have likely prevented the authoritarian turn in Turkey, and it might have prevented the refugee crisis, which could very well lead to the unravelling of the European project. The refugee crisis already helped produce Brexit.  From a narrow realist perspective of what constitutes US interests, Obama’s policies of benign neglect in the region are probably defensible, but the costs to the people of the region are incalculable, and on top of the active destruction wrought by the Bush administration, is creating a leval of anti-Americanism that is unprecedented. Worst of all, the entire region is slowly drifting into the orbit of Putin’s Russia: authoritarian crony capitalism is evolving from the de facto reality of the Arab world, into a norm that is openly embraced.

Brookings’ 2015 US-Islamic World Forum invited me recently to contribute to Will McCants’ series of discussions regarding ISIS’s relationship to the Islamic tradition which he initiated in response to the now (in)famous Atlantic piece by Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants“. I wrote about ISIS’s appropriation of classical concepts such as dar al-islam and dar al-harb to justify their actions against their enemies, domestic and foreign, while ignoring over 1200 years of the concepts’ evolution, including, in the post-World War II era where leading Muslim jurists have concluded that the distinction is irrelevant in the modern world.

Last night, I gave a talk at the Hartford Seminary titled “Liberalism and Islam: Pitfalls and Potentials.”  The talk centered around two themes: how normative liberalism reacts to intolerant groups in its midst, and what are the religious obligations of liberal Muslim citizens in a liberal democracy generally, and the war on terror in particular.

Given my criticisms of US policy in the Middle East, the “War on Terror,” and its “lawfare” against US Muslims, one might reasonably question why I should remain a US citizen at all?  Indeed, I have sometimes asked myself “At what point would the limit be crossed?”  I guess the plain reason why I have never seriously contemplated renouncing US citizenship, and doubt that I ever would, is my deep conviction that substantial groups within US society share my deep opposition to these policies as well, and that the future belongs to us, not to those status quo forces that perpetuate atrocities in the name of the American people.  This otherwise disturbing article in Slate, which details the extent of the torture and international law-breaking practiced by the United States during the Bush Administration, crimes which the Obama administration foolishly chose to inter rather than investigate as the crimes that they were, strangely confirms my long-term view of the United States.  I hope my fellow American Muslim citizens, particularly the post-9/11 generation, understand that they have allies in the US; they should not think that all Americans are anti-Muslim paranoids; and that it is possible to work together with those Americans to bring a halt to these abuses, and the further entrenchment of the “creeping” surveillance and torture state.