In recent months, two University of California campuses, Berkeley and San Diego, have been embroiled in fierce debates following the introduction of anti-Israel divestiture resolutions by their respective student senates. Both were defeated, but not before a number of California’s Middle East studies academics signed a petition supporting divestment.

The petition is posted at the website for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is dedicated to the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement. The list of names reads like a Who’s Who of California’s anti-Israel academics:

• Joel Beinin: Stanford University history professor and well-known anti-Zionist. As a regular guest on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program “Other Voices,” Beinin is notorious for railing against Israel. During an appearance on April 6, 2010, he described Israeli building policies in Jerusalem as “segregationist” and claimed that “visceral hatred” and “open bloodthirstiness” were “common” in Israeli society. He was one of only a handful of Middle East studies professors to take part in the odious “Israeli Apartheid Week” in March, 2009 with a speech at UC Berkeley.
• Hatem Bazian: senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley, visiting scholar at the Zaytuna Institute/College in Berkeley (the self-proclaimed “first Islamic college” in the U.S.), and committed anti-Israel activist. In March of this year, he was one of the speakers at UC Irvine’s “Israeli Apartheid Week,” which was co-sponsored by the radical Muslim Student Union (MSU) and the problematic Middle East Studies Student Initiative (MESSI). Bazian is perhaps best known for calling for “an intifada in this country!” at a 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco.
• Mark LeVine: UC Irvine history professor and abject apologist for terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood (a spokesman from the latter spoke to his class in October, 2008). LeVine is a defender of the extremist behavior of UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union, including their shouting down of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in February, 2010—something he described as a “teachable moment.”  In a recent Al-Jazeera op-ed, LeVine portrayed the Turkish terrorist supporters who were killed on one of the Gaza Flotilla ships as “martyrs,” “heroes,” and—in a warped nod to Memorial Day—“warriors every bit as deserving of our tears and support as the soldiers of American wars past and present.”
• Beshara Doumani: UC Berkeley associate professor of history. He has described Hamas as “a deeply rooted political organization with social and cultural and other dimensions” that—all evidence to the contrary—“has come forward many, many times to negotiate a truce with Israel.” Doumani was one of the signatories (along with Joel Beinin) to a ludicrous 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians—a charge that never materialized and for which no apologies nor retractions were ever issued.
• Hamid Algar: UC Berkeley Islamic studies professor, Khomeini acolyte, Armenian genocide denier, and defender of Palestinian suicide bombers, of which he said in a June, 2003 California Monthly interview, “such actions are closer to the case of a soldier who, in battle against overwhelming odds and in the certain knowledge that he will not emerge alive from the encounter, rushes upon the enemy.”
• Saree Makdisi: UCLA English professor who carries on the political legacy of his uncle, the late Columbia University professor and Orientalism author Edward Said. Makdisi has leveled blood libels against Israel, including—at an infamous January, 2009 UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies symposium—claiming that “the goal of Israel is to deliberately starve children.” Makdisi has a long history of supporting the BDS movement and has endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
• Minoo Moallem: UC Berkeley professor of gender and women’s studies. She was a signatory to a January, 2009 open letter to President Obama calling for an end to U.S. support for Israel based on its, “war crimes and in its acts of terror…its racist civil constitution and illegal occupations.” Along with a number of Middle East studies academics, Moallem signed an open letter to the International Society for Iranian Studies objecting to the inclusion of a faculty member from Israel’s Ariel University in the 2010 Iranian Studies Biennial Conference in Santa Monica.
• Suad Joseph: UC Davis professor of anthropology and women’s studies and president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the principal professional organization for scholars of the region and a frequent purveyor of anti-Israel “scholarship.” Joseph has signed a number of open letters either demonizing Israel or supporting boycotts, including the aforementioned letters regarding Israel and the war in Iraq and the exclusion of an Israeli academic from the Iranian Studies Biennial Conference, as well as an open letter challenging Israeli academics opposed to international boycott efforts. As president-elect of MESA, Joseph’s politicized perspective does not bode well for the future of the field.
• Other California Middle East studies academics who signed the petition supporting divestiture include Margaret Larkin, a professor of Arabic literature at UC Berkeley, and Omnia El Shakry, a history professor at UC Davis. El Shakry signed a March, 2008 “Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women Facing War and Occupation” opposing Israel’s incursion into Gaza following Hamas’s rocket barrage.

By way of comparison—at least as far as one California university goes—not one UC Irvine Middle East studies academic signed the May, 2010 faculty letter objecting to the atmosphere of “hatred against Jews and Israelis on campus” created by the MSU.

California academics have, however, played a leading role in the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. According to a February, 2009 Daily Bruin article on the Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel, “eleven of the 15 organizing committee members represent California universities, and four of them are from the University of California.” Moreover, two of the founding members of the organizing committee teach Middle East studies at California institutions:

• Rabab Abdulhadi: San Francisco State University (SFSU) associate professor of ethnic studies and race and resistance studies, and a senior scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative. Abdulhadi teaches SFSU’s first course focusing solely on the Palestinian people, an emphasis she justifies by claiming that, “Palestine is at the heart of the Arab world.” Adhulhadi spoke at an Al-Awda (Palestine Right to Return Coalition) conference at SFSU in August, 2006 and at York University in March, 2010 for Toronto’s “Israeli Apartheid Week.” She was one of the panelists at an event at SFSU timed to coincide with the second anniversary of SFSU’s Edward Said mural in November, 2009 and dedicated to the BDS movement. Omar Barghouti, founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel—the inspiration for the U.S. version—gave the keynote address.
• Sondra Hale: UCLA anthropology and women’s studies professor, and chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the notoriously anti-Israel Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES). At a CNES conference in October, 2009, Hale equated the pro-Israel groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) with “Nazis” and “McCarthyists.” In response to widespread criticism regarding the blatantly anti-Israel and, at times, anti-Semitic nature of a January, 2009 “Human Rights and Gaza” CNES symposium, Hale penned an op-ed in UCLA’s student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, slamming UCLA student and Bruins for Israel member Ben Meiselman for having the temerity to publish a piece criticizing the symposium. Hale proudly touted her prominent involvement in the Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel at the time of its inception, telling the Daily Bruin in February, 2009 that, were it to go into effect, “foreign exchange and cooperative programs with Israel would cease.”

What is it about California that has inspired so many of its academics to join the BDS movement?  Rank anti-Semitism on the left—masquerading as anti-Zionism—is hardly limited to California, but certain circumstances (beyond the sheer size of the system) have made the state’s schools ripe for this malady:

• With a frontier reputation as the “Left Coast,” California ability to lure “cutting-edge” academics has attracted politically likeminded academics from around the world.
• California’s long-running—and now former—prosperity brought huge numbers of immigrants from all over the world, so that when anti-Israel feelings and agitation became chic among left-wing student radicals over the past decade, there were sufficient numbers of both Muslim students and fellow travelers around to carry out large-scale demonstrations and create an extremely hostile atmosphere.
• A succession of leftist Democratic politicians has appointed like-minded administrators and trustees to the state universities who are loathe to cross swords with the faculty or student groups.  We’re now seeing second generation university administrators who are either sympathetic to radical student demands or, as products of the radicalized university themselves, lack the will to stand up to fashionable academic politics.

So it is that California has become the epicenter for the BDS movement, a legacy of which there is nothing to be proud.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.

Sherman Jackson, also known as Abdal Hakim Jackson, is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.

Jackson specializes in Islamic law and has written and spoken extensively on the subject. Soon after the

September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attacks, Jackson took the line popular among apologists, stating at a September 2001 University of Michigan Teach-in titled, “Terrorism: A Perversion of Islam,” that “the killing of innocent peoples is forbidden by the law of Islam and it has been from the beginning of Islam.”

But it turns out that not only is Jackson an apologist, he an outspoken proponent of the Islamist subversion of Western civilization.

Jackson made this abundantly clear at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit – 8th Convention in Toronto, Canada in December 2009, as a participant in the panel, “The New We: Muslims in Future of Western Society.” Jonathan Usher, who attended and wrote about the conference for Campus Watch, described Jackson’s speech as nothing less than “a call to battle.” As he put it, “It had little to do with peaceful co-existence with the West, but was an exhortation for Islam to dominate the West.” According to Usher, Jackson

…believes that the Muslim and Western worlds are in conflict and competition, and that only one can end up dominant. Put simply, he wants to replace Western culture with Muslim culture.

…Jackson expressed a desire to be included in American society—but not if any sort of cultural sacrifice were required. He said that adapting to Western culture would lead to being a Muslim in name only and advocated defining America by Muslim standards and imposing cultural and intellectual supremacy. He urged Muslims not to follow Western cultural authority, but rather to achieve their own cultural authority from the inside, as part of the system.

…Lastly, to cheers, he said that his primary commitment was to Allah, not to America.

Moreover, Jackson has a history of making such radical statements.

He co-authored a 2000 online book titled, American Public Policy and American-Muslim Politics and published by the Chicago-based International Strategy and Policy Institute, whose mission is to “promote the correct understanding of Islam and Muslims in the United States.” Jackson’s coauthors were DePaul University Director of Islamic World Studies Aminah Beverly McCloud and State University of New York at Binghamton professor and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies Ali Mazrui. McCloud  is a former board member of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a follower of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, while Mazrui’s bio notes that he is “one of the first to try and link the treatment of Palestinians with South Africa’s apartheid” and has also “argued that sharia law is not incompatible with democracy and supported its introduction in some parts of northern Nigeria.”

In the chapter, “Muslims, Islamic Law and Public Policy in the United States,” Jackson cites the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s influential theories about altering societies not through politics, but through cultural and educational institutions. Jackson proposes that American Muslims approach the “difficult task of penetrating, appropriating and redirecting American culture” in order to “influence the legal order in America.” As he puts it:

…it should be understood that once this is done, there are no Constitutional impediments to having these laws applied in the public domain. Muslims must be vocal and confident in articulating the public utility underlying the rules on things like riba [usury], adultery, theft, drinking, contracts, pre-marital sex, child-custody and even polygyny. This should all be done, however, in the context of an open acceptance of American custom (urf) as a legally valid source in areas where the shari’ah admits the reliance upon custom.

As for the gradual acceptance of the more horrifying aspects of Sharia law, Jackson notes that “it would be foolish to deny that the prospects for American acceptance of such institutions as stoning, or flogging or amputation are virtually nil, at least for the foreseeable future.” But he concludes on a note only an Islamist could find comforting:

…notions of what is cruel and unusual, of what is barbaric, of what is draconian (which is the real basis upon which America rejects these punishments) are a function of culture, not law. It is only through changes in American culture that American attitudes towards such things are likely to change. Thus, in the end, as in the beginning, we are brought face to face with the inextricable connection between American culture and Muslim self-determination. May God grant us the courage and the vision to rise to the task before us.

This call to gradually replace the liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution with seventh century notions of justice is both frightening and morally repugnant.

Despite a record of expressing such extreme views, Jackson has made a name for himself as a moderate and a reformer. His success in this charade stems in part from his willingness to break from his peers and  publicly discuss Islamic terrorism, its theological underpinnings, and the need for related reform. An article in the Wesleyan Argus quoted a November 2007 Jackson speech on “Jihad, Terrorism, and Modern Violence” at Wesleyan University:

‘Muslims in the West must be active and vocal in their condemnation of current violations of hirabah,’ he insisted, referring to the Sharia law that outlaws any act of publicly directed violence that spreads fear and helplessness. According to Jackson, hirabah more than covers today’s conception of terrorism. He discussed the moderate Muslim unwillingness to publicly decry acts of terrorism and attributed it to the desire to not be seen as ‘Uncle Toms.’

But Patrick Poole, writing for the American Thinker in September 2007, calls Jackson’s reasoning and motives into question. He describes Jackson as one of the earliest proponents of the “Islamic lexicon” and, in particular, an advocate for replacing the term jihad with hirabah in discussing Islamic terrorism. Poole and other skeptics allege that, in practice, this is nothing more than a semantic sleight of hand that serves to obscure the legitimization of terrorism within Islam and to further the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization-jihadist process.

Poole notes that Jim Guirard of the Truespeak Institute is the “foremost advocate for this approach,” and that Sherman Jackson is among the scholars he relies upon for his findings. Poole points to an unclassified memo from Pentagon Joint Staff analyst Stephen Coughlin in which Jackson is cited as one of Guirard’s contributors, along with fellow Middle East studies professors John Esposito of Georgetown University and Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware. Summarizing Coughlin’s findings, Poole concludes that,

…as Walid Phares and Stephen Coughlin have already revealed, many of the Western Muslim advocates of this new approach are directly tied to known Muslim Brotherhood front groups operating in the US. As Coughlin itemizes, Sherman Jackson is a “trustee” to the North American Islamic Trust, and affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Student Association, the first two of which were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the current Holy Land Foundation terror financing federal trial underway in Dallas, and the last was the original organizational wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. The hiraba-jihad terminology has also been endorsed by the Wahhabist Council for Islamic Education and the extremist mouthpiece Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. That is telling in and of itself.

Jackson is also considered an expert on the intersection of Islam and African-Americans (he is himself an African-American convert to Islam). His 2005 book on the subject, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third Resurrection, was reviewed favorably by radical Islam apologist John Esposito, James H. Cone (the originator of black liberation theology and stated inspiration for controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s former “spiritual mentor” in Chicago), and DePaul professor Aminah Beverly McCloud. Beyond McCloud’s aforementioned affiliation with CAIR and the Nation of Islam, she played a pivotal role in influencing Washington, D.C. PBS station WETA’s decision to cancel its airing of the laudable documentary on moderate Muslims, Islam vs. Islamists, in early 2007.

Jackson’s career may be peppered with associations and endorsements from some of the worst apologists and radicals from the field of Middle East studies—and his involvement in the obfuscating “truespeak” movement points to even more troublesome ties with Muslim Brotherhood front groups—but, ultimately, it is his own words that prove the most damning. His stated agenda clearly has nothing to do with moderation or reform; it is quite simply that of an Islamist.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.

As reported last week by Campus Watch, Dalia Mogahed, appointee to President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, executive director and senior analyst of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, and co-author, along with Georgetown University’s John Esposito, of Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, appeared (by phone) earlier this month on the UK-based Islam Channel television program “Muslimah Dilemma” (view here and read the complete transcript here.) Ibtihal Bsis, the show’s host, is a member of the Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir; Mogahed’s fellow guest, Nazreen Nawaz, is the group’s national women’s media representative. Given these affiliations, it’s no surprise that the discussion included such extremist fare as the promotion of sharia law for—of all things—protecting women’s rights, condemnation for secular pluralistic democracy, and the revival of a mythical caliphate as the answer to the Muslim world’s woes.

Mogahed has been roundly criticized for appearing on the show and, in a transparent attempt at damage control, she told U.S. News & World Report last week she has experienced second thoughts about her decision. Stretching credulity, she claimed she “had no idea that the show’s host or the other guest was affiliated with Hizb ut Tahrir,” that she only “found out the affiliation on air, when the other guest was being introduced in the beginning,” and that her staff “checked the show with a PR firm in Britain who told us there were no problems with it.” Even if it’s true that Mogahed herself was ignorant of the nature of the show, it’s hard to imagine that her sophisticated vetting system missed what a simple Google search would have turned up in seconds. Moreover, if she was truly surprised to find herself among radicals, wouldn’t she be more likely to speak up against them?

One has to wonder if this was a case of incompetence or fabrication.

When asked why she didn’t just hang up the phone, Mogahed, demonstrating further ignorance about the availability of data in the age of the Internet (apparently, she’s never heard of YouTube,) said:

“I assumed that very few people would watch this show but that doing something more dramatic would bring more attention.”

But it was Mogahed’s tepid response to and, at times, backhanded support for the objectionable opinions expressed on the show that brought attention.

To explain her reticence to speak out against such radicalism, Mogahed had another handy justification:

“As an analyst, I don’t engage in ideological debates. I am always on programs to explain the views and opinions of others—in this case, Muslims around the world—not to discuss my own views. Being on a program with people who are representing ideological movements puts an analyst in a very awkward position, where they are unable to respond to objectionable comments because of the limits of our role as analysts.”

This is unconvincing. What are analysts for other than to analyze what is said in discussions of which they are part? Was she invited on the show in order to “not discuss [her] own views”? In fact, she had plenty of opportunities to rebut the extremist statements of those with whom she appeared, or at least to state for the record that she—particularly as Obama’s Muslim affairs advisor—disagreed. Yet she chose to remain silent. In doing so, she missed a monumental opportunity to publicly condemn Islamist ideology. Perhaps that was the point.

As for Mogahed’s own endorsements of sharia law—delivered, she claimed, as the will of billions of surveyed Muslim women, not her own—she had only this to say:

“I don’t feel that I have regrets about what I said. I did a fair job of reporting the data. My one regret is appearing on the show to begin with.”

It’s a little late for that.

In thinking about women’s rights, sharia law, or Islamic law, doesn’t typically come to mind.

Yet, according to a survey conducted by Dalia Mogahed, executive director and senior analyst of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and appointee to President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the two are closely intertwined. Her survey alleges that a majority of Muslim women believe sharia law should either be the primary source or one source of legislation in their countries, while viewing Western personal freedoms as harmful to women.

The survey’s findings appear in the book, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, co-authored by Mogahed and John Esposito, Georgetown University professor and founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, named for its Saudi royal benefactor. While Esposito is well-known as one of the foremost academic apologists for radical Islam, Mogahed is making her name as a shill for sharia law. Mogahed employs the Gallup poll, which has been criticized by knowledgeable authorities as misleading and unscientific, to portray sharia law as what Muslims women want.

She spoke earlier this month by phone to the UK-based Islam Channel women’s television program “Muslimah Dilemma.” Hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the Islamist organization Hizb ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation), and featuring national women’s media representative for Hizb ut Tahrir, Nazreen Nawaz, the interview (view here; complete transcript here) presented a biased, pro-Islamist platform for discussing Muslim women’s rights. Hizb ut Tahrir’s self-described objective is “to resume the Islamic way of life by establishing an Islamic State that executes the systems of Islam and carries its call to the world.”

So it was with ostensible credibility that Mogahed could utter such preposterous statements as:

…we found that the majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance whereas only a small fraction associated oppression of women with compliance with the sharia.

And:

The perception of sharia and the portrayal of sharia has been oversimplified in many cases, even among Muslims. It is usually associated with maximum criminal punishment and laws that are hard for people to understand holistically, around family law, that to many people seem unequal for women. So I think that part of the reason is that there is this perception of sharia is that sharia in not well understood and in fact, Islam as a faith is not well understood.

And, ominously:

Well, I think what my role is, is very clear to me: to convey to the advisory council and through the advisory council to the president and to other public officials what it is Muslims want.

In delivering these outlandish pronouncements, Mogahed was soft-spoken and careful to confine her commentary to the results of her study. Not so with fellow guest Nazreen Nawaz, who took up the bulk of the interview expounding didactically on the benefits to be bestowed upon humankind by the revival of a Khilafah state, or caliphate. The caliphate envisioned by Nawaz is a mythical one, hearkening back to the so-called “golden age of Islam,” where, according to the party line, all was progress and advancement and everyone lived in harmony. If we could only return to the halcyon days, she urged, all the considerable problems of the Muslim world would be solved. As she put it: “Islam came to solve human problems.” These utopian beliefs reflect those Marxists who insist that “real communism” has not yet been implemented, Stalinism or totalitarianism is an aberration, and that the solution lies in implementing a “true” Socialist state.

Claiming that the brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mullahs in Iran are distortions of sharia law rather than examples of its true implementation, Nawaz promised that under the proposed caliphate, rulers would be democratically elected and accountable to the people, while women’s rights would be protected.

Demonstrating the utter delusion of a fanatic, Nawaz alleged that:

We know that sharia pioneered rights for women. This idea that women have the same rights of citizenship to a man, this was unheard of in empires or civilizations of the past. And we know that Islam brought this.

Nonetheless, Nawaz conceded that “there is evidence from Islam that says the Muslim woman cannot be the ruler of a state. This is from the Islamic text,” but managed to justify this exclusion by pointing to recent Muslim women leaders such as the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan who, she claimed, have “brought very little in terms of the lives and the standard of living of women in these countries.”

She also defended Islam’s “strict regulations in terms of social laws” and expressed admiration for precisely those features of Islamic law that most oppress women:

…men and women cannot socialize, they cannot be alone together…in terms of lowering the gaze, all of these things, the dress code, they’re all there to insure that there’s a healthy cooperation so that men and women can focus at the job at hand.

In contrast, Nawaz condemned the West for allowing women too much personal freedom, citing the breakdown of the family and promiscuity as the results:

I think living in the West we see some of the fruits of this idea of liberty and this idea of freedom, where people are free to have any relationship they want to. I believe that it’s caused a lot of problems in the social structure, you have adultery, you have problems of teenage pregnancies….

These are indeed dire consequences, just not, as Nawaz believes, of personal liberty. Rather, they result from the dissolution of the moral framework that supports liberty itself. The struggle to maintain the family structure and women’s dignity amidst growing libertinism is alive and well  in the West. But when given the choice, who would trade liberty for the opposite outcome: totalitarianism?

Sharia-compliant feminism: Dalia Mogahed claims that Islamic law protects women’s rights.

Furthermore, Nawaz demonstrated a lack of understanding about how women’s rights, and indeed human rights, have been achieved historically in the West:

Women have made a lot of progress in the West in terms of economic, political rights, education, and so on. But I would reject the claim that these values of secularism, and liberal values, and even in terms of democracy have, that they can claim victory for this progress. Because if we remember history, women actually had to fight against these values in order to secure their rights….And women even today have to fight in secular democracies against discrimination of these levels.

In the face of this vigorous defense of sharia law and strident condemnation of secular democracy, Washington insider Mogahed said not a word. Only when prompted to comment directly on one of Nawaz’s diatribes on the fictional caliphate did Mogahed finally speak, and then she restated the results of the Gallup poll in such a way as to provide backhanded support for Nawaz’s Islamist views. As she put it:

What Muslims around the world tell us they believe is that the key to progress is attachment to their spiritual and moral values. They really do see, many of them, that Islam offers a solution for their problems and they see Islam as their society’s greatest asset. When we asked people what they admired most about the Muslim world, what they tell us is their attachment to Islam, Islamic values, value of hospitality, the value of family. So I think that whereas people around the world do feel that the problems are diverse, many of them do mention Islam as a part of that solution, and when we ask people what can Muslims do to help themselves, one of the most frequent responses is for them to unify and another is for them to follow Islam and make it a greater and more authentic part of their lives.

If making Islam a “greater and more authentic part” of Muslim’s lives results in the implementation of sharia law, based not in mythology but in contemporary practice, the predictable outcome is the furtherance of backwardness, repression, intolerance, and inequality afflicting the Muslim world today. Is this really, as Mogahed would have it, what Muslims want?

More to the point, is it really what Americans, looking to President Obama’s choice of Mogahed as his advisor on Muslim affairs, want?

Now that’s a subject for a poll.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.