Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Spring 2016 11 the Muslim world, Islam is invoked by state authorities, quasi-governmental institutions, theological schools, and rebel groups alike when they oppress their own people, disadvan­ tage women, and persecute, drive out, or massacre those who think, live, or believe differently. Islam is invoked when women are stoned in Afghanistan, when entire school classes are murdered in Pakistan, when hundreds of girls are enslaved in Nigeria, when Christians are beheaded in Libya, when bloggers are shot in Bangla­ desh, when market- places are bombed in Somalia, when Sufis and musicians are murder­ ed in Mali, when critics of the regime are crucified in Saudi Arabia, when the best contemporary literature is banned in Iran, when Shiites are oppressed in Bahrain, and when Sunnis and Shiites murder each other in Yemen. To be sure, most Muslims reject terror, violence, and oppression. This is not just an empty talking point, but rather a reality I have experienced directly on my travels. Those who cannot take freedom for granted learn most poignantly to appreciate its value. All the mass uprisings in the Islamic world in recent years were uprisings for democracy and human rights. That includes not only the attempted (and mostly failed) revolutions in nearly all Arab countries, but also the protest movements in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, as well as the revolt at the ballot box in the last Indonesian presidential election. It is likewise instructive to note where the streams of Muslim refugees are headed in their hope to find better lives: it’s certainly not to religious dictatorships. Mean- while, the reports that reach us from Mosul or Raqqa hardly testify to popular enthusiasm for the ISIS occupiers, but instead to panic and despair. Every significant theological authority in the Islamic world has rejected ISIS’s claim to speak for Islam, documenting in detail how its practices and ideology go against the Quran and the fundamental tenets of Islamic theology. Let us not forget either that those on the frontlines in the battle against the Islamic State are themselves Muslims – Kurds and Shiites, as well as Sunni tribes and the soldiers of the Iraqi army. All of this needs to be said to puncture the fiction being promoted equally by Islamists and by Islam’s critics, both using identical words: that Islam is waging a war against the West. Rather, Islam is waging a war against itself. That is to say, the Islamic world is being shaken by an internal conflict whose effects on the political and ethnic cartography may well match those that resulted from the upheavals of World War I. The multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural Orient whose magnificent literary productions from the Middle Ages I studied; the Orient that I learned to love during long stays in Cairo and Beirut, childhood summer holidays in Isfahan, and visits at the monastery of Mar Musa; the Orient that, although always endangered and never free of maladies, never- theless remained a living reality: this Orient will cease to exist, just like the pre–World War I Europe which the German poet Stefan Zweig looked back on with nostalgia and grief in the 1920s. “We have been abandoned by the Christian world. We mean nothing to them.” Jacques Mourad