War, Peace, and Contemporary Conflicts

Like other sacred scriptures, including the Bible, the Quran contains a number of verses about warfare. These verses address the struggle of the early Muslims against the Meccans, who persecuted and fought them first in Mecca and then in Medina, where the Muslims, having established a community, defended themselves for the first time. Such verses make up only a small fraction of the Quran’s more than 6,000 verses. In addition, it is important to keep in mind the following:

1. A reading of the “warlike” verses in their context in the Quran invariably shows that they refer to situations in which the Muslim community was under attack, either through direct military aggression or forcible denial of legitimate rights of freedom of religion and expression; they refer to, and permit, only strictly defensive wars. Aggression is clearly prohibited (Quran 2:190).
2. The earliest verse related to fighting (22:39) states that permission to fight back is given to those who have been wronged, clearly indicating that such permission is an exceptional allowance responding to a specific situation, and that peaceful conduct is assumed to be the norm for Muslims.
3. There are strict rules of warfare outlined by the Prophet Muhammad and his successors that prohibit targeting civilians, specifically women and children, or even harming infrastructure or crops used by civilians.

While there are differing views among Muslims on their interpretation of Quranic verses about war, as about other subjects, the majority of Muslim scholars today interpret the Quran to allow war only for self-defense, as set out in the following verse: “Fight in the cause of God against those who fight you, but do not transgress limits by aggressing; surely God does not love transgressors” (Quran 2:190).

The other justification for war in the Quran is to protect others from harm, but this is permissible only if the harm prevented is greater than the harm caused by the acts of war. This is the same as the principle of proportionality in the Christian doctrine of just war, which bears other similarities to the concept of war in the Quran.

According to the following Quranic verses, protecting others from harm includes defending people of other faiths: “To those against whom war is made, permission is given to fight, because they are oppressed. Verily, God is capable of aiding them. They are those who have been expelled from their homes in defiance of what is just, for no other reason than that they say, ‘Our Lord is God.’ Had God not restrained one set of people by means of another, monasteries, churches, synagogues, temples and mosques wherein God’s name is oft-mentioned would have been destroyed. God will certainly aid those who aid His cause” (Quran 22:39-40).

The Arabic term jihad literally means striving or exertion of effort, not “holy war,” as it is often mistranslated, and encompasses both the internal struggle against harmful impulses and the external struggle against injustice and oppression. Thus, the word can refer to military action against an aggressor, but this is by no means the only meaning of the term. Traditionally, Muslim sources distinguish between the “greater” and the “lesser” jihad. The “greater jihad” is described by Muslim scholars as an internal struggle to avoid negative actions and cultivate good character. The “lesser jihad” is the external striving for justice, in self-defense or against oppression. One can do this in one’s heart, with one’s tongue or pen, and, if these are ineffective, by forcibly trying to change an oppressive situation, much as the Allies in World War II went to war against Hitler’s aggression. It should be noted, however, that violent revolution was often seen by classical scholars as the absolute last resort. The social chaos and mayhem that often ensue from overthrowing an oppressive leader were commonly viewed as much worse than the reign of an oppressor.

The Quran describes the desirability of peace and the means of attaining it in various passages, including the verse, “If they incline toward peace, then seek you peace also,” (8:61) which presents peace as a state to be actively sought. Another verse describes the blessings of peace: “‘Peace,’ a word from a Merciful Lord” (Quran 36:58). Furthermore, Salam ‘alaikum, “peace be upon you,” is the universal Islamic greeting; and as-Salam is one of the 99 names of God, meaning “The Giver of Peace.” One of the best-known prophetic supplications is: “O God, You are peace, peace comes from You. Blessed are You, O Possessor of Glory and Honor.” Furthermore, one of the various names for heaven is Dar al-Salam or “the Abode of Peace.”

Yes, a great many, and their stories are worth knowing. Muslim peacemakers are working throughout the world, building bridges between people of different faiths. We believe that the work we are doing at ING to increase religious and cultural literacy and promote engagement and understanding among Americans of diverse backgrounds is the best antidote for conflict.

Contemporary Muslim advocates of nonviolence include three Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, the youngest laureate in history, whose advocacy for girls’ education made her a global symbol of peaceful resistance to extremism; the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, honored for pioneering microfinance and later asked to lead his country’s transitional government; and the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, recognized for her lifelong work for democracy, women’s rights, children’s rights, and the rule of law. Alongside them stand the Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, former president of Al-Quds University and a leading advocate for a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace; Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Palestinian physician who lost three daughters and a niece to Israeli shelling in 2009 and responded by founding Daughters for Life, supporting education and healthcare for young women across the Middle East; the Somali peacebuilder Ilwad Elman, who rehabilitates former child soldiers and develops women’s leadership; Rebiya Kadeer, who has campaigned nonviolently for the religious freedom and civil rights of Uyghur Muslims; and Iltezam Morrar, who helped lead the Budrus protests, a successful nonviolent campaign against the routing of Israel’s separation barrier through a Palestinian village.

The tradition runs deep in recent history as well. Ahmadu Bamba (d. 1927), a Sufi scholar and poet from Senegal, nonviolently resisted French colonial rule while founding the Muridiyya order along with cities, schools, and farms. Begum Rokeya (d. 1932) of Bengal and Nazik al-Abid (d. 1959) of Syria pioneered women’s education, humanitarian relief, and social reform as paths to peace. Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988), a close associate of Gandhi, called nonviolence “the weapon of the Prophet” and organized the world’s first nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar or “Servants of God.” Fatima Jinnah (d. 1967), a co-founder of Pakistan, became a lasting symbol of constitutional, nonviolent civic leadership. And three scholars helped to build the intellectual foundations: Ayatollah Muhammad al-Shirazi (d. 2001), a major Shi‘i jurist who developed one of the modern Muslim world’s most comprehensive religious arguments for nonviolence; Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (d. 2021) of India, who devoted his career to an Islamic theology of peace and interfaith dialogue; and Jawdat Said (d. 2022) of Syria, who insisted that both Western wars and Arab despotisms be countered through peace rather than violence.

The narrative that Islam is defined by violence must ignore all of this, centuries of Muslim peacemakers, activists, and scholars who dedicated their lives to exactly the opposite.

Which Arabs and Muslims and which Jews are you referring to? Throughout the world where Arabs, Muslims, and Jews are living as minorities in Christian-populated countries, they tend to be allies with shared interests and concerns, such as the promotion of religious literacy and the fight against antisemitism and Islamophobia. Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans are also often allied on domestic issues of social justice.

Where Jews live today as minorities in Muslim-majority countries, such as Iran, accounts are mixed: some report living in harmony with their Muslim compatriots, while others report discrimination.

Historically, Jews and Muslims generally lived in harmony in many Muslim-majority countries, such as Morocco, Iraq, and Egypt (and, at least until the mass migration of Jews to Palestine in the early 1900s, in Palestine itself). Jews refer to Muslim rule in Spain in their history books as a period of renaissance for Jewish life. During the Spanish Inquisition, when both Muslims and Jews in Spain were forced to convert or leave, many Jews fled to Muslim countries where they lived for centuries in security and prosperity. These Muslim countries, with rare and short-lived exceptions, never propagated the anti-Jewish sentiment that resulted in pogroms and other forms of persecution that occurred in Europe.

If the question is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that conflict is roughly a century old and is understood by most Muslims as a dispute over land, sovereignty, and rights rather than a theological dispute, which is why Palestinian Christians such as Edward Said and Hanan Ashrawi have been among its most prominent voices. Israelis and Palestinians hold opposed accounts of that history.

Today, the evils of antisemitism and Islamophobia have brought Jewish and Muslim communities in America together in a mutual effort to denounce bigotry and prejudice against religious minorities, as exemplified by the fundraising efforts of Muslim Americans following the attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue. In this way, Jews and Muslims are increasingly uniting in response to a common threat that targets both communities. We must also acknowledge that the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by Israel’s attacks on Gaza, have divided many Muslim and Jewish Americans.

This question makes two assumptions: first, that there is more conflict among Muslims than among followers of other religions, and, second, that conflicts involving Muslims result primarily from their religion.

The first assumption is mistaken. Of the roughly fifty Muslim-majority countries, the vast majority are at peace. Furthermore, many countries with non-Muslim majorities are involved in conflict. The United States, for instance, a Christian-majority country, is the world’s largest arms exporter and is currently involved in several armed conflicts and has fought in many others, most famously the Vietnam War. The two world wars, the largest in history, were fought mostly between Christian-majority countries.

The second assumption is likewise misleading. While religion is sometimes invoked by parties to support a war, religion is at most one factor among many in producing conflict, and usually not the most important one. Economic and political issues are generally the underlying causes behind most conflicts, including those involving Muslims.

Additionally, in many of these conflicts Muslims are the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence and conflict. Some current examples include: Myanmar, where close to a million Rohingya Muslims have been persecuted and driven from their homes by the Burmese army and militants in what has been called a genocide; in China, where one million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in concentration camps; in Kashmir, where a brutal crackdown has resulted in the oppression of all its Muslim residents following decades of repression; and ongoing conflicts over land and rights in Palestine. This has also been the case in previous conflicts in Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, where others instigated conflict to the great detriment, loss of lives, destruction, and suffering of the Muslims living in those countries.

Muslims unequivocally condemn terrorism. Terrorism, defined as the use of violence and threats to intimidate, coerce, or exact retribution, especially for political purposes, flagrantly violates at least three interrelated Islamic principles: respect for life, the right to due process, and individual responsibility. The principle of respect for life prohibits the targeting of innocent civilians even during a time of war.

Suicide bombings violate the prohibition against suicide, and terrorism violates the prohibition against murder, which the Quran counts among the gravest of sins. Moreover, the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade the killing of noncombatants.

While one cannot speak for their motivations, Muslim violent extremists use the Quran the same way violent extremists of other faiths use their scriptures: by taking phrases out of context and constructing interpretations that serve a political agenda. The pattern is contemporary, not historical. Christian Identity theology, which underpinned Aryan Nations and still circulates in white supremacist movements, reads the Bible as establishing white people as the true Israelites and other races as lesser or satanic; the Army of God network has justified the murder of abortion providers with biblical proof-texts; and the 2019 Poway synagogue shooter published a manifesto defending his attack in explicitly Christian theological terms, which his own denomination immediately and categorically condemned. Jewish extremists have done the same with the Torah: Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994, emerged from the Kahanist movement that Israel itself outlawed as terrorists; Yigal Amir justified assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by invoking a halakhic concept, a reading mainstream rabbis rejected as a grotesque distortion; and in the West Bank today, extremist settlers behind “price tag” attacks and the 2015 Duma arson that killed a Palestinian family cite a divine promise to the land from the Torah, actions condemned by mainstream Jewish authorities and sanctioned by the United States and other governments. In every case the scripture is the same one the tradition’s mainstream reads peacefully; what differs is the reader.

Extremists across traditions also ignore the interpretive principles that legitimate scholarship insists on, above all, that a text must be understood with reference to the time, place, and situation in which it was given. The Quran, like other seminal religious texts, contains passages specific to a particular occasion and passages that are universal and permanent. The specific cannot be made to apply universally, while the universal always informs the specific; ignoring this distinction produces arbitrary readings tailored to fit an agenda, a verse revealed about a particular seventh-century battle pressed into service as a standing command.

Most terrorism committed in Islam’s name also depends on bypassing the tradition’s scholarly safeguards. Classical Islam left legal rulings to qualified scholars trained in an interpretive discipline built up over centuries. ISIS and similar groups discount that scholarly class entirely (ISIS marked mainstream scholars for assassination), promote their own members as “scholars,” and issue rulings far removed from anything Muslims traditionally found normative, acceptable, or humane. This is the structural parallel to the other traditions’ extremists: in each case, violence requires first dismissing the community of interpreters who would forbid it.

A distinction should govern everything that follows: holding extreme views is not the same as violence. An extremist holds religious or political positions far outside a society’s mainstream; a violent extremist advocates or commits illegal violence in their service. The two must not be conflated, the great majority of Muslims described as holding rigid or puritanical views reject violence, just as most Americans with radical political opinions never act on them. The real question is twofold: where does the extremism come from, and what turns a fraction of it violent?

Extremist movements have arisen in every religion and society, including Islamic history. Most historians trace the earliest example to the Kharijites, a seventh-century sect that declared other Muslims unbelievers and killed them, precisely the practice of takfir that groups like ISIS revived, and one the Muslim mainstream condemned then as they do now. Such groups have historically been marginalized and eventually disappeared.

Modern Islamic extremism, however, is largely a reaction to the last two centuries. European colonization of most of the Muslim world, followed by Westernizing regimes that treated Islam as backward, produced a humiliation to which some Muslims responded by calling for a return to the “original” Islam of the Prophet’s era. These revivalist or fundamentalist movements, literal, sometimes puritanical, and often political in their calls for an “Islamic state,” supplied the ideology. What has repeatedly converted ideology into violence is a second ingredient: concrete political conflict. Nearly every violent movement formed around an occupation or a despotic regime, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the wars in Chechnya and Kashmir, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the American occupation of Iraq, or in opposition to authoritarian rule at home, as in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood formed against British occupation, turned against Egypt’s own rulers, and saw more violent offshoots such as Islamic Jihad break away when political change failed. Researchers of radicalization consistently find this pattern: grievance and conflict supply the fuel, and an extremist reading of religion supplies the license and the recruiting language.

That religious zeal can galvanize movements responding to real or perceived injustices is not unique to Islam; it spans religions and secular ideologies alike. The practical conclusion follows from the opening distinction: puritanical belief, however alien to mainstream Muslims or their neighbors, is answered with argument and education, as Muslim scholars have answered it for fourteen centuries, while violence is crime, and mainstream Muslim authorities condemn it as such.

Wahhabism began as an eighteenth-century reform movement in the Arabian Peninsula: its founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, taught that Muslims had drifted into corruptions of pure monotheism and sought to strip away practices he considered innovations. Allied with the House of Saud, the movement became the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia. And in the later twentieth century its strict, literalist, and often intolerant interpretation spread internationally through well-funded publishing and educational campaigns, a spread widely criticized, including by many Muslims, for crowding out the diverse traditional scholarship, spirituality, and local practices of Muslim communities from West Africa to Southeast Asia.

It should be noted that “Wahhabi” is mostly an outsiders’ label; adherents typically call themselves Salafis, and that broader current ranges from quietist scholars who abstain from politics entirely to the violent fringe, so the terms should not be treated as synonyms for extremism, even though extremist groups have drawn on this ideology’s exclusivism. It is also a small minority position: the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims, including Muslim Americans, follow other traditions and reject its intolerance toward fellow Muslims (Sufis and Shi‘a especially) and others. Even Saudi Arabia has moved in recent years to curb the religious police, reopen public life, and rein in the international funding apparatus, an incomplete shift, but a telling one: the ideology’s original patron has been backing away from it.

Islamic teachings clearly prohibit killing innocent civilians. The position of the Muslim majority is clear, as demonstrated by the repeated condemnations of such killings by Muslim scholars and leaders across the world.

The prohibition is detailed, not merely general. Instructions attributed to the Prophet and to the first caliphs forbid killing non-combatants, women, children, the old, the infirm, and clergy; forbid destroying crops, livestock, and water sources; and forbid mutilating the dead.

No, on both counts. On ISIS: Pew surveys across Muslim-majority countries have found the group viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities, above 90% in several countries, including Jordan and Lebanon, with disapproval spanning every region surveyed, and Muslim religious authorities worldwide, including prominent conservative scholars, have formally declared ISIS’s actions and its claimed “caliphate” illegitimate. Support for al-Qaeda was in the low double digits even at its height, and confidence in bin Laden collapsed over his final decade. In several countries where roughly half of those surveyed expressed confidence in him in 2003, the figure had fallen to small minorities by the time of his death in 2011, a decline driven in part by al-Qaeda’s killing of Muslim civilians.

Among Muslim Americans, rejection of such groups is stronger still. Pew found 86% saying violence against civilians in defense of Islam is never or rarely justified, and Muslim Americans are more likely than the American public as a whole to say that targeting civilians is never justified for any cause.

This question rests on a misconception: Muslims have condemned terrorism consistently, repeatedly, and at every level, from grand muftis and international scholarly councils to local mosques, since September 11, 2001, and after every major attack since. The record is extensive and documented. ING maintains a sampling of these statements at Global Condemnations of ISIS/ISIL, and sociologist Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina has compiled Islamic Statements Against Terrorism going back to 2001, including fatwas from senior scholars across the Muslim world. Among the most notable: the 2014 Open Letter to ISIS leader al-Baghdadi, in which more than 120 senior scholars refuted the group’s ideology point by point on Islamic legal grounds, and mass fatwas against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban signed by tens of thousands of clerics. When a college student was told in 2016 that Muslims never condemn terrorism, she compiled a 712-page sourced list of them condemning it, a compilation that made international news precisely because the premise is so common and so wrong.

These condemnations are rarely covered by U.S. mass media, which is why many people sincerely believe they don’t exist; the gap is one of media coverage, not Muslim silence.

It is fair to ask in return: why should Muslims be expected to condemn terrorism repeatedly at all? Christians and Jews are not asked to denounce every violent act committed in their religions’ names, and the demand assumes that Muslims support any act committed in Islam’s name unless they specifically state otherwise, an assumption of collective guilt applied to no other community, and one that is unjust on its face. Muslims condemn terrorism because their faith condemns it, not because suspicion obliges them to.

Muslim Americans and their organizations have condemned terrorism thousands of times, in statements, sermons, fatwas, and campaigns, and continue to do so, yet the expectation persists in a way rarely applied to other communities when individuals sharing their religion or ideology commit violence. Scholars of prejudice call this collective responsibility, and it is a hallmark of bias: it treats members of a group as answerable for strangers’ crimes solely because of shared identity, contradicting the principle, affirmed in the Quran, that no soul bears the burden of another (35:18). We will continue to denounce violence because our faith and our principles require it, not because suspicion demands it, and we invite fellow Americans to notice, and question, the double standard.

The premise is contradicted by the American data. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which has tracked every domestic extremist-related killing since 2008, finds that right-wing extremists, white supremacists above all, along with anti-government extremists, have committed over three-quarters of extremist-related murders in the United States over the past decade, and from 2022 to 2024, all such killings, three years running, were committed by right-wing extremists. A widely cited database compiled by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute found the same pattern earlier: from 2008 through 2016, far-right plots and attacks outnumbered Islamist incidents by nearly two to one. The deadliest domestic attacks of recent decades tell the same story, Oklahoma City (168 dead, anti-government), El Paso (23 dead, white supremacist), Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue (11 dead, white supremacist), Buffalo (10 dead, white supremacist), and Charleston (9 dead, white supremacist). Islamist-inspired violence has not disappeared entirely: the New Orleans attack of January 2025, committed by an American who pledged himself to ISIS, killed fourteen people, the first such mass killing since 2017, and one condemned immediately by Muslim organizations nationwide. But the sustained pattern is unambiguous: for years, the primary source of lethal extremist violence in America has not been anyone claiming Islam.

Globally, the numbers refute the premise from the other direction. Out of roughly two billion Muslims worldwide, published estimates put the combined membership of armed extremist groups at well under one hundredth of one percent, and even multiplying that figure several times over to account for lone actors and unknown groups still leaves a vanishingly small fraction of Muslims involved in extremist violence.

Why, then, do “Muslim terrorists” loom so large in the public mind? Partly for reasons that are at least understandable: terrorism is designed to command attention, the 9/11 attackers intended those images to dominate the world’s news, and attacks that strike Western countries are inevitably matters of legitimate public concern, even though the statistical risk to any individual remains very low. But a large part of the answer is a measurable media distortion. A 2017 University of Alabama study of coverage of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 found that attacks by Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 357% more coverage than other attacks; as the study’s authors put it, the disparity may explain why the public fears the “Muslim terrorist” while overlooking other threats. The result: a tiny fringe of two billion people dominates the imagination, while the deadlier domestic threat, by the government’s and watchdog groups’ own counts, receives a fraction of the attention.

The same as every American’s, no more, no less, because assigning Muslims special responsibility for strangers’ crimes repeats the collective-blame error this document addresses elsewhere. That said, the factual record is clear: Muslim Americans have been active partners in public safety, not obstacles to it. Muslim communities have repeatedly alerted law enforcement to individuals showing signs of radicalization, studies of foiled plots have found community tips among the most common sources of initial information, and Muslim organizations run counter-extremism education, youth mentorship, and online counter-messaging. Muslim chaplains, officers, and analysts serve throughout the military, intelligence, and law enforcement.

Muslim American leaders do embrace two roles particular to them: teaching, inside the community, the classical Islamic case against extremist ideology, which mainstream scholars are better positioned than anyone to dismantle, and teaching, outside it, enough about Islam that Americans can tell a religion of two billion people apart from the fringe that blasphemes it. Both are education, which is ING’s own work. What Muslim Americans reasonably decline is the framing in which their citizenship is probationary, and their loyalty must be re-proven after every attack anywhere. Partnership works, suspicion doesn’t, and two decades of evidence support both halves of that sentence.

In March 2026, two men inspired by ISIS attempted to detonate improvised explosive devices outside Gracie Mansion, the New York mayor’s residence. The attack was thwarted and the men were arrested. New York’s mayor, himself a Muslim, condemned the attempt as a heinous act of terrorism, and Muslim American organizations and mosques across the country denounced it, as they have every such act. The episode illustrates realities this document addresses throughout: that terrorist movements like ISIS attack Muslims and Muslim leaders, not only non-Muslims; that Muslim Americans are frequently among the first to report and repudiate extremism; and that a small number of individuals radicalized by online propaganda no more represent Islam than perpetrators of other forms of ideological violence represent their communities.

In the United States over the past decade, government agencies and independent researchers have consistently identified domestic violent extremism, particularly racially and ethnically motivated violence, which includes anti-Muslim, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant attacks, as the most lethal terrorism threat, alongside a continuing, smaller stream of Islamist-inspired plots. Muslims have been victims of both: attacked by ISIS-inspired extremists abroad and at home (Muslims are the primary victims of such groups worldwide), and targeted by anti-Muslim attackers, as in the murders of three students in Chapel Hill in 2015, the Quebec City and Christchurch mosque massacres, ongoing mosque arsons and threats, and, in May 2026, the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where two teenage gunmen steeped in white supremacist ideology killed three members of the mosque community, including a security guard, in an attack they explicitly framed as a tribute to the Christchurch killer. The San Diego attack illustrates how this violence perpetuates itself: its perpetrators cited earlier attackers as inspiration, and their manifesto targeted Jews, Black people, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ people alongside Muslims, a reminder that the ideology behind anti-Muslim violence rarely hates only Muslims. Our principles condemn all of it equally: the sanctity of life admits no exceptions for the ideology of the killer or the identity of the victim.

Words from public platforms have measurable consequences. Researchers who track anti-Muslim incidents find that they spike after high-profile rhetoric portraying Islam itself as the enemy, and monitoring organizations documented precisely this pattern in 2026, when some officials and commentators framed the conflict with Iran in religious and civilizational terms. Harassment, threats against mosques, and online incitement rose sharply in the weeks that followed. Framing geopolitical conflicts as religious wars endangers Americans of the relevant faith, as Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, and Sikh and Hindu Americans mistaken for Muslims have variously experienced, and it also hands extremist recruiters the “clash of civilizations” narrative they depend on. Leaders of many faiths, and officials of both parties, have historically understood this. President George W. Bush’s visit to a mosque six days after 9/11 to declare that “Islam is peace” remains a frequently cited example. We ask the same care of public voices today.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest and most influential modern political Islamic movement, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna as a religious and social-reform society that grew into a political one. Its history is genuinely mixed. The movement’s ideology helped shape political Islam worldwide, and Hamas was founded in 1987 as its offshoot in Gaza. At the same time, the Brotherhood is not one organization: it is a decentralized family of national movements that differ dramatically from country to country, from parties that participate peacefully in elections and parliaments in several countries, to Egypt’s branch, which won that country’s first free presidential election in 2012 before being ousted by the military in 2013 and then banned, to Lebanon’s branch, whose armed wing fired rockets at Israel after October 7, 2023. Some governments ban the Brotherhood; others have Brotherhood-affiliated parties in their parliaments. Scholars debate whether the “global Brotherhood” meaningfully exists as an organization at all anymore, as opposed to a shared intellectual lineage.

The claim that mainstream Muslim American organizations are Brotherhood fronts is a different matter. The allegation traces largely to a single internal memorandum from 1991, written by one Brotherhood member, introduced as evidence in a 2007 terrorism-financing trial; activists have treated its wish list of organizations as proof of a continuing covert network. Major Muslim American organizations reject any Brotherhood affiliation, operate as transparent American nonprofits under American law, and have done so for decades; no U.S. administration of either party has found otherwise. Some founders of early Muslim American institutions had been Brotherhood members in countries where it was the main opposition, much as some early American institutions were built by people with old-world political pasts, the institutions themselves answer to their American members and boards. Treating millions of Muslim Americans’ civic organizations as a hidden conspiracy is not analysis of the Brotherhood; it is the collective-suspicion error, which these answers address throughout.

This is a live policy debate, and we describe it rather than resolve it. In December 2025, President Trump signed an executive order beginning a Brotherhood branch-by-branch review, and in January 2026 the administration designated three chapters: Lebanon’s branch as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, citing its armed wing’s rocket attacks on Israel, and the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for materially supporting Hamas. Legislation sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz would go further and designate the Brotherhood as a whole, and in August 2026 Senator Cruz chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America,” asserting a Brotherhood network inside American nonprofits and universities. All five Democratic members boycotted the hearing, calling it scapegoating of Muslims, noting it convened months after the deadly white supremacist attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, and interfaith organizations condemned it in similar terms.

The substantive debate divides roughly as follows: Proponents of broad designation argue that the Brotherhood’s ideology is the seedbed of groups like Hamas, that branch designations understate a connected movement, and that several Muslim-majority governments, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, have themselves banned it. Opponents, who have included national-security officials in administrations of both parties, argue that the Brotherhood as a whole does not meet the legal criteria for designation precisely because it is not a single organization: a blanket designation would criminalize nonviolent political parties in allied countries, hand authoritarian governments an American endorsement for repressing domestic opposition, and, the concern most direct for Muslim Americans, provide a legal tool for targeting Muslim civil society at home. That concern is no longer hypothetical: Texas and Florida have designated not only the Brotherhood but a Muslim American organization as a terrorist entity under state law. That organization denies any Brotherhood connection and is challenging both designations in court. Whatever one’s view of the Brotherhood abroad, the test for American policy for both individuals and organizations should be to judge them on their own conduct, under due process of law, and not by ideological genealogy or religious affiliation.

The rise of the Taliban has a complex backdrop that includes decades of war with the Soviet Union, Afghan governments, and the United States, as well as interventions by other regional and global powers. The Taliban arose in the 1990s following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. Their withdrawal came after a decade of war following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 in support of the Afghan communist government. The anti-communist Muslim resistance groups who first opposed the communist government, and then the Soviets who were propping it up, became known during the Afghan War as mujahideen, a derivative of the term jihad, which means a struggle against oppression or injustice. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the various factions of the mujahideen began to fight among themselves.

One of the groups to emerge during the Afghan Civil War was the Taliban, most of whom are members of the Pashtun ethnic group, who reside in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The Taliban, which means “students” in Pashto, derives its name from the fact that many of its members had been students in conservative religious schools and refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After coming to power in Afghanistan as a militia in the mid-1990s, they were able to take control of much of the country from 1996 to 2001. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and ousted the Taliban. Almost twenty years later, following the withdrawal of the last American troops in August 2021, the Taliban ousted the American-backed Afghan government and once again took control of the country.

The difference begins with a distinction the Taliban’s rhetoric collapses. Sharia, literally “the path,” is what Muslims believe to be God’s guidance for human life as revealed in the Quran and the Prophet’s example. Its overarching aims, as classical jurists themselves defined them, are the protection of life, religion, intellect, family, property, and honor. Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, is the human effort to interpret that guidance and derive specific rules from it, and human effort is exactly how the tradition regarded it: fallible, diverse, and revisable, which is why multiple schools of law developed and coexisted for centuries, each acknowledging the others’ legitimacy. When the Taliban announce that a rule is “Sharia,” they are asserting divine authority for what is actually their own fiqh, one interpretation, from one narrow scholarly lineage, filtered through one local culture. Most Muslims worldwide recognize neither the interpretation nor the claim that it is beyond question.

The content of the Taliban’s rulings reflects those particular origins. Their jurisprudence draws on a rigid strand of the Deobandi school as absorbed in rural Pashtun regions, fused decisively with Pashtun customs and tribal codes and hardened by decades of war. Their signature rules find little or no basis in mainstream Islamic law, and their most notorious contradicts it outright: the ban on education for girls and women reverses the Prophet’s teaching that seeking knowledge is an obligation on every Muslim, male and female, and has been condemned by Muslim scholars and scholarly bodies worldwide, including senior scholars of their own Deobandi tradition. Prohibitions on kite flying, music, sports for women, and beard trimming; the exclusion of women from work and public life; and harsh punishments applied without classical law’s stringent evidentiary safeguards belong to the same pattern: local patriarchal custom and a besieged movement’s severity, presented as divine command. Some Taliban actions, above all violence against civilians, violate what the great majority of Muslims regard as explicit Islamic prohibitions.

Most observant Muslims understand Sharia very differently: as moral and devotional guidance for daily life, prayer, fasting, honesty in business, duties to neighbors, spouses, parents, and children, interpreted with a diversity the tradition itself built in. There is no single global understanding or practice: some Muslim women wear hijab and others do not, a personal religious choice rather than a state mandate in most of the world. Only a few Muslim-majority countries center the corporal punishments the Taliban has made a signature; and the mainstream emphasis falls on compassion and justice, which the Quran makes Sharia’s ultimate purpose. The Taliban’s system is not “Sharia enforced” but one contested, widely rejected human interpretation enforced, a distinction that matters because granting the Taliban their own framing concedes the very point most of the world’s Muslims dispute.

Sharply. When the Taliban governed Afghanistan in the 1990s, they imposed mandatory burqas, barred women from most work and education, and enforced whipping and stoning for breaches of their code. Since returning to power in August 2021, they have done the same and gone further: girls are barred from school beyond grade six, women were excluded from universities in December 2022, and later decrees have restricted women’s employment, travel without a male relative, access to public spaces, and even medical training. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world that systematically denies girls both secondary and higher education, affecting an estimated 2.2 million girls.

This is far from the norm. With the exception of Iran and Saudi Arabia, Muslim-majority countries mandate no religious dress. In all Muslim-majority countries, girls’ enrollment in primary and secondary school continues to rise; women outnumber men among university graduates in a number of these countries; and women work as physicians, engineers, lawyers, and legislators. Muslim women have served as heads of state or government in more than a dozen nations. Where Islamic law informs national law, it is generally confined to family matters and does not include the corporal punishments the Taliban has made central. Muslim scholars and governments across the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, have publicly urged the Taliban to reverse the education bans.

It is critical to center the voices of Afghan women and Muslim women in general and to avoid a “savior complex,” which has long characterized Western narratives about Muslim women. These narratives can be harmful to women’s agency and contribute to Islamophobia. Additionally, it is important for non-Muslims to differentiate between the extremist practices of the Taliban and the normative practices of most Muslims, similar to how one would view the actions of the KKK in relation to those of mainstream Christian groups. Lastly, humanitarian aid to refugees and to Afghanistan itself is valuable, particularly when paired with sustained diplomacy aimed at restoring Afghan women’s access to education and work.

For most Muslim Americans it is both, though not in the way sometimes assumed. Religiously, Jerusalem is Islam’s third-holiest city, and the Quran teaches that Muslims worldwide form one community (ummah) whose members are responsible for one another, so the suffering of any Muslim population is felt personally, as many Jews feel a bond with Jews elsewhere and many Catholics with the global Church. But Muslim American concern for Gaza is above all humanitarian, grounded in the first of our five principles, the sanctity of all human life. The scale of civilian death and displacement in Gaza since 2023 has been mourned across religious lines, and Muslim Americans have marched, donated, and advocated alongside Jewish, Christian, and secular neighbors. It is also worth remembering that a significant share of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christian and Muslim Americans of Palestinian descent are grieving family members, not abstractions.

Antisemitism, hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews as Jews, is a real and rising evil that Islam’s principles oblige Muslims to oppose, and Muslim American organizations have repeatedly condemned it, including attacks on synagogues and Jewish communities. At the same time, criticism of the policies of a government, including the Israeli government, is a normal part of democratic discourse in which Israelis themselves engage vigorously.

Where exactly criticism of Zionism as a political ideology shades into antisemitism is genuinely contested, including among Jewish scholars and organizations, and thoughtful people draw the line in different places. Widely shared markers of antisemitism include holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, denying Jewish history including the Holocaust, or invoking classic anti-Jewish stereotypes. Muslim American scholars urge Muslims to observe these lines scrupulously and ask in return that advocacy for Palestinian rights and lives not be presumed antisemitic. Muslims and Jews in America share long experience as religious minorities, and many local Muslim-Jewish partnerships have continued their work through these painful years.

We believe it should not be described as one, and Muslim American scholars have objected strongly when officials or commentators frame it in religious terms. The conflict is a geopolitical one between states over security, weapons programs, resources, trade routes, and regional power. Framing it as a war between religions, or as a war of one civilization against another, misrepresents the facts, endangers religious minorities on all sides, and has contributed to the sharp rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and threats in the United States since the war began in early 2026. Muslims, Jews, and Christians have lived in the Middle East together for fourteen centuries, and religious leaders across traditions have called for de-escalation and the protection of civilians everywhere.

When the war began in February of 2026, there was concern that some government officials were framing the war as a religious conflict. Religious and nationalist ideologies have also influenced some of the actors involved, including Jewish religious-nationalist movements that invoke biblical claims to a “Greater Israel,” Christian Zionist and nationalist movements in the United States that interpret events involving Israel through apocalyptic expectations about the Second Coming of Jesus, and militant currents within Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah that have drawn on Shi‘i messianic ideas about the return of the Hidden Imam. These movements do not represent Judaism, Christianity, or Shi‘i Islam as a whole, and their adherents constitute only a portion of their respective religious communities. But when political conflicts are given divine sanction or interpreted as part of an apocalyptic struggle, compromise and peaceful resolution become more difficult. Political and religious leaders therefore have an important role to play in challenging efforts to turn geopolitical conflicts into sacred wars.

Muslim Americans are citizens of the United States, not partisans of any foreign government, and no reputable survey suggests otherwise. It is also important to distinguish between Iran’s government and Shi‘i Islam. Iran’s system of clerical rule dates back only to 1979 and rests on a recent doctrine, direct political guardianship by a jurist, that many senior Shi‘i scholars, including leading authorities in Iraq, have never accepted. Most Shi‘i Muslims live outside Iran, and most Muslim Americans are Sunni. Iranian Americans, many of whom left Iran because of its government, and Shi‘i Muslim Americans of all backgrounds are as diverse in their political views as any other group of Americans. Treating them as suspect because of a foreign regime repeats an injustice inflicted on other American communities in wartime, from German and Japanese Americans onward, and violates the third of our five principles: the right to security in one’s livelihood, profession, and residence.

The effects have been severe. Civil rights organizations documented record numbers of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian incidents in 2024 and 2025, and monitoring groups report that anti-Muslim rhetoric and threats surged further after the war with Iran began in 2026, including vandalism and threats against mosques, harassment of students, and employment discrimination. Some public officials have made statements questioning whether Muslims belong in American society at all. At the same time, the crisis has accelerated Muslim American civic engagement: record numbers of Muslims are voting, running for office, organizing legal aid, and building coalitions with neighbors of other faiths. Many Muslim Americans also emphasize that they are simultaneously grieving for relatives and fellow believers abroad while defending their own place at home, a combination that community leaders describe as exhausting but also galvanizing.