The Missing Martyrs

The author, an expert in Middle Eastern Studies and Islam, teaches sociology at the University of North Carolina. Following his source books on Liberal Islam (1998) and Modernist Islam (2002), he continues with the present densely documented publication his efforts to protect Muslims worldwide from instinctively being treated as potential terrorists.

Quoting Muslim authors like Hassan Hanafi, Amina Wadud, Abdullahi An- Na’im and Abdolkarim Soroush, he demonstrates that most Muslims around the world espouse democracy, human rights, social equality, and tolerance – being liberal without calling themselves so. Mainstream Islam for him is to be found not among radicals but among the Tablighi Jama[at, Wahhabi Muslims, Muslim Brothers, the Pakistani Jama[at-i-Islami and also among personalities like the Shaykh al-Azhar and Yusuf al Qaradawi, all of them moderate.

Kurzman does not overlook terrorism in the name of Islam (Abd al-Salam Faraj and Usama bin Laden being negative examples) but considers ‘martyrdom missions’, while being understandable, as (counter-productive) reactions to massive Western assaults on Muslims societies involving military invasion, political domination, economic dependence, and cultural decadence.