#islamicstudies — Public Fediverse posts

The latest releases from Ekpyrosis Press. https://www.ekpyrosispress.com #philosophy #Iran #Islam #IslamicStudies #sociology #psychoanalysis #USA #psychology #newbook #middleeast #academia

The latest releases from Ekpyrosis Press. https://www.ekpyrosispress.com #philosophy #Iran #Islam #IslamicStudies #sociology #psychoanalysis #USA #psychology #newbook #middleeast #academia

The latest releases from Ekpyrosis Press. https://www.ekpyrosispress.com #philosophy #Iran #Islam #IslamicStudies #sociology #psychoanalysis #USA #psychology #newbook #middleeast #academia

The latest releases from Ekpyrosis Press. https://www.ekpyrosispress.com #philosophy #Iran #Islam #IslamicStudies #sociology #psychoanalysis #USA #psychology #newbook #middleeast #academia

The latest releases from Ekpyrosis Press. https://www.ekpyrosispress.com #philosophy #Iran #Islam #IslamicStudies #sociology #psychoanalysis #USA #psychology #newbook #middleeast #academia

Here are a few new books that are soon to be released by Ekpyrosis Press: https://www.ekpyrosispress.com
#books #newbooks #philosophy #religion #islam #middleeast #muslim #sociology #history #MENA #anthropology #IslamicStudies #iran #civilization

Here are a few new books that are soon to be released by Ekpyrosis Press: https://www.ekpyrosispress.com
#books #newbooks #philosophy #religion #islam #middleeast #muslim #sociology #history #MENA #anthropology #IslamicStudies #iran #civilization

Here are a few new books that are soon to be released by Ekpyrosis Press: https://www.ekpyrosispress.com
#books #newbooks #philosophy #religion #islam #middleeast #muslim #sociology #history #MENA #anthropology #IslamicStudies #iran #civilization

Here are a few new books that are soon to be released by Ekpyrosis Press: https://www.ekpyrosispress.com
#books #newbooks #philosophy #religion #islam #middleeast #muslim #sociology #history #MENA #anthropology #IslamicStudies #iran #civilization

Here are a few new books that are soon to be released by Ekpyrosis Press: https://www.ekpyrosispress.com
#books #newbooks #philosophy #religion #islam #middleeast #muslim #sociology #history #MENA #anthropology #IslamicStudies #iran #civilization

The Scholar Who Refused to See Islam as an Enemy.

Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | July 17, 2026

[Editor’s note: Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World, Movement for Liberation from Nakba, and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth.

Here is my very brief comment:

Some men, like the late great Professor John Esposito, built bridges – while others now bomb and destroy those bridges…

Peace.]

***

The Legacy of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar who Refused to Turn Islam into an Enemy

July 17, 2026 at 10:14 am

John L. Esposito [X]

• by Junaid S. Ahmad

There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one who understood that scholarship is not an ornamental profession but a moral vocation.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

READ: US strikes on bridges in Iran leave dead and injured

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In
societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

READ: UN chief says Muslims face discrimination, urges action to combat Islamophobia

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

READ: John L Esposito, leading scholar of Islam and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, dies aged 86

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

READ: Iraqi Islamic Resistance offers $10 million reward for killing Trump

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

OPINION: Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

***

(Source: MiddleEastMonitor.com)

The Scholar Who Refused to See Islam as an Enemy.

Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | July 17, 2026

[Editor’s note: Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World, Movement for Liberation from Nakba, and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth.

Here is my very brief comment:

Some men, like the late great Professor John Esposito, built bridges – while others now bomb and destroy those bridges…

Peace.]

***

The Legacy of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar who Refused to Turn Islam into an Enemy

July 17, 2026 at 10:14 am

John L. Esposito [X]

• by Junaid S. Ahmad

There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one who understood that scholarship is not an ornamental profession but a moral vocation.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

READ: US strikes on bridges in Iran leave dead and injured

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In
societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

READ: UN chief says Muslims face discrimination, urges action to combat Islamophobia

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

READ: John L Esposito, leading scholar of Islam and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, dies aged 86

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

READ: Iraqi Islamic Resistance offers $10 million reward for killing Trump

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

OPINION: Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

***

(Source: MiddleEastMonitor.com)

The Scholar Who Refused to See Islam as an Enemy.

Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | July 17, 2026

[Editor’s note: Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World, Movement for Liberation from Nakba, and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth.

Here is my very brief comment:

Some men, like the late great Professor John Esposito, built bridges – while others now bomb and destroy those bridges…

Peace.]

***

The Legacy of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar who Refused to Turn Islam into an Enemy

July 17, 2026 at 10:14 am

John L. Esposito [X]

• by Junaid S. Ahmad

There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one who understood that scholarship is not an ornamental profession but a moral vocation.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

READ: US strikes on bridges in Iran leave dead and injured

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In
societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

READ: UN chief says Muslims face discrimination, urges action to combat Islamophobia

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

READ: John L Esposito, leading scholar of Islam and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, dies aged 86

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

READ: Iraqi Islamic Resistance offers $10 million reward for killing Trump

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

OPINION: Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

***

(Source: MiddleEastMonitor.com)

The Scholar Who Refused to See Islam as an Enemy.

Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | July 17, 2026

[Editor’s note: Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World, Movement for Liberation from Nakba, and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth.

Here is my very brief comment:

Some men, like the late great Professor John Esposito, built bridges – while others now bomb and destroy those bridges…

Peace.]

***

The Legacy of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar who Refused to Turn Islam into an Enemy

July 17, 2026 at 10:14 am

John L. Esposito [X]

• by Junaid S. Ahmad

There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one who understood that scholarship is not an ornamental profession but a moral vocation.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

READ: US strikes on bridges in Iran leave dead and injured

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In
societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

READ: UN chief says Muslims face discrimination, urges action to combat Islamophobia

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

READ: John L Esposito, leading scholar of Islam and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, dies aged 86

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

READ: Iraqi Islamic Resistance offers $10 million reward for killing Trump

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

OPINION: Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

***

(Source: MiddleEastMonitor.com)

The Scholar Who Refused to See Islam as an Enemy.

Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | July 17, 2026

[Editor’s note: Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World, Movement for Liberation from Nakba, and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth.

Here is my very brief comment:

Some men, like the late great Professor John Esposito, built bridges – while others now bomb and destroy those bridges…

Peace.]

***

The Legacy of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar who Refused to Turn Islam into an Enemy

July 17, 2026 at 10:14 am

John L. Esposito [X]

• by Junaid S. Ahmad

There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one who understood that scholarship is not an ornamental profession but a moral vocation.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

READ: US strikes on bridges in Iran leave dead and injured

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In
societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

READ: UN chief says Muslims face discrimination, urges action to combat Islamophobia

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

READ: John L Esposito, leading scholar of Islam and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, dies aged 86

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

READ: Iraqi Islamic Resistance offers $10 million reward for killing Trump

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

OPINION: Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

***

(Source: MiddleEastMonitor.com)

https://www.europesays.com/africa/306994/ NDLEA seizes N12.4bn cannabis shipment at Lagos port, arrests suspected traffickers #AdesaluPrimarySchool #Ankpa #Badawa #Damaturu #GovernmentGirlsSecondarySchool #IbejuLekki #IslamicStudies #KanoState #KogiState #lagos #MMIA #news #Nigeria #PremiumTimes #SchoolOfScience #YobeState

Join us in Istanbul this July 8-10 for the 2nd annual Institute for Critical Social Theory conference at Marmara University. For the full Call for Papers, see the ICST website: www.criticalsocialtheory.com #philosophy #sociology #psychoanalysis #history #MENA #academia #conference #Islamicstudies

Join us in Istanbul this July 8-10 for the 2nd annual Institute for Critical Social Theory conference at Marmara University. For the full Call for Papers, see the ICST website: www.criticalsocialtheory.com #philosophy #sociology #psychoanalysis #history #MENA #academia #conference #Islamicstudies

Join us in Istanbul this July 8-10 for the 2nd annual Institute for Critical Social Theory conference at Marmara University. For the full Call for Papers, see the ICST website: www.criticalsocialtheory.com #philosophy #sociology #psychoanalysis #history #MENA #academia #conference #Islamicstudies

Join us in Istanbul this July 8-10 for the 2nd annual Institute for Critical Social Theory conference at Marmara University. For the full Call for Papers, see the ICST website: www.criticalsocialtheory.com #philosophy #sociology #psychoanalysis #history #MENA #academia #conference #Islamicstudies

Join us in Istanbul this July 8-10 for the 2nd annual Institute for Critical Social Theory conference at Marmara University. For the full Call for Papers, see the ICST website: www.criticalsocialtheory.com #philosophy #sociology #psychoanalysis #history #MENA #academia #conference #Islamicstudies

Taken on Friday, 31 October, 2025 at 14:06 with Samsung Galaxy A05s.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #pendidikan #pendidikantinggi #indonesianeducation #pendidikanindonesia #university #universities #institute #institutes #college #colleges #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #islamicstudy #religion #religions #indonesia #myeducation

Taken on Friday, 31 October, 2025 at 14:06 with Samsung Galaxy A05s.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #pendidikan #pendidikantinggi #indonesianeducation #pendidikanindonesia #university #universities #institute #institutes #college #colleges #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #islamicstudy #religion #religions #indonesia #myeducation

Well, maybe later, you know that I really like studying religions and beliefs. Whatever religion I study, I compare one with another, seeking the truth from each. Islam, as my base belief, I study deeply. Indeed, Allah is the one who turns hearts upside down, you know what I mean.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #islamicstudy #religion #religions

Well, maybe later, you know that I really like studying religions and beliefs. Whatever religion I study, I compare one with another, seeking the truth from each. Islam, as my base belief, I study deeply. Indeed, Allah is the one who turns hearts upside down, you know what I mean.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #islamicstudy #religion #religions

Even if I couldn't get into a state university but a private one, I would only choose Muhammadiyah. I would probably choose Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta or Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta. You know that I am part of Muhammadiyah and I'm proud of it.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #indonesia

Even if I couldn't get into a state university but a private one, I would only choose Muhammadiyah. I would probably choose Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta or Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta. You know that I am part of Muhammadiyah and I'm proud of it.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #indonesia

But besides that, if I really wanted to study Islam in a state Islamic university/institute/college, I would definitely choose a better place to study. I would probably choose UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta or UIN Alauddin (my late grandfather graduated here)

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #islamicstudies #religion #religions #indonesia

But besides that, if I really wanted to study Islam in a state Islamic university/institute/college, I would definitely choose a better place to study. I would probably choose UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta or UIN Alauddin (my late grandfather graduated here)

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #islamicstudies #religion #religions #indonesia

For those who don't know, state Islamic institute (abbreviated as IAIN) is one of three forms of Islamic higher education in Indonesia. IAIN is in the middle, above it is state Islamic university (abbreviated as UIN) and below it is state Islamic college (abbreviated as STAIN)

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #islamicstudies #indonesia

For those who don't know, state Islamic institute (abbreviated as IAIN) is one of three forms of Islamic higher education in Indonesia. IAIN is in the middle, above it is state Islamic university (abbreviated as UIN) and below it is state Islamic college (abbreviated as STAIN)

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #institute #college #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #islamicuniversity #islamicinstitute #islamiccollege #religiousstudies #islamicstudies #indonesia

Rectorate Building of the State Islamic Institute of Manado, one of the many state Islamic institutes in Indonesia. This is located in Malendeng Sub-district, Paal Dua District in Manado City in Province of North Sulawesi. It's not too far from my home, yeah.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #universities #institute #institutes #college #colleges #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #religion #religions #indonesia

Rectorate Building of the State Islamic Institute of Manado, one of the many state Islamic institutes in Indonesia. This is located in Malendeng Sub-district, Paal Dua District in Manado City in Province of North Sulawesi. It's not too far from my home, yeah.

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #education #highereducation #university #universities #institute #institutes #college #colleges #islam #islamic #islamiceducation #religiousstudies #religiousstudy #islamicstudies #religion #religions #indonesia

Imam Hussain Hawza in Windsor, Ontario Opens New Semester
#ImamHussainFoundation #ImamHussainHawza #IHF #IHH #Hawza #Islam #ShiaIslam #IslamicEducation #Community #IslamicStudies #Faith #SpiritualGrowth #WindsorON #Canada #MuslimYouth #IslamicKnowledge
https://the-14.com/imam-hussain-hawza-in-windsor-ontario-opens-new-semester/

Imam Hussain Hawza in Windsor, Ontario Opens New Semester
#ImamHussainFoundation #ImamHussainHawza #IHF #IHH #Hawza #Islam #ShiaIslam #IslamicEducation #Community #IslamicStudies #Faith #SpiritualGrowth #WindsorON #Canada #MuslimYouth #IslamicKnowledge
https://the-14.com/imam-hussain-hawza-in-windsor-ontario-opens-new-semester/

Imam Hussain Hawza in Windsor, Ontario Opens New Semester
#ImamHussainFoundation #ImamHussainHawza #IHF #IHH #Hawza #Islam #ShiaIslam #IslamicEducation #Community #IslamicStudies #Faith #SpiritualGrowth #WindsorON #Canada #MuslimYouth #IslamicKnowledge
https://the-14.com/imam-hussain-hawza-in-windsor-ontario-opens-new-semester/

📚 New Arrival: Al-Hadith (4-Volume English Translation & Commentary)
A complete presentation of Mishkat-ul-Masabih — Arabic text, English translation, and detailed commentary ideal for study circles and personal research.

Learn more:
https://soltlane.com/al-hadith-an-english-translation-and-commentary/

#IslamicBooks #Hadith #Sunnah #IslamicStudies #BookRecommendation

📚 New Arrival: Al-Hadith (4-Volume English Translation & Commentary)
A complete presentation of Mishkat-ul-Masabih — Arabic text, English translation, and detailed commentary ideal for study circles and personal research.

Learn more:
https://soltlane.com/al-hadith-an-english-translation-and-commentary/

#IslamicBooks #Hadith #Sunnah #IslamicStudies #BookRecommendation

If the subject matter of Islamic Fiqh is of interest to you, I also recommend a reading of my attempt to define Islamic Fiqh in the context of how we define 'law' today:

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/may/02/defining-islamic-fiqh-between-enforceablepunishable-offences-instructions-self-accountability-and-recommendations/

#IslamicStudies #Islam #Fiqh

If the subject matter of Islamic Fiqh is of interest to you, I also recommend a reading of my attempt to define Islamic Fiqh in the context of how we define 'law' today:

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/may/02/defining-islamic-fiqh-between-enforceablepunishable-offences-instructions-self-accountability-and-recommendations/

#IslamicStudies #Islam #Fiqh

If the subject matter of Islamic Fiqh is of interest to you, I also recommend a reading of my attempt to define Islamic Fiqh in the context of how we define 'law' today:

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/may/02/defining-islamic-fiqh-between-enforceablepunishable-offences-instructions-self-accountability-and-recommendations/

#IslamicStudies #Islam #Fiqh

If the subject matter of Islamic Fiqh is of interest to you, I also recommend a reading of my attempt to define Islamic Fiqh in the context of how we define 'law' today:

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/may/02/defining-islamic-fiqh-between-enforceablepunishable-offences-instructions-self-accountability-and-recommendations/

#IslamicStudies #Islam #Fiqh

If the subject matter of Islamic Fiqh is of interest to you, I also recommend a reading of my attempt to define Islamic Fiqh in the context of how we define 'law' today:

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/may/02/defining-islamic-fiqh-between-enforceablepunishable-offences-instructions-self-accountability-and-recommendations/

#IslamicStudies #Islam #Fiqh

Alhamdulillah, I have completed my largest and most dear research task that I took on roughly 1+ years ago.

I have compiled a list of the 'ahkam' (ruling/law) verses of the Quran used by the scholars of Fiqh to derive and establish Islamic Fiqh from.

The verses are split according to chapter and subject.

This desire was spurred by a simple question: which verses do the Fiqh scholars consider Ahkam?

The answer is surprising.

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/oct/20/what-are-the-verses-of-ahkam-rulings-in-the-quran/

#IslamicStudies #islam #Quran #Fiqh

Alhamdulillah, I have completed my largest and most dear research task that I took on roughly 1+ years ago.

I have compiled a list of the 'ahkam' (ruling/law) verses of the Quran used by the scholars of Fiqh to derive and establish Islamic Fiqh from.

The verses are split according to chapter and subject.

This desire was spurred by a simple question: which verses do the Fiqh scholars consider Ahkam?

The answer is surprising.

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/oct/20/what-are-the-verses-of-ahkam-rulings-in-the-quran/

#IslamicStudies #islam #Quran #Fiqh

Alhamdulillah, I have completed my largest and most dear research task that I took on roughly 1+ years ago.

I have compiled a list of the 'ahkam' (ruling/law) verses of the Quran used by the scholars of Fiqh to derive and establish Islamic Fiqh from.

The verses are split according to chapter and subject.

This desire was spurred by a simple question: which verses do the Fiqh scholars consider Ahkam?

The answer is surprising.

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/oct/20/what-are-the-verses-of-ahkam-rulings-in-the-quran/

#IslamicStudies #islam #Quran #Fiqh

Alhamdulillah, I have completed my largest and most dear research task that I took on roughly 1+ years ago.

I have compiled a list of the 'ahkam' (ruling/law) verses of the Quran used by the scholars of Fiqh to derive and establish Islamic Fiqh from.

The verses are split according to chapter and subject.

This desire was spurred by a simple question: which verses do the Fiqh scholars consider Ahkam?

The answer is surprising.

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/oct/20/what-are-the-verses-of-ahkam-rulings-in-the-quran/

#IslamicStudies #islam #Quran #Fiqh

Alhamdulillah, I have completed my largest and most dear research task that I took on roughly 1+ years ago.

I have compiled a list of the 'ahkam' (ruling/law) verses of the Quran used by the scholars of Fiqh to derive and establish Islamic Fiqh from.

The verses are split according to chapter and subject.

This desire was spurred by a simple question: which verses do the Fiqh scholars consider Ahkam?

The answer is surprising.

https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2025/oct/20/what-are-the-verses-of-ahkam-rulings-in-the-quran/

#IslamicStudies #islam #Quran #Fiqh

under the title 'Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern Middle East'. 🕌 For more information and to tune in: www.ghil.ac.uk/publi.... 🔗 #islam #islamicstudies #islamicmodernity #middleeast #historyofknowledge #empire #skystorians #historysky 2/2

'Strengthening the Trust and Authority of Fatwa Institutions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Indonesia' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=d57ecb4a-f33f-4678-b374-1c41ec52bb66

#IslamicStudies #DigitalReligion #Fatwa #IslamicLaw #ReligiousAuthority

'Strengthening the Trust and Authority of Fatwa Institutions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Indonesia' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=d57ecb4a-f33f-4678-b374-1c41ec52bb66

#IslamicStudies #DigitalReligion #Fatwa #IslamicLaw #ReligiousAuthority

'Strengthening the Trust and Authority of Fatwa Institutions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Indonesia' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=d57ecb4a-f33f-4678-b374-1c41ec52bb66

#IslamicStudies #DigitalReligion #Fatwa #IslamicLaw #ReligiousAuthority

'Early Personal Quranic Manuscripts in Light of the Sana’a Palimpsest (DAM 01-27.1): An Analytical and Foundational Study' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=62af569f-57c9-4b39-b141-99707e99b59d

#IslamicStudies #QuranicManuscripts #SanaaPalimpsest #ReligiousEpistemology

'Early Personal Quranic Manuscripts in Light of the Sana’a Palimpsest (DAM 01-27.1): An Analytical and Foundational Study' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=62af569f-57c9-4b39-b141-99707e99b59d

#IslamicStudies #QuranicManuscripts #SanaaPalimpsest #ReligiousEpistemology

'Early Personal Quranic Manuscripts in Light of the Sana’a Palimpsest (DAM 01-27.1): An Analytical and Foundational Study' - a new article published in the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen:

📖 https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=62af569f-57c9-4b39-b141-99707e99b59d

#IslamicStudies #QuranicManuscripts #SanaaPalimpsest #ReligiousEpistemology

📣 New issue alert for the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen!

Peer-reviewed, bilingual, #OpenAccess—JCSIS provides a forum for quality research in multidisciplinary classical and contemporary #IslamicStudies from all over the world in both Arabic and English.

Published by Qatar University Press:
🔗 https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/QU_JCSIS

📣 New issue alert for the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen!

Peer-reviewed, bilingual, #OpenAccess—JCSIS provides a forum for quality research in multidisciplinary classical and contemporary #IslamicStudies from all over the world in both Arabic and English.

Published by Qatar University Press:
🔗 https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/QU_JCSIS

📣 New issue alert for the Journal of College of Sharia and Islamic Studies (JCSIS) on #ScienceOpen!

Peer-reviewed, bilingual, #OpenAccess—JCSIS provides a forum for quality research in multidisciplinary classical and contemporary #IslamicStudies from all over the world in both Arabic and English.

Published by Qatar University Press:
🔗 https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/QU_JCSIS

You can pick up a printed copy of her lecture at the GHIL. An open access version and podcast recording will be available in October. #globalhistory #muslimbrotherhood #islamicstudies

Call for Applications: Summer School (September 1–4) at the university of Bern on Digital Humanities for Islamic Studies designed for early-career researchers working with Arabic-script materials.

https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/attachments/2025summerschoolislamicateflyerv4-kopyasi.pdf

#islamicstudies #digitalhumanities