Why "Islam and the Idea of America"?
With thousands of podcasts out there, why this one? Maybe because it tells a story we’ve forgotten to tell: how Islam was never just the 'other,' but a voice woven into the very idea of America itself
Below is an excerpt from Islam and the Idea of America (a story-telling podcast forthcoming in November 2025).
A true challenge to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations isn’t found in the polite call for a “Dialogue of Civilizations.” No, a real counter-argument doesn’t just talk—it shatters. It smashes the illusion of a clean East-West divide, sweeping aside the tired mythology of binary oppositions. Huntington’s infamous phrase—“The West versus the Rest”—wasn’t even original. A century earlier, Rudyard Kipling had already carved that idea into imperial stone in his notorious, The White Men’s Burden:
“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
But as Edward Said brilliantly revealed in his Orientalism, this wasn’t just poetic despair. It was a strategy. A deliberate narrative of binaries. The mystical East versus the rational West. The religious East versus the secular West. The stagnant East versus the progressive, modern West. It was a manufactured “other” designed to define the Western self—and justify conquest, domination, colonization.
As we delve into Edward Said’s Orientalism, however, I realized that my students at American University are often unfamiliar with European and American intellectual writers who were inspired by Islam and Muslim intellectual heritage. From John Locke to Thomas Jefferson, from Lady Mary Montagu to Ralph Waldo Emerson, conversations on Islam were integral to shape what we call “West” today. My Muslim and non-Muslim students alike are fascinated to hear a rich intellectual genealogy that links Islam as a direct interlocutor in European enlightenment process. By only focusing on negative Orientalist depictions in the Western literature, there is a blind spot: We can miss the big picture at large.
And if we miss the big picture, we cannot break the fictitious binary of “East versus West.”
We might forget to see the deep, entangled roots that bind these traditions together. And without that recognition, the myth of East vs. West persists unchallenged.
Brilliant mind Marshall Hodgson saw through the illusion. The textbook line from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution is not a neutral timeline—it’s a selective, Eurocentric fantasy.
“Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, of which the Occident had been an integral part,” Hodgson wrote, “the Western Transmutation would be almost unthinkable.”
And in the 1980s, the famous philosopher Norman O. Brown stood before his students in California and admitted that Islam had changed his worldview:
“The recognition of the reality of Islam was for me a way to get out of the narrow historical framework of western civilization. As a classics professor, I had assumed all through my teaching career that I was teaching something that you could call “Western Civilization." Coming to recognize the reality of Islam for me is to recognize that Islam has just as much right to claim to be the synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism as western civilization, or whatever it is we are, has the right to do. That is to say, Islam is not another cultural tradition. It is not, specifically, of course, another oriental cultural tradition, with that implied traditional distinction between West and East. It is not another oriental tradition: it is an alternative, a rival interpretation of our tradition.”
Our tradition.
That phrase has stayed with me. I’ve been tracing its meaning ever since—through stories of philosophical borrowing, poetic exchange, political influence, and spiritual kinship. The deeper I go, the clearer it becomes: we need to see the East within the West, and the West within the East. Only then can we begin to dissolve the rigid walls of today’s identity politics, those same walls Huntington and Kipling once helped to build.
And so, I’ve started telling this story—the story of a shared history. A story not of oppositions, but of connections. Not of clashing civilizations, but of intersecting legacies. A story that doesn’t just critique the myth… it replaces it.