At AltMuslim, Shahed Amanullah inteviews Reza Aslan about his new book, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror. In addition to his main thesis about cosmic war, he talks about definitions of jihad and how the United States interacts with Islam and Islamism:
When it comes to governments, we have to recognize that even though these jihadist are fighting a war of the imagination, the fact remains that the reasons that fuel the jihadist movement are legitimate grievances, and they have to be addressed. Let’s make it very clear: for someone like bin Laden, who brings up issues like the suffering of the Palestinians or US support for Arab dictators, these aren’t real grievances for al-Qaida. They are symbolic grievances that they use to rally people to their cause. [But] the grievances themselves are legitimate and have to be addressed as such. What we need to do is compel our governments first to change their rhetoric of the war and strip it of its religious connotations, because all that does is empower the jihadists. But more important, we have to address these grievances that have essentially created this master narrative of oppression and suffering at the hands of a “crusading West”.
As for people like you and I—Muslims who live in the United States where we have a voice—we have two duties. The first is to compel our government leaders to have a much more broad-minded foreign policy when it comes to the Muslim world, and stop thinking of the Middle East as just a gas station. Secondly, we are in a situation now in which Islam, as I say in my first book No god but God, is becoming increasingly individualized. You have broad increases in education and widespread access to new ideas and theories, and the Internet allows these theories to spread across the world in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. It is up to those of us who are practicing and preaching a pluralistic, reform-minded, and more open ideal of Islam to get our voices out there, to make sure we are part of the debate that is taking place right now throughout the world about the meaning and message of Islam as we go into the 21st century.
Read the full inteview here.
