I think that's an excellent question.
Ms. Abdo, in her opening statement, talked about how the American Muslim community hasn't been able to articulate that stake-in-the-heart view, that stake-in-the-heart response to extremism. I thought Ms. Abdo's presentation was excellent, and her argument to take religion seriously is, I think, very important.
We largely live in a post-Christian west in that Christianity was at one point front and centre to the way we thought about governance. It no longer is. We have this way of thinking about religion that is very different from how anyone would have thought about religions at the time of their founding. There's a very good book by Scott Appleby called The Ambivalence of the Sacred. In it he argues that we have basically two views of religion among political scientists, one of which is that everything that religion brings is bad; the other one is that everything religion brings is good. I'd say that the latter one is more the way we think about it in the west. We tend to think that of course jihadists are wrong, because what they stand for is bad. But that's not necessarily true.
That's why in my presentation I emphasized that there are mistakes ISIL is making, clear digressions they're making, even from the Salifi jihadist perspective. You're not going to have a moderate scholar who will necessarily be able to just defend the extremist argument, because this is essentially an originalist argument, an originalist interpretation of religion arguing that you should discard the centuries of jurisprudence and the kind of scholarship that has changed Islam and made it more consonant with modern society. That's what jurisprudence has done. The Salifi argument is that all of that is a deviation from the religion; all of that is bidah, or innovation, and they need to go back to how it was originally practised. There's a powerful argument there.
I think one of our frustrations is that we see religion through that very narrow lens, a very western lens, which just isn't at all consonant with the way it's viewed in the Muslim world, or even by many Muslims in the west. As a result there's this frustration. We think that religion should turn out and be good. It should be consonant with democratic principles. But religion is a much more complex thing. Within the history of Christianity, obviously, you have much more complexity as well than in how it's understood today.