My subject is the great Golden Age of Islam, the 10th through the 13th centuries, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims were engaged in a powerful, interpenetrating debate about God, truth, and liberty. On these three axial ideas--the nature of God, truth, and liberty--that Golden Age marked a parting of the ways. Until the 13^th century, Islam was by far the superior civilization, and then the dynamic of the West began to take off.

My second theme is the greatness of Islam--the attraction of Islam--and also what I see as a weakness, growing out of that strength, as it was reflected in the 13th century debate; namely, the problem of human liberty.

Finally, I conclude with reflections on the task ahead for persons of good will today. That task is to form a circle of discourse within which Judaism, Christianity and Islam may learn again to speak coherently, together, about God, truth, and human liberty, in an age of pluralism and mass communications that is new for all human beings of our era.

1. The Golden Age of Islam

So let me plunge in. I begin with the high development of Islamic civilization nearly a thousand years ago, when it was in extraordinary dialogue with Christianity and Judaism, of a sort we haven’t experienced in hundreds of years since. Even then, Islam took a distinctive approach to human liberty, through submission to the greatness of Allah. Consider an everyday image, in which the drama of this theme is reflected in everyday prayer, on one’s knees, head to the ground in submission to the Almighty will. Submission is a predominant theme; the very meaning of Islam is "Yes." Muslims say "yes" with their bodies bowed toward God, bowing in the direction of Mecca more than once a day.

May I propose a contrast? Consider the traditional portraits of Joan of Arc. She stands erect in armor, with her face tilted upwards. Hers is also a symbol of a human "yes," but standing erect. Hers is a rather different sense of obedience to God. Her lightsome, upward-looking face radiates the freedom and responsibility of each single human individual. This contrast in imagery exemplifies part of the theme I mean to pursue with you.

At the time of the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 313, "Christianity" enrolled perhaps a tenth of the population of the Empire.[i] Mostly, it thrived in urban pockets: in the centers of Alexandria and Antioch, Jerusalem, Damascus, Constantinople, and some of the cities of Greece, in Italy, in Southern France, in Spain. There were missionary outposts (even bishops) as far north as Britain.

In 410, not a hundred years later, Rome was sacked by the barbarians. St. Augustine, a mature man at that time, was a Christian, in fact one of the most articulate and brightest students of Latin and Greek philosophy. But the majority of scholars around him were not Christian, the elites were not Christian, the schools were not Christian. Augustine was trying to create a Christian voice, an alternative philosophy in a pagan world. In 410, this Roman Empire which had recognized the Christian faith as licit for barely ninety years, was suddenly destroyed by the barbarians. Rome had not ever before been overrun, and now walls were pulled down, aqueducts were torn up, arches were thrown to the ground. Grass grew over the ruins of Rome for several hundred years.

A few dates are instructive: It was only in 355 that Hilary was made a Bishop of Poitiers in the center of France. It was only in 432 that St. Patrick went to Ireland. In 596, St. Augustine of Canterbury was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to become the great missionary charged with Christianizing England. In 563, St. Columba landed on Iona and began his Christianization of Northern Ireland. St. Boniface (695-754) began the re-Christianization of continental Europe, beginning with Germany in 750.[ii]

During this period, Christianity was a struggling, fledgling, hard-pressed civilization. It was already an intellectual/cultural force to be reckoned with, inspiring great new churches and a new humanism, in vital contrast with the pagan masters of Greece and Rome. But its own political unity was fragile.

Into this vacuum left by the wreckage of Rome in 410, from which Rome didn’t recover for several hundred years, swept Mohammed, rising like a sunlit sandstorm out of the deserts of Arabia, at the head of both a new religion and a new army. Mohammed by the year 630 had conquered Mecca and begun the establishment of the empire of Islam. In 632, he had moved to Medina, where he died. Within 11 years, his successors, the Caliphs who followed him, pursued the purpose and thrust of this religion, which was to conquer for Allah all of Asia Minor, then forge onward. Swiftly taking over Palestine and Jerusalem, victorious Muslim armies swung to the north into Persia, and to the south into Alexandria. They next began to conquer the whole western end of the Mediterranean. By the year 709, they had entered Spain--less than eighty years after Mohammed’s death. By 732, they had marched up over the Pyrenees into Southern France to begin an encirclement of Italy, but at Poitiers were defeated by the Franks. That northern advance was turned back, so that from then on, the concentration of Islam lay in consolidating the whole southern arc of the Mediterranean, from Spain through North Africa and then back up through Constantinople and on into Southeastern Europe. By the year 1000, the Islamic empire presided over the whole Eastern, Southern, and Western Mediterranean, with a pincer grip on both flanks of Europe.

At this time, the cities of Islam were glorious and wealthy, monumental, filled with beautiful tile and marble. Philosophy and schools of translation flourished, while Rome was still overgrown with weeds and Paris, with a noble few buildings and muddy streets, was essentially a farm village, a poor medieval town, and nothing like the ornament of scholarship that, say, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordova were.

In the year 800, Charlemagne had become the Emperor of the West, and there appeared the beginnings of the Carolingian Renaissance, the first extensive building of schools, the creation of splendid churches, the collecting of paintings and mosaics. The Christian monks were in many dispersed locations teaching new skills to the formerly barbarian tribes of Northern Europe, hunters and gatherers, such arts as how to farm for a profit, that is, how to grow more than they needed to live on, so that they could sell the surplus. From the proceeds, Europeans began building great new cities.

If you examine the contemporary "Medal of Europe" awarded each year to the person who does most for European civilization, you will see that the figure embossed on it is St. Benedict (480-543). This tribute is given to honor the Benedictine monasteries, established in place after place from Italy northward, around which gathered Europe’s cities. The monks built schools and workshops for hand-copying ancient manuscripts--there weren’t yet printing presses. (Imagine the tens of thousands of men and women who spent their whole lives copying manuscripts, so that other people could share the treasures of the past--imagine the dedication that took, and how many years of careful, loving labor were required.) Libraries were built to house these treasures, then schools of music. The beginnings of modern Western civilization lie here: the beginnings of cities based upon prayer and learning, gathering around the monastery walls. Poor little cities, compared to those of the Islamic world.

2. Islam and Human Liberty

Next, I must mention four great Islamic scholars during this period: the first, who died in 950, al-Farabi; ninety years later, a second, in Spain, Avicenna (980-1037); seventy years later, al-Ghazali (1058-1111), and another ninety years later, Averroes (1126-1198), the most famous and most influential.

During the various wars and conquests in the past one thousand years, most of the manuscripts of the Greek philosophers had been lost--for instance, in the fires that had ravaged the library of Alexandria. In particular, most of the Greek manuscripts of Aristotle were lost. Most of these had never been translated into Latin; they were not available in the West. Luckily, these had been translated into Syriac by St. Ephrem of Syria, near what is now Edessa, in 363. From Syriac they were translated into Arabic in the 800s. Al-Farabi was one of the first scholars to have in his hands the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. This text hadn’t been in Western hands for hundreds of years; St. Augustine, for instance, had mostly commented on Plato, not on Aristotle. Yet Aristotle was the one philosopher who had systematically thought through logic, laid the foundations for biology, collected all the constitutions of all the city-states in the region, traveled with the army of Alexander the Great, and begun what we now know as political science. He had begun to organize what became the study of rhetoric and poetics. He wrote the first two systematic treatments of ethics. Aristotle’s writing lies at the foundation of many modern empirical sciences, but Aristotle also thought about metaphysics, that is, about how a human being comes to understand the whole world of being, everything that can be inquired into, and how we ought to think in the largest terms about what can be true and universal across tribes and across ethnicities. His was a really extraordinary achievement. Almost all his work was lost, except in Syriac and in Arabic.

Al-Farabi’s commentary on Aristotle’s works enlightened generations of Islamic scholars after him. There is a well known story of how Avicenna, a hundred years later, "sought in vain to understand Aristotle's Metaphysics, and it was only through a book by al-Farabi on the intentions of the Metaphysics that understanding finally came to him."[iii] Then, in opposition to the views of al-Farabi and Avicenna arose al-Ghazali (1058-1111), who in a book entitled The Destruction of the Philosophers warned of the danger to Islam if the philosophers were to become dominant forces.[iv]

Avicenna had tried to show how one could think through Aristotle, and follow Aristotle’s arguments, and come to a much richer understanding of the world around us than the world had had before. Aristotle’s achievements need not interfere with our reverence and adoration of the infinite, transcendent God. On the contrary, it enhances our reverence for God. However, Avicenna wrote, one must note the difference between philosophical thinking and theological thinking. Philosophical thinking follows the evidence. Theological thinking is allegorical, metaphorical. It tells stories. So one ought not to hold the two in contradiction to one another; one ought to recognize the different styles of both.[v]

This tactic didn’t save Avicenna from some of the contradictions that are apparent between what’s in the Koran and what’s in Aristotle. And so Avicenna was under attack from more conservative Muslims. Working in Spain, Avicenna died in 1037. His work was translated into Latin, and through his writings, people in the West began to read long-lost commentaries on Aristotle.

It was a little hard to tell what Avicenna quoted accurately from Aristotle, and what was Avicenna’s; commentary and text were sometimes mixed together. I don’t want to complicate the story unduly, but Avicenna had a somewhat more mystical than empirical interpretation of Aristotle. He was more influenced by Plato, by Plato’s visions of forms, his sense of beauty, his idea of the ‘participation’ by one being in another. Avicenna cared less for Aristotle’s down-to-earth distinctions.

A great painting of Plato and Aristotle by Raphael hangs in the Vatican museum. Aristotle and Plato stand there as two Greeks in togas, against a background of Greek temples, Plato pointing to the heavens, Aristotle pointing to the ground. It’s a very nice way to visualize the difference in sensibility and outlook of these two Greek philosophers. Plato--the divine Plato, the Medievals used to call him--and Aristotle, the earthy one.

Avicenna adopted a rather heavenly interpretation of Aristotle. Some of the Medievals, the first ones who dealt with Avicenna (William of Auvergne and others) began to think ‘there’s something wrong here,’ and began to raise questions. But it was Averroes, who came along a hundred years later (1128-1198), who wrote the most penetrating commentaries on Aristotle –three different sets of commentary. In one of those sets, he gave great chunks of Aristotle pure and straight. Granted, his version of Aristotle had passed from the Greek to the Syriac, to the Arabic and then (for the Europeans) into Latin, so some accuracy was lost in multiple translations, but still, he presented the text of Aristotle, not commentary. Through Averroes, the West gained a better grasp of Aristotle. Indeed, Averroes won the sobriquet, "The Commentator" on Aristotle.[vi]

Then, gradually, through the activities of the Crusades during 1095-1270, new manuscripts of Aristotle were discovered and brought back to the West, and in that way a connection was re-established with the early Greek manuscripts. The Greek originals were translated speedily into Latin. And absorbing this fresh material became the work of Maimonides, the Jewish scholar in Spain in the 1100s, and Aquinas and others in the 1200s among Christians in Paris and Italy.[vii]

At last, the Muslims, Jews and Christians were all dealing with the same body of work. It was an extraordinary moment. Islamic scholars, Jewish scholars, and Christian scholars were discovering a large, secular body of reflection, concerning what it means to be a human being, written by a non-religious person. Not an atheist by any means, because Aristotle himself had come to a sense of God through his own reflection. But not Jewish, not Christian, not Muslim. Nonetheless, religious thinkers were heartened: we can’t be so far wrong if even a man who knew nothing of the prophets, nothing of Jesus, nothing of Mohammed, also came to a vision of God and of fundamental human ethics. It’s quite remarkable. Aristotle’s ethical doctrines were not so far from the Ten Commandments, not so far from what Judaism, Islam, and Christianity teach in practical life. They felt reassured.

My aim is to emphasize this great moment of conversation, dialogue, mutual learning. It was a conversation in which the Islamic scholars began with a great sense of superiority because they had contact with sources that the Christian and Jewish world didn’t have. They were extraordinarily brilliant in handling it. They were greeted with great esteem by those who considered themselves to be their pupils.

But there were some things that bothered Jews and Christians in what the Islamic scholars were writing. Maimonides the great Jewish thinker died in the year 1204. Aquinas, the greatest Christian thinker of the time, died in 1274. The latter often quotes from Maimonides, as he often quotes from Averroes and Avicenna, and occasionally from al-Farabi. The secular thinkers at the University of Paris and the lawyers--who were, I have to tell you, especially secular even in those days--loved the work of Averroes. They were delighted to find out that you can think one way in philosophy and another way in theology. And while none of them exactly espoused a two-truth theory--that you can hold one truth over here, and a contradictory truth over there, and not let it worry you--they approached that point.[viii] They used this device to break the connection that Judaism and Christianity wanted to establish, between the fact that there is one God, one Creator, and the result that there is only one standard of truth.

You can’t have two truths, one for theology and one for philosophy. You can’t have double-think. If faith tells you some things theologically which contradict what you think philosophically, something must be wrong. They can’t be both true. You have to go back to the drawing boards to see what you did wrong. There’s only one Creator. And what we learn in faith cannot contradict what we learn in philosophy. If it seems to, we have to re-think. And that has been a source of enormous vitality in Western thought.

Because there often are contradictions, you often are sent back to the drawing board. And that is why in the Jewish and the Christian world, new questions arise. Technology has continued to develop. Even new words arise. For example, the word "Trinity" never occurs in the Bible, but you can hardly talk about Christian beliefs today without using it. The word "rights" is another word that doesn’t occur in the Bible, and yet you can hardly talk about rights without seeing the roots of the concept in the Biblical language. It may be a long, torturous route from one to the other, but that route is there to be traced.

There is a principle of development in Judaism and Christianity, made necessary by the conviction that there is only one set of truths.[ix] If we discover new things in the world, we have to go back and read our Scriptures, read our tradition, in the light of these new things, and see how to evaluate our beliefs afresh.

3. The Parting of the Ways

Let me mention three issues on which in this great debate up through the 13th century, the Islamic world went one way and the Jewish and Christian world went another way--the parting of the ways. The best way that I can see to do that simply and clearly is to say that the greatness of Islam lies in this: Islam (like Judaism and Christianity) has a most powerful sense of the transcendence of God--the majesty, the greatness, the incomparability with anything else, of God. You see that in the Muslim’s abject bow at prayer, head lowered to the soil.

There is a sentence in the Psalms which says that the whole world, the whole vastness of the stars and everything else, is to God but a grain of sand. It’s insignificant, the whole world. That’s a way of saying how great God is. The purest single note in Islam is this greatness of God, and the appropriate human response to it is "yes." "Islam" mean submission; "Yes."

T. S. Eliot says that the most beautiful single line in all of human poetry is in Dante: E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace. "In His will, our peace." That’s a Christian and a Jewish expression of the relationship of humans to God. It sounds like submission, doesn’t it? "In His will, our peace." Sometimes we are told that Islam means "peace." It does mean peace, if you submit to His will. And it sounds as though that’s very similar to the Jewish and Christian "In His will, our peace." So let’s begin from there.

The difficulty arises because, in the way they interpreted Aristotle and Plato, Muslim scholars put so much emphasis on the greatness and transcendence of God, that they thought God really can’t be bothered with this grain of sand, with this changeable world in which there are seasons, upheavals and erosions, historic transformations and individual contingencies. God is concerned with necessary things, the things that are eternal, the things that stay the same. His will is not affected by all the things that happen on lower levels.

Parenthetically, nowhere else but in the desert do you see God’s greatness with such clarity. In the enormity of the skies, in the feeling of nakedness on the desert without protection, and in the fragility of human life itself, the sense of God’s greatness is especially acute, and maybe that was the inspiration that led to the rise of Islam where it arose. This view of God is lovely and compelling. It is good when people come to a sense of God’s greatness.

So, God’s transcendence is Islam’s great strength. Its weakness is that it can say little about human liberty, and about how human choice affects the will of God. How can God allow for human freedom; how can God permit human choice? It’s as though medieval Muslims imagined liberty to be a zero-sum game. If humans have it, God doesn’t. If God has it, humans don’t. It’s a philosophical problem they couldn’t see their way to solving.

First, Jewish, then Christian and Muslim writings were divided over the role of liberty as between God and man. So great is God that in the Islamic view He overpowers human liberty. There is a kind of determinism. What God knows and does is eternal and necessary and can’t be changed, and no individual will, no knowledge of singulars or contingency is possible to God. He doesn’t concern himself with things like us, and you can’t talk about human beings as images of God.

"Man and woman he created them," that much is clear in Genesis. "In the image of God He created them."[x] For Jews and Christians, human beings are made in the image of God. For Islam, to conceive of an image of God is to fall very short of, even to falsify, His Greatness. To speak of images of God is blasphemy. It marks one as an infidel--one who has not seen the point, and is in denial about the inconceivable greatness of God.

I’ve already mentioned the second of the three partings of the ways of Islamic and Christian thought: the tendency toward the "two truths" view. God is light, unchanging, eternal. Muslim scholars couldn’t discern a way, philosophically, to deal with contingency and changeable things, such as human beings changing their minds and following their own vocations--how that had anything to do with God in His unchangeable nature, they couldn’t see that. And so they had one set of truths for what philosophy led them to, and another allegory for talking about reward and punishment as the Koran does. The Koran seems to talk about the ethical life, allows for a certain degree of human liberty. And they just said "that’s allegory" or "that’s story"--that’s not truth, philosophically. So there’s a two-truth theory.[xi] Their way of solving the problem was not to solve it, just to say it’s insoluble. We have stories about human liberty, but what we know about God doesn’t support that. Christians and Jews adopted a different solution. (If "x" happens, then God eternally willed it. God knows necessary things necessarily, contingent things contingently.)[xii]

The third way in which Islam went in one direction, and Judaism and Christianity went another, is on a matter called the unicity of intellect. Islamic thinkers thought they were following Aristotle, but they were not. With Aristotle, they had come to believe that each of us has two kinds of intellect. One is the "potential" intellect, by which we are open to understand all things. We receive impressions of the world, we take things in. If you hear an account of something, you note that some people are much better observers than others, indicating different levels of potential intellect. But then there is an active, questioning, almost aggressive, intellect, which goes out raising questions, deploying logic and calculation, abstracting, asking more. And again, people have varying levels of inquisitiveness. This drive is called the "active intellect."

Some Islamic scholars took the view that while we each have a potential intellect--we are all receivers--there is really only one potential intellect in the world: the Divine intellect.[xiii] They reasoned that when, as a fruit of inquiry or investigation, we have an insight, we come to share in an understanding that others have shared before. (That’s often true, by the way. Education often entails coming to insights in books, and discovering that other people have had these insights before. You feel as if you’re coming to participate in smaller and smaller circles; the number of people who have understood this information is relatively small. If you have a higher education, you belong to a select circle among all among human beings.) So that’s the experience which the Arabs were trying to interpret: the experience of unity with others in the act of understanding.

One difficulty with this interpretation is purely epistemological. If there is only one potential intellect for all, it possesses all sciences and knowledge, so that no individual would really have to study--which is completely contrary to experience. Another difficulty is that this way of analyzing the act of understanding diminishes human liberty. It deprives human beings of their own personal acts of understanding. We are no longer the creatures capable of individual insight and choice, the kind of creatures that the stories of Judaism and Christianity require.

Every story in the Bible is a story of how human beings use their will. Sometimes they say "yes" to God, sometimes "no." King David in one chapter is faithful to his Lord, and in the next he is not. The suspense is always "what will he do next?" And so the axis of every story in the Bible is the arena of human will. The most important theatre of action in the world is what is happening in every man and every woman in their will. In this arena, God is offering humans friendship; do they accept it or not? That’s the drama of history. That drama hinges on human liberty, our capacity to say "yes" or "no." The Jewish and Christian story is that God created the whole cosmos so that somewhere in it would be a creature with whom He could share his love or His friendship. And to human beings He offered His friendship, as to no other creature. That’s why human beings have a dignity beyond any other creature. That’s why the death of a cockroach or a fly presents no moral crisis--no wrong against the natural order, in which all things come to be and then perish. Yet the untoward death of humans is somehow a violation of due order.

God wants the friendship of free people, not slaves, so we are free to say "yes." "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasps it not," the Christian Scripture (the Gospel of St. John) begins. So freedom is at the heart of the Jewish and Christian story, as it is not at the heart of the Islamic story.

You can see the dynamism that this Jewish and Christian story begins to unleash. In the 11th century there was the invention of the shoulder harness for horses and oxen.[xiv] Suddenly a culture could harness horsepower. The strength of horses is in the shoulders, not the neck or the head, so the invention of the shoulder harness was tremendously important for civilization. There was also the invention of the rear rudder for steering ships; the invention of mariner’s tools for plotting one’s position on the earth, which enabled men to go out on the ocean. There was the invention of eyeglasses and of magnifying glasses. Of cogs and wheels that make watches and clocks possible. There was a sudden explosion of innovations--what’s called the first Industrial Revolution of the 11th century--that starts making Western civilization the equal of Islam.[xv]

And it’s in that era that the Crusades began (1095), seven Crusades in all, lasting over a 200-year period, to try to recover the Holy Land, which had been Christian but then was taken. Crusades to try to re-liberate the Holy Land. Whatever the judgment we make of those wars, it was a point at which we can begin to see the reversal of the advance of Islam. Muslims had been stopped in France at Poitiers in 732, and then Christians retook the Holy Land. And then the Muslim advance started again; they drove the Christians out, and re-conquered Constantinople in 1453, and their massive fleet got as far as just off the shore of Italy in 1571, where they were barely defeated at the battle of Lepanto, by sheer miracle, and then they were defeated in 1683 in Vienna. (Otherwise, we’d all be speaking Turkish, because they would have cut off Southern Europe.) By the skin of Christians’ teeth both of those battles, at Lepanto and at Vienna, were won.

But more importantly, the fact that all humans are made in the image of God meant that in the West, human beings conceived of themselves as images of God, Who is the Creator of all things--called to create, to invent, to discover, to figure out how all things work. And the great thrust of modern science, and modern technology, the invention of a new form of political science, a new process of "modernization," the invention of economics--all this was launched in history. The dynamism of the West began to grow, partly out of the influence of the Bible as David Landes, a non-believing historian, has written in a recent most marvelous book: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Jews and Christians took joy in discovery, in being like God in fresh discovery. There is also joy discovering by the sweat of your brow--work is a vocation; to work is God-like.[xvi]

And finally the exercise of liberty. The task Christians faced was to create a world in which liberty is possible in more and more areas--politics, and economics, and daily life. These ideas give a powerful dynamic to civilization.

4. The Task Ahead

The third part of my inquiry concerns the task ahead for Christians of good will. The United States is now home for a great many Muslims. Muslims are our fellow citizens. All of us have been thrown into a worldwide struggle for our own survival. That’s a fresh reason--but not the only reason--why it’s our vocation now to see if there aren’t, after all, resources shared by Islam, Judaism and Christianity, with which we can revisit those three ancient problems--the transcendence of God, human liberty, and truth--to see if there aren’t in all of our religions, acting together, resources for coping with human liberty, pluralism, and the free exercise of faith in Allah.

Is there not a principle of development in Islam, which explains how Islam in actual fact has been found to be different in different civilizations? History shows that there’s a certain freedom within Islam to adapt to different cultures and climates, to experiment, to change, and to develop. Isn’t it possible for those developments to occur, specifically in Islam’s interpretation of human liberty?

If we hark back to our own efforts regarding human rights in the 1949 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we’ll see that during fifty-some years we have not paid much attention to human rights in the Islamic sphere. We were preoccupied with the Soviet sphere, with Latin America, with Africa. We let the whole Islamic world go without examination.

Who today is going to speak for the rights of women in Islam and the poor within Islamic countries? Who is going to speak for the opportunity for economic prosperity; for democracy, and human rights?

When we speak of human rights, we cannot mean only American rights. We mean the rights of all humans, including the rights of Muslims.

We need to give voice to those rights. We would be unfaithful to ourselves, unless we did. I believe, and the evidence supports my belief, that there’s a great echo to that voice in the Islamic world. You saw the joy in Afghanistan when people were liberated from the Taliban. You see in Iran today--that other regime that was taken over by a highly politicized version of Islam and placed under great internal repression by the Mullahs--that as many as 100,000 young people have taken to the streets every weekend in Iran during January and February 2002. There’s great restlessness in Iran.

There seems to be a widespread desire everywhere to have human rights declared, protected, and advanced. And for economic opportunity to be opened up for all Muslims, as it has begun to be for the other poor people in the world.

In a word, there are FOUR UNIVERSAL LIBERTIES, which are also MUSLIM LIBERTIES. We are struggling today:

First, for the liberty of Muslims to worship the Almighty [Allah] without terror or coercion, according to conscience and tradition, so that the praises of Allah may be sung freely in every part of world, with the same freedom that others enjoy, in praising God as their conscience directs.

Second, for the liberty to study, learn, and inquire, and the liberty to write and speak, from the honesty and purity of one's own heart, docile to the light that the Almighty [Allah] sheds in all.

Third, for liberty from poverty and lack of opportunity--for freedom from want, for Muslims everywhere in the world.

Fourth, for liberty from torture, tyranny, and arbitrary autocratic government, so that all the human, civil, and political rights of Muslims will be respected--everywhere in the world.

These are the four liberties for which we all struggle. Liberty of worship, liberty of speech, liberty from poverty, and liberty from tyranny. Basic human liberties. Simple things. Basic things. Fundamentals.

We invite all men and women of good will--all peoples everywhere--to fight at our side for these four liberties, everywhere in the world.

There is nothing we would like better, there is nothing that would make Americans safer, there is nothing that would make our national destiny more complete, than the achievement of a world in which these four liberties were respected, and practiced, and deepened--everywhere in the world, without exception.

Not only in the so-called developed world. But also in the less developed nations.

Not only in the rich nations. But in the poor nations most of all.

Where a people gain liberty, they produce abundant bread. Where the tents of liberty are pitched, foods of every sort are heaped up in abundance.

The world we should work for in the decades just ahead, is a world in which Muslims, like every other people on this planet, are free to worship as conscience directs them;

• a world in which Muslims, like every other people, are free to inquire and study and write and speak;
• a world in which Muslims, like every other people, escape from poverty by the millions, and find abundant opportunity to employ their immense wealth of God-given talents to make a better Earth;
• a world in which Muslims, along with all other peoples, are free to practice the arts of democracy, civility, and all the fundamental human rights that are endowed in every man and every woman on this earth, by our Creator. Who is One, and Who is Great. May His name be praised, through liberty for all.

We Americans claim no rights that are American rights only. All our rights are also Muslim rights at the same time. Every right endowed in us, is endowed also in every Muslim, and by the same Creator.

"The God Who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time," Thomas Jefferson wrote.

It is a liberty that God gave to all, equally. For too many decades we in America have not thought enough about extending that same liberty to our brothers and sisters in the Muslim world.

In this generation, vast changes are likely to sweep through the Muslim world, as the peoples of Muslim nations demand liberty and prosperity, and seek to regain their place as leaders among the nations of the civilized world.

Today, we are at a critical stage in human history, which might allow the entire planet, for the first time since time began, to begin to enjoy the human rights and the prosperity now achievable by all nations and peoples.

Notes

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy.