Ambivalence is built into the challenge, which is arriving at an Islam in greater totality bereft of “Islamist Jihad” (I can put in “etc.” right away because the terminology has not been clarified or sharpened as to who the political terrorist is within Islam), its taking of license without limits, and its motivation in language.  Abandonment and apostasy, humanism, reformation, revisionism — we talk and think about this a lot but know one knows the channel ahead: we do know that Muslims and everyone else expects and indeed should have an inherent right to security in their daily rounds, from mosque to open market, and that security has been deformed not only in the name of the religion but by way of language behaviors — deflection of responsibility; willful deception to name two — associated with it.

I’m just calling it as I see it.

Related Reference: “Brandeis University withdraws planned honorary degree for Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” Fox News, April 9, 2014.

Some friends compare Islam to the Borg Collective and expect it to rise “as one man”; others throw Rumi, an expansive humanist-universalist poet, on to their walls along with photographs of bright and dashing New York and Tehran designed Muslim woman’s wear (see, for example, Kavakci Couture).  Dredged out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan come pictures of colonial and post-colonial western-spirited days, a reminder that what the Islamic space looks like in some quarters today is not what it was in a still recent yesterday.

Nonetheless, all that noted, recent headlines have become wearying in their familiarity: Islamabad Market Bomb Kills at Least 22; Series of deadly car bombs hits Iraqi capital; Photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus Killed in Afghanistan; ISIS’ ‘Southern Division’ praises foreign suicide bombers; European jihadists form ISIS brigades in Syria; and so on.

Across Syria as I type, Jew-hating Arab nationalists and Jew-hating Islamic zealots are busy killing one another over dreams and desires that have become as archaic as they may be romantic, but it’s out of that bloody mire that one hopes will come a glimmer of sanity for a new era in Islam, whatever is to be, and then foreign affairs, and, finally, human relationships in general.

The revolution on the inside, reactive to despots, secular and theocratic, has yet to surface and bond.

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Related: Brandeis won’t give honorary degree to Islam critic.

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