In his masterpiece, Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali offers the following advice to Muslims: shun those ‘ulama’ that stand as supplicants at the ruler’s door. Instead, seek guidance of those that are visited by the rulers. Imam Ghazali was writing at a time when the rulers were Muslims.
In the March 9 issue of Newsweek magazine, Fareed Zakaria, the magazine’s editor and formerly both an adviser to the Bush administration on US policy in the Middle East and a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, published an article under the heading “Learning to Live with Radical Islam” and the tagline “It’s time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists”.
