Elibiary (cont’d): If we truly, as Americans, believe in our system of governance and Constitution as the best mankind ever created, then why would we fear allowing everyone to transparently bring their ideas forward in the public square to debate?
A number of years ago, at the height of tensions across the US vs. Islamdivide with hundreds of Muslims dying daily in American-occupied Iraq, I spent a week with dozens of very senior Salafi scholars at an Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America meeting, discussing in classical Arabic, relations with our country from an Islamic Jurisprudence perspective.
Being a young man presenting before such an audience, which naturallyincluded a number of scholars with publicly-available fatwas not very friendly to US relations, I found that properly engaged and debated, weAmericans can build effective partnerships across a number of Islamicmovements towards shared interests.
By contrast with his many associations with Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded organizations, Mohamed Elibiary has an adversarial relationship with Muslim reformers. In this interview, he defends Islamists while sharply criticizing their Muslimopponents. His opposition to Muslim reformers likely influenced the DHS training
