Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im is a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; his books include Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law. In the 1980s, when he was on the law faculty at the University of Khartoum in the Sudan, he was a member of an Islamic reformist group and was held briefly as a political prisoner. In the following viewpoint he argues that Muslims need to place the basic teachings of Islam into a modern context in order to adapt Islam to today’s world. He rejects both Western cultural domination and radical Islamic fundamentalism, including demands by fundamentalists to make the sharia (the historic law code of Islam) the starting point of establishing an Islamic...