by Mark Juergensmeyer

About the author: Mark Juergensmeyer is dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies and a professor of religion and political science at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Juergensmeyer is the author of The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, from which this viewpoint is excerpted.

“There is a desperate need for religion in public life,” the dean of Egypt’s premier school of Islamic theology told me. He meant, he went on to say, that there should be not only a high standard of morality in public offices but also a fusion of the religious and political identities of the Egyptian people. From his point of view, the Islamic religion is “a culturally liberating force,” which Egypt as a nation urgently needs...