Exploring the murky depths of my laptop this last week, I came upon a provocative pamphlet from about a decade ago, perhaps.
It’s provocative in a very good sense. The author, Dr. Tawfik Hamid, wrote passionately about the topic at hand, a passion that was palpable. Hamid is an Egyptian MD who identifies himself as a moderate Muslim. In the pamphlet, he was making the case that we must see what people mean when they invoke the name of Islam. Hamid found the need to do that, having joined an Egyptian jihadist group in the Eighties, which he then left as the result of the moral awakening that led him to be a Muslim reformer.
