Pseudo-Islam by the Epstein class

1. 2006A Palm Beach grand jury indicted him for soliciting prostitution. Police had opened the case a year earlier, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl said he had paid her for a massage.¹
2. 2008He pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution and to procuring a minor for prostitution. Federal prosecutors had already signed a deal not to charge him, and did not tell his victims first.¹
3. 2009Released in July after less than 13 months of an 18-month sentence. From October 2008 the sheriff had let him out on work release 12 hours a day. He registered as a sex offender.¹
4. 2019Arrested on 6 July on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors.² Found hanged in his cell on 10 August. The medical examiner ruled it suicide.³
5. 2021Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking a minor. She is serving 20 years for conspiring with him to sexually abuse minors.⁴
6. 2025In July the Justice Department and FBI said they had found no incriminating "client list".⁵ In November the House voted 427 to 1, and the Senate agreed without objection, to force the files out.⁶ By 30 January 2026 nearly 3.5 million pages were public.⁷

The files, and the reporting around them, show who was close to him, some of them long after his conviction. A few of the names:

• Les Wexner. The Victoria's Secret billionaire gave Epstein power of attorney in 1991.⁸ In February 2026 he told Congress that Epstein had conned him.⁹
• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The King began stripping his titles in October 2025. The palace noted that he still denies the allegations.¹⁰ Police arrested him in February 2026 on suspicion of misconduct in public office, over claims that he passed confidential reports to Epstein as Britain's trade envoy.^11,12
• Peter Mandelson. Britain withdrew him as ambassador in Washington in September 2025, over emails in which he suggested Epstein's first conviction was wrongful.¹³ Police arrested him in February 2026 in a misconduct inquiry. He faces no allegation of sexual misconduct.¹⁴
• Larry Summers. The former US Treasury secretary kept writing to Epstein until the day before the 2019 arrest.¹⁵ When the emails came out he left OpenAI's board and took leave from Harvard.¹⁶
• Bill Gates. Met Epstein many times from 2011, after Epstein had served jail time and registered as a sex offender.¹⁷ In June 2026 he told Congress that meeting Epstein was a "grave error in judgment".¹⁸
• Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton's spokesman said in 2019 that Clinton took four trips on Epstein's plane in 2002 and 2003.¹⁹ Trump called him a "terrific guy" in 2002,²⁰ and a prosecutor's email in the files lists him on at least eight of Epstein's flights between 1993 and 1996. Both men deny wrongdoing.^21,22

Congressman Ro Khanna defined the phrase two ways on NPR in November 2025. The narrow one covers the people who abused underage girls, or knew of Epstein's abuse and covered it up. The general one: "the Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don't apply to them".²³ By February 2026 Senator Jon Ossoff was aiming it at Trump's cabinet, "the wealthiest cabinet ever": "This is the Epstein class ruling our country."²⁴ This page uses the general meaning.

The two royal courts in the files

Two courts in the files matter most for this page, because the sections below show them paying for a "moderate" Islam.

In 2018 Epstein showed a New York Times columnist a framed photo on his wall of a man in Arab dress. "That's M.B.S.," he said, and claimed the Saudi crown prince had visited him many times. Both claims are only Epstein's word.²⁵ A photo in the 2026 release shows the two men together.²⁶ The files also show regular contact in 2016 and 2017 with Raafat al-Sabbagh, an adviser to the Saudi royal court.²⁷ In 2019 prosecutors said a safe in his New York home held a foreign passport with his photo, another name and Saudi Arabia as his residence. His lawyers said it was Austrian, and that he got it in 1982.²⁸

In February 2026 Dubai replaced Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem as chairman of the port operator DP World, after the files showed a years-long friendship with Epstein. He has not been accused of any crime.^29,30 In November 2010 Andrew emailed Epstein that an Emirati official would "like to introduce you to Sheikh Mohammed, the Crown Prince", whom Middle East Eye identifies as Mohamed bin Zayed, now the UAE's president.³¹ And in March 2017, three pieces connected to the kiswa, the cloth that covers the Kaaba, were shipped from Saudi Arabia to Epstein's house in Florida through UAE-linked contacts.³²

Nobody in the sections below is accused here of Epstein's crimes. The name points at who pays. Each entry says who funded, hosted or promoted the person, and links the source.

In 2003 the RAND Corporation, the American think tank, published a report by Cheryl Benard called Civil Democratic Islam. It sorted Muslims into four camps: fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists and secularists. It named its own project plainly: "If 'nation-building' is a daunting task, 'religion-building' is immeasurably more perilous and complex."³³

Its plan, in its own words:

• Put the modernists forward. "They, not the traditionalists, should be cultivated and publicly presented as the face of contemporary Islam." Publish their work "at subsidized cost" and "give them a public platform".³³
• Back the traditionalists "enough to keep them viable against the fundamentalists (if and wherever those are our choices)", and keep the two apart.³³
• Among the schools of law, "encourage those with a greater affinity to modernism, such as the Hanafi law school, versus others."³³
• "Build up the stature of Sufism", including in school curricula.³³
• "Identify appropriate modernist scholars to manage a Web site that answers questions related to daily conduct and offers modernist Islamic legal opinions."³³

Its section on the modernists opens with one line: "The modernist vision matches our own."³³

The 2007 follow-up, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, took its model from the Cold War. It describes how the CIA secretly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to win over European intellectuals, and how "the U.S. government acted like a foundation".³⁴ Its advice was to "quietly assist moderate Muslim intellectuals in organizing their own Congress of Freedom to combat radical Islam", steered by "an institutional structure within the U.S. government to guide, support, oversee, and continuously monitor the effort".³⁴

The network could start from "a core group of reliable partners" and work outward, "following the methodology of underground organizations". The foreign role should stay "very much in the background".³⁴

RAND also wrote the entrance test. A moderate supports "democracy and internationally recognized human rights, including gender equality and freedom of worship" and accepts "nonsectarian sources of law". The checklist asks whether a group believes "changing religions is an individual right", and whether "the state should enforce the criminal-law component of shari'a".³⁴ Five groups come first: "liberal and secular Muslim academics and intellectuals", "young moderate religious scholars", "community activists", "women's groups engaged in gender equality campaigns" and "moderate journalists and writers".³⁴

The money was already moving. In 2005 U.S. News & World Report revealed a classified White House strategy, Muslim World Outreach, which "for the first time states that the United States has a national security interest in influencing what happens within Islam". In at least two dozen countries, "Washington has quietly funded Islamic radio and TV shows, coursework in Muslim schools, Muslim think tanks, political workshops, or other programs that promote moderate Islam." In Indonesia alone, USAID was funding more than 30 Muslim organisations.³⁵

Egypt does it by decree. In July 2016 its religious ministry began handing imams one Friday sermon for the whole country, "written and approved by the government".³⁶ President Sisi had told them the year before: "we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah."³⁷

"The United States has embarked upon an ambitious theological campaign aimed at shaping the sensibilities of ordinary Muslims whom the State Department deems to be too dangerously inclined toward fundamentalist interpretations of Islam."

That is the scholar Saba Mahmood, writing in 2006 about the US campaign, which she traced partly through the 2003 RAND report. The reformers RAND names, she noted, are "upheld as 'good Muslims,' distinct from their 'bad' counterparts".³⁸ Mahmood Mamdani said the same of President George W. Bush: "what he means by 'good' Muslims is really pro-American Muslims and by 'bad' Muslims he means anti-American Muslims."³⁹

Who writes it, and who pays

• CB

  Cheryl Benard

  RAND; author of the 2003 report, co-author of the 2007 one

  Director of RAND's Initiative for Middle East Youth in 2006.⁴⁰ She is married to Zalmay Khalilzad,⁴¹ the US ambassador to Afghanistan and then Iraq, who earlier ran "Islamic Outreach and Southwest Asia Initiatives" at the National Security Council.⁴² The first person she thanks in the 2003 report is Zalmay Khalilzad.³³

• AR

  Angel Rabasa

  RAND senior policy analyst; lead author of the 2007 report

  At the launch he put the plan in one sentence: "What we can do is level the playing field by empowering the moderates."⁴³

• 

  Mohammed bin Salman

  Crown prince of Saudi Arabia since 2017

  Promised in October 2017 to take the kingdom back to "Moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all religions".⁴⁴ In 2018 Epstein pointed to a framed photo on his wall in New York and said it was him.²⁵

• 

  Abdullah bin Zayed

  UAE foreign minister; sponsor of Abu Dhabi's peace forum

  The official sponsor of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.⁴⁵ In November 2010 Epstein wrote that he had met him.³¹ In 2019 he shared Ed Husain's essay on "Islam's reformation" almost as soon as it came out.⁴⁶

RAND's 2007 report says it "does not cover the U.S. Muslim community", though it recommends "involving moderate U.S. Muslim groups and organizations". Abroad it names people, among them the Danish MP Naser Khader.³⁴ Muslim writers read the plan when it came out. Javeed Akhter wrote in 2004 that the 2003 report's aim was "not to positively influence the 'struggle within Islam' but to find out ways to manipulate it".⁴⁷

• 

  Hisham Kabbani

  Chairman, Islamic Supreme Council of America

  At a State Department forum in January 1999 he claimed that 80 percent of American mosques were "being run by extremist ideologies". Eight national Muslim organisations asked him to retract.⁴⁸ A Washington Post fact check found the figure rested on "a single observation by one Muslim cleric 12 years ago, who has offered no evidence".⁴⁹

  After 9/11 he briefed Senate staff.⁵⁰ In 2004 his council hosted the head of USAID at its Michigan headquarters.⁵¹ His aide Hedieh Mirahmadi advised US officials on promoting Sufism.^52,53

• MRM

  Muslim Reform Movement

  Declaration of 4 December 2015

  Its declaration says: "We reject the idea of the Islamic state." It calls sharia "manmade", rejects blasphemy laws, and says "Apostasy is not a crime."⁵⁴ One of its signatories is Naser Khader, the MP RAND had named as an example of a moderate eight years earlier.^54,34

• 

  Zuhdi Jasser

  President, American Islamic Forum for Democracy

  Founded his forum in 2003 and signed the reform declaration.^55,54 He was the chief narrator of The Third Jihad, a Clarion Fund film⁵⁵ that New York police showed to at least 1,489 officers in training.⁵⁶ In 2012 Senator Mitch McConnell appointed him to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.⁵⁷ The Center for American Progress named the Rosenwald Family Fund among his forum's funders.⁵⁸

• 

  Asra Nomani

  Co-founder, Muslim Reform Movement

  In March 2005 she helped organise a mixed-gender prayer service in New York, led by Amina Wadud.⁵⁹ In November 2016 she wrote in the Washington Post that she had voted for Donald Trump.⁶⁰

After the London bombings of July 2005, the British government reviewed its relations with Muslim communities.⁶¹ Under its Prevent programme, the Department for Communities and Local Government funded Muslim organisations, among them the Sufi Muslim Council, the British Muslim Forum and the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board.⁶²

The Institute of Race Relations told MPs that "those organisations which echo back the government's own political line are rewarded with large sums of public money". The Commons committee itself recorded wide concern about groups "artificially created, often in collaboration [with Government] to promote favoured ideologies".⁶³ Arun Kundnani, who studied Prevent, put it more bluntly: "A group will say, 'We're the good Muslims. We'll take some of that money to promote what the government wants to promote.'"⁶⁴

The Home Office ran campaigns under other names. Its Research, Information and Communications Unit ran Help for Syria from 2013 to 2016: a website and social media feeds that looked like a charity's. Its leaflets reached 760,000 homes.⁶⁵ The Home Office acknowledged that the unit made propaganda, and said: "All we're trying to do is stop people becoming suicide bombers."⁶⁶

• 

  Maajid Nawaz

  Co-founder, Quilliam

  Quilliam opened in 2008 and called itself the "world's first counter-extremism organisation".⁶⁷ The Home Office paid it £674,608 in its first year and about £1.26 million by 2012.⁶⁸ A minister told Parliament its funding had been "unique, not only in its scale but in its scope", and that the Home Office would stop paying its running costs in 2011.⁶⁹

  From 2011, Byline Times found, more than $1 million reached Quilliam's US branch through a pro-Republican lobby group, Gen Next Inc., followed by a $1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for 2014 to 2017.⁷⁰ Quilliam closed in April 2021.⁶⁷

• 

  Ed Husain

  Co-founder, Quilliam

  Quilliam's co-director when he gave evidence to MPs on Prevent in 2009.⁶³ Later a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior adviser to Tony Blair.⁷¹

  In December 2018 he urged Britain to stand by Mohammed bin Salman, who had "removed extremist clerics from many mosques, and allowed for musical concerts".⁷² A year later he wrote of "Islam's reformation" and an Arab-Israeli alliance.⁷³ In 2020 he called the UAE's accord with Israel "a win for every Muslim".⁷⁴ In 2023 and 2024 he ran an Atlantic Council project that held a summit of Arab, Muslim and Israeli ministers in Tel Aviv.⁷¹

• 

  Sara Khan

  Co-founder, Inspire; Commissioner for Countering Extremism from 2018

  Inspire launched its #MakingAStand campaign in 2014, and Khan called it a "jihad against violence". A Home Office document from March 2015 listed the campaign as a "RICU Product", and the security minister confirmed that the unit had given Inspire communications support since 2014.⁷⁵ Khan said the Home Office money for the campaign ended in 2015.⁷⁶

  In January 2018 the Home Secretary made her the first Commissioner for Countering Extremism.⁷⁷ Baroness Warsi said she was "seen by many as simply a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office".⁷⁸ In March 2021 the Prime Minister made her the government's Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience.⁷⁷

• SMC

  Sufi Muslim Council

  Launched 19 July 2006

  Launched at an event attended by the minister Hazel Blears.⁷⁹ The Department for Communities and Local Government paid it £392,500 between 2006 and 2009.⁸⁰ The last £150,000 was for "building the organisational capacity of the Sufi Muslim Council in order to work with the Muslim community to prevent radicalisation".⁶² Its founding director, Haras Rafiq, ran Quilliam from 2016 until it closed.⁸¹

In summer 2013 the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem launched the Muslim Leadership Initiative. It "invites North American Muslims to explore how Jews understand Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood".⁸² The first 16 participants landed in June 2013.⁸³ Writing in The Islamic Monthly, Sana Saeed described a programme that "sends American Muslims leaders to Israel to study Judaism and Zionism", funded by "a Zionist and anti-BDS organization".⁸⁴ In January 2015 the Palestinian BDS National Committee called for a boycott of it.⁸⁵

• AA

  Abdullah Antepli

  Co-founder, Muslim Leadership Initiative

  Founding director of Duke University's Center for Muslim Life, its first Muslim chaplain, and "the prime mover behind the MLI program".⁸³ He launched it in 2013 with Yossi Klein Halevi of the Hartman Institute.⁸²

• 

  Hassen Chalghoumi

  Imam in Drancy, near Paris

  His critics call him the "Imam for the Jews". In November 2012 he led a group of French imams to Israel.⁸⁶ After a 2019 trip that ended with President Reuven Rivlin, he said backing a boycott of Israel went against Quranic law.⁸⁷

  In June 2025 he danced at a Paris event organised in support of Israel and Israeli captives.⁸⁸ The next month he led 15 imams and Muslim leaders from five European countries to meet President Isaac Herzog, and told him the war that began after 7 October was "a war between two worlds". The European Council of Imams said the visit "does not represent the position of Muslims in Europe".⁸⁹

On 24 October 2017, on stage at an investment conference in Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman said: "We only want to go back to what we were: Moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all religions." And: "We will not waste 30 years of our lives in dealing with extremist ideas. We will destroy them today."⁴⁴

Asked on CBS what his moderate Islam meant, he pointed to "extremists who forbid mixing between the two sexes". Sharia asks women for decent dress, he said, but "does not particularly specify a black abaya or a black head cover".⁹⁰ He told The Atlantic: "We have no duty anymore to fight to spread Islam."⁹¹

In September 2017, three months after he became crown prince, the authorities arrested Salman al-Ouda, Awad al-Qarni and more than a dozen others. Reuters reported that the clerics had failed to back Saudi policy enough, including the isolation of Qatar.⁹²

• 

  Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa

  Secretary-general, Muslim World League, since 2016

  A former Saudi justice minister.⁹³ In May 2019 his league issued the Charter of Makkah, which says citizens "must faithfully pledge allegiance to their state".⁹⁴ In January 2020 he led 62 Muslims, 25 of them religious leaders, to Auschwitz with the American Jewish Committee.⁹⁵

  In 2022 he gave the Hajj sermon at Arafat.⁹⁶ His critics launched a hashtag to remove him from the pulpit, and call him "the Zionist imam".⁹³

• 

  Abdul Rahman al-Sudais

  Imam of the Grand Mosque, Mecca

  In September 2017, on a visit to New York, he told Saudi television that Saudi Arabia and the United States were the "poles of influence in the world", "steering the world and humanity to the ports of security, peace and prosperity".⁹⁷

  On 4 September 2020 he gave a Friday sermon on kindness to non-Muslims, with specific reference to Jews. Some listeners read it as a prelude to Saudi normalisation with Israel.⁹⁸ AFP noted that he had "courted controversy in the past for strongly anti-Semitic views".⁹⁹

In March 2014 more than 250 Muslim scholars and thinkers met in Abu Dhabi for the first Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.¹⁰⁰ Its official sponsor is the foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed.⁴⁵ That July the Muslim Council of Elders was launched in Abu Dhabi, headed by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, and Abdallah bin Bayyah.¹⁰⁰

The tolerance has limits. According to leaked documents published in July 2023 by European Investigative Collaborations, the UAE paid a Swiss firm, Alp Services, at least €5.7 million. Between 2017 and 2020 Alp sent Emirati intelligence the names of more than 1,000 people and 400 organisations in 18 European countries, labelled as part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. Alp's lawyers say the documents were obtained unlawfully.^102,103

• 

  Abdallah bin Bayyah

  President of the peace forum; chairman of the UAE Fatwa Council

  Vice-president of the Qatar-based International Union of Muslim Scholars until he resigned in September 2013.^45,104 He then took the presidency of the UAE's forum,¹⁰⁵ and in June 2018 the chair of its new official Fatwa Council.¹⁰⁶

  In August 2020, as the UAE agreed to normalise relations with Israel, the council said in a statement that war, peace and treaties are for "the sovereign ruler" to decide, and that it "blesses the wise leadership's acts".¹⁰⁷ A forum board member, Aisha al-Adawiyya, resigned in protest.¹⁰⁴ He convened the gathering behind the Alliance of Virtue, which Middle East Eye describes as promoting normalisation between Israel and Arab states. In 2023 the American Jewish Committee gave him its Human Dignity Award.^108,109

• 

  Hamza Yusuf

  Vice-president of the UAE's peace forum

  Bin Bayyah's deputy at the forum.¹⁰⁵ Critics attacked him after he said, on the sidelines of the forum's fifth gathering in late 2018, that the UAE is "a country that is committed to tolerance".^110,105 On 8 July 2019 Mike Pompeo named him to the State Department's Commission on Unalienable Rights,¹¹¹ and many Muslims spoke out.¹⁰⁵

  A 2016 video of him on the Syrian uprising emerged in 2019: "If you humiliate a ruler, God will humiliate you." He asked forgiveness from "anybody who misconstrued that and took offence to that".¹¹² When the forum's board backed the UAE-Israel deal in 2020, he said: "I do not engage in or endorse geopolitical strategies or treaties."¹¹³

• 

  Ali al-Jifri

  Founder, Tabah Foundation, Abu Dhabi

  A Yemeni Sufi scholar who set up the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi in 2005.⁴⁵ In August 2016 Tabah co-convened a conference in Grozny, hosted by the Chechen presidential office, to answer "Who are the Ahl al-Sunna?"¹¹⁴ Tabah's own report says it met under the patronage of Ramzan Kadyrov.¹¹⁵ The answer left out Salafi theology, which raised alarm, including among Saudi Arabia's senior scholars.¹¹⁶

RAND's first recommendation was to put the modernists forward and "give them a public platform".³³ Here are three of the best-known reformers, what they teach, and who backs them where the records show it.

• 

  Amina Wadud

  Professor of Islamic studies; imam of the 2005 New York prayer

  On 18 March 2005 she led a Friday prayer for men and women together at Synod House, on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. Three New York mosques had refused to host it, said the lead organiser, Asra Nomani.¹¹⁷

  Yusuf al-Qaradawi answered in a fatwa that all the Islamic schools "agree that women do not lead men in (performing) religious duties".¹¹⁸ The sheikh of al-Azhar said a woman may lead other women in prayer, but not a congregation with men in it.¹¹⁷

• 

  Irshad Manji

  Founder, Moral Courage Project

  Author of The Trouble with Islam, published in 2003.¹¹⁹ RAND's 2007 report reprints a 2006 manifesto she signed, "Together Facing the New Totalitarianism".³⁴ PBS scheduled Faith without Fear, a film that follows her, in America at a Crossroads, a series from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.¹²⁰

  She created the Moral Courage Project at New York University in 2008.¹²¹ In 2015 USC Annenberg made her a senior fellow to build it on the West Coast.¹²² IRS filings for the project's tax number show two grants of $30,000 in general support from the Cato Institute, and $378,000 for "education" in 2021 from the Charles Koch Institute, since renamed the Stand Together Fellowship.^{123,124,125,126}

• 

  Mustafa Akyol

  Senior fellow, Cato Institute

  Joined the Cato Institute in Washington in September 2018.¹²⁷ Charles Koch co-founded Cato in 1977,¹²⁸ and the Charles Koch Foundation's tax return for 2018 lists $2,134,500 in general operating support for Cato.¹²⁹

  He teaches that "There is no basis in the Quran for apostasy or blasphemy laws",¹³⁰ that apostates should be "neither executed nor 'rehabilitated'",¹²⁷ and "that the shariah was made for man, and not man for the shariah".¹³¹ In September 2017 immigration officers stopped him at Kuala Lumpur airport and he was held for 18 hours, after the Federal Territories Islamic Affairs Department accused him of teaching without official credentials.¹³²

In June 2004 Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, set out what he called enlightened moderation in the Washington Post. Muslims were to "shun militancy and extremism", and he wanted to fight "the common belief that Islam is a religion of militancy in conflict with modernization, democracy and secularism".¹³³ A study in Modern Asian Studies calls the programme "a recent attempt by the Pakistani state to manage religious thought and practice". It names Javed Ahmad Ghamidi as one of the key thinkers people link with it.¹³⁴

Washington backed it. In August 2006, while a bill to amend Pakistan's Hudood laws was before parliament, Voice of America ran an editorial "reflecting the views of the United States Government" in favour of the amendments. It cited Musharraf's call to "embrace tolerance and what he calls 'enlightened moderation'".¹³⁵ The same study records "increasing suspicion that the US was funding some of the Enlightened Moderation Programme", pointing to money for school curricula. That is suspicion. No record cited here shows US money reaching Ghamidi.¹³⁴

Musharraf was following an older general. Ayub Khan's first Council of Islamic Ideology, formed in 1962, had the stated goal of helping the government "define Islam (in Pakistan) in terms of its fundamentals in a rational and liberal manner". Dawn's Nadeem F. Paracha puts the two side by side: "Like Ayub, Musharraf too inducted 'progressive' Islamic scholars in the council, which included renowned liberal Islamic scholar, Javed Ahmad Ghamdi."¹³⁶

What Ghamidi teaches

• Hadith. Islam is the Qur'an plus a fixed list of practices he calls the Sunnah, and "a Hadith does not add anything to the content of Islam stated in the Qur'an and Sunnah."¹³⁷
• Stoning. He holds that the Qur'an's penalty for fornication is a hundred stripes, married or not. He reads the Prophet's stonings as a penalty for spreading disorder, writing that "the punishment of Rajm (stoning to death) is one form of Taqtīl."¹³⁸
• Apostasy and blasphemy. He calls polytheism, disbelief and apostasy grave crimes, but "no human being can punish another human being for these crimes. This is the right of God alone."¹³⁹ Pakistan's law punishing blasphemy against the Prophet, he writes, "has no foundation in the Qur'an or Hadith".¹⁴⁰
• Head covering. "Although covering the head is not mandatory", he writes, devout women still cover it.¹⁴⁰ The Qur'an's cloak directive in 33:59 "was a temporary measure adopted to protect Muslim women from the evil of lecherous people".¹⁴¹
• Music. He counts it among the adornments the Qur'an makes lawful: "music is the zinat of the voice and poetry is the zinat of words."¹⁴⁰
• Jihad and the caliphate. Only the state may go to war. "No individual or group of Muslims has the right to take this decision on their behalf." And: "Neither is khilafah a religious term nor its establishment at the global level a directive of Islam."¹³⁹

RAND's 2007 checklist for a moderate asked whether a group believes "changing religions is an individual right". Ghamidi's view that no human may punish apostasy comes close to the answer it wanted, though he still calls apostasy a grave crime. Neither RAND report names him.^34,33

In 2020 the fatwa office of Jamia Uloom-ul-Islamia in Banuri Town, Karachi, listed 29 of his views that it says go against the clear texts of the Qur'an and hadith and the agreed beliefs of Sunni Muslims. The list includes his rulings on apostasy, stoning, music and the dupatta. It ruled that his word carries no weight in the Shariah.¹⁴²

• 

  Pervez Musharraf

  Military ruler, then president of Pakistan, 1999 to 2008

  On 28 January 2006 he appointed Ghamidi to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a body set up under the constitution.¹⁴³ Daily Times said Ghamidi and the other new members "were also chosen for their progressive outlook".¹⁴⁴

  That September Ghamidi resigned. The government had sent its Women's Protection Bill, which amended the Hudood laws, to a separate committee of ulama, and he said that made it "useless to be part of such an institution".¹⁴⁵ Musharraf refused to accept the resignation.¹⁴⁶

• 

  Javed Ahmad Ghamidi

  Founder, Al-Mawrid; namesake of the Ghamidi Center of Islamic Learning, Texas

  Born in 1951, he founded Al-Mawrid in 1983 and became chief editor of its Urdu monthly, Ishraq, in 1985.¹⁴⁷ Pakistani channels built programmes around him, among them Live with Javed Ahmed Ghamidi on Aaj TV and Ghamidi on Geo.^148,149 In August 2009 the state gave him the Sitara-i-Imtiaz for public service.¹⁵⁰

  He left Pakistan in 2010, by Dawn's account.¹⁵¹ Al-Mawrid US, set up in 2014, says it "was able to convince Mr. Ghamidi to move to the U.S.", and in October 2019 it announced the Ghamidi Center of Islamic Learning near Dallas.¹⁵² Its 2024 tax return reports $1,026,174 in revenue, almost 90 percent of it donations. The public copy blanks out donors' names, as US law allows for any charity of its kind. No return from 2017 to 2024 reports a government grant.¹⁵³

  In a July 2023 interview, quoted in a Daily Express column, he said all Muslim countries should have recognised Israel when it was created in 1948. Had they done so, he said, Muslims could have stopped the brutal treatment the Palestinians have suffered since, and Israel would not have spread as far as it has.^154,155 His essay "Downfall of the Muslims" says their recovery "can neither be achieved through warfare nor resistance movements", and that this path cannot "oust the Jews and Hindus from Palestine and Kashmir".¹⁴⁰ In 2015 an Israel National News op-ed by Rebecca Abrahamson made him the eighth in "a series featuring Muslims who are pro-peace with Israel".¹⁵⁶

  On Palestine he has said much the same for years. In May 2021, during that month's fighting in Gaza, his centre posted an interview in which he says the problem "does not have a solution except that the Palestinians accept the 1948 decision of the United Nations". Israel, he adds, must withdraw from the occupied territories. The words are from the centre's own English subtitles.¹⁵⁷ A month later he said the people of Palestine "are not ready for it", and that Muslim intellectuals, ulama, political leaders and rulers "should persuade them that they too need peace right now". He said he was not calling the international community's decisions just. "The maximum concessions that the Victors could give to the Vanquished were given by them. After that, you have to accept them." Of that verdict he said, "You have to buy peace at all costs."¹⁵⁸ The centre posted the whole series again on 9 October 2023, two days after Hamas retaliated against Israel.¹⁵⁹

  After 7 October he kept to it. In a clip his centre posted in January 2024 and credits to Dunya TV, he said Hamas had started the war believing it could end Israel by force, and that he disagreed with that decision. Since the Muslims lost the First World War, he said, there has been no path anywhere but reconciliation, and there will be none until the balance of power changes. He added that everyone's prayers were with them.¹⁶⁰ In February 2025 he said he had never stopped anyone from political struggle, only from armed action. He called the war a suicide in which thousands of children had died, one that had reached the point of genocide. Good leadership, he said, looks for paths of peace and keeps up the struggle without violence.¹⁶¹

  In April 2026 he told the podcaster Shehzad Ghias that Palestinians have a right to resist, since another nation came and settled in their country. His quarrel, he said, is with their strategy. He compared it to advice he would give his own young son: you hold a wooden stick, the man coming at you has brought a cannon, so this is no time to fight, hand over the goods. When Ghias said the intifada and the Oslo accords had cost Palestinians land and brought them nothing, he answered that their partial self-rule was granted to them as the defeated side, not the victor. Muslims were defeated, he said, and now need time to rebuild and a chance of peace, as the Prophet sought ten years of it through the treaty of Hudaybiyyah. That chance could only have come by accepting Israel, and refusing to recognise it was a declaration of war.¹⁶²

  Hudaybiyyah, in 628, laid war aside for ten years and let each tribe ally with either side. The Muslims kept its terms even when that meant handing back Abu Jandal, a Meccan who reached them in chains as it was signed.^163,164 Less than two years in, one clan of Bakr, allies of Quraysh, raided Khuza'a, allies of the Prophet, at night. Ibn Ishaq says Quraysh supplied the weapons and some of their men fought in secret, and he calls it the breaking of the covenant. When Abu Sufyan came to Medina to renew the pact, the Prophet would not speak to him, and in January 630 he marched on Mecca.^163,164,165 Neither Ibn Ishaq nor al-Tabari records an earlier breach. One raid ended the treaty.

  Ghamidi spoke six months into the Gaza ceasefire of 10 October 2025. By 14 April 2026 Gaza's Government Media Office, part of the Hamas-run administration, had counted 2,400 Israeli violations: 921 shootings, 1,109 shelling and targeting attacks, 273 demolitions and 97 incursions.^166,167 UN OCHA, relaying Gaza's health ministry, counted 786 Palestinians killed since the ceasefire by 21 April.¹⁶⁸ Israel says its fire answers Palestinian breaches, and IDF reports gathered by the Long War Journal count 139 of those by 6 April.¹⁶⁹

  Philosophy has three classic tests of whether a claim is true. Correspondence asks whether it matches the facts. Coherence asks whether it fits the rest of what its holder believes. The pragmatic test asks whether acting on it works.¹⁷⁰ This section puts four of the two men's claims to all three.

  Recognise Israel for a respite, as the Prophet made peace at Hudaybiyyah

  Correspondence

  Hudaybiyyah's terms, as Ibn Ishaq gives them, were a ten-year truce, the return of Meccans who fled to Medina, and a pilgrimage put off to the next year. None asked the Muslims to give up their claim to Mecca, and they took it two years later.¹⁶³ What Ghamidi asks of the Palestinians is recognition of the state that holds their land, during a ceasefire Gaza's media office says that state broke 2,400 times in six months.

  Coherence

  Ghamidi's own commentary on the Qur'an sets the rule. On 9:7 he writes that the treaty "would be abided by as long as the Quraysh abide by it", and on 9:13 that the verse "shows that the Quraysh had actually done so". He treats the fighting in that surah as God's punishment of the Prophet's opponents, a decision "made solely by God", which limits what 9:13 says about war now.¹⁷¹ It does not change his rule about treaties. A truce binds while the other side keeps it. His advice asks the Palestinians for more than a truce, from a side that has not kept the one it signed.

  Pragmatic

  Ibn Ishaq's biography says of Hudaybiyyah, "No previous victory in Islam was greater than this", because the safety it brought let the Muslims' numbers grow.¹⁶³ That respite worked because Quraysh kept the truce for most of two years. The Gaza ceasefire gave no such respite. Its first six months killed 786 people, by the health ministry's count that UN OCHA relays.¹⁶⁸ What followed the PLO's own recognition of Israel in 1993 is in the box on Ilyas's two-state advice below.

  Muhammad Mushtaq Ahmad, in a piece Ghamidi's own centre carries among critiques of him, wrote that Ghamidi disagrees about more than strategy, since he takes a different view of whether Israel's creation and the Palestinian struggle against it are legitimate. He called the advice to accept the 1948 decision victim blaming.¹⁷² Junaid S. Ahmad, answering the 2026 interview in MuslimMatters, wrote: "He is the theologian of managed defeat."¹⁷³

  In July and August 2003 Ishraq ran a long article by Muhammad Ammar Khan Nasir, an assistant fellow at Al-Mawrid, which held that the religious right of trusteeship over Masjid al-Aqsa belongs to the Children of Israel.^174,175 The 2003 article was Nasir's, but Banuri Town's fatwa pins a harder version of the view on Ghamidi himself, that Muslims have no right to Masjid al-Aqsa and only the Jews do.¹⁴²

• MI

  Muhammad Hassan Ilyas

  Director of research and communication, Ghamidi Center of Islamic Learning

  Born in Karachi in 1988, he studied at madrasas in Karachi and Islamabad, joined Ghamidi in Malaysia and moved with him to the US in 2019. Ghamidi, he says, has also been his father-in-law since 2014.¹⁷⁶ He hosts the centre's weekly programme with Ghamidi on Dunya News, recorded in Dallas.¹⁷⁷

  On 26 September 2025 he spoke at a side event of the UN General Assembly's 80th session, "Weaponization of Religion by the Taliban and Its Consequences on Afghanistan and Beyond". Afghanistan's UN mission, still run by diplomats of the government the Taliban overthrew, organised it, and Mustafa Akyol from the section above spoke too.^178,179 Ilyas told the room: "The Taliban way is not Islam. It's a tribal culture dressed as Islam." The Taliban, he said, "cannot be defeated by bullets and B2 bombers alone. The real battle is a battle of ideas."^180,181 A 2026 Routledge book by Sohaib Khaliq prints the speech in full as the "Farahi School (Al-Mawrid) Statement at the United Nations".¹⁸¹ The speech does not mention America, Israel or Palestine. Asked later why he had not condemned Israel there, he said Gaza was not the subject of the event.¹⁸² The YouTuber Qaiser Ahmed Raja claimed the speech rests on RAND's 2003 report, while saying he did not claim Ilyas was on anyone's payroll.¹⁸³

  The UN's journal lists the event as organised by Afghanistan's mission alone.¹⁸⁴ FARAGEER, whose report the event launched, says it co-hosted with the missions of Afghanistan, Spain and Mexico, with support from Vital Voices and the Women's Peace and Humanitarian Fund, a UN and civil society partnership.^185,186 FARAGEER is a Canadian non-profit incorporated in November 2024. Its directors include Candice Bergen, a former leader of Canada's Conservative opposition, and the journalist David Loyn.^187,188 Its founder, Nargis Nehan, was a senior adviser to President Ashraf Ghani and his acting minister of mines and petroleum, and says she was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy from October 2024 to February 2025.¹⁸⁹ Its 2024 report lists four donors, Vital Voices among them.¹⁹⁰ Vital Voices grew out of an initiative that Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright set up after 1995 to advance women "as a U.S. foreign policy goal".¹⁹¹ The report launched at the event thanks "our donor ICAN, FCDO" without spelling out the second name. FCDO is the abbreviation of Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.^192,193

  Afghanistan's mission had also co-hosted FARAGEER's side event at the 2024 General Assembly.¹⁹⁴ One of Ilyas's fellow panellists, Tariq Osman, had been a senior adviser on the US Institute of Peace's religion and peacebuilding team.¹⁹⁵ In February 2026 Ilyas and Akyol sat on a FARAGEER panel again.¹⁹⁶ No source found says who invited Ilyas.

  In a March 2024 podcast he called America a conqueror, the most civilised in history and the only one Muslims can talk to. Muslims had to decide, he said, whether to manage their affairs with that superpower or fight it, and in Palestine they had seen what fighting brings.¹⁹⁷ In the edited text of the same interview on his site, he says Muslims are a conquered people, held down so far that the world powers only let them live, and that those powers keep telling them they are slaves who should learn the manners of living as slaves. His answer is to drop dreams of past glory and build at home, as he says Malaysia and Turkey did to get out of slavery.¹⁹⁸

  The table sets his ranking beside how other conquerors treated the people they took. Where historians disagree, it gives the range and says who counted.

  Conqueror	What happened to the conquered	Dead
  The Prophet, Mecca, 630	Amnesty for anyone who locked his door or entered Abu Sufyan's house or the mosque. Commanders were told to fight only those who resisted. Of eight people excepted, four were killed and four pardoned.163	About 20, adding up the deaths Ibn Ishaq reports
  Umar, Jerusalem, 637 or 638	A written guarantee of safety for lives, property and churches, in return for the poll tax. The same text bars Jews from living in the city.199,200	No massacre reported
  Crusaders, Jerusalem, 1099	A promise of protection in the Aqsa Mosque was broken. Muslims and Jews were slaughtered, then barred from living in the city.201	Hundreds by Britannica's count, 3,000 to 5,000 in the Aqsa Mosque alone by Thomas Madden's. Later Muslim chroniclers claimed 70,000.201,202
  Saladin, Jerusalem, 1187	The Christians could ransom themselves, the poor included. Several thousand who were not redeemed were probably sold as slaves.203	No massacre reported
  Mongols, Baghdad, 1258	The city was sacked and the caliph killed.204	Hundreds of thousands by Britannica's count. Medieval claims run from 300,000 to 2 million.204,205
  Britain, India, 1919 and 1943	At Amritsar troops fired about 1,650 rounds without warning into an unarmed crowd in a walled garden. In Bengal, wartime policy, rice exports among it, turned shortage into famine.206,207	379 by the official count to about 1,000 by the Congress inquiry at Amritsar. About 1.5 million by the official count to 3 million in Bengal.208,209,210,207
  United States, Philippines, 1899 to 1902	US forces burned villages, herded civilians into camps and tortured suspected guerrillas, by the State Department historian's account.211	As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians, from violence, famine and disease211
  United States, Japan, 1945	Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.212	About 210,000 by the end of 1945212
  United States, wars after 2001	Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. The Army's own inquiry found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib.213,214	Over 940,000 killed directly, more than 432,000 of them civilians, and 3.6 to 3.8 million more from the wars' knock-on effects, by the Costs of War count213

  America, the most civilised conqueror in history

  Correspondence

  The table does not bear the ranking out. The orders Malik's Muwatta records from Abu Bakr to his armies forbid killing women, children and the old, or cutting down fruit trees.²¹⁵ The Prophet took Mecca with about 20 dead. America's wars since 2001 killed over 940,000 people directly.^163,213

  Coherence

  In the edited text of the same interview, Ilyas says the world powers only let Muslims live and keep telling them they are slaves who should learn the manners of slavery.¹⁹⁸ A conqueror that tells the conquered to learn slavery's manners is not, by his own description, the most civilised in history.

  Pragmatic

  His case is that America is the one conqueror Muslims can talk to, and that Palestine shows what fighting brings.¹⁹⁷ In the two years after 7 October 2023 the conqueror he recommends talking to gave Israel $21.7 billion in military aid, by the Costs of War count, for the war he holds up as proof that fighting fails.²¹⁶

  In a March 2026 live session he took up the complaint that America and Israel break international law. Speaking as the powers, he said they wrote that law as the big brothers of the house, so that the others would behave. A state that no longer accepts them as big brother, in his telling, should remember that they made the rules and hold the stick. In the same answer he called the people urging Muslims to fight today the Muslims' biggest enemies, and said Muslims survive on a respite the powers allow them.²¹⁷

  Both of the big brothers he speaks for turn up in the Epstein files. Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, visited Epstein about 30 times between 2013 and 2017, by the Wall Street Journal's reading of Epstein's calendar.²¹⁸ The calendar also shows a private meeting between the two in New York in September 2012, while Barak was Israel's defence minister.²¹⁹ From 2015 to 2019 Barak stayed in a Manhattan flat Epstein owned, which Epstein's staff called "Ehud's apartment". In February 2026 he admitted he had known since 2008 that Epstein had been tried and jailed.²²⁰ Justice Department emails show that in 2015 Epstein put $1 million, through Barak's partnership, into Reporty, an Israeli emergency-call technology start-up now called Carbyne.²²¹ On the American side, beyond the two presidents named at the top of this page, NBC News found at least six senior officials of the current administration in the files.²²² Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who had said he cut Epstein off in 2005, confirmed in February 2026 that he took his family to lunch on Epstein's island in December 2012.²²³ Tom Barrack, now the US ambassador to Turkey, kept in close contact with Epstein for years after his conviction. The day after the 2016 election Epstein told a senior Saudi official that Barrack was their "point person".²²⁴ Barak says he regrets ever meeting Epstein, and none of these men is accused of his crimes.^220,222

  He rejects the word defeatist. In January 2025 he said his camp had never told Muslims to accept America's slavery or live as tributaries of the world powers, and called its approach practical.²²⁵ That June he wrote that defeat is not the Muslims' destiny, but mistaking it for victory is their greatest defeat.²²⁶

  His camp never told Muslims to accept America's slavery

  Correspondence

  His camp's own words say otherwise. Ghamidi told Palestinians in 2021, "You have to buy peace at all costs", and to accept what the victors had conceded.¹⁵⁸ In an interview reposted in November 2024, Ilyas called the Second World War's victors the conquerors of the world and said the world is their tributary.¹⁷⁶ In 2026 he said Muslims survive on a respite the powers allow.²¹⁷ Buying peace at any price from the power one lives under is what a tributary does.

  Coherence

  He says defeat is not the Muslims' destiny,²²⁶ yet calls the people urging them to fight their biggest enemies²¹⁷ and ranks their conqueror the most civilised in history.¹⁹⁷ Ruling out resistance while praising the victor leaves the victor's terms as the only road out of defeat. That is the position he says his camp never took.

  Pragmatic

  William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1974 that Henry Kissinger had told him in 1968 that if South Vietnam's president went the way of Diem, the world would learn "it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal". The line rests on Buckley's account alone.^227,228 Saigon fell in April 1975, weeks after President Ford told Congress, "we reduced our economic and arms aid to South Vietnam."^229,230 In October 1990, with Soviet troops gone from Afghanistan, Washington suspended aid and most arms sales to Pakistan over its nuclear programme.²³¹ Hillary Clinton admitted in 2009, "We have walked away from Pakistan before".²³² As a frontline ally after 2001, Pakistan put the cost of terrorism at US$126.79 billion by 2018, and Imran Khan put its dead at more than 70,000.^233,234 In 2020 America signed a deal with the Taliban. Its own inspector general found that the talks left out the Afghan government, "making it appear weak and abandoned by its primary ally".²³⁵ Diplomats of that government still run Afghanistan's UN mission, the one that hosted Ilyas's speech.¹⁷⁹

  His January 2025 article on Palestine, in the centre's English journal, says "the Jewish connection to this land is as ancient and profound as that of Muslims". It calls the war a genocide whose lesson is that "Muslims sacrificed what they had achieved on the altar of flawed strategies, illusions of grandeur, and ineffective armed resistance", and asks them to "abandon emotional slogans and unrealistic dreams".²³⁶ In a March 2025 clip he invited Palestinians to sit down and accept the two-state solution, then build themselves up rather than lose more generations.²³⁷

  Sit down and accept the two-state solution

  Correspondence

  The Palestinians' representatives accepted it decades ago. In 1988 the Palestine National Council declared a state on the basis of the UN's 1947 partition resolution and asked for peace talks on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.²³⁸ In 1993 Arafat wrote to Rabin, "The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security." Rabin's reply recognised the PLO as the Palestinians' representative, not a Palestinian state.²³⁹ Hamas's 2017 charter calls a state on the 1967 lines "a formula of national consensus", while it still refuses to recognise Israel.²⁴⁰

  Coherence

  The solution needs two sides, and the other side has voted it down. In July 2024 the Knesset voted 68 to 9 that it "firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan".²⁴¹ In September 2025 Netanyahu said, "There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River."²⁴² Ilyas's own teacher says the answer also needs Israel to leave the occupied territories,¹⁵⁷ and the International Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that Israel must end its occupation "as rapidly as possible" and evacuate the settlers.²⁴³ An invitation that asks only the Palestinians to move does not fit either.

  Pragmatic

  Acceptance has been tried. When the PLO recognised Israel in 1993, about 110,000 settlers lived in the West Bank and about 140,000 in East Jerusalem. Thirty years later the figures were about 465,000 and 230,000.²⁴⁴ The EU counted over 750,000 in 2025.²⁴⁵ Announcing approval of the E1 settlement plan in August 2025, Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said it "buries the idea of a Palestinian state".²⁴⁶

  That June he wrote that Israel's abuses were beyond denial, but that history would never forgive Hamas the criminal strategy that threw a whole generation into fire and blood.²⁴⁷

  Historians have not returned one verdict. Norman Finkelstein was born in Brooklyn in 1953 to Holocaust survivors.²⁴⁸ By his own account both parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto until its 1943 uprising, and his father went on to Auschwitz and survived its death march.²⁴⁹ He took his Princeton doctorate in 1988 with a thesis on the theory of Zionism, and his books include The Holocaust Industry and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, which the University of California Press published in 2018.^248,250 DePaul University denied him tenure in 2007 after Alan Dershowitz campaigned against him, and Dershowitz said he was "very proud" of it.²⁵¹ In 2008 Israel banned him from entering for ten years.²⁵²

  Finkelstein reads the record the other way from Ilyas. In January 2009 he said Hamas "had adhered to the ceasefire from June 17th until November 4th" of 2008, when an Israeli raid killed six of its men, and that Hamas was signalling it wanted a settlement on the June 1967 border.²⁵³ The Oxford historian Avi Shlaim wrote the same week, "It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire." He also wrote that killing civilians is wrong, for Hamas as for Israel.²⁵⁴ Israel said the raid hit a tunnel Hamas meant to use to seize soldiers.²⁵⁵ On 7 October 2023 Finkelstein likened the attack to the Warsaw Ghetto revolt.²⁵⁶ He calls it a slave revolt like Nat Turner's, in which, he notes, innocents were deliberately killed.²⁵⁷ He has since spoken of "Massive atrocities on October 7th", and in August 2026 he said again that he refuses to condemn Hamas.^258,259

  Other historians split along the same line. Omer Bartov of Brown calls 7 October "obviously a war crime", and calls Israel's war that followed a genocide.²⁶⁰ Ilan Pappé says Hamas committed war crimes that day, and that Israel cannot take the moral high ground.²⁶¹ Rashid Khalidi says colonised peoples may use all means within international humanitarian law, and he has called Hamas's attack on Israeli civilians a war crime.²⁶² Benny Morris says the attackers "were out to kill civilians".²⁵⁸ And one historian who writes with sympathy for Gaza comes close to Ilyas. Jean-Pierre Filiu of Sciences Po wrote in Le Monde in August 2025 that Hamas bears a crushing responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe, and that history's verdict on it will be final.²⁶³ In 1982 the UN General Assembly reaffirmed the right of peoples under foreign occupation to struggle for liberation "by all available means, including armed struggle", and named the Palestinians among them.²⁶⁴

  In November 2025 Ilyas said Muslims had refused a 58th Muslim country put in their lap in 1948, and that everyone should join in condemning Hamas.²⁶⁵

  Khateeb al-Attar answered the article in MuslimMatters: "Ilyas believes that occupied peoples like the Palestinians can only hope to buy peace by signing off any right to justice."²⁶⁶ Mushtaq Ahmad's piece on Ghamidi, above, says Ilyas repeated the 1948 argument the week before it was written.¹⁷²

Under Ayub Khan

• FR

  Fazlur Rahman

  Head of the Central Institute of Islamic Research until 1968

  The institute was set up in 1960. The 1962 constitution gave it the job of research "for the purpose of assisting in the reconstruction of Muslim society on a truly Islamic basis".²⁶⁷ Rahman ran it, and advised Ayub's first Council of Islamic Ideology.^268,136 After parts of his book Islam came out in Urdu, he was accused of denying that the Qur'an is uncreated and divine. He resigned in 1968 and joined the University of Chicago in 1969.²⁶⁸

  Ayub's diary blames "ignorant and politically motivated mullahs". He accepted the resignation "with great reluctance", and wrote: "These people will not allow Islam to become a vehicle of progress."²⁶⁸

• GP

  Ghulam Ahmad Parwez

  Editor, Tolu-e-Islam; civil servant from 1927 to the mid-1950s

  His movement's biography says he joined British India's central secretariat in 1927, rose in its Home Department, kept the same seat in Pakistan's government and retired in 1955. It says he started Tolu-e-Islam in 1938 at Iqbal's urging and on Jinnah's instructions.²⁶⁹ He rejected hadith as a source of law, arguing that they do not carry "the original words of the Messenger of Allah; the ahadith are interpretations."²⁷⁰

  Dawn's Paracha says Jinnah asked him to edit the magazine, and that he retired in 1956. He writes that Ayub's regime at first backed Parwez's 1961 push to say the prayer in Urdu, then dropped it when the ulama attacked him.²⁷¹ RAND's 2003 report cites his chapter on hadith for the claim that all versions of the Qur'an but one "were destroyed". The chapter itself blames such talk on "conspiracies of Non-Muslims".^33,270

Ghamidi's is one school among several. Here are five more, oldest first. They disagree on most rulings, and Madkhalism is far stricter than the other four. What they share is powerful backing, from a government, a foreign donor or officials who liked what they taught.

The Ahmadiyya movement

• 

  Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

  Founder, Ahmadiyya movement, Qadian, Punjab; died 1908

  In 1882 he wrote that Islamic law "strictly forbids the raising of the sword against a government under whose protection Muslims lead free and peaceful lives". In the same book he says his father gave the British fifty horses and fifty sepoys in 1857.²⁷² The Punjab's official register of notable families records that General Nicholson gave the family a certificate for its loyalty that year.²⁷³

  For Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 he sent her a book. Acting maliciously towards a government that allows civic freedom and the free practice of religion, it says, "is a criminal act rather than jihad", and his followers are "a faithful army" for the British government "overtly as well as covertly".²⁷⁴ In 1900 he announced that "jihad with the sword has ended from this time forward", and made loyalty to the British a condition of taking his pledge.²⁷⁵

  He claimed to be the Promised Messiah and the Mahdi, and a prophet who brings no new law.^275,276 Mainstream Muslims hold that this breaks the finality of Muhammad's prophethood,²⁷⁷ and Pakistan's constitution has classed his followers as non-Muslims since 1974.²⁷⁸ The religious studies scholar Adil Hussain Khan files talk of the founder's secret motives under "a slew of elaborate conspiracy theories". The loyalty needs no theory. It is in his books.²⁷⁷

• 

  Mirza Masroor Ahmad

  Head of the Ahmadiyya movement since 2003; based in Surrey

  The movement's caliphs have lived in Britain since 1984, when the fourth left Pakistan for London.²⁷⁷ In 2019 the headquarters moved to Tilford, Surrey.²⁷⁹ At Westminster in 2008 he cited British rule of pre-partition India as an example of Britain's "quality of fairness", and a cabinet minister brought the prime minister's good wishes.²⁸⁰

  In 2008 Stephen Harper attended the caliph's inauguration of the movement's Calgary mosque, and said Canadians would see "the moderate, benevolent face of Islam" in the mosque and the people who worship there.²⁸¹ A Westminster group for the community had the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, as vice chair in 2025, and the community runs its secretariat.²⁸² In a 2018 Commons debate an MP noted that Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, an Ahmadi, "was one of the first Ministers looking after the counter-extremism policy".²⁸³ The caliph is no simple mouthpiece. In 2012, speaking at the European Parliament, he said the West showed less concern for the Palestinians than for Syria and Libya, and warned that this "perceived double standard" was feeding anger in Muslim countries.²⁸⁴

The Gülen movement

• 

  Fethullah Gülen

  Founder of the Hizmet movement; in Pennsylvania from 1999; died 2024

  RAND's 2003 report names him as a modernist voice, with "a version of Islamic modernity that is strongly influenced by Sufism and stresses diversity, tolerance, and nonviolence".³³ He came to the US for medical treatment in 1999, was charged in Turkey, and stayed in Pennsylvania.²⁸⁵ When the immigration service turned down his petition to be classed as an "alien of extraordinary ability", a federal judge ordered it approved in July 2008.²⁸⁶

  According to the historian Michael Reynolds, his application had the backing of two former CIA officers, Graham Fuller and George Fidas, and a former US ambassador to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz.²⁸⁷ The Wall Street Journal counted 29 letters of support, one of them from Fuller, whom it described as "a resident consultant at the Rand Corp."²⁸⁵

  In June 2010, in his first interview with an American news organisation, he said the Gaza flotilla's failure to seek accord with Israel "is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters". He said he had made a charity linked to his movement get Israel's permission before helping Gazans.²⁸⁵ USA Today found that his movement secretly paid for as many as 200 trips to Turkey for members of Congress and their staff from 2008.²⁸⁸ Turkey accuses him of directing the 2016 coup attempt. He denied it, and the US never charged him. He died in Pennsylvania on 20 October 2024.²⁸⁹

Madkhalism

• RM

  Rabee al-Madkhali

  Saudi hadith scholar, namesake of Madkhalism; died 2025

  He rose during the Gulf war of 1990 and 1991 as "a staunch defender of the Saudi royal family's decision to allow U.S. troops on Saudi soil", and taught obedience to the ruler "regardless of how just or pious he is".²⁹⁰ When the Sahwa clerics attacked that decision, a West Point study says, the government arrested them and "strongly backed Madkhali". The same 2006 study suggested the US "could discretely fund mainstream Salafi figures like Madkhali". It is a proposal. No source here shows it was carried out.²⁹¹

  In February 2011, as the Arab uprisings spread, he taught that a ruler who prays may not be risen against, and called the demonstrations ignorant, barbaric and chaotic. He is no friend of the West. The same talk calls Western democracy hostile to Islam.²⁹² The Crisis Group warns that the doctrine could bolster "any figure or faction that seeks to impose themselves in an undemocratic manner while claiming religious legitimacy by allying with them".²⁹⁰

  In Libya, the Crisis Group reports, Qadhafi let the movement grow because it "preached against political dissent". From early 2018 Madkhali openly urged his Libyan followers to back Khalifa Haftar, and Madkhali units became "key to his fighting strength".²⁹⁰ He died on 9 July 2025.²⁹³

• 

  Khalifa Haftar

  Commander of the eastern Libyan army

  He told Jeune Afrique in 2018, as the Crisis Group quotes him, that the Madkhali Salafis "are indeed our allies. They believe in the authority of the state".²⁹⁰ Amnesty International said in 2022 that his son Saddam led the Tariq Ben Zeyad group, which is reported to include many Madkhalis. The group got money and equipment from Haftar's army, some of which appears to have come from the UAE and Jordan, according to UN experts.²⁹⁴ The Crisis Group places Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE behind Haftar, but found no evidence for claims that the Madkhalis are a Saudi "Trojan horse".²⁹⁰

The Liberal Islam Network

• 

  Ulil Abshar Abdalla

  Co-founder, Liberal Islam Network, Jakarta, 2001

  The network was founded in March 2001.²⁹⁵ Its statement of principles holds that "the idea of truth (in the interpretation of religion) is relative", and that "Religion should be of the private domain".²⁹⁶ In a Kompas article in November 2002, Ulil wrote that there is no God's law in the sense most Muslims understand it. The headscarf, cutting off hands, qisas and stoning, he wrote, need not be followed, because they are local expressions of Islam in Arabia.²⁹⁷

  The Washington Post reported in 2009 that he set up the network "with Asia Foundation funding", and that the foundation's work against hard-line Islam in Indonesia was part of "a USAID-financed program called Islam and Civil Society". It said he was flown to Washington in 2002 to meet officials including Paul Wolfowitz, and that the Asia Foundation later pulled the money.²⁹⁸ RAND's 2007 report names the network in its plans for Southeast Asia, and lists the Asia Foundation among groups "funded by the U.S. government".³⁴ In the foundation's 2025 financial year, $79.8 million of its $90.8 million in contributions came as government grants. The return does not say how much of that came from the US.²⁹⁹

  In 2005 the Indonesian Ulema Council ruled it forbidden for Muslims to follow religious pluralism, secularism and liberalism.³⁰⁰ In 2022, under Yahya Cholil Staquf, Nahdlatul Ulama made Ulil head of its research body, Lakpesdam.³⁰¹

Humanitarian Islam

• 

  Yahya Cholil Staquf

  Co-founder, Humanitarian Islam; head of Nahdlatul Ulama, 2021 to 2026

  RAND's 2007 report wanted network-building in Southeast Asia to "incorporate NGO work with the moderate traditionalist Indonesian organization Nahdlatul Ulama".³⁴ In May 2017 NU's youth wing, GP Ansor, adopted a Declaration on Humanitarian Islam. It calls for "an alternative Islamic orthodoxy", and says any attempt to set up a universal Islamic state or caliphate "will only lead to disaster for Muslims".³⁰² LibForAll, a North Carolina foundation, credits its co-founder, C. Holland Taylor, with writing it together with Staquf.³⁰³

  On 31 May 2018 President Joko Widodo swore him onto his advisory council.³⁰⁴ Two weeks later he spoke at the American Jewish Committee's Global Forum in Jerusalem, and met Benjamin Netanyahu.^305,306 He was elected NU chairman in December 2021.³⁰⁷

  In August 2025 he invited Peter Berkowitz, who ran the State Department's policy planning staff from 2019 to 2021, to teach on NU's leadership course.^308,309 That November NU's supreme council removed him, over speakers "allegedly linked to 'international Zionist networks'".³¹⁰ He apologised and called the invitation his mistake.³¹¹ He was restored in January 2026, then lost the chair at NU's congress on 31 August 2026.^312,313

  The 2025 tax return of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, lists him, unpaid, as its deputy chairman and president, with Taylor as deputy chairman and chief executive.³¹⁴ Its founders in 2021 include Yaqut Cholil Qoumas, then Indonesia's minister of religious affairs.³¹⁵

• CT

  C. Holland Taylor

  Co-founder and chief executive, LibForAll Foundation

  He set up LibForAll in 2003 with Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia's former president. It calls itself a nonprofit "formed in the wake of 9/11 to help meet U.S. and international peace and security needs".³¹⁶ RAND's 2007 report names the "North Carolina-based Libforall Foundation" among US groups doing the work it recommends.³⁴ The Washington Post reported that its money came from wealthy Americans, among them heirs of the Hanes underwear fortune, and from European groups. Taylor said the US government had given only $50,000, from a State Department counterterrorism unit.²⁹⁸

  Ansor's letter with the 2017 declaration names him its international emissary for the United Nations, the Americas and Europe, and tells him to take the text "to various international parties".³⁰² LibForAll's latest tax return describes its work with NU and Ansor as projecting strategic influence from Indonesia to Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.³¹⁷ In March 2026 he testified to the US Congress's Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and passed on Staquf's greetings.³¹⁸

The Qur'an's verse 4:34 opens, in the Saheeh International translation: "Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allāh has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth." For wives whose "arrogance" is feared it gives three steps, the last of them "strike them [lightly]". The translators' footnote says the Prophet "never struck a woman or a servant", and laid down that the striking "must not be severe or damaging and that the face be avoided".³¹⁹

The classical commentator Ibn Kathir reads the first line as making the man "her maintainer, caretaker and leader who disciplines her if she deviates", "because men excel over women and are better than them for certain tasks". The striking comes only after advice and separation in bed have failed, "without severe beating". A husband whose wife obeys him "does not have the right to beat her or shun her bed".³²⁰

Four more verses treat men and women differently. Husbands "have a degree over them", in 2:228.³²¹ A son inherits "what is equal to the share of two females", in 4:11.³²² A debt needs two male witnesses, or "a man and two women", in 2:282.³²³ And 4:3 allows a man "two or three or four" wives, or one if he fears he cannot be just.³²⁴

Feminist Islam calls the classical reading of these verses patriarchal. Asma Barlas subtitled her 2002 book Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an.³²⁵ Ayesha Chaudhry calls the Islamic tradition "fundamentally patriarchal".³²⁶ Two founders of the Musawah movement called their 2012 essay "Decoding the 'DNA of Patriarchy' in Muslim family laws". In it they wrote that qiwamah and wilayah, men's authority and guardianship, are "not Qur'anic concepts but juristic constructs".³²⁷

Their answers come in three kinds. Some reread the verses and blame the men who wrote the commentaries. Some go after the hadith and the men who narrated them. And some concede that the text itself carries the hierarchy, or the permission to strike, then refuse it anyway.

Amina Wadud, who led the 2005 prayer above, is the plainest case. "There is no getting around this one," she wrote of 4:34 in 2006, "even though I have tried through different methods for two decades." Then: "This leads me to clarify how I have finally come to say 'no' outright to the literal implementation of this passage." Later in the same book: "the Qur'an is not God. Words are fallible."³²⁸

RAND picked the same issues. Cheryl Benard's 2003 report compares the camps on what it calls "Marker Issues", among them polygamy, the hijab and wife-beating. Of the verse on striking, it says the modernists "doubt the authenticity of that sura altogether". For the hadith it proposes that "a body of 'counterhadith' should be made available".³³ The 2007 report says "Moderates are hospitable to Muslim feminists", and that they want discriminatory injunctions on women reinterpreted, for example the rule "that a daughter's inheritance should be half that of a son's". It names Sisters in Islam, in Malaysia, among the groups that promote gender equity.³⁴ Benard did not count Wadud as one of hers. She lists Wadud's first book among the traditionalist publications sketching a "kinder, gentler" vision of Islam.³³

The scholars

• AB

  Asma Barlas

  Professor emerita of politics, Ithaca College

  She holds that the Qur'an is "egalitarian and antipatriarchal", and that the fault lies with its readers.³²⁵ She does not reject 4:34. She rereads it "as charging men with maintaining women from their economic resources".³²⁵ Kecia Ali cites her for the reading that the verse may favour some men over other men.³²⁹ In 2008 she held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.³³⁰

• 

  Fatima Mernissi

  Moroccan sociologist; died 2015

  Her 1987 book, published in English as The Veil and the Male Elite, takes on the hadith "Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity." She goes after its narrator, Abu Bakra. Umar, she writes, had him flogged for false testimony, so he "must be rejected as a source of Hadith by every good, well-informed Malikite Muslim". She calls 4:34 "a verse in flagrant contradiction" to the verse she names after Umm Salama.³³¹ Ibn Kathir cites the same hadith in his commentary on 4:34.³²⁰

  She won the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2003, shared with Susan Sontag.³³² In 2004 she was one of three Islamic thinkers given the Erasmus Prize, on the theme of religion and modernity. The Dutch king is the prize foundation's patron.^333,334 She died in 2015.³³³

• LB

  Laleh Bakhtiar

  Translator, The Sublime Quran; died 2020

  Her 2007 translation renders the last step of 4:34 as "go away from them". She called her reading "a return to the Sunnah", not a personal interpretation.³³⁵ She told the New York Times she had nearly stopped at that verse: "I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can't keep translating." The paper reported that she does not speak Arabic but learned to read the texts while working in Iran, and that she found "to go away" among six pages of definitions of daraba. In the same article Seyyed Hossein Nasr said: "I am not apologetic about why the Koran says this."³³⁶ She died in 2020.³³⁷

• KA

  Kecia Ali

  Professor of religion and Islamic studies, Boston University

  She concedes what Barlas will not. Of 4:34 she wrote in 2003 that "it is impossible to remove all difference or hierarchy from this verse without doing violence to the Qur'anic text itself".³³⁸ Her 2006 book argues that, because it privileges male sexual agency, "in some crucial sense the Qur'an is a thoroughly androcentric" text, though not, she argues, a misogynist one. It says it is "not enough to simply posit" that the Qur'an is egalitarian. It traces classical marriage law to milk, "ownership, dominion, or control".³²⁹

• AC

  Ayesha S. Chaudhry

  Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice, University of British Columbia

  For her 2013 book she read the commentators and jurists on 4:34, and found "Not a single pre-colonial Islamic jurist or exegete" who read it as forbidding husbands to hit their wives. The tool they recommended most often was the siwak, a tooth-stick. She calls the "mythologized" tradition "an obstacle" to new readings of the verse.³²⁶

  Her chair is a federal Canadian post, awarded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.^339,340 For a chair at her tier the programme pays the university $100,000 a year for five years.³⁴¹

• AH

  Aysha Hidayatullah

  Associate professor of theology and religious studies, University of San Francisco

  Her 2014 book, Feminist Edges of the Qur'an, looks at what feminist readers had done with the text and grants the point: "on some level our critics are correct: we have sometimes tried to make the Qur'an mean what we want it to mean". Of the meaning "to strike" in 4:34 she writes that "there is no act of interpretation that may eradicate this possibility". Her conclusion is that while the Qur'an "takes remarkable steps toward equality", it "perhaps cannot in the end be fully reconciled with our understandings of sexual equality and justice".³⁴²

• 

  Leila Ahmed

  Professor of divinity emerita, Harvard Divinity School

  Her 1992 book, Women and Gender in Islam, finds "two distinct voices within Islam". Its ethical vision, she writes, "is stubbornly egalitarian", and in tension with "the hierarchical structure of marriage pragmatically instituted in the first Islamic society".³⁴³ She won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, worth $100,000.³⁴⁴

The organisations

• 

  Zainah Anwar

  Co-founder, Sisters in Islam and Musawah

  Sisters in Islam began in the late 1980s with eight women who met in her living room. Its own history names them, among them Amina Wadud and Sharifah Zuriah Aljeffri, then "cultural affairs adviser at the US Embassy". Their reading of the Qur'an, it says, found that "it was not Islam that oppressed women, but male-centred interpretations of the Qur'an".³⁴⁵ Its booklet on 4:34 argues that "daraba is a restriction on existing practice, and not a recommendation".³⁴⁶

  The Sigrid Rausing Trust gave it £610,000 from 2005 to 2013.³⁴⁷ The European Commission committed €707,866 in 2017, and €761,442 in 2022 for gender-equality work in "conservative environments".^348,349

  In July 2014 Selangor gazetted a fatwa that declared SIS Forum, the company behind the group, deviant, along with anyone holding "liberalism and religious pluralism".³⁵⁰ In June 2025 the Federal Court ruled 3 to 1 that the fatwa could not bind a company, since only natural persons can profess Islam. A company, the Chief Justice said, "lacks the capacity to repent".³⁵¹ The next day the Sultan of Selangor urged the group to stop calling itself Sisters in Islam.³⁵² It dropped "Islam" from its public name that July, and now signs as SIS Forum (Malaysia).³⁵³ The Commission paid it another €316,229 in October.³⁴⁹

• MSW

  Musawah

  Launched in Kuala Lumpur, February 2009

  Sisters in Islam launched it at a meeting of about 250 people from 47 countries.³⁵⁴ From 2010 to 2018 it ran a research project on qiwamah and wilayah,³⁵⁵ which produced the 2015 book Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.³⁵⁶ Its 2024 brief on the project calls the two concepts "human-made concepts constructed by jurists", and says: "These patriarchal constructs lead to injustice and do not reflect or serve family realities today."³⁵⁷

  Sweden's aid agency has committed SEK 36.5 million to it since 2020. Its grant record says Musawah wants to "present alternatives to the prevailing view of Islam and legislation".^358,359 The Ford Foundation's tax returns show $1,411,000 paid to it from 2014 to 2024.³⁶⁰ Open Society gave it $720,000 in 2021 and 2023,³⁶¹ and the Dutch foreign ministry committed €1,017,301 through a consortium that ran from 2021 to 2025.^362,363

Some governments pay for the theology itself. From 2016 Canada's International Development Research Centre put CAD 786,400 into a family-law project whose plan says the solution "must involve the promotion of moderate interpretations of Islamic Law".³⁶⁴ In 2023 Germany's foreign office budgeted €35,000 for a project whose first stated aim is the "Dissemination of KUPI Fatwas", the rulings of Indonesia's Congress of Women Ulama.³⁶⁵

The states

• 

  Beji Caid Essebsi

  President of Tunisia; died 2019

  On Women's Day, 13 August 2017, he said the inheritance law could now be amended step by step toward full equality, and announced a commission on individual freedoms and equality inside the presidency.³⁶⁶ The next day the office of the Mufti of the Republic backed him.³⁶⁷ In 2016, by Espace Manager's account, the Mufti himself, Othman Battikh, had called equal inheritance contrary to sharia.³⁶⁸ In September 2017 Tunisia ended its ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men.³⁶⁹

  Tunisia's cabinet approved an equal-inheritance bill on 23 November 2018.³⁷⁰ Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: "I warmly welcome this significant move to secure equal rights for women and men in Tunisia."³⁷¹ The bill stalled in committee³⁷² until, in Al Jazeera's words, "it was forgotten with the death of Essebsi" in July 2019.³⁷³

• 

  Bochra Belhaj Hmida

  Chaired the Commission on Individual Freedoms and Equality (COLIBE), 2017 to 2018

  Her nine-member commission handed its report to the president in June 2018.³⁷⁴ It proposed equal inheritance, and repealing article 23 of the Personal Status Code, which makes the husband head of the family.^375,376 One of its authors, Abdelmajid Charfi, said the proposals "in no way contravene Islamic precepts, but embody an enlightened reading of these precepts".³⁷⁷ The commission's website says UN Women supported its design.³⁷⁴

  On 11 August 2018 thousands marched on parliament against the report.³⁷⁷ Al Jazeera reported signs that called the proposals "an affront to God's word".³⁷⁸

• 

  Abbas Shoman

  Deputy head of Al-Azhar in 2017

  Two days after Essebsi's speech he said that inheritance is divided by verses of definitive meaning, which admit no ijtihad and do not change with time or place. When people without the learning interfere in such rulings, he said, it is squandering, not renewal.³⁷⁹ Al-Azhar's statement of 20 August 2017 called equal inheritance a reckless idea that provokes Muslims, and said the inheritance verses leave no room for ijtihad.³⁸⁰

• 

  Kais Saied

  President of Tunisia since 2019

  On Women's Day 2020 he said the Qur'an's text on inheritance is clear, and called the fight over inheritance a mistaken one.³⁸¹ In Human Rights Watch's translation: "The Qur'an is clear about this and there is no room for interpretation."³⁸²

• 

  Mehmet Görmez

  President of Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs until 2017

  In February 2008 the BBC reported that the directorate, the Diyanet, had commissioned "a fundamental revision of the Hadith". Görmez, then a senior official, gave it an example about women: a hadith that limits their travel, which he called genuine but temporary. "It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that."³⁸³ Two days later the Diyanet denied that the work was a reform or a revision. Among the claims it called baseless was that hadith were being read within a moderate Islam framework.³⁸⁴

  The project's seven volumes keep the travel hadith, as a road-safety rule, and keep 4:34. They call its last resort a solution tied to the society and family of that day.³⁸⁵ The Diyanet had gone further in 2002. A consultation of about a hundred theologians declared that every report demeaning a woman for being a woman is either distorted or fabricated, and that the witness rule in 2:282 reflected women's passive role in commerce at the time.³⁸⁶ Görmez left office at the end of July 2017. SWP, a Berlin think tank, says the public does not know for sure whether he was dismissed or forced to resign.³⁸⁷

• 

  Mohammed VI

  King of Morocco and Commander of the Faithful

  His 2004 family code puts the family under the direction of both spouses.³⁸⁸ It dropped the wife's duty of obedience, which the 1957 code had listed among the husband's rights.³⁸⁹ Presenting it in 2003, he said that as Commander of the Faithful he could not permit what God had forbidden.³⁹⁰

  In December 2024 the minister of religious affairs, Ahmed Toufiq, presented the Higher Council of Ulema's opinion on a new review. He said the council agreed with most of the 17 questions the King had put to it. Three, he said, touch formal texts that allow no ijtihad: DNA evidence of paternity, inheritance between Muslims and non-Muslims, and abolishing ta'sib. Under ta'sib, when someone dies leaving daughters but no son, male relatives on the father's side take what is left after the daughters' shares.³⁹¹ For the daughters, the council offered gifts as the alternative.³⁹²

Riyadh loosened male guardianship in August 2019. Any Saudi citizen may now apply for a passport,³⁹³ and the regulations let women over 21 travel without a guardian's consent.³⁹⁴ Human Rights Watch noted that a Saudi woman still needed a male guardian's approval to marry.³⁹⁵

Pink Islam teaches that same-sex relationships fit inside Islam. Its mosques are small. Its backers are not. The records below show grants from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Open Society Foundations and a German federal ministry.

The scholar Joseph Massad named the project behind it: "It is these missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the organizations that represent them which constitute what I will call the Gay International."³⁹⁶ Jasbir Puar calls the rise of "national homosexuality" alongside American empire "homonationalism".³⁹⁷ Sarah Schulman described Israel's version as "a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians' human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life".³⁹⁸

• MPV

  Muslims for Progressive Values

  Los Angeles, founded 2007

  Co-founded in 2007 by Ani Zonneveld and Pamela Taylor.³⁹⁹ Its principles "support full equality and inclusion of all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, in society and in the Muslim community".⁴⁰⁰ In 2011 msnbc reported that Zonneveld planned to officiate the Islamic wedding of a lesbian couple.³⁹⁹ In 2018 a UN committee recommended the group for special consultative status at the Economic and Social Council.⁴⁰¹

  Its funders include the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, with grants in filings from 2014 to 2022,⁴⁰² and the Open Society Foundations, with $50,000 in 2019 and $150,000 in 2021 for general support.^403,404

• 

  El-Farouk Khaki

  Co-founder, Unity Mosque, Toronto

  A refugee lawyer who co-founded Unity Mosque in 2009, where "anyone can give the call to, or lead, prayer".⁴⁰⁵ NBC News reported no dress code for women, no gender segregation, and women regularly leading Friday prayers.⁴⁰⁶

• 

  Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed

  Founder, Homosexuels musulmans de France

  Founded HM2F, the association of gay Muslims in France. He told France 24 in 2012 that nothing in Islam or the Quran forbids homosexuality.⁴⁰⁷ In November 2012 he announced a prayer space where women and men would pray together, with marriages to follow.⁴⁰⁸

• DA

  Daayiee Abdullah

  Imam in Washington, DC; died 2025

  In 2011 msnbc called him "the nation's only gay imam". He read the story of Lut as a punishment for something closer to gang rape than consensual homosexual sex.³⁹⁹ That year he created the Light of Reform Mosque in a Washington public library, and in 2015 the MECCA Institute.⁴⁰⁶ He officiated same-sex marriages.⁴⁰⁹ He died on 3 August 2025.⁴¹⁰

• 

  Seyran Ateş

  Founder, Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, Berlin

  A lawyer who opened the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin on 16 June 2017, where men and women pray together.⁴¹¹ Women may preach and lead prayer there, and the mosque says its doors are open to all LGBTIQ people.⁴¹² Egypt's Dar al-Ifta said the mosque's ideology violated the rules of Islam.⁴¹³

  The mosque names the ZEIT-Stiftung as the source of more than a tenth of its 2019 income.⁴¹⁴ Its contact point for LGBTIQ Muslims is funded by the German federal family ministry's Demokratie leben! programme, and the mosque's 2020 financial plan lists €179,810 from it.^415,416

• IMI

  Inclusive Mosque Initiative

  London, launched November 2012

  Launched in London in November 2012.⁴¹⁷ It calls itself "an intersectional feminist mosque" and says: "We are an LGBTQI+ inclusive mosque." Its prayers are "often led by women, without any gender segregation". It says the Oak Foundation funds its running costs and campaigning.^418,419

A ruling that follows the evidence changes when the evidence does. A ruling that follows a sponsor changes when the sponsor does. Three documented cases, the last of them a man who would not change.

• Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia

  Before

  In January 2017 he called concerts and cinemas "a depravity" and warned that cinemas meant mixing of the sexes.⁴²⁰ He had called that mixing "evil and catastrophe", and women driving "a dangerous matter that exposes women to evil".⁴²¹

  After

  Cinemas reopened in April 2018.⁴²² As King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman rose, AP reported, he would "soften, change or silence his social stances", and he later supported the end of the driving ban. He died in September 2025.⁴²¹

• Aidh al-Qarni, preacher of the Sahwa

  Before

  A leading voice of the Sahwa, the Islamic revival movement that the Saudi state now demonises.^423,424 In September 2017 the state arrested prominent clerics, among them Salman al-Ouda.⁹²

  After

  On 6 May 2019, on a Ramadan talk show, he apologised "in the name of Al-Sahwa" for "the mistakes that have contradicted the Qur'an and Sunnah". Then: "I am today supportive of the moderate Islam, open to the world, which has been called for by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman."^423,425

• Salman al-Ouda, who would not

  Asked

  After the Saudi-led isolation of Qatar in mid-2017, the authorities ordered him to tweet a specific text supporting it, according to a family member.⁴²⁶

  Answer

  He tweeted a prayer instead: "May God harmonize between their hearts for the good of their people." He was arrested that September. Prosecutors brought 37 charges and asked for the death penalty.⁴²⁶ In May 2025 Amnesty International said he was still held in solitary confinement.⁴²⁷

The numbers match the superscripts above. Links go to the original, or to an archived copy where the original is gone. A few sit behind paywalls.

1. "Executive Summary of Report: Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and Its Interactions with Victims during the Investigation". U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, November 2020. justice.gov
2. "Jeffrey Epstein Charged In Manhattan Federal Court With Sex Trafficking Of Minors". U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 8 July 2019. justice.gov
3. "Investigation and Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, New York". U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, June 2023. oig.justice.gov
4. "Ghislaine Maxwell Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison For Conspiring With Jeffrey Epstein To Sexually Abuse Minors". U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 28 June 2022. justice.gov
5. Ryan Lucas. "DOJ says no evidence Jeffrey Epstein had a "client list" or blackmailed associates". NPR, 7 July 2025. npr.org
6. Alexander Bolton. "Senate unanimously approves bill to force release of Epstein files". The Hill, 18 November 2025. thehill.com
7. "Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act". U.S. Department of Justice, 30 January 2026. justice.gov
8. Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press. "Billionaire Les Wexner is being deposed in the Epstein files probe. Here's what documents show about their relationship". PBS NewsHour, 18 February 2026. pbs.org
9. Dareh Gregorian. "Billionaire Les Wexner tells lawmakers that he was "conned" by Jeffrey Epstein and did "nothing wrong"". NBC News, 18 February 2026. nbcnews.com
10. "A statement from Buckingham Palace". The Royal Family, 30 October 2025. royal.uk
11. Danica Kirka, Associated Press. "Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office over ties to Epstein". PBS NewsHour, 19 February 2026. pbs.org
12. Lauren Frayer and Leila Fadel. "U.K.'s ex-Prince Andrew is released after his arrest over Epstein revelations". NPR, 19 February 2026. npr.org
13. Nadine Batchelor-Hunt. "Lord Peter Mandelson Sacked As Ambassador To US". PoliticsHome, 11 September 2025. politicshome.com
14. Pan Pylas and Jill Lawless. "Former UK ambassador Mandelson released on bail after arrest in Epstein probe". Associated Press, 23 February 2026. apnews.com
15. Daniel Arkin. "Larry Summers' years of emails with Jeffrey Epstein roil Harvard". NBC News, 20 November 2025. nbcnews.com
16. Ashley Capoot. "Larry Summers takes leave at Harvard, resigns OpenAI board seat after Epstein email furor". CNBC, 19 November 2025. cnbc.com
17. Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart. "Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past". The New York Times, 12 October 2019. nytimes.com
18. "Bill Gates testifies in closed-door US House meeting over Epstein ties". Al Jazeera, 10 June 2026. aljazeera.com
19. Kate Sullivan. "Bill Clinton "knows nothing" about Epstein's "terrible crimes," spokesman says". CNN, 8 July 2019. cnn.com
20. Landon Thomas Jr. "Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery". New York, 28 October 2002. nymag.com
21. Kayla Epstein. "Epstein files takeaways: Possible co-conspirators, fake video and Trump trips". BBC News, 24 December 2025. bbc.com
22. Dareh Gregorian, Ryan Nobles and Kyle Stewart. "Bill Clinton tells lawmakers in closed-door testimony that he "saw nothing" and "did nothing wrong" related to Jeffrey Epstein". NBC News, 27 February 2026. nbcnews.com
23. Patrick Jarenwattananon, Tyler Bartlam and Scott Detrow. "Democratic lawmaker reacts to Trump's reversal on Epstein files". NPR, 17 November 2025. npr.org
24. Kate Plummer. "Jon Ossoff's "Epstein Class" Speech Lauded: "Every Democrat Needs To Watch"". Newsweek, 9 February 2026. newsweek.com
25. James B. Stewart. "The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People". The New York Times, 12 August 2019. nytimes.com
26. Sean Mathews. "Jeffrey Epstein was told to keep "close eye" on Saudi Arabia amid Ritz Carlton purge". Middle East Eye, 4 February 2026. middleeasteye.net
27. Syan Vallance. "Latest Epstein files documents reveal links to multiple monarchies". ABC News (Australia), 7 February 2026. abc.net.au
28. Tom Winter and Rich Schapiro. "Jeffrey Epstein used foreign passport with fake name to enter Saudi Arabia: prosecutors". NBC News, 17 July 2019. nbcnews.com
29. "Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files". Al Jazeera, 13 February 2026. aljazeera.com
30. Sana Noor Haq. "Powerful Dubai tycoon replaced after DOJ reveals sexually explicit emails with Epstein". CNN, 13 February 2026. cnn.com
31. Imran Mulla. "Andrew tried to have Epstein introduced to the UAE's Mohammed bin Zayed". Middle East Eye, 6 February 2026. middleeasteye.net
32. Elis Gjevori. "Epstein files show Kaaba cloth pieces from Mecca shipped to him via UAE-linked contacts". Middle East Eye, 1 February 2026. middleeasteye.net
33. Cheryl Benard. "Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies". RAND Corporation, MR-1716-CMEPP, 2003; RAND's catalogue lists 2004, pp. x-xiii, 3, 8-13, 23-24, 33, 37-38, 47-48, 54, 63, 70. rand.org
34. Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell H. Schwartz and Peter Sickle. "Building Moderate Muslim Networks". RAND Corporation, MG-574-SRF, March 2007, pp. xi, xiv, xviii, xxi-xxii, 13, 21, 26, 67-71, 79, 83-84, 88-97, 105, 110, 141, 164-165. rand.org
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Photographs

All from Wikimedia Commons or Wikipedia, under the licence named. Each links to its file page.

• Jeffrey Epstein: Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department, Public domain
• Mohammed bin Salman: وكالة الأنباء السعودية (Saudi Press Agency), CC BY-SA 4.0
• Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan: U.S. Department of State, Public domain
• Hisham Kabbani: Wissam7007, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Zuhdi Jasser: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Asra Nomani: United States House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, Public domain
• Maajid Nawaz: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Ed Husain: Martin Grüner Larsen, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Sara Khan: Mramoeba, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Hassen Chalghoumi: Guillaume from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0
• Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa: Dom.Ross, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Abdul Rahman al-Sudais: Prime Minister's Office, India, GODL-India
• Abdallah bin Bayyah: Web2man at Arabic Wikipedia, Public domain
• Hamza Yusuf: Omar Chatriwala from Doha, Qatar, CC BY 2.0
• Ali al-Jifri: AbaasYunas, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Abrahamic Family House, Abu Dhabi: Boubloub, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Amina Wadud: Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Irshad Manji: Michael Bachelard, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Mustafa Akyol: Malaoffice, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Pervez Musharraf: Antônio Cruz/ABr, CC BY 3.0 BR
• Javed Ahmad Ghamidi: CR Guru PK, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Mirza Ghulam Ahmad: Not credited, Public domain
• Mirza Masroor Ahmad: Tavis, CC BY 2.0
• Fethullah Gülen: VOA, Public domain
• Khalifa Haftar: US Department of State, Public domain
• Ulil Abshar Abdalla: Mimihitam, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Yahya Cholil Staquf: Advisory Council of the President of the Republic of Indonesia, Public domain
• Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed: G.Garitan, CC BY-SA 4.0
• El-Farouk Khaki: Kenn Chaplin, Public domain
• Seyran Ateş: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Fatima Mernissi: Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Leila Ahmed: Marginalia Review of Books, CC BY 3.0
• Zainah Anwar: Anasuyas, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Beji Caid Essebsi: U.S. Department of State from United States, Public domain
• Bochra Belhaj Hmida: Nawaat Youtube channel, CC BY 3.0
• Abbas Shoman: Akhbar El yom TV, CC BY 3.0
• Kais Saied: Quirinale, Attribution
• Mehmet Görmez: HakanIST, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Mohammed VI of Morocco: UN Climate Change, CC BY 2.0