In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks being conflated with civilizational chauvinism.
Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that encounter, and how quickly a conversation that should be healing can instead further inflame civilizational divisions that have been raging for a millennium, more recently under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction. I’m committed to religious pluralism, to the sense that the Word speaks every tongue available to human beings, and that no single institution or language can contain the divine. But that commitment doesn’t exempt me from blind spots. If anything, it increases my responsibility to slow down, learn more about what remain foreign cultural grammars, and to be careful with the metaphors I inherit and repeat.
That’s why I invited Jared Morningstar into a follow-up conversation. Jared is in a rare position: a scholar-practitioner with deep philosophical training, a Westerner and a modern subject who is also a practicing Muslim, trying to hold together fidelity to the tradition’s depth, breadth, and richness with a critical, non-defensive honesty about real internal tensions.
We began with the word Islam itself, which is often translated as “submission.” Jared showed how, in Arabic, that translation sits inside a wider semantic field rooted in the same consonants as salam: peace, tranquility, rest. The connotation is less “conformity to an imposed order” and, for him, more like the Taoist wu wei: a harmony in which the active/passive dualism melts.
From there, the conversation opens out into a variety of intersections: the Qur’anic reverence for Jesus as Word of God (without an incarnational Christology), Sufi Neoplatonic currents like the Nur Muhammadiyah, and the shared Hellenic grammar that makes “Athens and Jerusalem” a more accurate origin story than the usual “foreign other” framing. Jared also complicated the usual modern western frame of “church and state” by describing Sunni Islam’s decentralized institutional ecology—legal pluralism, multiple schools of jurisprudence and theology, and the crucial point that Sharia is not akin to positive law in the modern Western sense, but a transcendent ideal approached through interpretive jurisprudence. Modern Islamic nation-states have become theocratic, but Jared’s reminders about recent history helped unveil possible colonial distortions, ie, the pathological fusion produced by the Western imperial importation of the nation-state form into a very different civilizational context.
I sought out this dialogue with Jared primarily because I needed it. I needed a friend who could both correct my shortcuts and deepen my sense of what’s alive inside Islamic spirituality beyond the noxious Western media environment that profits from narratives of clash and incommensurability. If Christianity is going to move beyond itself and avoid being captured by yet another instantiation of the civilizational crusade complex, then Christians (and post-Christians, and seekers circling the Christ) have to become more fluent in the other tongues in which the divine has been praised, feared, wrestled with, and loved. My hope is that this conversation contributes in some small way to that fluency. I offer it to your ears as a peace-full attempt to tune the heart to a cosmic music grand enough to include not only the more than half of humanity identified with the Abrahamic faiths, but all of humanity.
Here’s the transcript of my talk with Jared:
Matt Segall: Thank you for joining me.
Jared Morningstar: My pleasure. Thanks for making the time.
Matt Segall: I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken with Jacob Kishere.
Jared Morningstar: Yeah, a couple times, actually.
Matt Segall: Okay, I need to watch those—he has a podcast. I’m a little ill-prepared for this discussion then, because I haven’t seen them. But I’ve spoken with Jacob a few times, and twice we recorded a podcast on the theme of “Christianity beyond itself.” I found those conversations really generative. In the last one, Islam came up, and I feel a real urgency for that conversation to happen.
I also feel rather ill-equipped for that encounter, and yet very eager to become better equipped—to speak about it in a way that fosters healing and doesn’t further inflame civilization-level divisions that, for the better part of the last millennium, have often been on the verge of ripping the world apart in an irreversibly damaging way. Now that we have weapons of mass destruction, this civilizational encounter needs to happen in a way that doesn’t get us all killed.
Jared Morningstar: Yeah. In ways, I feel ill-prepared too, even though I consider myself someone who—on a kind of objective level—has been studying this tradition for about a decade. I’ve done a lot of work not only as a somewhat removed academic, but also as a participant: someone identified with this tradition. And still, I don’t quite know how to explain the depth, breadth, and richness of Islamic intellectual traditions. Despite a decade of deep study, and personally knowing other people in this tradition with deep commitments—people who have had access to traditional modes of learning and discourse—it truly feels like I have a kindergarten-level familiarity, given how refined and sophisticated these discursive traditions are within this civilization.
But nonetheless, I find myself in an interesting position as someone who does have real familiarity with the tradition and can speak to certain things, with a unique vantage as a Westerner—a modern Western subject—while also being a practicing, engaged Muslim, and someone with philosophical training in Islamic thought, as well as in various lineages of contemporary and ancient Western thought.
So the hermeneutics I try to bring to religious, cultural, and political questions involving Islam are an interesting hybrid. I’m trying to hold different commitments together: a commitment to the richness and sophistication of the Islamic intellectual heritage, while also viewing it from a critical vantage using tools from our contemporary philosophical toolbox. But it’s a delicate and frankly dangerous spot to be. I don’t want to do damage to this tradition, especially in a context of so much misrepresentation and mischaracterization that fuels exactly the kind of civilizational and religious “clash” many people feel.
At the same time, I don’t want to be stuck in a defensive, apologetic posture that only papers over things—only defends. There are genuine points of tension, and contexts where we probably would like to move toward a new dynamic, a new situation, a new vantage point. So trying to hold those lightly and complexly, dynamically together is my best intention, at least.
Matt Segall: Thank you—that’s a wonderful entryway into this conversation. You have a unique position as a scholar-practitioner of a minority tradition, existing in the United States within a majority Christian and secular context.
In my own way, I’m also a scholar-practitioner. I have a relationship to all world religions, but Christianity is where the practitioner dimension is most explicit: practicing as a practitioner, having a relationship to Christ, while also engaging philosophically and in a scholarly way with a vast, multifaceted, internally conflictual Christian tradition. I’m always trying to learn more about my own tradition as a scholar.
Having that practitioner dimension for both of us makes this not just academically interesting. You describe yourself as a modern Western subject—and sure, both of us still inhabit that cultural form—but I also hear you as at least verging on, if not fully inhabiting, a metamodern, psychedelic, participatory, pluralist, processualist worldview. So there’s a lot of common ground for us to explore the relationship between Islam and the West.
We also have this complicated thing happening in the West: a lot of secularism alongside a resurgent fundamentalist Christianity, full of internal contradictions. The West is a mess. And when I look at the Islamic world, Iran seems to be spiraling again toward breakdown—on the verge of civil war, from what I can tell. Meanwhile, the United States is becoming a rogue state geopolitically. Maybe it always has been to some degree, but the mask is off now: power grabs without any justification in relation to democracy or international law. And internally we have Trump’s federal police killing people and claiming absolute immunity from prosecution. Things are spiraling both in the West and in the Islamic world.
And of course the Islamic world has many internal disputes that go beyond theological differences: real political factions, Sunni and Shia, and more. Islam gets grouped into a massive bloc for most Westerners—most Americans at least—and that’s just an infantile understanding of Islamic civilization.
You watched Jacob and my conversation. What stood out for you most when we were talking about Islam and its relationship to Christianity and the West?
Jared Morningstar: A couple things. Broadly, one thing that hit me was: I wished there was a little more familiarity and context with some of the lived, internal understandings here, in a way that would have enriched the discussion and helped avoid some of the dangers of mischaracterization that can happen so easily—especially in a media environment where, unless you have close first-hand experience with Muslims individually or culturally, it’s easy to absorb very narrow or outright incorrect understandings.
It’s not the fault of any individuals involved. It’s a manifestation of a noxious media environment and political context fueled by narratives of clash, incommensurability, and so on.
One particular example that stood out was the discussion of religious language or metaphor in Islam—right from the term itself: “Islam” as meaning “submission,” which is a very common English translation. There’s truth to that translation; it’s not entirely off-base. But familiarity with Arabic as a language colors it differently.
Arabic works primarily through triliteral consonant roots that create words: three consonants as a basic semantic unit, arranged with different vowels to form different words. Words with the same root have semantic linkages—a lexical field of associations.
With Islam, we have the consonants s-l-m. With different vowels you get words like “salam,” which connotes peace, tranquility, rest—being settled. So the submission Islam gestures toward already resonates semantically with tranquility and peace. From that vantage point, which is immediate for Arabic speakers and for Muslims familiar with common religious terms in Arabic, I don’t hear Islam as conformity to an imposed order or command. I hear something closer to a Taoist sense of wu wei: where the distinction between activity and passivity melts away, and one is in harmony with a flow, with a natural order.
So yes, it does mean submission, but that’s the connotation that pops up for Muslims, myself included. I just wish this kind of material were more readily known and available in these discussions.
Matt Segall: That’s extremely helpful. I like the Taoist framing you’re giving—peace instead of submission. As a Whiteheadian, I think of what Whitehead says at the end of Adventures of Ideas about peace. Peace can sound passive, but Whitehead insists it implies a kind of zest for life. It’s not a withdrawal from life, and it sublates the active–passive dualism. I resonate with that quite a bit.
It raises the importance of understanding the cultural grammar of religious scripture—how metaphors for the divine and our relationship to the divine are contextually embedded. You can’t rush to think you understand another tradition just because it’s been translated into English in a particular way.
The challenge for true religious pluralism, I think—speaking as someone oriented toward Christ and the revelation of the Word made flesh—is that there’s the Word, the Logos, and then the question of how it incarnates differently in each culture, in each language. Where pluralism comes in for me is not that I relativize my relationship to the revelation of Christ’s resurrection—however we interpret that statement. I think it’s true and real. But I also know that if the Logos has incarnated, that revelation can be translated in so many different ways.
In Islam, Jesus is important, but not the incarnation of the Word. Yet Islam’s relationship to the divine could still be understood as a translation of what I take to be revelation. Does that track for you?
Jared Morningstar: Absolutely. You might be surprised to learn that in the Qur’anic narrative, Jesus is referred to as the Word of God—Kalimatullah in Arabic. So these traditions are closer on that Christology point than one might initially anticipate. Of course, the Islamic perspective is not incarnational: Christ is not the Son of God, God made flesh, and so on. But Jesus is an authentic prophet of the one God, who came with a revelation that has a unique status as the Word of God.
And likewise, Muhammad has a revelation too. Then you get into very interesting Sufi metaphysics, especially in more mature Islamic discursive traditions, heavily influenced by Neoplatonism—like the Christology of certain church fathers and medieval Christian thinkers. There’s a lot of resonance, and it’s also worth unpacking the real differences.
One main divider is that there is something genuinely unique about the Incarnation in a historical and particular sense, and it’s in that sense that Islam rejects the Christian position. In Islam, we have many prophets. None are incarnations of God, but all bring a manifestation of the divine in the form of revelation to a community. They’re more archetypal figures. You get more of a cast of characters, rather than the Christ archetype elevated as the central and—often in Christianity—exclusive mode of God’s self-disclosure in the world.
For me personally, that’s been an attractor on the Islamic side. It’s easier to square on a rational level: there have been all kinds of modes of divine disclosure throughout history, each with unique characteristics, without one totalizing, violent mode—even as we have the Qur’anic revelation as a final communication in that form.
But the paradox and slipperiness of the Incarnation and Trinity—the dual personhood of Christ as fully divine and fully human—are exactly the points of Christianity that are so rich and have been generative. I don’t mean to denigrate them. But my grappling there has made Christianity more difficult to inhabit from the inside.
Matt Segall: Yeah. A few things come up for me. I’ve never found an easy relationship to a particular church or doctrinal lineage in Christianity. I feel very heterodox—on the esoteric fringes—and I was only drawn back to Christianity by personal experience, transpersonal experience if you want.
For me, a lot of institutional Christianity overemphasizes this particular Jewish guy who lived in the first century. That’s also what’s rich about it: the emphasis on the personal and the particular. But the Christ is a more cosmic being for me—present not only in every human being, but in some sense the spirit of the Earth itself. To say Jesus is special might mean he was a conduit through which Christ entered history in a different way. But now that it’s entered history, Jesus is great—and there’s still a task: not to idolize this particular Jewish guy, but to recognize the transformation within monotheism at that time that remains important.
That leads to another question I struggle with. I don’t want to be supersessionist, I don’t want to be anti-Semitic. I’m half Jewish myself. But I’m tempted by readings of the history of the Abrahamic faiths as an evolutionary process: from the particularity of Judaism, to Christianity as the recognition that God’s love is for all people—Peter and Paul arguing whether it’s just for Jews or for everyone, and Paul winning that argument—and then Islam centuries later. Do you see Islam as some further development? If so, what is Islam bringing?
And one last question: about Neoplatonism. Our friend John Vervaeke likes to say Neoplatonism is the cultural grammar of the West. Would you say it’s also the cultural grammar of the Muslim world, or is that going too far?
Jared Morningstar: I’d say yes: Hellenic sources are likewise a cultural grammar of Islamic civilization. There are other sources added, and Islamic intellectual heritage has its own unique endogenous developments, just as Christian theology in Christendom developed its own internal grammar. But recognizing the shared Hellenic inheritance problematizes setting “the West” and “Islamic civilization” as two distinct trajectories. There’s so much shared. Both are civilizational traditions rooted in Athens and Jerusalem, the ancient Near East, and Abrahamic religion. They’re closer to siblings than foreign others.
If you truly extract one from the other, you don’t really have them. Without the Arabic translation movement bringing Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers into Arabic—and then re-entering the West through Muslim Spain and other channels—you don’t get the same scholasticism and then the Renaissance. The whole trajectory of the West doesn’t make sense without the Islamic strand. Often Islamic thinkers themselves get written out, and you end up with Greek sources “cleansed” of that history.
But figures like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) mattered for the scholastics, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as well—Muslim theologians, legal thinkers, philosophers. And vice versa: Assyrian Christians were important players in the early Arabic translation movement under Islamic rulers. So you don’t get the uptake of Greek heritage without interreligious collaboration already.
It makes me wish we could rediscover these ties, because they’re so rich. Even without inventing new philosophical systems to make pluralism work, you can find already-existing historical contacts, collaborations, and shared genealogies that are profound.
Matt Segall: Yeah. We talk about East meeting West on the West Coast of the U.S. in the 1960s or something, but you can go back thousands of years—Alexander the Great expanding from Macedonia almost to India, and this influx into Greece of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and other Asian traditions. Then the Crusades—war again—while cultural exchange happens. Thomas Aquinas develops his philosophy in response to Islamic philosophers. Nicholas of Cusa stages an early attempt at interreligious dialogue after Constantinople is sacked. It’s always been war that leads these civilizations into deeper mirroring at crucial inflection points.
When we define “the West” as a coherent matrix, its identity has often been forged in opposition to the Islamic world. But opposition doesn’t mean a lack of mutual influence. What we’re trying to do is shift: maybe we don’t need war to get to know each other better. Maybe there’s a peace-full way—remembering our history and recognizing how much we share in deep cultural grammar. The resurgence of Platonism—neo-neo-neo Platonism—feels like a positive sign that can help build bridges.
Jared Morningstar: Yeah. And within Islamic civilization itself, there are some more positive examples than in European Christendom of collaboration and coexistence—without sanitizing conquest and empire. There was sophisticated Jewish thought in lands ruled by Islam in the so-called Golden Age. There were subjugations and questionable dynamics, but contrasted with Inquisition, Crusades, and expulsions in Christendom, there’s still something aspirational there.
Matt Segall: But I want you to come back and answer the question about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Is this a developmental unfolding? How do you understand that?
Jared Morningstar: Let me give a typical Muslim understanding, and try to flesh it out in a way listeners might resonate with, and then maybe go beyond it. One way Muslims have thought about the Abrahamic triad is that Islam is a later synthesis of Jewish and Christian revelations.
Judaism: the Old Testament prophets are authentic prophets; the Torah is authentic revelation. But historically, scriptures get corrupted over time, and communities lose contact with the revelation. Likewise Christianity: Jesus is an authentic prophet with a particularly high station; his revelation was authentic; a community received it; but over time it got corrupted and people went astray from the heart of Jesus’ mission and the revelation of the Gospel.
In Muslim polemics, Jews went too far toward legalism; Christians had the opposite issue, going too far toward a disembodied transcendental spirituality disconnected from the world. Muhammad and the Qur’an are imagined as a corrective synthesis: a balancing of law—a particularized orientation with spiritual, ethical, interpersonal dimensions—while also providing a container for proper spiritual and mystical ideals.
Sufi thinkers especially see archetypes here: Moses foregrounding a more legalist archetype, Jesus a more spiritual archetype, and then the Qur’an as more universal and integrated. There’s also a historicist perspective: God communicated in particular modes to particular communities at particular times, and the Qur’an endeavors to be a more universal, synthesized communication to humanity. That said, it has its own exclusivism and trickiness, in ways similar to Christianity.
Matt Segall: Carrying on from that, could you say something about Muhammad’s significance? As a prophet you can’t depict, as someone understood to have received the Qur’an through the archangel Gabriel—yet also as a historical figure with a sense of mission. How do you understand Muhammad, and how would you compare or contrast him with Jewish prophets and with Jesus—leaving ambiguous the relationship between Jesus the person and Christ as a cosmic being?
Jared Morningstar: One of my favorite comparative frames is to parallel Muhammad not with Jesus, but with Mary.
Matt Segall: Mother Mary.
Jared Morningstar: Yes. For Muslims, the Qur’an is the Word of God—the exemplary, final, universal Word. Just as Mary was the vessel who bore the Word of God as Jesus, God made flesh, Muhammad is the vessel for the Qur’anic revelation of the Word.
In traditional Christian thinking, Mary’s virginity signified a kind of purity that made this miraculous. There’s an interesting parallel with the proclaimed illiteracy of Prophet Muhammad in traditional Islamic understanding: a purer vessel making the emergence of God’s Word miraculous.
As prophet and mission: a prophet brings revelation, brings sharia, brings divine law from God. Muhammad is more similar to Jewish prophets in that he’s not an incarnation of God. It’s rare in Islamic history for Muhammad to be divinized. Other figures have been divinized more regularly—for example, Ali in certain heterodox but rich strands of Shi’i thought.
However, in some Sufi discourses influenced by Neoplatonism, there’s an understanding of Muhammad more similar to Logos Christology: the Nur Muhammadiyah, the light of Muhammad. In this framework, the light of Muhammad is the first creation of God—a Neoplatonic first intellect read as the essence of Muhammad, the generative principle of creation. Even there, God remains distinct from this light. And there’s a distinction between cosmic Muhammad and Muhammad as historical person and prophet.
Matt Segall: That’s interesting. I want to note here that it was a Jewish philosopher—Philo of Alexandria—who made Paul’s translation or conversion of Judaism into Christianity possible. Philo’s understanding of the Logos is one of those Neoplatonic seeds, part of the mycelial subtext out of which these mushrooms—Christianity and Islam—grow.
I want to go back to the developmental framing: Judaism as exaggerated legalism, Christianity as exaggerated spirituality, Islam as synthesis. I’m reminded of Joachim of Fiore, the medieval Catholic abbot who saw three ages: Father, Son, Spirit. The age of the Father was Old Testament legalism, childhood. The age of the Son was the present church environment, adolescence—priests, doctrine, institutional structure. He foresaw an Age of the Spirit where individuals, personally transformed by Christ, no longer need legal systems or church hierarchies, but are inwardly in contact with the divine.
The church didn’t like that. He wasn’t wholesale condemned, but they called it an error. And then you have scholars like Charles Taylor—and my colleague Sean Kelly—arguing that the Incarnation, in some sense, seeded modern secular materialism. That’s a complicated argument, but it connects to what you’re describing: Islam critiquing an overly spiritual Christianity by re-sacralizing worldly life.
This brings up the question of secularism. Islam offers powerful critiques of Western secular modernity’s spiritual vapidness. And yet, there’s also the modern Western separation of church and state that hasn’t occurred in much of the Islamic world—though in the U.S. you wonder whether it ever really existed.
This becomes a flashpoint around women’s rights, among other things. I’ve heard sophisticated Islamic critiques of Western “freedom,” arguing that women exposing themselves in the way encouraged in the West isn’t necessarily freedom, but a subtler oppression—and that covering can be a deep freedom. There’s something to that, though of course similar issues exist in Catholicism.
So I’m wondering about whether some kind of Enlightenment-type event is needed—something that allows air to flow between religion and politics, church and state—in ways that don’t seem as possible in current Islamic states.
Jared Morningstar: Let me rehearse a wide range of materials, because there’s a lot to contextualize. I want to talk about sharia, but first religious institution in Islam. Because Christianity and Islam are close, Westerners often translate Christian forms directly onto Islam, and that’s a mistake.
There is no equivalent to “the church,” especially in Sunni Islam. Sunni Islam is very decentralized. There’s never been a figure equivalent to a Catholic pope, or even an archbishop, or a centralized religious leader with doctrinal authority. There isn’t an equivalent to a Protestant-style church as an organizing institutional body responsible for doctrine and congregational organization. These are not centralized functions in Sunni Islam—and even in Shi’ism, where things have a different flavor, you still don’t get a direct analogue.
Historically, you had a political leader—the caliph or sultan—an imperial ruler with religious justification for rule and mechanisms for a legal system at the political level. But this is distinct from sharia. The sultan’s law—siyasa—is not the same as fiqh, jurisprudence, which is what legal scholars do. Fiqh is the legal process of determining judgments of sharia on different matters.
A huge amount of sharia concerns acts of worship: where you place your hands during prayer, whether across the chest or at the sides. Different legal schools answer differently. An important point: sharia is not positive law in the Western sense. Sharia is a transcendent ideal. There’s no section of the Qur’an or Hadith labeled “sharia” listing laws. Jurisprudence is the process of taking Qur’an and Hadith and synthesizing them to determine what the right course of action is. Legal scholars issue fatwas—rulings—often non-binding. This is not like “it’s on the books, so it must be done.” It’s a sophisticated historical tradition continuing today, requiring many years of training, like becoming a lawyer, but with a spiritual-religious dimension.
Interestingly, legal scholars were not simply part of the state. Caliphs and sultans didn’t, in most cases, appoint them. This functions like checks and balances: legal scholars had popular authority and provided religious guidance in day-to-day matters—divorce, contracts, business, prayer, ablution, charity.
Legal scholars are also distinct from theologians, who address doctrine—aqidah. And what’s inspirational is the pluralism within Sunni Islam: four orthodox legal schools that mutually recognized legitimacy, even with preference for one’s own school. Likewise, multiple theological schools debated intensely, but these differences didn’t create separate “churches.” A Maturidi theologian can pray right alongside an Ash’ari theologian. These differences didn’t fracture communal life.
So Islam achieved civilizational unity without centralization in the way Christianity often had. In a melting-pot place like the West, you see different legal persuasions attending the same mosques and praying side by side. That’s an initial context for secularism.
That said, in the post-colonial nation-state era, you get unprecedented forms where sharia is codified as positive law. This was in response to the Western import of the nation-state as the organizing structure. It made some things worse than they were traditionally, in terms of theocratic and repressive structures we worry about. Those weren’t absent in traditional Islamic societies, but the picture was more complex. There’s a lot of scholarship showing the tension between traditional Islamic political structure and the nation-state—Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State is influential here. We’re in the nation-state paradigm, even as national sovereignty is now being challenged.
Matt Segall: That’s really helpful. In Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War and helps give rise to the nation-state, and over centuries it fosters the development of individual rights—initially for white landowners and then gradually for more people. But the nation-state was forcibly imported into the Islamic world, generating pathological fusions that didn’t exist pre-colonially. Your account breaks down caricatures and allows a more careful conversation.
So if we look at contemporary Iran or Saudi Arabia—both in conflict with the U.S. in different ways—I wonder: as a Muslim, how do you feel about claims made by leadership—bin Salman, the Ayatollah—about Islam and whether their political structures align with what Islamic faith would want for a community? And more broadly: how do you hope Islam as a tradition responds to the use of Islam for maintaining political power?
Jared Morningstar: Let me focus on Saudi Arabia, since I’m more familiar with the geopolitical aspects and it’s predominantly Sunni, which is what I’ve been speaking from. Iran is predominantly Shi’a and has different structures that would take longer to unpack.
Saudi Arabia is revealing historically. A key pointer is British colonialism of the Arabian Peninsula. As colonial pressures ramp up, you get an endogenous movement: a zealous religious reformer, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. He pushes a “back to the sources” reform, opposing the classical traditions—legal schools, theological schools—as innovations (bid‘ah), adulterations of pristine revelation. He advocates more direct access and is violent, targeting fellow Muslims as heretical for allegiance to medieval interpretive traditions.
Initially this is a backwater movement, but British colonialism sees the conflict and leverages it: supporting Wahhabism as a way to control the population. So you get an early alliance among a puritanical literalist reform movement, colonial powers with political-economic interests, and the House of Saud with dynastic aspirations. This unstable alliance continues into the modern period.
Saudi Arabia becomes a petrostate using petrodollars to export this puritanical, scripturalist vision globally. It’s hard to disentangle organic inspiration from the economic and political context that propelled it. Many people are genuinely inspired by it, and it has moderated since early reforms, but it created a stringent puritanical faction worldwide.
You end up with a state allied to puritanical religion alongside wanton hyper-modernism: private jets, petroeconomies—things absent from ancient texts. It’s an odd fusion. And because scripturalism pushed aside medieval interpretive traditions, it made room for a nation-state style of Islamic theocracy to seem permissible—something classical thinkers would have found odd. If all you have are ancient sources, with some political content but far from modern life, you might think: do the nation-state thing and infuse it with state-guided sharia, and that’s fine. But that’s not how classical Islamic thought operated for centuries, until very recently with the colonial period.
Matt Segall: That’s a clarifying case study. British colonizers fanning fundamentalism, then the U.S. having this bizarre relationship with Saudi Arabia.
To begin to wrap up and come back to the U.S., we have very recent events in New York City: a Muslim mayor, democratic socialist Muslim mayor, Zoran Mamdani. It’s an interesting inversion: progressives are usually wary of politicians bringing religion into politics, but in Zoran’s case his religion is part of the picture. He’s labeled a communist, but he’s not—he’s a democratic socialist, distinctions that are basic but hard for many Americans.
How do you feel about this development? Does it herald a positive shift? Where do you see dangers? Can Zoran’s success be replicated, and what relationship does it bear to a progressive Islam?
Jared Morningstar: Let me share some discourse trends I saw that might not be visible from other vantage points. There’s a divide among Muslims about Zoran and his candidacy.
On one side: people happy to see Muslim representation and political ambition, who found him jovial and inspirational, and who resonate with his progressive political and economic platform.
On the other side: more religiously conservative Muslims wanting nothing to do with him. Partly due to the socialist aspect, and the way conservative Muslims cross-pollinate with conservative Christians—absorbing anti-communism and anti-socialism through a pan-conservative religious alliance.
Even more: conservative Muslims denouncing him because they think he’s not religious or serious enough, and because his support for queer communities and LGBTQ issues is seen as anti-Islamic and disqualifying in terms of Muslim legitimacy—not that he’d be declared non-Muslim, but seen as a very bad Muslim.
Then there’s sectarianism: Zoran comes from a Shi’a background, and you see tribalistic Sunni–Shi’a dynamics too.
Matt Segall: I didn’t even know that. Is Sunni Islam more predominant in the United States?
Jared Morningstar: Yeah. Globally it’s around 85–90% Sunni and 10–15% Shi’a, roughly. Sunnism is the majority globally and certainly in America. Canada has a larger Shi’a diaspora than the U.S., which changes the landscape there.
Matt Segall: Is there anything else you were hoping we’d touch on?
Jared Morningstar: I’d like to dig into the metaphysical side more, the pluralism more, drawing on Neoplatonic frameworks and some theologies.
Matt Segall: What does religious pluralism mean to you? I’d love to hear how you orient, because it feels urgent. Urgent, and also maybe by design an open-ended conversation about what it really means.
Jared Morningstar: Religious pluralism is crucially important to me. I’d go so far as to say one of my major motivators pushing me toward Islam was precisely this question. Pluralism spiritually and religiously feels natural to me from an Islamic vantage point. Some of that comes directly from the Qur’an: the idea that God sent prophets to all peoples. Some are listed; many are not. I forget the number the Qur’an puts forth, but I think it’s over a hundred thousand.
So there’s a baseline sense that there’s authentic divine wisdom in other cultures. It’s a better starting point for those questions. You also find proclamations like “there is no compulsion in religion,” which cuts strongly against people’s impressions of Islam. The classical traditions sometimes downplayed it, but it’s there as authentic revelation. There are Hadith reports like “seek wisdom even unto China.” So there’s a basic ethos in Islamic civilization of mining wisdom and knowledge beyond the original recipients of revelation to Muhammad—7th-century Arabian peoples.
That’s been beautiful for me. Historically, many Muslim thinkers embodied this ethos, integrating Zoroastrian wisdom into Sufi metaphysical frameworks—developing syncretic, pluralistic traditions like hikmat al-ishraq, the wisdom of illumination, associated with Suhrawardi. It’s striking how natural that can be from an Islamic starting point.
For me, Islam provides a grounding point—a concrete container—for integration and cross-fertilization. You can do integration in a more atomized New Age way, with more freedom, but it’s isolating. In Islam, I can go to a mosque anywhere, fast Ramadan, and participate in a simultaneous spiritual practice of millions of people worldwide. That these can coexist—baseline communal unity alongside exploratory freedom and cross-traditional engagement—is unique and beautiful to me.
Matt Segall: Well said. For me, pluralistic spirituality has involved the idea of continuous revelation—scripture as open-ended. I’m not aware of churches where the Bible is still allowed to be a work in progress, or where further texts might be considered revelatory. Do you see any scriptural basis in the Qur’an for continuous revelation? Or is the Qur’an the final revelation—finished?
Jared Morningstar: The mainstream perspective is finality: the universality and completeness of the Qur’an, Muhammad as the seal of the prophets. That comes directly from the Qur’an and is fairly unambiguous. That said, there have been Sufi thinkers and—especially—Shi’i thinkers who push toward something like continuous revelation. In Shi’ism, the Imam functions as a continuing spiritual guide after the Prophet, with ongoing interpretation and guidance in a way adjacent to the original revelatory function. In Ismaili Shi’ism this is foregrounded, continuing today with the Aga Khan as a living figure of continual spiritual interpretation.
Let me share a perspective from Muhammad Iqbal—the South Asian poet and philosopher, and also one of the architects of Pakistan. He offers a kind of process Islamic perspective on the finality of revelation and the seal of prophecy.
For Iqbal, the age of prophecy has come to a close: there won’t be authoritative spiritual communication from on high to human beings in that form, because we’ve entered a new age—an age of discursive discussion. No longer can someone proclaim spiritual inspiration and authority and have people simply go along. Now we need to discuss, share ideas, and give reason a stronger role. There’s something beautiful in that: we’ve gotten the spiritual material we need, and now demonstration and discussion matter more than faith in someone’s claims.
This doesn’t mean inspiration or mystical unveiling isn’t operative, but it functions as a safeguard against cultish charismatic leaders. I’ve had tension with the intensity of finality—seal of prophecy—but Iqbal’s developmental frame helps: it’s not that everything is simply done, but that a new task is in front of us—a new phase of human consciousness and engagement with spirituality. That’s a better way for me to hold it.
Matt Segall: I’m glad you brought Iqbal in. I agree there’s a need for maturation in our relationship to revelation. Even if I want to defend continuous revelation, that doesn’t mean new scripture everyone must orient around. It could mean an evolution of consciousness.
I like how John Cobb Jr. talked about Christ or the Logos working today as a source of artistic or poetic inspiration in individuals and communities—revelation as expressions of beauty that afford deeper intimacy with each other and with the world. Not so much extending scripture, but the Logos revealing deeper truth in us through expression. A modern secular framing would call it artistic expression, but art with a capital A: the impulse to beautify the world, intensify intimacy, and deepen harmony—where diversification is part of intensifying harmony, not flattening difference into one song. I suspect Iqbal as poet would align with that.
Jared Morningstar: Yeah. For Muslims, “revelation” in the strict sense is the bringing of a new sharia—a new concrete mode of spiritual orientation in human historical life—and that is done. Creating a new religion is foreclosed for Muslims. But if by continuous revelation we mean inspiration anew in all kinds of ways, then absolutely.
There’s a great Hadith: God is beauty and loves beauty. And in the Qur’an: wherever you turn, there is the face of God. These things are accessible, creative, and continuing to be revealed in profound personal, existential, and even communal ways. But the idea of a new binding community orientation—probably not. Still, that finality gives solidity to a current religious configuration.
Matt Segall: That’s beautiful. I’m deeply appreciative, Jared, for your willingness to have this conversation. Interreligious dialogue requires openness to being converted in conversation—not necessarily converted to the other’s religion, but converted to a deeper form of your own, with renewed commitments as a result of deeper understanding of others. Communion across differences can only enhance self-understanding. I appreciate you, and I feel better equipped to continue this conversation now. There’s so much more we could talk about in a future conversation, but hopefully this sparks more conversation online. I look forward to talking more.
Jared Morningstar: Inshallah. Likewise.
Matt Segall: Great. Thanks, Jared. Thanks.
Footnotes2Plato 
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