Listening to Muslims: Akbar Ahmed

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ALL AUTHORS WANT you to read their books, but not all say it's absolutely necessary, for the sake of world peace, that you pick up a copy. Akbar Ahmed does. He wants everyone in the West to read his book "Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization" — or read someone else's on the topic. Or visit a mosque and invite Muslims to their churches and synagogues.

Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University and a Brookings Institution senior fellow, sees the West's clash with the Muslim world as the No. 1 problem facing America today, and says a lack of understanding is creating the divide. The temperature between these two civilizations is approaching a boiling point, he argues, and the only way to bring it down is through knowledge, discussion and experience.

"Unless that happens, the Muslim world is a major potential problem," says Ahmed. "Because you have 1.4 billion people today, and, by the middle of the century, you'll have one in four people who are Muslim. So it's not going to go away. And it's not going to be blown off the face of the earth, either — we saw that in Iraq. If you want to control it by controlling the temperature, begin the process of understanding."

To aid in that goal, Ahmed went to the Muslim world with five young Americans to distribute questionnaires and talk to people in bazaars and mosques and madrassahs and universities. The group went to nine countries to gauge the feelings of Muslims around the world.

The team discovered the issue that Muslims saw as their chief threat was not Israel or the United States' military might, but rather the perception of Islam in the Western world. And they determined that there was still hope.

"That is the good news," said Ahmed, who will be at Politics & Prose on Saturday to discuss his journey and his book. "Anti-Americanism is very superficial. A couple of strong symbolic gestures and a couple of initiatives and it can suddenly disappear like froth on the ocean waves. … There's always been this great reservoir of good will, and we can recapture that reservoir by taking some symbolic initiatives and some substantial ones."

The first step is as easy as picking up a book.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Sat., 6 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Tenleytown)

Photo courtesy Brookings Institution Press