John L Esposito, who died on July 15 at the age of 86, spent more than half a century challenging one of the modern world’s most persistent habits: reducing Islam to a problem.
Through revolutions and wars, terrorist attacks and refugee crises, through the rise of political Islam and the resurgence of Islamophobia, he argued with remarkable consistency that nearly two billion Muslims could not be understood through newspaper headlines or electoral slogans. He became not merely one of America’s leading scholars of Islam but one of the world’s most influential interpreters of the relationship between Islam and the West. I first encountered John Esposito through his books long before I knew much about the man himself.
Like countless students and teachers from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world studying in the UK, I found ‘Islam: The Straight Path’ and later ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Islam’ on university library shelves. They stood apart from many Western books on Islam. They neither romanticised nor demonised. They simply tried to understand. One could disagree with Esposito’s interpretations – and many did – but one never felt that he had approached Islam with prejudice. In retrospect, that intellectual fairness may have been his greatest gift.
Born in Brooklyn in 1940 into an Italian-American Catholic family, Esposito did not begin his academic life intending to become a scholar of Islam. Trained in theology and the history of religions, he took an unexpected turn in his career after meeting Palestinian-American philosopher and Islamic thinker Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi. Few academic relationships proved more consequential. Al-Faruqi, then teaching at Temple University, possessed an extraordinary ability to persuade Western scholars that Islam deserved to be studied not as an archaeological curiosity or geopolitical problem but as a living intellectual civilisation. His vision of dialogue between faiths, his insistence that Muslims speak for themselves and his critique of Orientalist assumptions left a lasting impression on the young Esposito.
Esposito later acknowledged that al-Faruqi transformed the way he approached Islam. Instead of studying Muslims as objects of research, he sought to understand how Muslims understood themselves. It was an approach that combined historical scholarship with empathy while refusing to abandon critical inquiry. The assassination of Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi and his wife Lamya in 1986 shocked the academic world and deeply affected Esposito personally. He often spoke of his mentor with admiration and gratitude, recognising that much of his own intellectual journey had begun with al-Faruqi’s encouragement.
In many respects, Esposito spent the following four decades extending the conversation that his mentor had begun. That commitment found institutional expression at Georgetown University, where Esposito became Distinguished University Professor and founded the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Under his leadership, the centre evolved into one of the world’s foremost institutions for the serious academic study of Islam, interfaith relations and contemporary Muslim societies.
History ensured that his scholarship would never remain confined to university seminars. The Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf Wars and, above all, the attacks of September 11 transformed Islam into one of the most politically contested subjects in Western public life. Governments sought experts. Television channels demanded commentators. Publishers rushed to explain ‘Islam’ to anxious audiences.
Esposito was among the few scholars capable of providing both historical depth and contemporary analysis. Over a career that produced more than 50 books, he consistently challenged simplistic narratives. He demonstrated that Indonesian Muslims, Turkish secularists, Iranian clerics, Senegalese Sufis and American converts belonged to the same religious civilisation while inhabiting profoundly different political and cultural worlds. His work became especially significant after 9/11, when many commentators treated terrorism as Islam’s defining characteristic.
Esposito insisted that extremism had to be studied seriously but also proportionately. Violent movements, he argued, should not be mistaken for an entire civilisation. This refusal to simplify inevitably attracted criticism. Some conservative critics accused him of underestimating Islamist extremism. Others alleged that his willingness to engage with Islamic movements reflected excessive sympathy. Yet critics on the opposite side sometimes argued that he remained too measured in his criticism of American foreign policy. Such attacks from opposing ideological camps suggested that Esposito occupied an increasingly lonely position: committed to evidence rather than political fashion.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in his writings and public statements on Palestine. Esposito consistently argued that no serious discussion of relations between Muslims and the West could ignore the Palestinian question. He regarded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not merely as a regional dispute but as one of the defining moral and political issues shaping perceptions across the Muslim world. Unlike many public intellectuals after 9/11, he resisted reducing Palestinian grievances to questions of extremism or security. Instead, he repeatedly emphasised occupation, dispossession, unequal application of international law and the denial of Palestinian national rights.
He argued that understanding Palestinian anger did not require endorsing violence, just as condemning terrorism did not require silence about occupation. His position often attracted fierce criticism in American political circles, particularly from those who regarded any sustained criticism of Israeli government policies as evidence of bias. Esposito remained unmoved. Scholarship, he believed, required intellectual independence rather than ideological conformity. Defending Palestinian human rights, in his view, was consistent with defending Israeli security because both ultimately depended upon justice and a negotiated peace. That willingness to address uncomfortable subjects won him deep respect across much of the Muslim world.
Many Muslim academics viewed him as one of the few prominent Western scholars willing to challenge double standards without abandoning scholarly rigour. Several years into my own academic career, I began to appreciate something that students often overlook. It is relatively easy to write books that reassure readers they are already right. It is much harder to write books that persuade readers to reconsider deeply held assumptions. Esposito consistently chose the latter. Whether discussing political Islam, interfaith relations or Palestine, he insisted that historical evidence should precede ideological certainty. Universities today could do with more scholars of that temperament.
Esposito’s influence reached well beyond academia. Policymakers consulted him. Journalists relied upon him. His books were translated into numerous languages and became standard texts in universities across Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. Generations of diplomats, journalists, teachers and students first encountered Islam through his writing before they encountered Muslim scholars themselves. Perhaps his greatest achievement was demonstrating that genuine understanding requires neither agreement nor conversion.
A practising Catholic throughout his life, Esposito never claimed to speak for Muslims. Instead, he sought to ensure that Muslims were heard accurately and judged fairly. That distinction mattered enormously. The world he leaves behind has become more polarised than the one he entered. Social media rewards outrage over reflection. Political rhetoric often values certainty above evidence. Religious literacy has declined even as religion continues to shape international affairs. Under such conditions, Esposito’s insistence upon nuance, historical context and intellectual honesty appears almost radical. Returning to his books after learning of his death, I was struck less by any individual argument than by their tone. They were calm without being complacent, sympathetic without becoming partisan and critical without descending into polemic. Those qualities are increasingly rare, not only in public debate but even within universities.
John L Esposito spent a lifetime building intellectual bridges across one of the modern world’s deepest divides. Bridges are rarely celebrated while they stand. They become truly visible only when people realise how difficult the crossing would be without them. Few scholars have done more to make that crossing possible.
The writer is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: [email protected]
