Outside the lecture hall where I arrived recently to give a presentation in one of my classes I found perhaps a hundred students milling around, waiting for the previous class to be over so they could go inside. To my surprise there was an eerie silence among the crowd. None of them were talking to each other. Almost all were staring intently at the tiny screens of their cell phones, though a few were chatting away on ear-plug microphones, appearing to be oddly talking to themselves.

This has become the new normal in any crowd under, say, age 30. On campus, a student sent me a text message that required a long and complicated response, one that my inept thumb-typing could not easily master. Perhaps, I texted back to the student, we could meet sometime, and wondered where he was at the moment. “In the next room,” he cheerfully responded, and came bounding into my office. It had never occurred to him to confront me directly when a text message could easily suffice.

What, I began to wonder, is changing in the digital age? Is it simply a matter of new technology and our habits of communication that are changing or is it something more? I began to wonder whether we are witnessing some subtle transformations, not only in how we interact with each other, but also in how we think about ourselves.

After all, one aspect of the modern era was the emergence of what has been called the modern person. The all-encompassing changes of the period of modernity that dominated public life in the West from the 18th through the 20th centuries were not only technological, economic, and political. They also shaped the modern person whose traits were individualistic, inquisitive and ambitious–quite different from the communitarian and obedient patterns of the medieval masses.

If we are now living in a post-modern age, an era in which global forces are shaping our social, economic, and cultural lives, wouldn’t it be understandable if these also affected our sense of selfhood? In other words, could it be possible that we are witnessing the emergence of a digital self?

I tried to imagine what the features of this digital self might be. And what I came up with are several understandings of the self–traits that include a sense of being globally connected, informed, and confident. But as I thought about it, it seemed to me that each of these characteristics were deeply ambivalent. Though they are based on real changes there are aspects of them that are illusory, aspects of the self that are internally contradictory, or not fully realized.

This is what I mean.

The illusion of connectivity.

The ability to instantly contact and interact with almost anyone anywhere on the global is one of the most startling features of the digital age. I have seen hikers in Ladakh and adventurers in Machu Picchu who are able to connect with their cell phones to get on line and send selfies of their rare experiences to thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers around the planet.

This is connectivity. Or at least it is the appearance of it. Like the crowd of students waiting to get into my class who said scarcely a word to each other as they perused their instance communications from far-flung friends, this kind of connectivity can be strangely alienating. It is, on the one hand, a way of being in touch immediately with anyone that you know (and many that you hardly remember ever having met). But on the other hand it is a way of preventing the sustained social interactions that build friendship and trust. It is like cocktail party chatter that seems so entertaining and yet appears so vacuous when compared with a deep one-on-one conversation with an old friend. And yet there is something vibrant about these digital connections and the webs of networks that they create.

The illusion of wisdom.

Want to know who were kings in 15th century France? Want to know the quantity of beef annually raised in Argentina? No worries—the answers are as close as your hand held device or your computer tablet. You can Google virtually everything. The ubiquitous hand-held devices also provide easy access to social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, to the Internet web pages that span the universe of knowledge, and to video clips and essays representing every interest imaginable. It is a vast and extraordinary access to information, one that would have left the 18th century European Enlightenment thinkers in awe. They were the ones who first devised the encyclopedia—the idea that the universe of human knowledge could be contained in a few volumes on a library shelf. Now it turns out that their dream has come true in an even smaller receptacle, the tiny device you hold in your hand, where the infinitely expanding Wikipedia replaces the medieval shelf of stored data.

All of this knowledge at one’s fingertips gives the illusion of wisdom, of being at the crest of a great wave of information. The problem is that it is selective information. After all, we are the ones who decide what words or phrases to put into the Google search engine, and it is Google’s algorithms that determine what responses come up first. One might think that with all of the “friends” that you “like” on Facebook you would have a great diversity of points of view with which to contend. But no, Facebook has a way of reading your mind, or at least determining your political, cultural, and consumer tastes, and adjusts the feed of Facebook postings to your Facebook wall accordingly. In these ways the information that you get simply confirms and reinforces your own values and opinions.

So in a curious way, all of this avalanche of information is filtered in a way that actually makes you less informed, in the sense of seeing a variety of points of view and encouraging you to make some judgement among them. We have seen the results of this kind of silo-effect of media information in recent elections where one’s information about candidates you liked were valorized, and the competitor demonized, in a way that guaranteed a divisive and angry outcome to the elections. It also provided opportunities for media manipulation and the purveying of misleading and outright false reports that would be rapidly recirculated simply because they reinforced the biases and assumptions of the senders. And yet, the basic fact of improved information access is a part of the digital age, a resource to be channeled and potentially utilized for the improvement of human wisdom.

The illusion of personal power.

The instant connectivity and information access of the digital age leads to a third characteristic—a sense of self-confidence. This is the impression gained by individuals, with all these resources at their fingertips, that they know as much or more than anyone else.

I have experienced this directly in my role as a “terrorism expert,” as the media sometimes calls me. I put that term in quotes since I’ve never felt comfortable with that label. I am keenly aware of the limits of my own knowledge, and feel uncomfortable being described as an expert in anything. Still, religious terrorism is something that I have studied and written about over the past thirty some years, so I should know something about it. Recently, however, I have found that when people ask for my opinion, either privately or in an on-air interview, I am quickly interrupted to be given their opinion about the subject. “Well this is what I think,” the questioner will say. And then they’re off on a lengthy diatribe that often echoes comments that they have read on line, heard on radio, or seen on television. If the expert posts his or her authoritative voice on Wikipedia, it can be erased in a moment’s notice by virtually anyone who has a different take on the topic, without have to demonstrate a shred of expertise in that field.

So everyone’s an expert, as I have pointed out in a recent blog post on this topic. But it’s not just terrorism on which they have the illusion of expertise, but also politics, the economy, religion, education, international affairs—in brief, everything. This challenges the whole range of established authority, not just in academia, where we sense this mounting disrespect almost daily, but also in the social and political institutions that lead our societies. Recent elections in the United States and Europe demonstrate that the outside politician, the Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Emmanuel Macron, has an appeal simply by virtue of not being part of an established political party. The same phenomenon is seen in the cultural sphere, where the rise of new religious movements and demagogic preachers in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, as well as in Christianity, are part of the anti-authoritarian mood of the global age of self-confident self-empowered individuals.

This self-confidence is illusory, since it is not based on any real power or is channeled through democratic process of social and political change. It is rebellion that has no hope of becoming a revolution, and is easily exploited by demagogues who pretend to represent the voices of the populace. The dark side of this illusion of power is anarchy, a devolution of social institutions that are felled by the rise of a deep distrust of authority based solely on one’s own imagined power. Short of that, however, is a different possibility: that the challenge to authority can create opportunities for change and empowerment that do have credibility given the possibility of mass social mobilization in the global age, a coordination of interests that can be harnessed for positive social purposes as well as for venal ones.

The digital self of the global age, therefore, is lonely but widely connected, limited in understanding but able to access vast resources of knowledge, impotent in an ability to act but empowered with a brazen self-confidence. It is a contradictory self, but one that is not without promise. After all, despite the illusions of connection, wisdom and power, there is an extent to which each of the three of these have an authentic basis in the new realities of the global era. We do have an ability to communicate with large numbers of people easily; we do have access to more information and an ability to create our own platforms of information; and we do have the confidence sense that we have the power to change things. And for these reasons, the global future is one that is open to be shaped in myriad ways. One can only hope that at least some of these will be positive.

When people find out that my research field is the global rise of religious violence they often start to ask questions. “What do I think of ISIS?” they may ask. Or, “do you think that religion causes terrorism?”

I suppose such questions are understandable, even though I hesitate to answer them. Even though I am sometimes interviewed on television or on radio with the descriptor that I am a “terrorism expert,” I’ve never felt comfortable with that label. I am keenly aware of the limits of my own knowledge, and feel uncomfortable being described as an expert in anything.

Still, religious terrorism is something that I study. And I’ve done it for over 30 years. I’ve written several books and scores of articles about the topic, and have interviewed dozens of people directly involved in terrorist acts or supporters of them. I’ve interviewed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Doctor Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, leaders of Hamas; Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the key organizers of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the anti-Palestinian Koch Party; Rev Michael Bray, convicted of bombing clinics that provide abortions on the East Coast of the United States, and Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist anti-Muslim activist whom Time magazine called “the Buddhist face of terror.”

So yes, I should know something about the subject of religious terrorism. For this reason, against my better judgement, I often try to answer these simple questions. Hesitantly, in words that I think are uncomplicated and relevant, I try to give a common sense response about what is for me a very complicated subject without sounding like I’m giving an academic lecture.

But often before I can utter more than a word or two, I’m interrupted. “Well this is what I think,” the questioner will say. And then they’re off on a lengthy diatribe that often echoes comments that they have read or seen on television.

Sometimes they have decided that a particular religious tradition is at fault, invariably Islam. At other times it is religion in general that is the cause, regardless of the degree of religiosity expressed by the perpetrators of particular terrorists acts. And occasionally they aver that the problem is political leadership and cowardice in “getting tough” with evil doers.

My attempts at correcting, nuancing, or qualifying their opinions are to no avail. They know what they know, and they want me to know it.

Why, I wonder, did they bother asking me if they were not interested in my analysis? I’ve given some thought to this interesting situation, and tried to make sense of it.

Part of the problem, I think, is the proliferation of talk-shows on radio and television—sometimes in a daily 24-hour format—that is all about opinion. Everyone has one, everyone has the right to express theirs, and talk shows are the way to do it. Real expertise is simply not a part of the talk show equation. Asking an expert something is simply an excuse to give one’s own opinion on the topic.

I discovered how this format affects conversation when, soon after 9/11, I was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, a talk show host on Fox news. When he opined that Islam produced terrorism, I tried to politely point out that the 9/11 attackers were a minute number of a very marginal fringe of an extremist branch of Islam that virtually all Muslims would disparage what they did.

“That’s an interesting opinion,” O’Reilly said. I tried to explain to him that this was not just “an opinion,” it was a fact based on evidence and a part of my analytic judgement as someone who studies the relationship between religion and violence comparatively around the world. But then I realized that I was speaking into a dead microphone, he had already cut me off and was on to something else.

So part of the problem is that an expert is just someone else with an opinion, no better and probably worse, than opinions expressed by people whom others trust. Some of these opinion setters are media hosts like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Others are authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They present convincing templates of reality that are difficult to penetrate by people such as me who actually study some of the things that these opinion setters have pontificated about.

Another problem is related to globalization. We live in an era in which increasingly information is decentralized and divorced from structures of authority. Encyclopedias are an example. When during the European Enlightenment, Denis Diderot produced an Encyclopédie, the idea was that the most authoritative versions of knowledge would be available in one place. In the 21st century, the most commonly consulted encyclopedia is Wikipedia, which anyone can alter and amend at will. It is only as authoritative as the last person to edit the entries.

The problem is even more pronounced in reporting on the world’s news. In the United States, as in most countries, news information was disseminated to the general public through very limited sources, usually ones in which the public had great trust. During the later decades of the 20th century the nightly news of the major networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—were the arbiters of the received knowledge of daily events. At that time, Walter Cronkite, the anchor for CBS-television news, was regarded as “the most trusted man in America.”

In the 21st century everyone is trusted and no one is trusted. We can pick our own version of the news, and viewers of MSNBC and Fox News seem to inhabit different planets. If one does not trust any of the televised variants of current events, the Internet provides abundant fora for alternate views, some of which are downright bizarre.

No wonder, then, that experts don’t count. In these media realms independent experts simply do not exist, or are deeply suspect. If they offer counter narratives they are presumed to be speaking from an opinionated position that cannot be trusted.

“Are you one of those liberal professors?” This was the question posed by a Mid-West relative of mine who admitted that her main source of information came from Fox News. No matter that I was a once-trusted relative and that I had spent years in the University presumably becoming accomplished in some arena of knowledge, the very fact that I spoke outside her media box was cause for suspicion.

So I supposed in an era of media opinions and the globalized decentralization of information, I should not feel insulted if no one trusts me to be an expert. I can live with that. I’m more disturbed, however, by what this says about the diffusion of knowledge and the lack of public consensus in the global era. That is an issue about which we should all be concerned.

Ainslie Embree (1926-2017) was chair of Columbia University’s history department, interim dean of the School of International and Public Policy, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Counselor for Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Asian History.

Once when Ainslie was striding along in his usual brisk, authoritative way on the sidewalks of Manhattan’s upper West Side near the Columbia campus, I had almost to trot to keep up with him. Why, I asked, did he walk so fast?

“In this city,” Ainslie proclaimed, “you have to move quickly, keep your eyes straight ahead, and act like you know what you’re doing.”

That struck me as good advice, not just for surviving in the city but in life in general. And I took it as one of many of Ainslie’s words of wisdom.

Yet in many ways, what I learned most from Ainslie in the forty-five years that I have known him as a friend and mentor, was quite different. It was his patience and attentiveness that made him such a striking presence in the academic world in which he reigned.

Take, for instance, his role at conferences. He would install himself at the lobby bar in the main conference hotel and hold court. Friends and colleagues would pass by, pause, and then share some news or simply acknowledge his presence.

To see him function there or at the faculty club or the Cosmos Club was to watch the master of networking. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone wanted to bend his ear, share some political gossip or international intrigue, or gain some advice on their careers. He had a way of making each person feel that he was listening only to them, and listening carefully.

He was patient in scholarship as well. I helped him edit his essays into two books, and at times it seemed that he would not let go. He wanted to rewrite one more time, add another reference, tweak another sentence so it was just right. And he succeeded; his essays are masterpieces of careful and precise scholarship.

And yet, if one looks back at the whole of a long and productive career that lasted almost a century, one sees a different arc. Though the details are slow and precise, the overall effect is transforming, shifting from academia to public service, from history to current affairs, from local issues to global concerns, bearing loyalties that could at once be Canadian, American, and South Asian. And the cumulative effect is a well-crafted life, one of purpose and product that will long endure.

So he was right, what he said that day on the busy streets of New York City. He survived because he moved quickly, kept his eyes straight ahead, and acted like he knew what he was doing.

My 2009 videotaped interview with Ainslie can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeVxoqPDc-0.

This essay was published in the Huffington Post on July 7, 2017

I spent a week in North Korea in the 1990s and went away from my interviews with government leaders with the sense that they were in a profound grip of paranoia. From one office to the next I was shown pictures of how the city of Pyongyang was destroyed during “America’s War of Aggression,” which was their name for what we call the Korean War. In their collective memory it was the US who started it with the sole purpose of obliterating their country, a goal that they think we still harbor.

Considering their distrust of Americans it was a bit of surprise when I was invited to go there along with several of my colleagues at the University of Hawaii where I was serving as dean of the University’s School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies at the time. The idea was for our team to negotiate the possibility of scholarly exchanges and mutual academic projects with Kim Il Sung University and the leading research center in the country, the Institute for Juche Thought (juche is the term for the ideas of Kim Il Sun that are treated as if they were a blueprint for all of humanity).

So although at least some of the government officials with whom we spoke had a goal of joint academic ventures, it also became clear that not all of them were enthusiastic about the idea. As their hostile comments to us implied, the United States was a belligerent, evil power with only one goal in mind: the destruction of North Korea.

It is this paranoia that continues to be the dominant point of view in Pyongyang. If anything the attitude has gotten even worse under the present leader, Kim Jung Un. Behind the killing of his uncle and his half-brother was an ideological difference between those like Kim who persist in a kind of siege mentality and those who would prefer to open up their society’s doors to the wider world.

When we were in Pyongyang, we saw plenty of examples of how students in North Korean universities were preparing themselves for the global arena. English was a surprisingly popular foreign language, even more than Chinese or Russian. Computer literacy was required, and although the access to personal computers was limited, the computers in the college classrooms were in heavy demand. When we visited classrooms in the universities our presence was consistently warmly greeted.

The issue, then, is how the West—especially the United States, which looms so large in the North Korean imagination—can respond to North Korea’s actions in a way that will encourage the progressive, globally-minded elements within the country and undermine the paranoia of those leaders who rule as if a new Korean War was just around the corner.

Clearly the way not to respond is to stoke their paranoid fears. When US President George W. Bush listed North Korea among the three evil enemies in the “axis of evil” mentioned in his 2002 State of the Union speech, North Korean leaders were terrified. It was as if their worst fears were coming to life. The yearly joint military exercises between the US and South Korea off the shores of North Korea are also annual reminders of the enormous military might that is poised against them.

It is understandable, then, that North Korean leaders have responded defensively. They have convinced themselves that the only thing that can prevent the nuclear annihilation of North Korea is deterrence. By creating their own nuclear weapons capacity, they think, they will forestall an American invasion.

The paradox of this position is that the development of North Korean nuclear weapons capability is precisely what frightens political leaders in the United States. Responding in kind, with increased sanctions and threats of military intervention, is likely to increase the paranoia of North Koreans and lead to even more frantic attempts to shore up their deterrent nuclear weapons capability.

What to do? It turns out that North Korean leaders are hungry for any sign of respect from the West. Witness the pathetic fawning over the aging former basketball star, Dennis Rodman, by Kim Jung Un. Or the incident during the regime of the present leader’s father, Kim Jung Il, when in 2009 he demanded that former President Bill Clinton come to Pyongyang personally for an audience with Kim Jung Il before he would release two American journalists who had been taken hostage. Clinton made the journey, and it turned out that what Kim Jung Il wanted most of all was a formal picture of him standing next to the former U.S. President in the ornate meeting room of a Pyongyang governmental palace, proving that Clinton had come to his quarters.

So as distasteful as the idea might seem to those who think that taking a “hard line” against North Korea is the most effective tactic, in fact it might be the worst option available. It might hasten the mounting spiral of paranoia and trigger the possibility of devastating preemptive strikes, possibly with nuclear warheads that could obliterate whole cities, including Seoul and Tokyo. What might begin to de-escalate the crisis would be a surprising openness of America to meetings and conversation, perhaps returning to the idea of US support for peaceful nuclear energy projects, as has been negotiated in the past.

Such a strategy of openness would probably not transform North Korea overnight. But it would be a welcome change from the freight trains of war that we hear rumbling these days on both sides. What is at stake is not only the future of US relations with North Korea, but the assurance of peace in a nuclear-charged world.

Years ago when I was co-directing the Berkeley-Harvard program in comparative religion our conference in Cambridge had divided into two camps, the ethical relativists and the ethical absolutists. Peter Berger was on the side of the absolutists.

The discussion came to the case of sati, the practice in India of widow-burning, where the grieving widow was supposed to throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her departed husband and achieve a kind of divine immortality as a result. Berger listened to the cultural defenses of the practice for a moment or two, and then he had had enough.

Berger stood up, his voice thundering as he pointed an accusing finger at each of us. “If the funeral pyre was burning in the midst of this room and an old lady started climbing on it, who among you moral relativists,” he said, his words reverberating through the ornate hall of the old Harvard seminar room, “would pause even a second in keeping her alive?”

Whatever else was said that day, Berger’s image of the old lady on the funeral pyre in the seminar room lingered in our minds and framed much of the rest of the debate. That was Berger—he had a powerful way with words, enhanced by striking images from a fertile imagination.

It was not just his own, but the social imagination of whole societies that was the subject that Berger pursued throughout his career. A whole generation of young scholars became excited about the importance of the social sciences through his co-authored Social Construction of Reality, which taught us that all of the realities of everyday life are in some way socially constructed. The point was not to trivialize what we think of as reality, but to demonstrate the power of the social imagination in informing our sense of what we think of as real in the world. It is a point that he expanded on in a charming way in what is often thought of as a textbook, Invitation to Sociology, but which is largely Berger’s ruminations on the sociological imagination.

It is the power of this imagination that attracted Berger to religion. Like another great late sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, he thought of religion as “alternative reality,” the suggestion of transcendence that lay behind the fractured constructions of reality that provide us with the day-to-day world around us. The book of his that makes the best connection between religion and the social construction of reality is likely The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Social Theory of Religion. His regard for religion as a cultural resource for thinking of ultimate matters led him to become a well-known defender of religion. His prominence as a champion for God rose during the era of the “God is dead” mentality, and a series of books, perhaps most notably, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, defended the possibility of religious thinking and its challenges from an aggressive atheism.

His form of religiosity was an old-fashioned Lutheran variety that left little room for social activism and the cultural compromises with modernity that many liberal Christian congregations have adopted. For that reason he was often regarded as politically conservative, though in Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change, he tried to be as critical of capitalism as he was of radical socialism.

Later in life he returned to the idea of the social construction of reality in an interesting book, Redeeming Laughter, which set out to understand why things are funny. A clash of conceptions of reality are at the heart of it, which is why religious humor is particularly interesting. Berger himself loved to tell humorous stories, and he regarded this as one of his most interesting books. He told me he was disappointed that the book did not have more of an impact in the United States. He felt that it had a better reception in Europe.

In his last years he became increasingly interested in religion in a global context. His Center for Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University became an important arena for scholars from different religious traditions to interact, and Berger became involved in trying to understand commonalities among the different faiths. He was also trying to understand the role of religion in an era of globalization.

Berger wrote the introduction to a book co-edited with Samuel Huntington, Many Globalizations, which argued that economic globalization is only one aspect of a series of different kinds of globalization. He added that globalization itself looked different from different parts of the world. Hence the project of understanding the global era is one requiring multiple perspectives, which the essays in the book attempt to provide.

Again, religion was at the heart of Berger’s thinking about the world, including the global world of our 21st century era. In the lead essay for a book on Religion in Global Civil Society that I edited, Berger notes that “whether civil or uncivil, there can be no doubt that religion today is being globalized to an unprecedented degree” (p15). Trying to make sense of this new reality, like the many social realities that fascinated him over his enormously prolific career, continued to challenge Berger, and at heart there was the moral issue: was religion used for civil or uncivil ends?

This brings me back to the story with which I began these comments, the image that Berger raised of the hapless Hindu widow about to mount her husband’s funeral pyre that Berger imagined to be blazing away incongruously in the middle of a Harvard seminar room. “Would any one pause for even a second,” he demanded to know, in keeping her from carrying out her grisly mission?

After a bit of a silence, all of us cultural relativists had to admit that despite our efforts to give the social and religious context to such an event and to understand why she might be propelled to commit such a deed, Berger was right. We would have tried to stop her. There is, he demonstrated to us—not just in this story but in all of his incredibly prodigious output in a long and productive career–still a deep moral compass in our modern globalized world. We can challenge and we can question, but when it comes to action, who among us would let someone burn?

When the preeminent historian, Ainslie Embree, died this week at age 96, he was lauded for his contributions to our understanding of South Asian history and politics, but what was sometimes overlooked was what he offered to the study of religion. Arguably it was Embree who helped to launch programs in the study of South Asian religious culture in the United States, and who first recognized the seriousness of the secular-religious split in South Asian nationalism.

He came by the study of religion naturally. A Canadian pacifist who somehow got swept up in World War II as an air force navigator, he then turned to religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York. Afterwards, in 1947, he accepted an assignment from the United Church of Canada to go to India where he and his wife taught at Indore Christian College. On returning to New York in 1957 he completed a PhD in history at Columbia University. It remained his academic home for most of the rest of his rich career as a professor, dean, department chair, and member of the US diplomatic service in Delhi.

Columbia had created a Western Civilization requirement and Embree, along with the China expert Theodore deBary, were determined to make it a global civilization requirement. Embree created the textbook, Sources of Indian Tradition, that became standard for courses in Hinduism and South Asian Islam. He also helped to establish the South Asian Institute, an early model for the new research field of South Asian Studies throughout the Western world. It is hard to imagine now how novel it was then, this idea of studying cultural regions, especially seemingly arcane ones like Asia. But Embree was a pioneer.

He also forged new paths in the study of religion and nationalism long before the rest of the academic community realized how important this topic would become. In a remarkable book of essays, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India (University of California Press, 1990), Embree showed how secular and religious visions of the Indian nation were fundamentally in competition, though he understood that the religious versions had their own political motivations. In a separate essay, he ruminated over the partition of India in 1948 and the creation of Pakistan. Though ostensibly an attempt to keep Muslim and Hindu communities separate, Embree thought that issue was never about religious identity but about religious politics, the aspiration of competing political leaders, and wondered how history might have been different if the British had not conceived the issue in communal religious terms.

The case of South Asia, Embree thought, was a good example of why politics and religion should never mix. Like the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with whom he had studied at Union Seminary, Embree thought that religion did much to enrich the culture and vitality of a national community, but not its politics, where it could be misused in the hands of ambitious politicians. Like Niebuhr, Embree was a realist in seeing that the “sublime madness” of the religious vision could be not only an inspiration for greatness but also a tool for venal political aspirations.

The suicide attack by Salman Abedi outside the Manchester arena that killed 22 young people out on a fun evening on the town was claimed by ISIS to be one of its actions. On the other hand, the terrorist movement of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria seems to claim credit for anything violent these days, and it is not yet clear whether Abedi was directed to carry out this mission by ISIS leaders in Syria or whether it was simply branded that way. Abedi may have just been sympathetic with their ideas and carried out the attack on his own.

Either way it may give the impression that ISIS is still in the game. By being connected with such a hideous act of carnage, the movement may seem to be a global player, a force to be reckoned with, and an organization worthy of recruiting new volunteers.

But appearances can be deceiving. The area controlled by ISIS is shrinking daily. The main cities of Fallujah and Ramadi have been liberated from ISIS, and most of Mosul is now free from ISIS control. Only the northern sections of the city are still dominated by ISIS holdouts and their area dwindles almost daily in house-to-house combat. The northern portion of Syria, near the Turkish border, has been freed by Syrian Kurdish forces, and a combination of military forces is closing in on the capital city of the ISIS caliphate, Rakka.

Perhaps more important, the ISIS troops have become demoralized in these military failures. The wages paid to its soldiers have shrunk to a fraction of what they were receiving just a year ago, and the once-steady stream of volunteers from expatriate Muslim communities around the world has decreased to a trickle. ISIS is no longer as cool as it once appeared to be.

So although the Manchester attack may have appeared to put ISIS back into the headlines and back into the terrorist limelight, the movement is floundering. One tragically dedicated person with a suicide belt is not the same as a flourishing militant organization.

But that raises the question of why someone like Salman Abedi would do such a thing. Was he motivated by a deep hatred of the Western culture that surrounded him as he grew up in Manchester? Was he brain washed into a religious ideology that made him think that his act would bring him instant salvation? Or was his motivation more personal, simply a longing to prove himself, to make a mark on history?

The motivations for Abedi are not yet clear. In my monitoring of on-line Twitter chats among young ISIS supporters, however, I have found a consistent theme, a longing for community. This idea of being part of a family is not just a feature of ordinary tweets, it is prominent in the memorial sites set up on line and included as tweet attachments. These commemorative sites that appear on the web-based magazines such as the former Dabiq, now renamed Rumiyah, talk about the dead soldier’s devotion to their comrades as much or more than it cites their devotion to their faith. In fact, the two seem to be intertwined.

It is understandable that a young person who felt alienated from the society in which was raised–perhaps feeling shunned from the kind of sociable crowd that would attend an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena—might take out his resentment in a violent way. It is a common element in youth rampages from Columbine to Sandy Hook. But as much as ISIS might claim this one as an example of its vitality, the sad fact is that a single tragically misguided suicide attacker cannot rescue a failing movement in its persistently downward spiral to oblivion.

“We were constantly at war,” a young Sunni Arab man told me, describing life in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. He had lived in the eastern part of the city for three years, the whole time under the watchful control of the Islamic State. Just weeks before I met him, he seized an opportunity and had fled.

When I talked with him in February he was in a makeshift refugee camp near the town of Hassan Sham just outside East Mosul. The town, like most of Mosul, had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. Now he and his family were crowded into a city of 20,000 refugees, living in tents supplied by UNICEF and staffed by generous donors from the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

I was brought to the refugee camp by colleagues associated with the Kurdistan university that had co-sponsored my trip to the country in February, 2017. They knew that I was interested in meeting refugees who had recently fled the control of the Islamic State, and through their contacts I was able to secure permission to one of the newest camps, constructed just a couple of months ago on territory that was formerly controlled by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or Daesh, an acronym for the Arabic phrase for the movement which happens to spell out a word similar to “bullies” in Arabic).

I was interested in finding out what life was like under ISIS rule, and it was as harsh as I had expected. The Sunni Arab guy described it like living in a prison. Since he was not willing to join ISIS he was fired from his job in the government-controlled water works. For over two years he had been out of work, doing odd jobs and selling family mementos to make ends meet. Though he was in the preferred religious and ethnic group from the rulers’ perspective, he was not the image that they had in mind for a perfect Muslim. When he was caught smoking a cigarette, for instance, he was put in prison for forty days.

One of his friends joined our conversation and explained that he too had been out of work. He previously was in construction, but under ISIS no new buildings were erected, so he sold his car and then various articles of furniture to survive. But at least he was alive. When ISIS found out that he had previously worked as a security guard for the Iraqi army he was forced to march to an open field with twenty other men accused of various offenses. Then to their shock the ISIS guards started firing their weapons at them. People were killed right beside him, the young man told me. He fell down as if he was dead, lying still next to the corpses of those who had been shot. For hours he lay there until he thought it was safe to sneak away. He then hid until the liberation forces came and he was able to spirit his two wives and seven children away from Mosul and out of ISIS controlled territory.

Fleeing Mosul was not an easy thing, as it turned out. My ideas about how wars end come from old World War II footage where the troops triumphantly march down the middle of the street and the jubilant population cheers from sidelines, waving flags.

The war with ISIS is not ending like that. In fact, in many cases it is not clear exactly when or whether the fighting has ended, since ISIS fighters and supporters have infiltrated the houses of ordinary civilians, some of whom may have been tacit supporters and others not. Even their neighbors do not know. All the residents were intimidated by ISIS as long as it had control. When things changed, no one knew whom to trust.

The liberation troops entered the areas of Mosul carefully, taking fire from ISIS on all sides, and wary of landmines and booby traps. The liberation troops were Iraqi Army or Sunni tribal militia; Kurdish Peshmerga troops and Shi’a militia were also fighting ISIS in the region but were not supposed to be in the vanguard of combatants that enter into the inner city. When they thought that they had liberated an area—say a city block of apartment houses—they often retreated to their encampments for the night, only to find the next morning that ISIS had retaken the block. In some cases the ISIS fighters had never left; they had found secure hiding places or tunnels in the buildings and were waiting for the chance to reassert control.

This meant that those civilians who were desperate to leave, such as the two fellows with whom I spoke, had to make several split-second decisions. They had to decide whether their neighborhood was truly free of ISIS soldiers, and whether the time was right for them and their families to make their getaway.

In both cases, therefore, the two men with whom I spoke decided to sneak out in the middle of the night. They chose a time when they thought that the liberation forces were near and ISIS security guards would be busy fighting them. When they and their wives and small children escaped in the cover of darkness, carrying only as many family possessions as they could hold in their hands, they had only a vague sense of where to go. They headed east, towards Kurdistan and freedom.

Soon they encountered checkpoints, and these presented problems. They had to make quick decisions about whom to trust. A roadblock manned by what may have appeared to be Iraqi Army might in fact be ISIS loyalists pretending to be part of the Iraqi Army. Making the wrong calculation about whom to trust could lead to deportation back to Mosul. Or at worst they would be killed on the spot.

For this reason they avoided checkpoints, scurrying around them and behind houses, until they were far from the city. At that point, when they felt reasonably secure, they identified themselves as refugees to what they hoped were units of the Iraqi Army. Mercifully, they were safe. A truck then brought them to the refugee camp where they were assigned a tent and for the first time in years could breathe sighs of relief.

They had arrived at the camp only weeks before I talked with them, and what was surprising was how ordinary it all seemed, how manner-of-factly they told their stories of escape. Part of the reason was that they have not had much time to reflect on their ordeal, since they have had to adjust to a new life, and figuring out how to survive in a refugee camp with tens of thousands of others.

One of the first things one of the men did was to trim his beard. He did not become smooth shaven, since the style for men in Iraq is often to keep some semblance of beard. But he did not want the bushy Muslim beard that ISIS required of all men. He also began to listen to rock music on the little portable radio he carried with him, blasting its tunes from a Kurdistan radio station. In Mosul he also had the tiny portable radio, but he kept it hidden. Now he could listen to rock music in the open, and smoke cigarettes whenever he wanted to. These were small symbols of freedom, but important ones to him.

Both men wanted to return to Mosul to rebuild their lives. That is not possible at present, of course, since the city is still a war zone. Moreover, even when the last ISIS fighter has been killed or captured, the city will be left in shambles. I passed by several villages that on the outskirts of Mosul which, like many parts of the city itself, have been utterly destroyed. In the villages I saw, not a single building was still habitable. And even if they could rebuild, the infrastructure of water, electricity and sewer lines will take months if not years to reconstruct. And then there is the fear of landmines and booby traps that the ISIS fighters have left behind.

To rebuild all of this will take money and civic will. Without monetary support from the Iraq government or from the international community, the civic resolve may wither as well. Already there are reports that the Iraq city of Fallujah, only recently liberated from ISIS control, may again slip into the hands of ISIS given the frustration and desperation of the residents of the city who are having great difficulty in rebuilding their lives. As horrible as ISIS control may be, it has provided a kind of civic order and funding to maintain a city’s infrastructure.

To the fellows with whom I spoke in the refugee camp at Hassan Sham, these were problems for the future. Right now they were happy to breathe freely and imagine the possibilities of an improved life, even if that road to rehabilitation will be as perilous as the journey that they had just made in fleeing Mosul.

My thanks to Rebeen Fadhil, a journalist and social activist with the Harmony project in Erbil, Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq, for arrangements and translation assistance.

My meeting with Gulen at his retreat in Pennsylvania in December, 2016. A version of this essay was first posted by Religion Dispatches on January 12, 2017, under the heading, “Talking with the ‘Religious Terrorist’ that Turkey Wants to Extradite.”

Who would have thought that a Turkish cleric living in Eastern Pennsylvania would present the Trump administration with one of its first foreign policy challenges. But Turkey wants Fethullah Gulen extradited to face charges that he was involved in the failed coup attempt against the Turkish strong man, Recip Erdogan, several months ago. Trump’s short-lived national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, a former Turkish lobbyist, had suggested that this would be on the top of the agenda for the new foreign policy team. With Flynn gone, the outcome of the request is more uncertain.

But if Trump’s administration does extradite Gulen this will likely trigger a storm of protest from human rights activists around the world, since his conviction by Turkish courts will be seen as a sham justification for Erdogan’s attempt to purge Turkey of his political opponents. Since the coup Erdogan has rounded up tens of thousands of journalists, teachers, lawyers, police, and others thought to be sympathetic to the Gulen movement.

Gulen is in the center of this storm, and since I have made it my habit to study the intersection of religion and politics around the world, he was clearly someone I would like to meet. Recently, I had a chance to do just that.

My visit to Gulen in December 2016 was arranged by people in the movement associated with his teachings–the Hizmet (“service”) movement–who knew that I was interested in meeting him. Since I had already planned to be on the East Coast on that day, the movement did not provide for my airfare or any compensation for this visit, aside from an omelette at an I-Hop as we drove to the retreat from Newark airport. Three other scholars were also invited to the meeting; we were a group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

When we were introduced to Fethullah Gulen he attempted to rise from his chair. He swayed and tottered a bit, and I was afraid that he would fall. His aides quickly were at his side, steadying him, and he shook my hand firmly. Though he was frail, I found him to be alert and attentive, and he closely followed the conversation as the comments were translated from English to Turkish. At an age somewhere between seventy-five and seventy-eight (the records are not clear about the precise years), he is dealing with the effects of diabetes and cardiovascular ailments.

The reason that I had come to meet Gulen was not to find out whether he was in fact implicated in the coup attempt—I would have no way of assessing whether that was the case. Rather I came out of curiosity, to try to understand the extraordinary magnetism of the man who has garnered such an incredible following of hundreds of thousands of middle class professionals in Turkey and around the world, and whose political power has threatened Turkey’s head of state. My initial impression was of a reserved, quiet gentleman who was respected by those around him but not fawned over as spiritual leaders sometimes are.

The meeting room in his quarters where we met was the size of a large living room with comfortable, overstuffed chairs and couches lining either side with one prominent chair at the head of the room, almost like a throne. Clearly it was his, since there was a TV remote and some reading material beside it. I stepped aside so he could take the chair but he insisted that as the guest, I should take the honored spot. He took a more modest seat by the side. Soon tea and Turkish sweets arrived, and the conversation began.

“Do you often wonder,” I said to him, “why, considering all the possible enemies that he might have, Erdogan would target you? Do you sometimes ask yourself, ‘why me?’”

Gulen thought for a moment, and then said that he had often asked himself that question, especially in recent months. He had come to the conclusion that he and Erdogan were cut from different cloth. They were both interested in relating religion to public life, but their approaches were not the same. Erdogan came from the perspective of “political Islam,” he said, which by its nature was autocratic. It could not tolerate any form of organization that challenged him, or that he could not control.

Gulen told us that he did not know Erdogan well—they had only met on two occasions. One was when Erdogan came to him to ask for his political support, explaining that like Gulen he wanted to bring moral values into public life. At the time Gulen thought that that was a good thing, and he supported him, as did many of those associated with his movement. Many observers have credited the Erdogan-Gulen alliance as a major factor in weakening Turkey’s secular Kemalist establishment.

The relationship between Erdogan and Gulen began to sour, however, when information surfaced about corruption within Erdogan’s inner circle, and about the president’s autocratic attempts to solidify power. Gulen supporters within the police, the judiciary, and the news media were leading the corruption charges. Soon Erdogan began rounding up the more vocal of his Gulen-related critics and shutting down Gulen-related newspapers.

Then came the July 15, 2016 attempted coup against Erdogan, and Gulen was immediately accused. Even when the coup was underway, however, Gulen himself had been quick to denounce the effort as undemocratic. He and his associates denied having anything to do with it. I have no way of verifying whether or not this was the case, though considering his relative isolation in his woodsy retreat with little or no organizational structure around him, it seems hard to imagine him plotting an intricate coup attempt involving high level military leaders in a country on the other side of the world.

It seems even less likely that the tens of thousands of teachers, journalists, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and social service providers who have been imprisoned in Turkey since the coup attempt have had anything to do with it. Coup plots are by their secretive nature privy only to a small inner circle of those directly engaged in the operations. Even if an inner circle of Gulen supporters were involved, it is unlikely that the tens of thousands of Gulen admirers would have had any advanced knowledge.

Yet it is likely that many of them were critical of Erdogan’s rule. The largest circulation newspaper in Istanbul, Zaman, was sympathetic to Gulen’s positions and though once a supporter of Erdogan, it increasingly became critical of what it regarded as a deeply corrupt regime. Even before the attempted coup, the government had raided the offices, imprisoned many of the journalists, and eventually closed down the paper. Gulen’s followers were becoming identified as the government’s foes.

It is difficult to say, however, just who is a follower of Gulen since I am told that the movement does not keep roles. There is no initiation, no membership as such. There may be inner circles and networks of which I am not aware, but it appears for the most part to be a broad movement of those who agree with the main ideas of Gulen’s teachings and are inspired by him. Just owning a book written by Gulen can implicate someone as a follower.

What Gulen teaches in in his published writings is an interesting mixture of Sufi mysticism, interfaith tolerance, civic virtues and entrepreneurship. What is attractive is a notion of a modern Islam compatible with those who live active lives in multicultural milieus. This ideal of an engaged Islam has led his followers to establish hundreds of schools, newspapers, hospitals, social service projects, interfaith councils, and professional associations. My sense is that most of these projects are decentralized, created by the ingenuity of those inspired by Gulen’s teachings, and not orchestrated by a central command. Assuming this is the case, it would be difficult to see the movement as an organizational threat.

The setting of Gulen’s quarters did not give the appearance of the control center for a vast international organization, let alone one that could threaten a major international power like Turkey. What we saw when we visited the retreat center was a former youth camp on twenty-six wooded acres on a quiet road near the town of Saylorsburg in eastern Pennsylvania. A large farmhouse has been renovated into guest quarters, and another building is used for conferences. It is in this building that we met with Gulen in the meeting room that was adjacent to his bedroom, his only place of privacy in the compound. The bedroom itself was perhaps only ten by twelve feet in size, just enough room for a desk and chair, a dresser, a prayer rug, and a narrow single bed on a low frame near the floor.

In the compound were several other cottages for visitors and students, but the place seemed empty when we were there. He taught a group of students every morning, we were told, but there were no permanent residents on the property aside from Gulen himself. I did meet one visitor who was staying there at the time, the former head of a university in Turkey who had escaped from the country in the recent purge of tens of thousands of Gulen supporters following the attempted coup against Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a coup that Erdogan claims that Gulen masterminded, and for which Gulen’s followers were being punished.

From the appearance of the retreat center, it was hard to imagine the organization as a powerful threat. Yet any movement is a threat in that it is not easily controlled. If Gulen is right, and Erdogan fears anything that he cannot control, then the Gulen movement with its critical stance towards what it regards as abuses of the public trust, must seem threatening indeed. It is understandable, then, that the Erdogan regime has closed down all of the schools, universities, newspapers, and service projects related to Gulen throughout Turkey, and attempted to pressure governments elsewhere to do the same.

The question is whether Erdogan will be able to destroy the movement. Much of the rest of our conversation with Gulen was about that, how it can maintain itself in a time of persecution.

Gulen noted that the history of religious traditions is rife with cases of perseverance in the face of oppression, and in some instances the hardship seems to have made the movements more resilient. The history of Judaism is a case in point. But so is Christianity. I mentioned that when my wife and I visited Turkey’s Cappadocia region we stayed in rock caves where early Christians hid from Roman persecution. Christianity seems to have endured despite it, not only in Turkey but throughout the world, and Gulen affirmed that his following might as well.

When the Dalai Lama was forced to leave Tibet, many thought that his form of Tibetan Buddhism had been forever squashed. Yet in exile, the Dalai Lama has risen to a figure of global prominence, a spokesperson for a multicultural religiosity. Some in the room when I talked with Gulen mentioned that his teachings might have the same effect and also have a global impact, and he said that he hoped that that would be the case.

At the end of the forty-five minute conversation, Gulen rose to offer a gift of a nicely packaged Cross ballpoint pen and an elegant looking bottle of perfume. He was happy, his associates told me as we were leaving the room, to have had the chance to talk about broad issues and the future of the movement. Ordinarily these days, they said, he has been consumed with darker matters, about the fate of his many followers and the institutions they had created. He was pleased, they said, to turn again to his larger vision, that of a more just and tolerant society for Turkey and the world.