This week, Josh Zepps sits down with commentator and writer Shadi Hamid. He’s a senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and his new book is Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World.  

There is a heated debate about whether there is something intrinsically unique about the religion of Islam that has lead to destructive groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, or whether their existence has nothing to do with religion and are merely the product of politics. Many insist that Islam is not unlike any other religion in its infancy and that with time it will go through a natural course of reform. Hamid suggests that Islam is indeed distinct from other religions, but that those distinctions aren’t in and of themselves good or bad. Hamid urges us to look at the root of these conflicts, because Islam’s unique doctrine and origin will likely mean that its path to reform will look very different from the path of enlightenment values that other religions have embraced before it.