The Future of Islam | Author Haroon Moghul

Haroon Moghul, author of 2Billion Caliphs and How to be a Muslim, will speak as part of MCC’s Friday Night Family Series.

Maghrib to Isha (7:06 p.m. to 9 p.m.) | Friday, September 23 | MCC Prayer Hall or watch virtually staging.mcceastbay.org/live

Limited dinner box sales from 6:15 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Banquet Hall.

Sidi Haroon will speak about a vision of a Muslim future. He will explain the attraction of Muslims to their faith, discusses the challenges contemporary Islam confronts, and how we might imagine an Islamic theology and identity ready to face tomorrow as well as why Muslims often fail to acknowledge that our internal pluralism isn’t a flaw so much as it’s an embracing design feature of Islam.

Questions? events@staging.mcceastbay.org

Each month, MCC invites insightful American Muslims who are making a positive impact on our community to speak at its Friday Family Night speaker series.

• – More from our Friday Night Series: https://staging.mcceastbay.org/friday-night

Haroon Moghul is an author, essayist, and Friday sermon preacher. An award-winning journalist and opinion columnist, his articles have been featured by The New York Times, NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, TIME, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian, among many others. He’s also appeared on all major US news networks and many international channels like the BBC and Al-Jazeera as an expert commentator on Islam and Muslim communities. Haroon is the author of several books, including How to be a Muslim: An American Story (2017), which was glowingly reviewed by The Washington Post and NPR’s Fresh Air, as well as Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of a Muslim Future (2022), which argues for more dynamic and egalitarian Muslim communities. He has served as an expert guide to the Islamic heritage and legacy of Muslim Spain, Turkey, and Bosnia. Haroon has spoken about his faith at universities, houses of worship, and conferences on five continents. Raised in a family of religious scholars, he played a formative role in the development of the Islamic Center at New York University. After completing his undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Middle Eastern Studies at that institution, he continued with a focus on Islamic thought in colonial South Asia at Columbia University, supplemented by extensive research and learning in Egypt and Pakistan. After spending much of his life in the American northeast, he recently moved to Ohio, where he’s become a stepfather. He writes about the challenges and joys of raising Muslim kids at a new Substack called Sunday Schooled. Learn more about him at https://www.haroonmoghul.com

Haroon Moghul’s many books include My First Police State, The Order of Light, and How to Be Muslim: An American Story, a “profound and intimate” (The Washington Post) memoir about life in the United States during the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A former member of the cohort of the Muslim Leadership Initiative, a fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, a Friday preacher, and public speaker, Moghul’s writing investigates the topics of pop culture, faith, futurism, and philosophy. He has contributed essays to The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, Foreign Policy, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among several other media outlets. In Two Billion Caliphs, Moghul uses his Muslim perspective to answer some of life’s biggest questions and to address Islam’s misunderstood past, its present challenges, and the hope it can offer for the future.

About the Book, Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of a Muslim Future
Explains the attraction of Muslims to their faith, discusses the challenges contemporary Islam confronts, and how we might imagine an Islamic theology and identity ready to face tomorrow.

Islam is often associated with and limited to the worst of the world—extremism, obscurantism, misogyny, bigotry. So why would so many people associate with such a fundamentalist faith? Two Billion Caliphs advocates for a way of being Muslim in the world, ready for today and prepared for tomorrow. Unlike stale summaries, which restrict themselves to facts and figures, Haroon Moghul presents a deeply Muslim perspective on the world, providing Islamic answers to universal questions: Who are we? What are we doing here? What happens to us when we die? And from description, Moghul moves to prescription, aspiring to something outrageous and audacious. Two Billion Caliphs describes what Islam has been and what it is, who its heroes are, what its big ideas are, but not only to tell you about the past or the present, but to speak to the future.

Two Billion Caliphs finds that Islam was a religion of intimacy, a faith rooted in and reaching for love, and that it could be and should be again. Fulfilling that destiny depends on the efforts of Muslims to reclaim their faith, rebuild their strength, and reimagine their future, on their own terms. Two Billion Caliphs offers Muslim thoughts for the age ahead, to create an interpretation Islam of and for days to come, the kind of religion the world’s Muslims deserve, with echoes of the confident faith Muslims once had. The destiny of Islam, then, is not, as so many prefer to argue, a reformation. It is a counter-reformation. A restoration of what once was.