"Is Islam Exceptional?" Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution

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What role does Islam—the religion of the vast majority of the Arab world’s 440 million inhabitants—play in the region’s governance and in its prospects for peace, progress, and prosperity? Shadi Hamid, author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, explores this and other questions. His findings bear not just on the future of the Middle East, but of the West as well.

Moderated by MEI Faculty Director Tarek Masoud, Sultan Qaboos Bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations.

About the Speaker

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds. He is the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs, and co-editor of Rethinking Political Islam. His first book Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East was named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2014. In 2019, Hamid was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine. He received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and his PhD in politics from Oxford University.

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