Politics & Society

By the end of the year, France will pull more than 2,000 troops from the Sahel, but its military involvement in the region will persist. Blindly referring to ideological root causes of violence, however, leaves local conflicts out of the equation, while ignoring religious factors altogether is equally problematic.

Hardly a day in Western media and on the political stage goes by without a discussion about Muslims and Islam. Yet, we still seem to grapple with understanding the complexity of Muslim identities. We talked with Ulrike Freitag, director of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, about internal diversity, hands-on research, and the importance of “unmuting” marginalized voices.