Kacem El Ghazzali recounts how political Islam has transformed the Muslim world over the last forty years into a much less tolerant place. Local customs and traditions have been suppressed in the Islamist drive to impose strict religious restrictions on dress and speech that did not exist a generation ago. Most worrying, even the supposedly moderate forms of Islamism are pursuing the same goal of suppressing alternative traditions and religions. El Ghazzali insists that these developments should be understood neither as the true form of Islam nor as a distortion of Islam but rather as the recent strengthening of a particular interpretation of Islam to the detriment of alternative ones. The primary problem is not Western oppression but the growth of Islamist ideology against those Muslims who support human rights. Unfortunately, rather than allying themselves with such voices of tolerance in the Muslim world, the well-meaning attempts by Western leftists to promote tolerance of other cultures has often led them to defend the most reactionary and repressive examples of Islamic culture: http://www.telospress.com/telos-194-spring-2021-political-theology-today/