Today’s Must Read

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Anthony Shadid, now of The New York Times, is not only one of our best mideast correspondents, he’s also a deep chronicler of the evolution of political Islam. The central argument of his 2002 book Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam was that even as the centrality of radical Islamic politics has grown in American eyes, there’s been a contrary evolution on the ground in the Middle East — toward a softer-edged political Islam, more comfortable with democratic norms and political pluralism. Shadid has a piece in the Times today revisiting this question, “Egypt’s Path After Uprising Does Not Have to Follow Iran’s.”