John Esposito, 86, showed how Islamophobia warped US policy

Esposito’s clash with the “clash”

Danny Postel, in an obituary for New Lines Magazine, argues that Esposito’s academic legacy served as a repudiation of that of the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who claimed to explain “the roots of Muslim rage” and “what went wrong” in the Islamic world. Lewis was also responsible for coining a viral academic meme, “The Clash of Civilizations,” in his 1991 essay in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The term would later be adopted by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in his 1993 article and 1996 book of the same name.

Esposito’s 1992 book, “The Islamic Threat,” was followed in 1993 by his role in establishing the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

What emerged on the East Coast was two intellectual currents that would compete in a post-Cold War world, particularly after 9/11. One focused on an essentialist reading of Islam and its inevitable conflict with the “West,” and another sought to deconstruct that very narrative.

Studying with Esposito

My father gifted me Esposito’s 1988 book, “Islam: The Straight Path.” As with everything he gifted me, he had used it before and raved about it. My father, born in the predominantly Muslim island of Zanzibar in 1935, had learned about his faith from Esposito, a man born in 1940 into a working-class Italian-American family in Brooklyn.

Influenced by his devout Catholic mother and his father’s commitment to social justice — his household essentially embraced liberation theology — Esposito aspired to become a Catholic priest. He joined the Capuchin Franciscan Order as a youth, the same order whose distinctive white headdress gives us the name “cappuccino” because of its resemblance to the coffee’s white froth. He left seminary before ordination and went to graduate school, earning a doctorate in religious studies at Temple University under the Palestinian scholar Ismail al-Faruqi.

His books inspired me to apply to Georgetown University to study under him during my master’s program, and I eventually became his research assistant. I will never forget one conversation in 1996, when I ranted in his office about how nobody inside the Washington Beltway was paying attention to the threat of a terrorist named Osama bin Laden, who had forged an alliance with another obscure group, the Taliban, in Afghanistan. I lamented that there were few institutions in Washington, whether in the State Department or at the university level, focused on or offering courses on Afghanistan that year. The ramifications of that lack of institutional knowledge would become apparent years later.

When I graduated in 1998, my father’s dream was to meet Esposito. My father was the son of an ayatollah who was prominent among the Khoja Shi’a community of East Africa. My father lived up the street in Zanzibar’s Stone Town from Farrokh Bolsara, who later moved to the U.K. and changed his name to Freddie Mercury. Yet, for my father, it was Esposito who was his pop star. There, I gave Esposito a graduation gift: a necktie my mother made from a red-and-white kafiyya, the same style worn by Prince Waleed, the Saudi businessman and supporter of Esposito’s center at Georgetown.

Just three years later, our field and lives were changed by the 9/11 attacks, followed by the war in Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq War, the civil wars that followed the Arab Spring in 2011, the rise of the Islamic State in 2014, Israel’s 2023 wars, and America's Third Gulf War in 2026.

While his books influenced me, it was his 2011 interview with John Feffer that has stayed with me. Speaking of the Obama administration, he said, “Look at the administration and tell me where you see significant senior Muslim appointments. They’re simply not there.”

While I was a research assistant for Esposito, I was also part of the same White House intern intake in 1997 that included Huma Abedin, who would later become Hillary Clinton’s inseparable aide. Had Clinton won the election in 2016, Abedin would have been the most prominent Muslim in the White House. From that Khoja Shi’a community in East Africa that my grandfather used to preach to, a mayor of New York would emerge, Zohran Mamdani.

I quoted from that same 2011 article in April 2026, in a lecture I gave at the Islamic Center of San Diego mosque, in reference to the 2010 controversy over the Cordoba House/Park 51 mosque, derisively called the “Ground Zero” mosque, that was never built in lower Manhattan, because of its proximity to the Twin Towers. It resulted in what Esposito called a “wave of anti-Muslim sentiment.”

People vandalized mosques. A church congregation leader stood outside of a mosque shouting “Murder!” and “Jesus hates Muslims.” These creeps came out into the daylight because they felt that they could do it, that it was not politically incorrect to do it.

Indeed, his comments were prescient; figures from President Donald Trump to university presidents promoted or allowed Islamophobia to flourish in the media, even on our university campuses.

Esposito finally established The Bridge Initiative to document Islamophobia, making the professor a cartographer of this hate. Tragically, the most recent Islamophobic attack documented by this program was an attack in May on the very mosque I lectured at earlier this year; two teenagers attacked it, killing three people. They said they were inspired by a nursing student from my very own campus, Cal State San Marcos, who himself attacked a local mosque and synagogue in 2019.

Esposito’s work was relevant, from San Diego to the Gulf, up to his death.