In-Person NY Roundtable: Iran’s Government, Arab Neighbors, and the Future of the Middle East

HUSAIN: My name is Ed Husain. I’m a senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I have the distinct honor of welcoming our guest, but I just want to say a few words by way of introduction as to who it is that we’re dealing with here. Sheikh Al Mahfoudh bin Bayyah’s father is the prominent Muslim jurist philosopher Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah. Sheikh Abdallah is a mentor not just to me personally, but to tens of thousands of Muslim scholars around the world. He is very influential to us in the West and is an advisor and a professor to at least five royal families in the Middle East. My generation of Arabs and Muslims born and raised here in the West is the first generation since Andalusia to be here. We had distinct questions as to what it means to be a Westerner, what it means to be a Muslim. So, for example, most of us in Europe and here in America were raised with ideas that we must create something called the Islamic State, we must try and uphold a Sharia law that is in tension with the common law tradition here in the West...