ABSTRACT
Islam is narrating an epoch-defining story. It has moved millions across the Islamic world. The most important story from Islamic lands tells how this Islamic Awakening, with its call for reform and resistance, has taken hold in the lives of millions of common people, making itself felt on the mass as well as elite level. Mainstream Islamists have taken the lead in an innovative transnational Islamic project of reform and renewal to bring Islamic discourse and practice fully into the twenty-first century. Centrist Islamists have no illusions as to the deadly character of the extremist challenge to their own project of Islamic reform and legitimate resistance to foreign intrusions. In politics and foreign policy, narrative is everything. But there was no new narrative here. The president displayed no new thinking to make sense of the moral and political failures of US foreign policy in the region and to guide a more rational and modest foreign policy course.
