Dr. Zuhdi Jasser on Defending Democracy and Confronting Political Islam through the Clarity Coalition

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): A Further Inquiry

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/04

Part 1 of 2

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is a Syrian American physician, U.S. Navy veteran, and co-founder of the Clarity Coalition (Champions for Liberty Against the Reality of Islamist Tyranny). A leading voice for Muslim reform, he advocates for secular governance, universal human rights, and freedom of belief. He founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and co-launched the Muslim Reform Movement. Jasser challenges political Islam and theocratic ideologies, promoting liberty through public discourse and civic engagement. Alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed, he empowers reformers to confront extremism while defending the rights and freedoms foundational to Western democratic societies.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. He is one of the co-founders of the Clarity Coalition, or Champions for Liberty Against the Reality of Islamist Tyranny. He is an internationally recognized Muslim reformer, physician, and human rights advocate committed to defending secularism, liberal democracy, and universal human rights. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed also founded the coalition. It confronts theocratic ideologies, political Islam, and blasphemy laws while promoting freedom of speech, gender equality, and freedom of belief.

Through public education, conferences, and advocacy, the Clarity Coalition offers a bold, principled response to rising extremism. It strives to empower voices that champion reform and challenge religious authoritarianism. Thank you very much for joining me today, Zuhdi. I appreciate it.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser: It is great to be with you, Scott. Thank you.

Jacobsen: So, why the Clarity Coalition? Because we have already covered the what. 

Jasser: When you look at history, it is doomed to repeat itself unless you learn its lessons. We are in a time of global transformation. As the son of immigrants—my family escaped Syria in the mid-sixties—I understood what Western democracy was all about, especially the American version, which ties national identity to the principles of the Constitution and the rule of law. In America, there is no singular race that defines national identity. It is a nation of immigrants united by a shared social contract.

If you look at the founding of America, it was a rebellion against theocracy. Islam has not undergone that internal revolution. It is 1,445 years old and is currently struggling against entrenched theocratic establishments. After 9/11, I founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—not to fight the symptom of terrorism, but to address the root cause: the ideological disease of political Islam, the concept of the Islamic state. My goal was to defeat that idea.

Later, I found others across Canada, Europe, and elsewhere working on similar initiatives. Together, we launched the Muslim Reform Movement in December 2015. While it is still, in many ways, a startup effort, we face a global Islamic establishment backed by petro-authoritarian regimes with trillions of dollars and deeply entrenched organizational infrastructure.

As we struggled to gain traction, we reflected on the 20th century. One of the West’s most effective strategies to counter Soviet communism was to form coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger—a network of think tanks, activists, and policymakers who understood the threat posed by the USSR.

So, I thought: the Muslim Reform Movement is part of the answer, but the rest includes many groups working to counter jihad, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and theocratic Shia movements—all of which are metastases of the same pathological cancer: theocracy within Islam. That is how we decided to form this broader coalition. CLARITY stands for Champions for Liberty Against the Reality of Islamist Tyranny. As a Muslim, I understood that it is not enough to simply be against something—you have to articulate and organize around what you are for.

If you want to defeat drug addiction, you cannot simply work against drug addiction. You have to give kids and addicts other things they want to do to become successful citizens. So it’s about liberty. It’s about championing freedom to defeat political Islam or Islamist tyranny. And that coalition has grown. If you go to our website, you’ll see several individuals there—women’s rights activists, gay rights activists, social activists, free marketeers—others who all share one thing: an understanding that jihadists and political Islamists are not compatible with Western society as we know it.

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Jacobsen: Do you rank order any of these stipulated values around universal human rights, secular governance, freedom of speech, and belief? Or do you take these less as a random assembly and more as a unified patchwork?

Jasser: That’s a great question. If you look at our founding meeting—where that language came from—it looks terrific and easy to say and talk about, but it took us quite a bit of time to agree on what that language should be. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) includes many core principles we all agree on, but some aspects were debated. For example, we spoke with British individuals who pointed out that the U.K. does not have a formal constitution, so codifying these things can be difficult. But ultimately, it is all about freedom and liberty.

I will tell you—I have my rank order. In that regard, I cannot speak on behalf of the coalition, but to me, the most important thing is free speech. Secular governance is probably the second most important. Liberty is a principle that is derived from those two. If you do not have free speech, and if you do not believe in secular governance—yes, you can believe in a society under God—but unless you think that human beings should be able to, through a separation of powers, create their laws, then you can never win an argument against people who believe they are invoking God’s law.

So, my two pivotal elements are free speech and secular governance. As Voltaire—or whoever said it—reminded us, the most harsh and offensive speech needs defending. Moderate speech is uncontroversial. But it is the voices on the fringes of society, those who say the most provocative things, who are the real test of that right.

Jacobsen: Which majority-Muslim society—if not in leadership or official hierarchy, then in public opinion surveys—seems to imbibe these values most?

Jasser: That’s a good question. For instance, even in Saudi Arabia, surveys show that around 5% of the population identifies as atheist. So, while that is not publicly acknowledged or visible, it tells us something about the underlying currents in society.

There are 56 Muslim-majority countries on the planet, and there is not a single one I would prefer to live in over any Western country. None of them imbibe a culture grounded in the Western understanding of liberty and individual rights. That is why our Clarity Coalition exists. At its core, it is about preserving the West, because Western societies—our countries—offer a unique postmodern environment where we can practice our faith more freely than in any Muslim-majority country.

That said, you are right. If you look at the Pew polls, many of them show that a significant portion of Muslims support Sharia-based laws that are incompatible with universal human rights. For example, in countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, 80 to 90 percent of Muslims believe that if someone leaves Islam, they should be killed. That is a litmus test for identifying an ideology fundamentally incompatible with Western modernity.

Those numbers drop to around 40 percent in countries like Indonesia or among Muslims in India. India is not a Muslim-majority country, but it has the largest Muslim population in the world, about 200 million people. Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in terms of population.

If you look at Iran, for instance, it has one of the fastest-growing atheist populations in the world. It also has one of the largest populations of Muslims leaving Islam. To me, as someone who has a close, orthodox relationship with God, that is a red flag for Muslims. If we do not figure out how to prevent the faith from turning into a cult, we will lose it in a few generations. A cult, by definition, is a belief system where leaving the faith is met with death. And tragically, that is currently the majority opinion among many Muslims globally.

Those ideas must be debated publicly. Consider Saudi Arabia: it positions itself as an ally of America, yet the country is effectively an open-air prison. This is a profound issue that needs to be addressed.

The reason I bring up Iran is because it is the ripest country, in my view, to overthrow a theocratic regime within the next ten years. The theocrats are on the defensive. The reason they are causing so much mayhem across the Middle East is precisely because they are on the verge of a massive revolution.

If that revolution happens, it will be a monumental victory for anti-theocrats. Many Iranians had buyer’s remorse just months after the 1979 revolution. They wanted to get rid of the Shah because they viewed him as a dictator, and they hoped an Islamic government would bring religious and personal freedom. Instead, it was a massive step backward—even worse than the Shah’s dictatorship.

These movements—what the media called the Arab Spring in 2011—were more of an Arab Awakening. Yes, they have been chaotic. But in the long run, they represent progress. Even if messy, they are a step forward.

As a Syrian American, I will tell you—as much as 800,000 Syrians lost their lives in the Syrian revolution—it has still been a step forward. You do not get rid of theocracy easily. If you talk to patients who have gone through aggressive cancer treatment, some die, some end up in palliative care, and some recover completely. It is similar when it comes to getting rid of theocracy. These populations will often endure significant loss of life in the process.

If you look at the Western experience in building democracy, take the Thirty Years’ War in Europe against theocrats—10 million people died over three decades. That is roughly where Islam is now. It is going through that same painful reckoning, where theocrats are being slowly pushed back.

What is remarkable to me is that, despite this oppressive environment, there is a growing percentage of Muslims who harbour anti-theocratic ideas. Much of that is thanks to social media. And that is why regimes like Saudi Arabia work so hard to control social networks. If you look at the top ten Twitter influencers in Saudi Arabia, many of them are radicals—Wahhabi or al-Qaeda–style voices.

Why would a government that claims to oppose al-Qaeda allow its most extreme elements to dominate public discourse? The answer is simple: that is how dictators retain power. They create fear and chaos to justify their military authority. Assad did the same thing in Syria. He suppressed moderate thinkers under the pretext of fighting ISIS, while doing very little actually to combat ISIS. 

It was ultimately the U.S. military under General Mattis that dismantled ISIS, not Assad. Assad often empowered them, just as the Egyptian government empowered the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a pattern. Country after country, we see extremists being enabled so that moderates, free thinkers, and critical inquiry—what your show promotes—cannot exist. Open conversation is suppressed.

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