On Friday, September 18, 2026, Michigan State University’s Muslim Studies Program marked its 20th anniversary at the MSU International Center. The honoree was Mohammed Ayoob, a distinguished professor emeritus of international relations and the program’s founding coordinator. The university’s chief inclusion officer spoke and the program’s director presented a plaque. An anonymous donor put up $50,000 for an endowment in Ayoob’s name. Then Ayoob explained, once more, what the program exists to teach.
Ayoob contends that Islam, as a body of doctrine, was irrelevant to al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the “so-called Islamist movements” he attributed to American and Israeli policy along with the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan.
“It was not Islam that motivated the attacks,” he said of September 11, 2001. “The reality was far more complex and was primarily related to the widespread opposition to American policy in the Middle East, rather than to Islam that was used as a justification for the attacks.”
He went further. “The continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the expansion of settlements, the creeping annexation of the West Bank, and the economic strangulation of Gaza gave Hamas a degree of credibility among segments of the Palestinian population,” Ayoob said. “The fact that the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority was not only corrupt but was also perceived as an agent of the Israeli occupation increased Hamas’s popularity amongst the Palestinian population. These factors had nothing to do with Islam.”
These quotations come from The State News, Michigan State’s student newspaper, which covered the event on September 19. No other outlet has reported on the event—a notable fact, as the founding scholar of a Muslim studies program at a large public university could—in person—assure his university’s administrators that the deadliest terrorist attack in American history had nothing to do with the ideology its perpetrators cited in their own statements.
Ayoob’s argument is also noteworthy. His claim is not that Islam is a religion of a billion and a half people, the vast majority of whom have never harmed anyone, although that is a fact that no serious person disputes. Instead, he contends that Islam, as a body of doctrine, was irrelevant to al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the “so-called Islamist movements” he attributed to American and Israeli policy along with the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan. Yet, the men who wrote al-Qaeda’s fatwas, named their movement the Islamic Resistance Movement, and pledged Hezbollah to the guardianship of the jurist would find this rather strange, because they said what they believed. Ayoob’s assertion requires us to disbelieve them.
This is not a new position for MSU’s program. In 2019, its current director, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, spoke at Georgetown’s Qatari- and Saudi-founded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding about his book Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism. Campus Watch Fellow Andrew Harrod was there. Khalil argued that jihadists sit “on the fringes of the jihad tradition” and that “the attempts of al Qaeda and ISIS to justify terrorism on Islamic grounds typically require the abandonment of both strict literalism and the historically prevailing interpretations of Islamic thought.” When pressed on clerical support for suicide bombing, he answered: “If you want to identify people who are okay with suicide bombing, I can give you a list,” and named Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose Al Jazeera program reached an estimated 60 million viewers. Yet, his example undermines his argument, because a phenomenon with a list of mainstream clerical endorsers is not fringe.
Jabbar Bennett, MSU’s chief inclusion officer, told the audience that the program’s work serves the university’s mission, which he defined as “to replace myths and stereotypes with knowledge.”
Ayoob’s own scholarship has drawn the Forum’s attention before. The Middle East Quarterly reviewed his book Will the Middle East Implode? in 2015 and found that it “contains almost nothing original but tediously rehashes what the media has reported.” His earlier work, The Many Faces of Political Islam, is, by his own account at Friday’s event, “widely used in courses teaching the subject.” His thesis, therefore, is not confined to one anniversary speech, but forms part of the curriculum.
Little wonder, considering the university’s position as stated during the celebration reflects the same ahistorical line. Jabbar Bennett, MSU’s chief inclusion officer, told the audience that the program’s work serves the university’s mission, which he defined as “to replace myths and stereotypes with knowledge.” Jeffrey Riedinger, the former dean of International Studies and Programs, recalled that he was happy to “twist enough arms at central administration” to fund it. No one asked which myths, or whether a program founded in 2002, in Ayoob’s own account as a response to 9/11, had in 20 years tested its founder’s proposition against the record of the Islamic State, October 7, or the Iranian regime’s own theologians. Friday night’s comments made clear that Ayoob’s proposition has become a founding myth of its own, now with an endowment attached.
There is another way to run a Middle East program, and it was described in the press that same week. The Forward reported on September 18 that Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies programs have spent a decade cross-listing courses and sharing steering committees and now co-teach a course called “Difficult Conversations on the Middle East.” Jonathan Smolin, a professor of Middle Eastern studies who teaches it, told the paper: “In the first class, students come in with this idea of, ‘How do I win the debate? How do I show that I’m right?’ That’s categorically not what we’re doing in the class.”
To be sure, Dartmouth’s model has its own problems. Its syllabus, as The Forward describes it, treats “Palestinian armed resistance” and “the accusation of genocide in Gaza” as topics for debate—an allegation that begs for critical analysis. But it at least acknowledges that a debate exists. Michigan State’s program, in contrast, celebrated 20 years of having declared the question answered once and for all.
No one asked which myths, or whether a program founded in 2002, in Ayoob’s own account as a response to 9/11, had in 20 years tested its founder’s proposition against the record of the Islamic State, October 7, or the Iranian regime’s own theologians.
Campus Watch, the Forum’s project that critiques Middle East studies, has documented this pattern since 2002: programs that begin as a response to a crisis harden into institutions whose first loyalty is to their founding explanation. Michigan State’s Muslim Studies Program is a clear case. It was established, by its founder’s account, to answer one question. Twenty years later it has a new director, a dean’s blessing, a chief inclusion officer’s endorsement, an endowment, and offers the same answer.
The taxpayers of Michigan fund the university. Its students deserve to learn how to critically address the question their program was created to address. They are unlikely to gain this skill from the program itself.
