Two Baptist champions of religious freedom and tolerance recently gave an interview to imam Abdul Malik Mujahid who hosts a talk show broadcast by Muslim Network TV, a news outlet headquartered in Chicago. Anna Piela and Michael Woolf, a Chicago-based husband-and-wife team of ministers and scholars from the American Baptist Church, used the interview with Mujahid to promote their recently published book Confronting Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice (Judson Press, 2025). In so doing, Piela and Woolf helped normalize Islamism—a movement that undermines the very freedoms they claim to defend.
Does Islam have a privileged status when it comes to being shielded from critique?
In their text, the authors rely extensively on Baptist proponents of religious freedom such as Roger Williams to argue that Muslims should be welcomed into the fold of American civil and religious life with open arms. Invoking the writings of Krister Stendahl, the authors also argue that Christians should cultivate an attitude of “holy envy” toward Islam to improve how they practice their own faith and to exorcise from their world view the anti-Muslim beliefs that Christian intellectuals have been promoting for centuries.
“Islamophobia is not only what we see coming from conservatives [and] political figures who seem to be very hostile to Islam … It is sort of the air we breathe,” Piela said to Mujahid. “It is around us.”
Piela and Woolf’s choice of Mujahid as the confessor of the sins of American churches is odd given that he served as president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) in the mid-1990s and has spoken at numerous ICNA events since. To put it mildly, ICNA is no promoter of peace love and understanding, but a font of Islamic supremacism.
In 2010, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reported that, “ICNA’s magazine has featured interviews with terrorist leaders in Pakistan, called on youth to fight abroad in Kashmir, and honored like-minded extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and South Asia’s Jamaat-e-Islami.”
ICNA support of Jamaat-e-Islami is particularly troublesome given that, according to Michael Rubin, director of policy analysis for the Middle East Forum, “was intimately involved in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide that killed up to 3 million,” and consequently “became just the second political party after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party to face an international tribunal for its crimes.”
Mujahid, who did not respond to an email query from Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), has been able to distance himself from this extremism, having served as the president of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, a prominent interfaith organization, from 2010 to 2015. Moreover, Mujahid was, according to CBS Evening News, the force behind the “Hey, ISIS, You Suck!” billboard campaign of 2016.
“ISIS and Islamophobes are the two sides of the same coin which is hurting Islam as well as Humanity,” he told CBS.
The following year, however, Mujahid spoke at a conference organized by the Muslim American Society (MAS) and ICNA, which he used to lead. A true supporter of interfaith relations and religious freedom would sever ties with ICNA, which lionizes Sayed Maududi, the founder of the previously mentioned Jamaat-e-Islami on its website. In his book, Let Us Be Muslims, published in the 1930s, Maududi called for the overthrow of Western democracies and the imposition of sharia law throughout the world.
“The lesson is clear,” Maududi wrote. “We must fight until the sovereignty of all beings other than Allah is brought to an end, until only the law of God rules in the world, until the sovereignty of God alone is acknowledged, until we serve only him.” Elsewhere Maududi wrote, “Islam is not merely a religious creed or compound name for a few forms of worship, but a comprehensive system which envisages to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforces its own program of reform which it deems best for the well-being of mankind.”
In the face of such aggressive certitude promoted by Islamists throughout the world— including the United States—Piela and Woolf promote an easy-going pluralism, declaring in their book that, “the sheer multiplicity of religious beliefs ought to make us pause and consider whether God also delights in the many different conceptions and understandings of the holy.”
With rhetoric such as this, Piela and Woolf—who are so quick to condemn their fellow Christians who show the least bit of concern over the misdeeds of Muslims—demonstrate themselves to be ill-equipped to face up the threat of Islamism.
Piela and Woolf, who did not respond to an email inquiry from FWI, seem intent on defaming anyone committed to standing up to the threat of Islamism by accusing them of “Islamophobia.” In their book, they cite polemics from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to condemn Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney and numerous other commentators for opposing the spread of Islamism in Western democracies, portraying them as a cadre of “educated and charismatic Islamophobes.” They fail to acknowledge however, that Pipes himself has worked assiduously to respect the religious beliefs and rights of Muslims in Western democracies even as he calls for an updating in how the faith is practiced in the modern world.
It’s not something they want to talk about. They ducked the issue during another interview with Mobashra Tazamal from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, an institution that seeks to stifle open discussion about the challenges facing Islam in the modern world. When this writer asked the authors “Is there a way for non-Muslims to talk about the impact of mass-immigration from Muslim-majority countries on civil society and the safety of women in Europe without being accused of ‘Islamophobia?’” that question was also dismissed. In the minds of Piela and Woolf and their Islamist interlocutors, such questions are taboo.
When asked (by this writer) if the authors had asked Pipes for a response to CAIR’s accusation of “Islamophobia” and if highlighting the issue of antisemitism in the Christian world qualify as “anti-Christian” or “Christianophobic,” Tazamal dismissed the question.
Piela and Woolf would do well to read Islam Rising: How the Christian College Can Equip the Next Generation by scholar Tim Orr from Indiana University. Orr acknowledges that Muslims are the target of bigotry but that a critique of their faith is part and parcel of life in the modern world. “No one accuses people of being Christianophobic if a critique is offered of Christianity,” he writes. “What if Islam has inherent problems in its history, its holy book, and the contemporary expression of the religion? To draw conclusions about its history may be thought to be rooted in some sort of phobia. Does Islam have a privileged status when it comes to being shielded from critique?” he asks.
For Piela and Woolf, the answer is clearly yes.
