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In "Veiled Truths" (July/August 2010), Marc Lynch's suggestion that clever U.S. diplomats ought to play rival factions of the Islamist movement against one another has a ring of common sense, which I applaud, even if the idea is not exactly novel. But I worry that Lynch's one intelligent remark may lull readers into supposing that his other comments are equally sensible -- for example, his judgment that Hamas is a "moderate" movement, useful as "a firewall against radicalization." But mostly, I worry that this one comment may lull readers into believing anything that Lynch writes about me or my book The Flight of the Intellectuals.

Lynch's complaints about me are large and various, and they rise to a climactic sentence: "Nor is he concerned that expressing extreme anti-Islamic views and embracing only those Muslims who reject Islam might help al Qaeda by antagonizing those hewing to the Muslim mainstream and perhaps convincing them that [Osama] bin Laden is right after all." If you disentangle the complexities of the gerunds and clauses in the sentence, you will see that Lynch has accused me of being an anti-Muslim extremist whose writings are fodder for terrorism. Here, I conclude, is a less than positive review. And yet what dreadful thing have I done?

It has lately been argued that the United States should "engage" with Islamists. I agree. Therefore, I have engaged with the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan. I have done this by taking him seriously as a thinker, by reading his work closely, by examining his philosophical assumptions, and by arguing with him at length. This is not an incitement to terrorism. This is a way to clarify ideas and reduce misunderstandings. To be sure, my study of Ramadan's work has not aroused in me feelings of admiration. But I have laid out in full the reasons for my poor opinion, as critics, unlike diplomats, should always do.

Lynch has immersed himself in Ramadan's world of intra-Islamist debate. But I fear that in doing so, he has succumbed to a common syndrome of academic regional specialists: he has ended up adopting several of the intellectual assumptions that ought to be his topic of study. He denounces me as an unreasonable extremist because he cannot imagine how a reasonable person could read Ramadan in a different light than he does. And he fails to notice that by taking some of the Islamists' assumptions as factual reality, he has lost the ability to make elementary judgments. His depiction of Hamas as a moderate and helpful organization can serve as one example, and I will point to another.

The name of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamic scholar and al Jazeera televangelist, pops up repeatedly in my book because it pops up still more frequently in Ramadan's major books on Islamic philosophy. Lynch judges my description of Qaradawi to be drawn "so crudely that few Muslims would recognize him in the caricature." Lynch would prefer Qaradawi to be described as "an icon to mainstream nonviolent Islamists and an object of outrage among Salafi jihadists" -- which makes Qaradawi sound admirable, or at least minimally acceptable, even if, as Lynch acknowledges, Qaradawi "often takes issue with U.S. foreign policy and is certainly hostile toward Israel."

From reading Lynch, however, or from reading Ramadan (who has always treated Qaradawi as a revered mentor, even when respectfully disagreeing with him), one would never guess that Qaradawi is a genocidal anti-Semite. In Qaradawi's televised opinion, Allah inflicted Hitler on the Jews "to put them in their place." And Qaradawi has called for a renewal of Hitler's efforts: "Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one."

Lynch observes that I describe Qaradawi as "monstrous," with the quotation marks signifying Lynch's wry opinion that I have rendered Qaradawi cartoonishly. He scoffs at my insistence on noticing a Nazi influence in Qaradawi's thinking. But Lynch is able to scoff only because, like Ramadan himself, he hides behind euphemisms -- in this case, his phrase "hostile toward Israel," when what he really means is "Hitlerian."

These television speeches by Qaradawi were translated and posted online by the Middle East Media Research Institute in January 2009. A few months later, Ramadan published the most recent of his serious philosophical books, Radical Reform -- and in this book, exactly as in the past, Ramadan repeatedly cites Qaradawi in a spirit of deference and reverence. My impulse is to be horrified. Lynch's response is to say that if someone in this debate is an extremist, it is I. Who is right? I will only observe that Lynch should not expect people with reactions like mine to pipe down anytime soon.

Lynch complains that I rely on translations, but this is not true in regard to Ramadan, whom I have read in his own language of French. Lynch writes that "Ramadan has criticized bin Laden and condemned terrorism." But Ramadan, in his untranslated book Jihâd, violence, guerre et paix en Islam, specifically limits his criticism to bin Laden's opinions, not addressing his actions -- given that, in Ramadan's view, there is no "definitive proof" of bin Laden's role in 9/11. And Ramadan explains that Palestinian terrorists have "no recourse" but terrorism -- which, to my eyes, undoes his condemnation.

In The Flight of the Intellectuals, my discussion of controversies over the phrase "Islamic fascism" derives from yet another untranslated book: Sortir de la malédiction (To Escape the Curse), by Abdelwahab Meddeb, a prize-winning French Tunisian author. My discussion of this topic concludes with commentary on a novel by the Francophone Algerian writer Boualem Sansal called The German Mujahid, which pertinently asks why people shrink from noticing the obvious links between the Nazi past and the Islamist present. Lynch appears to think that Francophone writers such as Meddeb and Sansal count for nothing in the world of modern ideas -- not to mention the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun or scholars such as the Syrian German political theorist Bassam Tibi (just to cite some writers whose work directly influenced my book).

But what makes Lynch so sure? Ramadan's single most interesting thought is his prediction that European Islam will someday prove to be the center and not just a marginal element of worldwide Islam. When that day comes, however, the truly influential thinkers and writers will turn out to be the very people whom Lynch dismisses as inconsequential -- the European (and North American) liberals from Muslim backgrounds, freethinkers and pious believers alike. These people, the anti-Islamists, are right now composing brilliant and lasting works of literature and philosophy -- but their achievements will never be recognized by Islamism's apologists in Western universities.