higher values the United States proclaimed—freedom, justice, democracy. They respected the American argument that its political system could save people of every nation from poverty and oppression. American idealists proffered democracy with something of the same ardor enjoyed by religious movements, making it a competitor to other world-organizing social ideas such as communism, fascism, and Islam. Religious Muslims may have rejected America’s moral claims, but secular modernist Muslims saw great hope in it, and found no inherent contradiction between American ideals and Islam as they
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