The Four Freedoms
A Ramadan declaration.

By Michael Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of the upcoming On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.
January 2, 2002 7:45 a.m.

he new annual survey by Freedom House on the state of liberty in the world lists seven Muslim countries among the ten least free in the world — and most of the other Muslim countries do not fare a great deal better, although Turkey, Bangladesh, and Bahrain indicate that notable progress toward democracy is not inconsistent with Islam.

During Ramadan, I confess, I did not do much fasting. But I did do a lot of thinking, trying to explain to myself why I had paid so little attention over the years to the state of democracy and the protection of human rights in Muslim countries. In self-defense, I reply to self-accusation with the retort that ending Communism was the first priority — behind the Iron Curtain, in China, Cuba, and North Korea, and even through foreign outreach throughout Africa and Latin America. I should have known better.

After September 11, we are fighting also for Muslim civilization — for that great and noble civilization of Islam, which once built a region of gleaming cities and learning and science that were the envy of the world.

When our American forebears wrote in the Declaration of Independence of "certain inalienable rights, endowed in us by our Creator," they were not describing merely American rights. They were describing the rights of all men and women everywhere. They were describing Muslim rights, too.

The United States of America has been fighting against terrorism, yes, and against lawlessness, and the taking of the lives of innocent non-combatants, including women and children.

But, far more important, we need to make sure that the United States of America is also fighting for something.

The United States is fighting for FOUR UNIVERSAL LIBERTIES, which are also MUSLIM LIBERTIES. We are fighting:

First, for the liberty of Muslims to worship the Almighty [Allah] without terror or coercion, according to conscience and tradition, so that the praises of Allah may be sung freely in every part of world, with the same freedom that others enjoy, in praising God as their conscience directs.

Second, for the liberty to study, learn, and inquire, and the liberty to write and speak, from the honesty and purity of one's own heart, docile to the light that the Almighty [Allah] sheds in all.

Third, for liberty from poverty and lack of opportunity — for freedom from want, for Muslims everywhere in the world.

Fourth, for liberty from torture, tyranny, and arbitrary autocratic government, so that all the human, civil, and political rights of Muslims will be respected — everywhere in the world.

These are the four liberties we fight for. Liberty of worship, liberty of speech, liberty from poverty, and liberty from tyranny. Basic human liberties. Simple things. Basic things. Fundamentals.

We invite all men and women of good will — all peoples everywhere — to fight at our side for these four liberties, everywhere in the world.

There is nothing we would like better, there is nothing that would make us safer, there is nothing that would make our national destiny more complete, than the achievement of a world in which these four liberties were respected, and practiced, and deepened — everywhere in the world, without exception.

Not only in the so-called developed world. But also in the less-developed nations.

Not only in the rich nations. But in the poor nations most of all.

Where a people gain liberty, they produce abundant bread. Where the tents of liberty are pitched, foods of every sort are heaped up in abundance.

The world we should work for in the decades just ahead, is a world in which Muslims, like every other people on this planet, are free to worship as conscience directs them; a world in which Muslims, like every other people, are free to inquire and study and write and speak; a world in which Muslims, like every other people, escape from poverty by the millions, and find abundant opportunity to employ their immense wealth of God-given talents to make a better Earth; a world in which Muslims, along with all other peoples, are free to practice the arts of democracy, civility, and all the fundamental human rights that are endowed in every man and every woman on this earth, by our Creator. Who is One, and Who is Great. May His name be praised, through liberty for all.

We Americans claim no rights that are American rights only. All our rights are also Muslim rights at the same time. Every right endowed in us, is endowed also in every Muslim, and by the same Creator.

All of us together, every woman and every man, are made in the image of the same Creator. From that Creator, each of us receives our innate dignity, our noble vocation, our call to liberty, and mercy, and justice, and love.

"The God Who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time," Thomas Jefferson wrote.

It is a liberty that God gave to all, equally. For too many decades we in America have not thought enough about extending that same liberty to our brothers and sisters in the Muslim world.

In this generation, vast changes are likely to sweep through the Muslim world, as the peoples of Muslim nations demand liberty and prosperity, and seek to regain their place as leaders among the nations of the civilized.

It is important for the United States to be out ahead of that curve, in order to be faithful to our own traditions.

[Note: The obvious allusions are to FDR's State of the Union Address to Congress on January 6, 1941, well in advance of Pearl Harbor, but already establishing the positive aims on whose grounds he would be defending western civilization if war came. He sought to establish a positive world vision for an era of world war.

In our case, we have the uncommon but necessary duty of describing a vision for Islam as well as for ourselves. Our task is to describe Islam better than our enemies do.

We have the advantage that both the Taliban government and the Ayatollah's government in Iran — the two most prominent experiments in a hijacked, politicized perversion of Islam — have been hugely unsuccessful and are bitterly hated by Muslim populations. Our task is to put in words an alternative vision, attractive to Islamic populations, because human and universal, but expressed in accents accessible to them.]