Understanding faith traditions—their civilizational and cultural histories and contributions—wins further clarity and recognition if the scholar comes to the field equipped with knowledge of other faith traditions as well as profound spiritual experience. This is the case of John Louis Esposito, an American of Italian origins who intended to become a priest, and ended up building bridges between the so-called Muslim world and the West. Esposito was influenced in his early life by the Catholic devotion and teachings of his mother, and the struggle for social justice that his father instilled in him and the working-class family members in Brooklyn, New York. Esposito spent ten years in the Capuchin Franciscan Order, from the age of 14 to 24, before leaving it before ordination to immerse himself in the mundane world: the study of world religions, their scholarship, and their lived traditions. Esposito gained his BA in philosophy from St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1963, and an MA in theology at St John’s University, New York, in 1966. He completed his PhD at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1974, under the prominent Palestinian-American scholar and theologian Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, who left an important mark on him. After teaching Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam for nearly two decades at the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, world events and academic needs contributed to making Islam his focus since the 1970s. He played a pioneering role in focusing on the role of religion in International Relations studies at a time when the field was so “secular” and hardly mentioned religion in the study of global affairs.
Esposito was hired by Georgetown University in 1993 and became Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Professor of Islamic Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and Founding Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU for short, founded in 1993 as Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and renamed as ACMCU in 2010). Esposito also founded “The Bridge Initiative: Protecting Pluralism – Ending Islamophobia” in the Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2015. He also wore other hats that his scholarship and vocation seem to have obliged him to wear; he was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders and the European Network of Experts on De-Radicalization, was a senior scientist for The Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, and was an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. He also served as a consultant to the US Department of State and other agencies, European and Asian governments, corporations, universities, and media worldwide. Esposito is the only scholar to have been elected President of both the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies (ACSIS). He was also awarded seven honorary doctorates.
I unfortunately never had the chance to meet Esposito. Thanks to an unplanned tour, I visited Georgetown University, and I had the good fortune to be given a tour of campus by Professor Jonathan AC Brown, who chaired al-Waleed Ben Talal’s Christian-Muslim Understanding Center (ACMCU) after Esposito, between 2015 and 2019. Jonathan pointed me to the office of Esposito, the founding director of the Center. It was not possible not to mention him and talk about him. Moreover, through the Reset Dialogues Seminars organized in Casablanca in 2018, we tried to have Esposito, but the timing did not allow him to join us. I came to know him through his many books some two decades ago. Esposito published some 55 books in total, including monographs, edited volumes, handbooks, besides encyclopedias entries. I used his books for my teaching syllabus on Islam and Politics, and still use them for other ones, and for research. And I liked to listen to him in some live seminars and conferences several times during the last few years.
Since Esposito passed away on July 15th, 2026, I have read multiple short and long tributes written by senior and junior scholars of religions, and scholars of Islam, Muslim and non-Muslim. I have seen how he has been mourned by scholars, public intellectuals, and some major Muslim figures in the Muslim-majority societies, like the current Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim. Maybe the last time that I have seen so much empathy with a major figure of the “Western world” in the “Muslim world”—and the two intertwine immensely—is when the beloved Pope Francis passed away in 2015. As an outsider who became so close to the heart and intellect of the tradition and its people, Esposito can easily sit as the “pope” (in the meaning of father) of understanding Islam Studies in the United States in particular, and the larger West since the 1970s, as did before him, for example, the French Jacque Berque, the Scottish William Montgomery Watt, the Swiss Hans Küng, or the Italian Massimo Campanini, among a few others, in their own contexts and with a less global influence that distinguishes Esposito’s heritage.
Besides being a profound scholar, Esposito was a public intellectual, a real bridge between two constructed entities in the public imaginary: Islam and the West. He cherished his profession and vocation: He says, “My journey in Islamic studies and religion and international affairs has been both my profession and vocation; my experiences with so many Muslims across the world have enriched my life immeasurably” (Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, 2011). Esposito was the voice of Islam and Muslims in American academia, in particular at a time when other scholars of Islam influenced politics and views on Islam and Muslims in opposite and conflictual ways, as did shrewdly Bernard Lewis and politically Samuel Huntington, two prominent proponents of the clash of civilizations thesis. Esposito was the voice of reason and understanding in the climate of wars on terror and stigmatization of the Muslim community and Muslim world for the crimes of the few radicals and terrorists. Esposito’s ethics obliged him to say what the extreme majority of Muslims worldwide think and believe. His The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (1999) and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (2002) distinguish between the classical tradition and its modern usurpation by non-Islamically and anti-Islamic trained radicals. His Islam: The Straight Path (1988) reflects mainstream Islamic thinking and doctrines past and present, and may remain his best text, if only one is to be selected. Its more simplified version in the format of question-answer is What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam (2002). Esposito also let Muslims speak, after the rise of Islamophobia post-9/11, 2001, through a milestone work, co-authored with Dalia Mogahed, entitled Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (2008). Esposito believed that mainstream Islamic movements are not violent, defend social justice from their conservative and non-violent perspective, and believed that they adjust to the democratic game where the context allows it. He wrote on the topic with John Voll, Islam and Democracy (1996), and also after the so-called Arab Spring social protests, with Emad El-Din Shahin, The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (2014). His preoccupation during the last decade or so was Islamophobia, on which he edited, with Ibrahim Kalin, Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (2011). The topic remains highly relevant today. Esposito founded the Bridge Initiative in 2015 to monitor Islamophobia and to solidify the topic as a research field. In one of his latest appearances with Aljazeera Arabic website, he wrote, on June 16th, 2026, on the perception of the Quranic universalist ethic by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, the presence of Islam in the country through the African-Americans, and the rise of Islamophobia again through the “Muslim Ban” of January 2017, under President Donald Trump, and other Islamophobic outlets and narratives. Esposito also defended the Palestinians against the ongoing calamities they have been suffering, and considered it one of the main reasons behind the ongoing misunderstandings, tensions, ongoing wars, and Islamophobia. He has been targeted, mostly by radical Zionists and Christian Zionist zealots, like the Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes, for his free and fair positions.
In The Future of Islam (2010), Esposito says, “The threat to the West will not come from civilizational differences but from the political and socioeconomic reality that breeds radicalism.” He adds, “Majorities of Muslims globally clearly do not see conflict with the West as primarily religious or civilizational. Rather, they distinguish Western powers by their policies. We, in turn, need to dismiss fears of civilizational threats and disaggregate the ‘Muslim world’ into distinct countries whose conflicts originate from the specific policies of each nation and its leaders.” I could not agree more!
Esposito kept repeating in the prefaces and introductions of his multiple works that Islam is the second largest religion in the world, and that out of every five inhabitants of this Earth, one of them is Muslim, and that it is the second religion of Europe, and third in the United States. His intent behind such basic reminders was to alert the readers that it is irrational to think that all Muslims are violent and terrorists, or that Islam is not as universalist in its appeal as Christianity is. Esposito believed in the “Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition,” and worked for it through knowledge production, intellectual dialogue, and human relations. He says, “Our common future demands a new, more inclusive sense of pluralism and tolerance built upon mutual understanding and respect. If we are ever to achieve such mutual understanding, an essential part of the package must be knowledge of what Islam teaches and what Muslims believe about Islam as well as what we believe about them.” (Islam: The Right Path, 2011). It is no surprise that, when asked by the video-interviewer Soraya Salam for Al Jazeera Centre Stage (04 May 2023) about his faith, he responded in a pluralist and embracing way, as a wise theologian would do, by saying the following: “Whoever does good in this Life, whether they have faith or not, will lead a life of peace in the afterlife.”
And we do not walk alone in this life! Besides his parents, Esposito remained forever recognizant of the great help his wife Dr Jean Esposito offered him, starting from the moment he decided to pursue a PhD, while she worked. In some book acknowledgements, he said she was his best friend and critic. The Al-Waleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) and Dr Jean produced a brief and excellent honorary video of his career, which can be watched here (“The Legacy of John Esposito”).
May we, those touched and/or influenced by John L. Esposito, minimally or maximally, directly or indirectly, build on his scholarly and human legacy for future generations!
Cover photo: John L Esposito, Prof. of the Middle Eastern & Religious Studies at Georgetown University, being interviewed by Farouq in 2014. Photo Credit; Nouri Prods (Wikimedia Commons)
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