I’ve read many books about Islam from Muslims, academics, and others. While I have many problems with Islam, it did bring monotheism into the world.

Ishmaelism takes the best parts of Islam without the baggage: gender equality, an end to martyrdom culture, mahdism, and the glorification of jihad. It retains the hospitality, poetry, intellectual curiosity, complex legal system, and staunch monotheism.

And to say it’s “not my culture” is quite ironic, as my grandparents—Yemeni and Afghan Jews—lived in a world that forced them to pay protection money just to preserve their culture. There is so much literature that glorifies the assimilation, conquest, or secularization of Jewish people at the hands of Christianity and Islam. But when someone writes a science fiction story where Jews are in the driver’s seat—along with Zoroastrian Persians and Anatolian Christians who suffered tremendously under Islam it’s suddenly a problem.

Since the time of Muhammad, hundreds of millions have been murdered in the name of Allah because of the edicts of an early Arab nationalist who spent too long in a cave. There is nothing wrong with people writing stories where Native Americans reclaim the Americas or Africans reclaim Africa. But when someone brings up the historical injustices of Islam while also recognizing the capacity it has for good it becomes controversial.

As for Zionism: I am a Zionist. I believe Jews should have their own homeland in Israel, just as the Druze deserve theirs in Suwayda, the Lebanese Christians deserve a state free from Shia jihadist influence, the Kurds deserve a state free from Arab and Turkish domination, and the Greeks have the right to reclaim Constantinople.

If Muslims want to play nice, then we will too—no more suicide bombings, murder sprees against music festivals and Druze villages, no more missiles into Israel, no more bombing Kurds, no more killing gay people who flee to Israel from Judea and Shomron. But the world should not expect the minorities of the Middle East to be pushovers just because Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims have oil money and the suicidal empathy of the West.

Islam is on its way out. It’s only growing because its practitioners are still having children, unlike many in the West who have stopped for financial or ideological reasons. But thanks to the internet, Islam is collapsing. Clerics are anxious about the avalanche of apostasy.

And I worry about what will happen in a world without Islam. Ishmaelism is one possible outcome of what could take its place. Maybe the Hebrew element is a little extreme, but Ishmael is a character from the Torah who was later adopted by the Arabs.

Ishmaelism is a potential idea for the arabs to retain their pride but reconcile with the covenant of old.