Yet, there was a twist: Christianity — as Alexis de Tocqueville suggested in Democracy in America — offered Americans unique access to robust, pluralistic, and free political lives. That’s because it laid down only very general precepts: Love God and love your neighbor. Almost everything else was negotiable — and, sure enough, Americans promptly divided off into a great number of sects and denominations (some which, for the rather disenchanted Tocqueville, utterly beggared belief).

Now, here’s where Obama runs into trouble. Tocqueville surmised that, although Islam was by no means incompatible with robust, pluralistic, and free political life, it did face high hurdles in reconciling its creed, and its more particularistic vision of permissible behavior, with the unfolding realities of the democratic age — what we’d call “modernization,” “globalization,” and so on. Making matters even more difficult, Islam developed with deep roots in the aristocratic age. Those roots nourished a religion extraordinarily hard to disentangle from the cultural logic of tribe, family, kin, honor, and inherited identity.

In America, of course, Islam had much the same opportunity as other religions to emphasize its simplest articles of faith, permit free choice in political, scientific, and economic life, and escape the wrenching experience of “democratization” destined to result so often, around the world, in cycles of slaughter and stagnation. Outside America, however, Tocqueville foresaw that Islam was much more likely to collide with the democratic age than conform to it.