Bruce Schreiner/AP

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams (right) chats before a state House committee hearing on Feb. 20, 2020, in Frankfort, Kentucky. The hearing was on a proposal to require a government-issued photo ID in order to cast a ballot. The measure is part of a 2021 bipartisan election access bill.

When Joshua Douglas wrote a book on how individual Americans are trying to expand voting rights as a way to help their communities, he didn’t expect a large Republican readership.

After all, Republicans have spent years trying to make it harder to cast a ballot at election time.

So when Michael Adams, Kentucky’s chief election official, called in 2019 to congratulate him on his new book, he wasn’t sure what to think. Then Mr. Adams, a Republican, asked him if he would join a statewide commission on voting procedures.

Would it be an opportunity, wondered Professor Douglas, to expand access for voters? Or would he be a pawn to make a package of new restrictions look more palatable?

He said yes.

Later that year, Mr. Adams was elected as Kentucky’s secretary of state and oversaw last November’s bare-knuckle ballot. Now its legislature is poised to enact an overhaul of the state’s voting law that threads the needle between the right to vote and the contested fight over how that right is exercised.

Its bill would expand early voting, including three days of in-person voting, and mandates a universal paper ballot, while adding an ID requirement and banning third-party collection of ballots. The bill has passed both Republican-controlled chambers and is expected to get final approval later this month; Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has signaled he will then sign it into law.

As Republicans and Democrats nationwide pull in opposite directions on how easy it should be to vote, Kentucky is making a remarkable tack to the middle. For now, it seems an outlier, but its example may resonate as lawmakers in red and blue states debate how equitable, fair and accessible the ballot box should be.

“You need to have bipartisanship in election policy. And we showed here that you actually get higher turnout and more trust from the public in your system if it’s done that way,” says Mr. Adams.

Mr. Douglas, who teaches at the University of Kentucky, says he made the right choice to join the commission, noting that Mr. Adams was a “straight shooter” with a simple message: “Let’s make it easy to vote, hard to cheat.”

“What a lot of people don’t realize is those [aims] aren’t mutually exclusive,” says Mr. Douglas. “It’s not an either/or thing. That realization is why we’ve got a great thing going in Kentucky.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Veterinary technician Shesney Huff walks her dogs, Josi and Juna, through downtown Middlesboro, Kentucky, on March 17, 2021. Ms. Huff hopes easier access to the voting booth will help the city grow its economy. Right now, she has to commute more than an hour to Knoxville, Tennessee, for work.

Restrictions in battleground states

Across the U.S., the push and pull over voting rights is roiling a country wrestling over the meaning of democracy and who gets to define it.

The Brennan Center counts hundreds of Republican bills introduced to limit ballot access after the disputed 2020 election. The battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia – former Republican strongholds that Joe Biden won – have gone the furthest to roll back voting rights, citing false claims by former President Donald Trump and other Republicans about mail-in voting fraud.

Georgia lawmakers are debating whether to dramatically curtail early voting on weekends – “souls to the polls” – and limit access to mail balloting. Not coincidentally, the effort comes after Black voters made increased use of mail ballots in defeating Mr. Trump and sending two Democratic senators to Washington.

Still, the push by Republican lawmakers to change the rules may not reflect their constituents’ views. A new poll in Florida found that a majority of voters, including Republicans, want more choices, not fewer, for when and where they vote.

“Sometimes it seems on this issue that there’s no middle – you’re on one side or the other,” says Trey Hood, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. “But then you look at polling and you see that sometimes the voters are sort of in the middle [on voting access] and it’s the politicians who are so polarized.”

Nor is it clear, four months after the last election, that Republicans have a winning strategy in trying to throttle the expanded access to the ballot that the pandemic made possible.   

“The contest should be about ideas, not about access to ballots,” says Emory University political scientist Bernard Fraga, who studies voter participation. The efforts to restrict, he says, fly in the face of “evidence that shows ... higher turnout helps both parties. It makes democracy more representative.”

“Pro-voter” rules 

Why Kentucky found a bipartisan groove in legislating the rules of the road is partly down to political dynamics. Under pressure, Republicans allowed early voting in November, which led to higher turnout but didn’t tilt the balance to their opponents. In fact, Republicans increased their share of the vote, with many of the new voting rules in place.

“The things that we did [in 2020] that are being ratified and preserved didn’t really favor one party over the other. They were just pro-voter,” says Mr. Adams.

The national debate over voter access is high stakes. Democrats say that an erosion of voting rights by courts and Republican-controlled legislatures could swing future elections, especially given the slim margins of victory for Mr. Biden in battleground states. Democratic-run statehouses are rowing in the opposite direction by introducing legislation that would make it easier to vote.

Last week, Sen. Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator elected from Georgia, introduced the For the People Act to the Senate. Passed on partisan lines in the House, the bill expands voting access in many ways, including universal mail-in ballots and automatic registration for all citizens at age 18. It also includes strict campaign-finance rules. Republicans have criticized the act as federal overreach that undermines democratic rule-making.

Amid the economic fallout from the pandemic, the battle over voting access has also focused some people on the importance of voting as a civic duty and a form of empowerment. 

Democratic political consultant Atiba Madyun believes that Americans are increasingly seeing voting access as a fortifying force for their communities.

“We have this battle within,” says Mr. Madyun, who is Black and whose novel, “Saving Grace,” traces how politicians can rise even as their communities fail. “More of us are seeking to find clarity in it. We have to go through this [battle over voting] in order to become a more perfect union.” 

The gateway to the west 

That dynamic is seen here in places like Middlesboro, a former mining town of 10,000 in southeastern Kentucky, where voting access is viewed by many as a key to addressing stark social and economic divisions.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Dustin Sizemore's face reflects in his car window in Middlesboro, Kentucky, on March 16, 2021. Mr. Sizemore, an unemployed musician, plans to take advantage of the state's expansion of voting options to cast a ballot in the next election.

Situated in a massive meteorite crater, or astrobleme, Middlesboro had a reputation as a gambling town in the 1930s and installed the first streetcars west of Washington. Known as the gateway to the west, it even built an opera house.

Today, it faces another transition. Worn down by the decline of coal and a raging opioid epidemic, its residents and leaders are trying to figure out what’s next.  

For Dusty Stepp, a handyman and former addict, the effort by Republicans to make voting easier in Kentucky is an acknowledgment that communities need not just financial investment, but civic involvement, to thrive.

“When you can’t or don’t vote, you become kind of disinvested,” says Mr. Stepp. “You can feel it. You can see it.”

Two years ago, Kentucky became the latest state to restore the voting rights of former felons, affecting thousands of convictions related to the opioid epidemic. Dustin Sizemore, an unemployed musician who did time in prison, says he’s not yet seen his voting rights restored.

He’s not sure it’s worth it, because he believes the U.S. is in the thrall of a global cabal that has weakened the voice of the average American. Yet he reckons he would vote if he could. “A choice is better than no choice,” he says.

R.M., a just-retired janitor and former coal miner, lauded the state’s transition to simple paper ballots in November’s election, which the new bill would mandate statewide.

“They made it easier to vote last year and that’s why I voted,” he says. “I never liked the machines with the levers and the contraptions. A simple piece of paper is what I wanted and it’s what I got.”

A lifelong Democrat, he says he has voted for Republican candidates in the past, and will again, if they make an appealing case. “I’m in the middle, like I think a lot of people are,” he says. “I listen. You can convince me. But you have to try.”

Standing behind a neat counter filled with pies, cakes, and napoleons, Isabel Pochesci is not afraid to think big. 

“I’d like to have 10 more Indulgenzas,” she says, after opening her first pastry shop, Indulgenza, here in suburban Boston two months ago. “For a pandemic, we are doing good. ... I’m not scared.”

“For me it was scary,” says her daughter, Paula De La Torre, the store manager who serves the trickle of customers who wander in for a midafternoon snack. “But I trust her,” she says of her mother.

A few blocks away on Main Street, Mahboob Ali Khan is waiting for the dinner takeout orders to come rolling in. He opened Peshawari Kebabs here in Waltham a month and a half ago. “It’s taking a big risk because the people believe it’s still very risky” to eat out, he says. But “so far so good. ... We just see the people’s demand. Most of the [Pakistani] restaurants were closed” because of the pandemic.

Here in Waltham, a Boston suburb known for its eateries, these new startups represent a small piece of a national entrepreneurial boom that’s unprecedented in this century. In 2020, American entrepreneurs applied to start a record number of new businesses: almost 4.5 million, nearly a quarter more applications than a year earlier, according to census figures. The boom goes a long way to compensate for the decline in entrepreneurship during and after the Great Recession. And the fact that it happened during the economic turmoil of the pandemic makes it even more remarkable.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Co-owner Mahboob Ali Khan poses in his new restaurant, Peshawri Kebabs, in Waltham, Massachusetts, on March 12, 2021. They opened for business on Feb. 4.

“The numbers make me more optimistic about the recovery,” says John Haltiwanger, an economics professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. “It’s a very healthy sign that actual entrepreneurship is back to levels of the 2000s.”

In some ways, the boom is surprising. It came in the midst of a pandemic, which added risk and uncertainty, while most surges of entrepreneurship come after a recession. After declining last spring relative to 2019, typical for startups in the middle of a recession, business applications began to soar in July.

In other ways, however, the boom is the logical outcome of a difficult, game-changing environment. For example, a record high 3 in 10 entrepreneurs who started a business in 2020 did so not because they wanted to but because they had to, according to a Kauffman Foundation report. That’s a dramatic change from 2019, where only 1 in 10 startups stemmed from necessity. So many workers lost their jobs and couldn’t find new ones that they had to strike out on their own to try to bring in income.

SOURCE:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey via Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Another factor: Employees suddenly having to work from home have more time on their hands to try freelancing. Unlike the Great Recession of 2008-09, banks weren’t squeezed and didn’t stop lending. And the value of homes rose, giving entrepreneurs a key asset to borrow against and fund their ventures.

“It’s much easier now to start a business and to find a buyer of your professional labor in a remote working world than it was in 2009,” says Kenan Fikri, director for research at the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization in Washington. The current environment “allows people to take that risk with more confidence.”

“It’s people being resourceful” amid change

Many of these new startups are sole proprietorships and are likely to stay that way. While those are significant, the crucial ones for economic growth are companies that hire employees. Applications for businesses likely to hire are up 15.5% from 2019 and more than 20% higher than the average for the previous decade. The rise is taking place across the board – representing all kinds of industries, from home-based companies flying almost under the radar to firms aiming to make a big splash.

“It’s people being resourceful when they see a change,” says Donna Kelley, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and a member of the oversight board of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. “There are so many opportunities that are opening up. Entrepreneurs see these opportunities. Technology is enabling it. Market change is also enabling it.”

This past July, Adagio Therapeutics, a $50 million venture spun off from a New Hampshire biotech firm, started operations here in Waltham to develop antibodies to protect against coronaviruses. It began a phase one trial last month.

The retail sector is seeing the biggest jump in startups. Applications in 2020 ran more than 50% higher than a year earlier. The biggest growth came from retailers selling goods online or for direct delivery rather than in stores, perhaps not surprising given the changes that the pandemic has wrought. It’s these shifts that open up the possibilities for new businesses.

But retail shops are also opening. 

Rising diversity among business owners

At Liam’s Market on Prospect Street, Marie Julien is directing workers to reposition a shelf. As they clear away bottles of yellow mustard and brightly colored boxes of fufu flour, she talks about her entrepreneurial journey. She’s had three grocery stores – the last one on Waltham’s trendy Moody Street catering to Haitians, Africans, and Spanish speakers, but that closed. Now she is trying to make a go of it on Prospect Street, which offers a less trendy mix of gas stations, auto parts, a cafe, and plumbing supplies. 

“It’s hard,” she says. “But we survive.”

The pandemic has not been kind to working women. “Women have an inordinately large footprint in retail and service, which have been harder hit,” says Linda Edelman, chair of the management department at Bentley University in Waltham. And working mothers typically have had to shoulder more child care and education responsibilities than men. The number of female entrepreneurs jumped last year, according to the Kauffman Foundation, but not enough to overcome the long-standing gap with male entrepreneurs, whose numbers also jumped last year. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Erick Aroche and his wife, Marylin Morales, pose in their new shop, Kairo’s Cake and Bakery, with her mother, Blanca Castanaza, and their daughter, Jaylene, who both help with the baking, in Waltham, Massachusetts, on March 12, 2021.

Black entrepreneurship is a different story. After lagging other racial and ethnic groups for the past quarter century, the share of entrepreneurs within the African American community jumped last year to the level of white Americans, the Kauffman Foundation found. Latinos continued to outpace both of those groups, as well as Asians. 

Next to Liam’s Market, Erick Aroche and his wife, Marilyn Morales, have opened a small corner bakery serving tres leches cakes, concha bread, and other specialties for the neighborhood’s Central American population. They are first-time entrepreneurs, and he describes waiting for a message from God before opening the shop last September, before a surge in pandemic cases in Massachusetts. They named their business Kairo’s Cake & Bakery, after the ancient Greek word kairos, meaning the critical or opportune time.

“Everything is fine,” says Mr. Aroche, “because always God is with us.”

Anne Lawrence/Broome County Concerned Residents

A town road in New York's Broome County is being expanded by the developers of a wind farm so that large trucks and turbine blades can pass, in March 2021.

In a pair of small towns outside Binghamton, New York, a battle is raging over competing priorities in the state’s efforts to mitigate climate change and protect its environment.

A new 27-tower wind farm promises to significantly boost clean energy production in New York, which relies on fuels imported from other states to generate most of its electricity. But the project comes at the cost of some 313 acres of local forest that currently act as a “carbon sink” for emissions. And preserving such forests is also an important piece of the state’s climate strategy.

Tony Wagner, who owns forest land near the wind farm site, fears the project, known as Bluestone Wind, will degrade the habitats and ecosystems of thousands of acres of contiguous forest. He’s part of a group of concerned citizens who fought fiercely against the project, but to no avail; the trees started coming down earlier this year.

“There’s a place for wind turbines, but this is the worst possible place for wind turbines,” says Mr. Wagner. 

In some ways, this is a classic case of not-in-my-backyard versus the power of a big-money developer and the exigencies of climate action. But here, some residents are looking beyond concerns about noise and aesthetics, and asking a thorny question: Is it worth trading hundreds of acres of forest land for a couple of dozen wind turbines? 

The conflict raises larger questions about how states like New York, which aims to generate 70% of its energy from renewables by 2030, will balance these competing environmental priorities when considering new clean energy projects.

Wind and solar farms face opposition across the country where similar clashes between competing environmental priorities, along with NIMBY complaints, are playing out. A new study by Columbia Law School counted at least 100 local ordinances in 31 states that block or restrict renewable energy projects. 

“There’s a climate crisis and there’s a biodiversity crisis, and smart renewable energy development can answer both,” says Nathan Cummins, who directs the Great Plains Renewable Energy Strategy at The Nature Conservancy.

His work focuses mostly in the central United States – where the vast majority of wind turbines are located – and he wasn’t able to speak about Bluestone Wind directly. But he said there are ways to add clean energy to areas that have already been developed to avoid most, if not all, negative impacts to the environment. Moreover, offshore wind farms, though they tend to stoke controversy, are showing a lot of promise.

“There’s enough low-impact land out there that you don’t need to make the trade-offs,” Mr. Cummins says.

Anne Lawrence/Broome County Concerned Residents

At this parcel in New York's Broome County, all trees were cut in March 2021 to accommodate a portion of Bluestone Wind, a wind farm project. The piles of wood chips come from smaller trees or tops that can't be used commercially, and may be repurposed in embankments for flood and runoff control.

Small towns, big controversy

Chris Stanton, the lead developer of the Bluestone Wind project, first approached the towns of Sanford and Windsor in 2016 with a plan to construct dozens of wind turbines along mountain ridgelines.  

“What we found early on is that we had a very receptive community,” says Mr. Stanton, project development manager for Northland Power, the Canadian company that is building Bluestone Wind.

The proposal was particularly well received, he said, by landowners who stood to benefit financially from leasing small plots where the wind turbines will stand. One is Sanford’s last surviving dairy farmer, who credits the leasing income for keeping him in business. The same goes for a Methodist youth camp in the area that is leasing land.

“A lot of the landowners who are participating in the project tend to rely on their land for income,” Mr. Stanton says.

Dewey Decker, Sanford town supervisor, paints a much more complicated picture; many of the town’s 2,000 residents, especially those who won’t see direct financial benefits, remain skeptical. Sanford is, however, expected to receive $800,000 in taxes annually from Bluestone Wind, and the project will create 150 temporary construction jobs.

“There’s a lot of controversy; there’s no question about that. This has been a real struggle; this has been a four year struggle, if you want to know the truth,” Mr. Decker says.

Perhaps the loudest group of opponents is the effort led by Mr. Wagner and others in Broome County. 

Mr. Wagner lives in Maine, but his family owns a 310-acre plot just south of the wind farm site. This slice of forest was handed down from his grandparents, and he wants it to eventually pass to his grandchildren. The property is a certified tree farm that follows sustainable harvesting practices aimed at preserving the long-term health of the forest and its wildlife.

Mr. Wagner says he probably won’t even be able to see the 670-foot-high wind turbines from his property, even if he did live here. He got involved in the campaign to help his neighbors protect an environment they hold dear.

“We hate to see the land being destroyed,” he said.

Thorny trade-offs

No matter what type of energy a community depends on, there are always trade-offs. Fossil fuels have obvious, well-documented pollution and emissions consequences. Nuclear has until now been a hard sell for a public that hasn’t forgotten previous meltdowns. Wind and solar, which are now some of the cheapest and cleanest options, don’t guarantee continuous power generation, and have significant impacts on the land.  

The Bluestone Wind project could produce enough power to supply about 59% of the county’s households, according to Northland Power. (However, the power generated locally feeds into a regional grid, along with other sources.) Viewed another way, that’s the equivalent of taking 15,800 cars off the road, Northland estimates. 

Mr. Stanton, the project developer, says that fossil-fuel substitution far outweighs any potential environmental impacts. The developer went through a rigorous state permitting process, including submissions on wildlife protection, natural resources, visual character, and other commonly litigated issues. 

“[The standards] are based in research and science,” he says.

Even when renewable energy projects pass certain standards, they still have environmental impacts, both direct and indirect, says Mr. Cummins of The Nature Conservancy. For example, because wind turbines have to be spread far apart, the towers and their access roads can have the effect of fragmenting animal habitats. And the trees cut down to make room for these developments represent a store of carbon that gets lost. 

A complex puzzle

Concerns about flora and fauna, however, are only one piece of a complex puzzle around where to build wind turbines. Developers also have to consider wind speeds, the ability to plug into the larger electrical grid, and the cost of construction.

In a state like New York, which lacks the high wind speeds of the Great Plains, mountain ridgelines are among the only viable places to build onshore wind farms.

So a project like Bluestone Wind might be the best-case scenario, and some of the impacts can and are being mitigated. But rather than minimizing and mitigating in densely populated Northeast states, Mr. Cummins says we should build out wind capacity in Great Plains states while developing offshore wind farms, so as to avoid these trade-offs all together. 

“Avoidance is the most cost-effective way for conservation,” he says.

As the pace of clean energy construction increases in coming years, these decisions will become all the more urgent. Wind and solar energy, for all of their benefits, take up much more land than fossil fuel power plants. And they promise to significantly transform the landscape in places like Sanford and Windsor.

Mr. Decker, the Sanford town supervisor, says the idea of cutting down trees is not completely foreign to residents; there’s already some logging activity in the area. But the way acres of land are being cleared for Bluestone Wind has jolted the community, nonetheless.

“To just go in and clear-cut, that doesn’t look good,” he says.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify the sources of electricity generated in New York.  

As Imam Husamuddin Meyer walks through this old city of cobblestone streets and classical architecture in central Germany, many young people pass by and wave to him as though he were a YouTube star. Clad in a turban, the bearded Sufi cleric is a visible presence in the community. “I know so many of them,” he says, with a hint of pride.

Imam Meyer, who grew up in a well-to-do Protestant family nearby, is the country’s first, and longest-serving, Muslim prison chaplain. As people wave to him, he is heading to work at the juvenile prison. And his work has been critical: He’s played a key role in fighting the religious extremism that all too often thrives behind bars. 

Long before many Germans became aware that prisons were a hot spot for radicalization, Imam Meyer saw how giving inmates “spiritual tools” could help them reach the inner peace they need to avoid veering into Islamic fundamentalism. Over the past 12 years, he has gone to the youth correctional facility daily to pray, talk, and recite the Quran with young Muslim inmates so they are “protected from outside influences and not ... easily manipulated,” he says. 

Radical Islam “is like a disease,” he says. “Once it infects you, it infects others. We have to fight hatred.”

In her 35 years as a prison director, Hadmut Jung-Silberreis has also seen the importance of solid spiritual counseling. This is a constitutional right offered to prisoners regardless of their faith, but in reality, it has been difficult to offer such counseling to Muslim prisoners. One reason is an institutional hurdle: Under Germany’s unique model of state-church relationships, most Islamic communities have yet to be recognized as legal cooperation partners of the state, which would entitle them to an array of privileges, including fully paid chaplaincy services.

Yet Muslims have been filling Germany’s prisons, driven in part by jihadism and “honor killings.” When Ms. Jung-Silberreis took over the youth correctional facility here in 2006, she vowed “to give young Muslim men proper spiritual counseling.” She asked the city for help in finding an imam to lead Friday prayers, one who would only speak German and not represent a foreign nation. Mr. Meyer was the clear choice. 

An unusual journey

The son of a school principal and a psychologist, Imam Meyer had once eyed becoming an engineer. But a post-high school motorbike trip through Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and other Muslim countries in the 1980s transformed his plans. The beauty and hospitality he witnessed rekindled a spiritual longing that had nagged at him since childhood. Instead of engineering, he studied ethnology, geography, and Arab and Islam studies. The discovery of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes connecting with God through emotions rather than through religious edicts, prodded him to convert to Islam. “Those people lived the love of God,” he says.

Back in Germany in the mid-2000s, he traded his first name, Martin, for Husamuddin and his Western clothes for a turban and a beard. He became an imam in a small mosque in Wiesbaden, earning a living as a private tutor. When the prison director, Ms. Jung-Silberreis, called, “I just went in and said, ‘Let’s see what happens,’” he says.

And so on a Friday evening that fall, he rolled out a small rug in the prison’s chapel for the first time. Almost all the Muslim prisoners – roughly 100 – came in for prayers. Their thirst for answers and for rudimentary knowledge of Islam convinced him that he had to come back.

As Imam Meyer helped sensitize officials to budding religious extremism, the Ministry of Justice in the German state of Hesse started hiring more Muslim chaplains. Then in 2016, following terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, the ministry significantly increased its budget for Muslim prison chaplaincy, making it the cornerstone of a newly created Network for Deradicalisation in Corrections (NeDiC). There are now Muslim chaplains for all 16 of Hesse’s prisons.

“Good spiritual counseling automatically has a deradicalization impact,” says Clementine Englert, a head judge who is also NeDiC’s coordinator at the Hessian Ministry of Justice. Her department – not Muslim associations – carefully selects and oversees the training of Muslim chaplains, with Imam Meyer serving as the most experienced member. Inside the Wiesbaden juvenile prison with him as a chaplain, day-to-day life works better; there are fewer problems, prison officials note. 

“Inmates feel listened to” with an imam “who speaks their language,” says Ms. Jung-Silberreis. “They feel that the institution takes their faith seriously and offers them ways to practice it.”

Combat radicalization in prison

The inmates come from all walks of life: the refugee caught stealing a phone, the young man charged with drug possession, as well as Islamic State returnees. Conversations with Imam Meyer include the fear of recidivism and the atrocities seen fighting in Syria and fleeing war in the Middle East. Disoriented and angry, many of the young men are vulnerable to the simplistic, black-and-white worldview of radical Islam. Seen as Turks, Albanians, or Bosnians by their German friends and as Germans by their parents, they are caught in an identity conflict. “Then an Islamist comes to you and says, ‘You don’t belong anywhere; just be Muslim,’” says Imam Meyer. “They offer them a third way.”

Abdul, a radicalized Muslim convert who spent five years in prison on robbery charges, says he could have become one of those young German jihadis, until he met Imam Meyer. He remembers being angry and full of self-hatred, and “when you hate yourself, you’re capable of anything,” says Abdul, who asked that his real name be withheld. 

“With Imam Meyer, I discovered the real core of Islam,” he says. “It’s about self-reflection.”

While Abdul has “made it” – once released from prison, he fulfilled his dream of working as an artist – many haven’t. “I’ve known many who’ve made headlines,” Imam Meyer sighs.

He met Arid Uka, the Kosovar Albanian who shot two American airmen at the airport in Frankfurt in 2011 – the first deadly Islamist attack on German soil. And after Mohammed Merah, a French jihadi of Algerian descent, went on a killing rampage in southern France the following year, an inmate came to Imam Meyer and said what a great deed Mr. Merah had committed. “I looked at him for a long time and said, ‘He did well?’” 

“But I then understood,” he says. “Everywhere, Muslims are bombed – in Afghanistan, in Libya.” Often, a deep sense of injustice is behind religious extremism, he says.

“The inmates ask me, is terrorism allowed in Islam?” Imam Meyer says. “I tell them, ‘No, Islam is a way to reach inner peace, the good life here and beyond. Terrorism is contrary to that.’” Imam Meyer wants to give inmates inner peace because “if they are at peace with themselves and content, they don’t need to commit crimes.” 

But for radicalized youths to trust him, he needs time – more than the 14 hours per week he is allotted now. It is high time to treat Muslim chaplains the same as full-time Christian chaplains, he says.

On a recent winter afternoon, a young man called the hotline of the Violence Prevention Network, a deradicalization group that Imam Meyer also works for. The shy man came to see the imam, who rolled out his prayer rug, closed his eyes, and let his prayer beads slip through his fingers while reciting a verse. “You need to create new thinking,” he says. 

AP

New soldiers in the Afghan National Army march during a January graduation ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Some call it a pipe dream. Others say it is a grand self-delusion. In the Biden White House, however, it is called a “moonshot.”

Since early March, the new U.S. administration has let it be known that it hopes the Taliban in Afghanistan will form a transitional regime with the elected government in Kabul leading up to national elections. Despite having very different views on Islam, women, and governance, the two warring sides “must find a path to a political settlement,” says Zalmay Khalilzad, the special U.S. envoy on Afghanistan.

The United States wants the Taliban and Afghan leadership to start these power-sharing negotiations in coming weeks, preferably with Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan on the sidelines for added pressure. And to lay down a marker on how they should go, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in a letter that the current constitution can be an “initial template.”

The difficulty in this moonshot is that Mr. Ghani, like most Afghans, considers the 2004 constitution to be sacrosanct, especially in its protection of women’s rights and other democratic principles. The Taliban, meanwhile, cling to a goal of re-creating the Islamic emirate of their rule from 1996 to 2001, just before the U.S. invaded to strike at Al Qaeda after 9/11.

If these newly focused talks actually start, Afghanistan will be doing what has been elusive for many Muslim countries: reconciling a utopian view of an Islamic community living under religious law with the vision of a society of equal citizens committed to basic rights under elected leaders.

President Joe Biden’s strategy is not new. When he was vice president, President Barack Obama said the U.S. would “join initiatives that reconcile the Afghan people, including the Taliban.” At a local level, many Afghan leaders have found ways to talk to the Taliban with respect, often succeeding in moderating their views or persuading them to leave the group. These dialogues start from an Islamic perspective that finds common ground on religious and democratic values.

Part of the Biden plan is to use the talks to convince the “reconcilable” members of the Taliban to break off and opt for peace. The U.S. has already worked with parts of the Taliban in attacking the forces of Islamic State in Afghanistan. The Taliban also hint at softening their position on educating girls. In recent days, they suggested a three-month “reduction of violence” period. And under a tentative deal with the Trump administration last year, the militant group has not attacked U.S. forces, which number about 3,500.

Under that deal, Mr. Biden has inherited a deadline of a total withdrawal of forces by May 1. He has suggested extending the deadline. Perhaps he hopes his moonshot will launch. Other Muslim countries have created constitutional democracies while finding a popular role for Islam. It may not be a pipe dream to think Afghanistan can do the same.