Reopening Muslim Minds

0:00:00.4 Mustafa Akyol: There are some Islamic teachings which will say, “Obey the ruler because God tells you to obey the ruler.” And I would say, does He really want me to obey this tyrant who’s just chopping off the heads of his critics? I don’t believe that, and I don’t see that in the Quran.

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0:00:22.2 Aaron Powell: This is Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:24.5 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:26.1 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Mustafa Akyol. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and one of the most widely-​read voices for liberty in the Islamic world. His new book is Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance. Welcome back to the show, Mustafa.

0:00:44.7 Mustafa Akyol: Thanks so much, Aaron. It’s a pleasure to discuss this with you and Trevor.

0:00:50.4 Aaron Powell: Tell us about the evening you spent with the inquisition.

0:00:54.6 Mustafa Akyol: That’s a good evening. Well, actually that was not a good evening, but it’s a good story. You’re referring to, I guess, the arrest I had in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in September 2017, which is a story I tell in the introduction chapter of my newly-​released book, Reopening Muslim Minds. This was a part of my trip to Malaysia in 2017. I was invited by the Islamic Renaissance Front, which is an organization founded by Malay Muslims who are dedicated to the ideas of liberty and toleration and human rights. And they published my earlier book, Islam Without Extremes, in Malay, and they had hosted me a few times before that trip.

0:01:41.6 Mustafa Akyol: But they said in 2017, “Please come to Malaysia again. We organize these big public lectures for you, and a lot of people will listen and it would be good.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And I went from Boston, Wellesley, Massachusetts technically, to Kuala Lumpur and I delivered a few lectures. In one of them, I touched upon the sensitive topic of apostasy, which is leaving your religion, of course, and renouncing Islam. And I said, “Well, listen. Classical Islamic jurists considered apostasy as a capital crime, and that is still in the laws of about a dozen Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries, “Islamic” states such as Saudi Arabia or Iran.”

0:02:28.3 Mustafa Akyol: But I said, “This doesn’t make sense. It’s not based on the Quran. It actually violates the Quranic maxim, there is no compulsion in religion, so we should let this go. If people lose their faith in Islam, it’s their choice. We should respect that.” And I emphasized, “Well, you cannot really police a religion because if people don’t believe in it, you cannot really achieve faith through dictates.” But soon after I emphasized you cannot police a religion, religion police walked in and at the end of the conference, they started to interrogate me. And the next day, at the airport, they arrested me and they charged me for violating the law which bans teaching Islam without permission from the state, which meant that I could be jailed for two years.

0:03:14.2 Mustafa Akyol: Luckily, I was released, thanks to some diplomacy, high level diplomacy. But that was one glimpse of the problem I’m speaking about in the Muslim world today, which is a freedom deficit sometimes justified by arguments from Islam. And I challenge those arguments from within Islam too, just with a more liberal perspective, liberal in the classical sense.

0:03:39.7 Trevor Burrus: This is a complex question I’m going to ask, but I think it’s something that we’ll return to. But when I read your story, it made me think about the way that the enforcement of the Sharia law by these religious police empowers people to be despotic if they want to be. And so, these people who came up to you after your talk and say, “We don’t like you and there’s a lot of discretion involved.” So in addition… So this idea of like how many of these people are pure adherents to the Muslim faith, or how many are using it to achieve political power and despotism in order to empower themselves politically and otherwise?

0:04:20.1 Mustafa Akyol: Well, that’s a very good question, Trevor. And I think deep down, you’re right in the sense that those “religion police forces” we have today in Malaysia, a certain part of Indonesia, some parts of the Arab world, even Nigeria, and Iran for sure, they are supposedly serving the faith and upholding the faith, but they’re also upholding their own power over society. It gives them legitimacy, it gives them power, it gives them the power to control. Some of them might be genuinely thinking that they are serving God’s cause. As you know, some Christians genuinely believed that the Inquisition was a good thing, or the Crusades was a good idea, but there is… Even if they do not know this, there’s a lot of power dynamic there, certainly.

0:05:11.2 Mustafa Akyol: And one of the arguments I therefore make in the book is to disentangle Islam from state power. And I’ll tell you, this is not an easy argument, because the fusion of Islam and state power is a long-​established tradition, it is there from the beginning. The caliphates is a symbol of that political power merged with Islam. But in my book, I argue that this was not a divine blueprint, this was just a historical contingency, just like the fact that Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire at some point, and a lot of terrible things happened in the name of Christianity. And finally, Christians outgrew that phase with the ideas of classical liberal thinkers like John Locke.

0:06:00.8 Mustafa Akyol: And I’m arguing for the same transformation to happen within Islam, and I’m trying to show that this is not going to be a betrayal of Islam [0:06:05.8] ____, we can still be pious, as pious as we want, and we believe in, but that piety will be more genuine and valuable because it will be based on liberty and not coercion.

0:06:19.5 Aaron Powell: Maybe this is a good opportunity and a helpful one for our non-​Muslim listeners for you to just give us… If we’re going to be talking about the ideas of Islam and their relation to the state and the way that those have interacted positively or negatively, could you give us… This is a big question, just a brief introduction to the core ideas of the Islamic faith, so we have that foundation to build off of?

0:06:48.7 Mustafa Akyol: Sure, definitely. It will not be easy, but let me try to… Let me begin with this. Most of the people who might be listening to us right now would probably be more familiar with the Jewish or Christian traditions if they are coming from the West, right. And a lot of people speak about the Judeo-​Christian tradition, and I think that’s important and yeah, that’s a good way of looking into history, but I would say, well, you should add one more thing to that, and that is the Judeo-​Christian-​Islamic tradition, because ultimately, Islam is the third of the three great monotheisms that we’re talking about here.

0:07:32.9 Mustafa Akyol: Islam itself emphasizes that. When you read the Quran, the Quran says, well, this book is to confirm the other books, the Torah and the Gospel, and the Quran shows utmost respect to Abraham and Moses and Jesus, and just said… And it says, well, here’s a new prophet, Muhammad, and he’s bringing monotheism to Arabs, which were polytheists before, so Islam consciously emphasizes that it is yet another branch on the Abrahamic tree. Well, Muslims themselves, you know, downplay this to some extent, because saying we are the true ones, and the other ones are the misguided ones, but there’s even promise for salvation of Jews and Christians in the Quran, which is a very interesting theme.

0:08:18.2 Mustafa Akyol: Which means that troubles that has happened in other civilizations can take place in Islam as well, and especially I’m referring to Christian history very often. I mean, when you look at Christian history, when you look at 17th century Christendom, for example, it was not called even Europe that much at the time, it was called Christendom, and you would see that Protestants and Catholics were slaughtering each other for being heretics in the middle of Europe, and you would find people burnt at the stake alive for being quote unquote, a heretic, or rich.

0:08:54.3 Mustafa Akyol: And I think it was a really dark era of Christianity, and the problem… Was the problem Christianity itself, that it’s hopeless, it can never be a tolerant religion? No, it was a really bad time and Christians had not yet figured out that using coercion in the name of Jesus is not a good idea, but they ultimately did. I think Christianity outgrew that phase, Western Christianity at least, and by and large, world Christianity today, you don’t see people being beheaded for blasphemy against Jesus, or being burned alive, but that happened through some rethinking of the Christian tradition.

0:09:29.5 Mustafa Akyol: And I believe the problems we have in the Islamic world today are problems like that, it comes from this historical marriage of religion and power, a marriage that finally has to be broken. And I think when we do that, we can see that there are strong bases in Islam for freedom. I’ll remind just one episode from the inquisition you mentioned, the Malaysian religion police arrested me in part for quoting the Quranic words, actually, not the full words, but a part of it, the beginning of it, which reads, there is no compulsion in religion, [0:10:10.0] ____ in Arabic.

0:10:10.9 Mustafa Akyol: So I kept using this words, this words has become the motor of the liberal-​minded Muslims in the past century, there is no compulsion in religion, people put on their websites. And so this seems to imply to us that religion should be based on free choice and not coercion. Well, the Malaysian religious police takes great pain to put an… A parentheses into that words, you don’t… They don’t write in like that, they write “there is no compulsion in religion only while you’re becoming a Muslim.” So the idea is that you can enter Islam, but once you enter, you cannot leave, that’s apostasy, and that’s a crime. And also when you are in the religion, you are subject to the authority of the religion police, which will check whether you’re fasting on Ramadan, for example, or whether you’re properly dressed.

0:11:00.8 Mustafa Akyol: But if you leave that aside, there are some very powerful ideas in Islam, that single verse, there is no compulsion in religion, and a few other verses like that in the Quran, actually allowed the Muslims to stay away from forced conversion, which was a very common practice in classical pre-​modern world. Thanks to that, thanks to that Quranic basis, Jews could live as Jews in the Islamic world without being forced to convert, Eastern Christians as well. That’s why when Christians were persecuted in 15th century Catholic Spain to become Christians, they fled to the Ottoman Empire which allowed them to live with their faith.

0:11:42.6 Mustafa Akyol: So what I’m trying to say is that there are huge problems of freedom in the world of Islam today, which is coming from… Which are coming from certain interpretations of Islam that are certainly illiberal, authoritarian, it’s radical even, but there are also grounds in Islam for freedom, which historically have helped sustain human dignity and freedom to some extent, and what I’m trying to do is to criticize those problems, but also revive the grounds of freedom in the Islamic tradition, in Islamic scripture, or the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

0:12:20.6 Trevor Burrus: Another thing, which may not be relevant totally to your thesis, but is something that comes up just for way of background, is Sunni and Shia, is there… First of all, could you give a little idea what that difference is, but also, does that difference map philosophically in terms of openness at all and the way we see in the Muslim world today?

0:12:40.8 Mustafa Akyol: Yeah, of course, that’s a big sectarian division in Islam, that is with us since the, let’s say, first century of Islam as a religion. Here’s what I can say, it’s fascinating. Actually, Sunni and Shia Muslims believe in the same Quran, they have no different idea about the Quran. It’s the same text, they believe in Prophet Muhammad, they have no distinction about that too, they all revere Prophet Muhammad. The big dispute is who was the rightful heir of the Prophet Muhammad when he passed away in the year 632.

0:13:16.8 Mustafa Akyol: The Sunnis believe that the four first caliphs, and caliphs are successors to the Prophet Muhammad, they were all legitimate. When Prophet Muhammad passed away, Abu Bakr, then Umar and Osman and Ali, they became his heirs, and that’s all fine and that was what it was meant to be. The Shiites believe, no, it was Ali’s right to be the heir of the Prophet Muhammad and others usurped that from Ali. So they have a narrative of the suppression of Ali and his descendants.

0:13:46.0 Mustafa Akyol: By the way, this was not just persona but also tribes, because the tribe of Osman was an Umayyad tribe and the tribe of Ali was a different thing. So there was a tribal conflict, actually, underneath this conflict. Now, I am a Muslim from a Sunni background. I would define myself a Sunni, therefore. But if you ask me which interpretations of this history is actually true, I’ll tell you, “Well, I don’t know, I was not there.” You have two historical interpretations. This is like Christians, which didn’t happen in Christianity, fighting over whether St. Paul versus Peter or James the Just was the actual heir of Jesus, you can have that discussion.

0:14:32.4 Mustafa Akyol: What made this discussion a more burning one, a more faithful one, was power, because there was a caliphate to rule. And if Ali ruled it, it would be his people who would be ruling, his bloodline. And now, the Umayyads rule it and they were despots and they suppressed Ali and they actually killed his child, his son, Hussein, in a tragic, horrific massacre at Karbala, which is for Shiites had become the history. To me, this whole issue of dispute between Sunnis and Shiites actually shows us that power has not been a blessing, but a curse from the very beginning.

0:15:12.8 Mustafa Akyol: Also, there is an interesting theological school that emerged in this first big civil war in Islam. It’s called a Fitna or called the first Civil War between the followers of Ali and Osman fighting each other. They said, what I’m actually saying today. They said, “Who is exactly right here, the followers of Ali or Osman and Osman’s descendants, the Umayyads?” They said, “Well, we don’t know for sure.” And they said, “This is probably not resolvable, so let’s postpone this to afterlife to be solved by God.” So that’s why they were called the postponers. In Arabic, the term is Murji’ah.

0:15:57.9 Mustafa Akyol: And I’m a big fan of them in Islamic thought because they realized that there might be things that you cannot agree on, but you can leave it up to God, leave it to afterlife, let God sort it out, and in the meantime, we can live and let live. And they helped actually tame some of the fanaticism in early Islam. So the Murji’ites are one of the theological schools in early Islam from which I extract an idea of tolerance, and it’s not an accident when you read the publications of terrorist groups like ISIS, they will all hate the Murji’ah. Actually, ISIS had a very long article in its monthly magazine saying Murji’ah is the greatest evil that the Islamic world has ever seen, and they called Murji’ah the liberals. They allow people to do what they do. And I’m saying, yes, that’s why the Murji’ah is a great idea. The postponers were a great school in early Islam.

0:16:54.9 Aaron Powell: What was the state of political and economic liberty during Muhammad’s time and in the early days of Islam?

0:17:05.7 Mustafa Akyol: That’s a great question, Aaron. And the picture there is even brighter, actually, I should say, because Islam was born as an unusually business-​friendly religion. Why is that? First of all, because Prophet Muhammad has a feature that is really uncommon among the world’s founders of religion, which is he was a businessman, he was a merchant. Before starting, before beginning to preach monotheism at the age of 40, he was a very successful merchant who was trading from Mecca to all the way into Syria. And his city, Mecca, was the center of trades.

0:17:49.4 Mustafa Akyol: And actually, some of the first Muslims, some of the first caliphs, actually, were also merchants, so they knew how the markets work. That’s why when you look into the life of Prophet Muhammad, you will see episodes like he comes to Medina where he escaped to save his life and the life of his followers, believers, from persecution in Mecca. One of the first things he does in the city is to establish a marketplace, and he says, “This is your market. Let no be tax taken in it.” So he established a tax-​free market in Medina.

0:18:24.9 Mustafa Akyol: There’s another episode where in the market of Medina, there is some shortage and prices have gone up. And some of the people in Medina, Muslims, come to Prophet Muhammad and they said, “Muhammad,” because he’s also the ruler of the city, at least the Muslim community, they asked from him, “Can you please lower the prices?” And Prophet Muhammad famously says, “It is Allah who fixes the prices and I cannot.” And he says, “I don’t want to do injustice to anybody.” So he has a saying which says, fixing the prices is an injustice to the merchants, obviously, and it could be injustice to the people who will be buying and selling in the market, all of them.

0:19:08.5 Mustafa Akyol: So these are the kind of bases that has really made Islam actually a very market-​friendly religion, and it’s not an accident that the early Islamic civilization thrived economically, and Muslims invented some even business techniques that actually made their way into Europe. Muslim merchants were, for example, instead of carrying a lot of money, that was gold or silver at that time, by the way, the Islamic empire has printed sound money, gold and silver, which was also an important economic asset at that time. Muslim merchants began to carry papers showing that they have some cash here in Morocco, so they can carry the paper all the way to Baghdad and cash the money there.

0:19:55.9 Mustafa Akyol: They called this paper Sak, which in Arabic means written document, soon it came into Europe through the Crusades, and Sak became the cheque, as the French and the British language calls it, so there are interesting Islamic inventions that made their way into Europe. Some of them are inventions about the market, and Benedikt Koehler, who’s a German economist and banker, has a fascinating book, Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism. And he shows that actually the Islamic world was the center of capitalism like a 1000 years ago, and actually it helped Italian states, for example, to get some ideas and things moved on.

0:20:43.8 Mustafa Akyol: Unfortunately, what happened in the lens of Islam is that, that early dynamism, which was economic dynamism, which was fostered by the Prophet and the Quran, declined, and my colleague and friend Ahmet Kuru has a very fascinating book about that which came out two years ago, Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment, and he says the decline took place because of despotic states growingly dominated the Islamic scene, curbing the merchants, empowering the military, croaching on the market economy. And you see how that works in the writings of Ibn Khaldun, by the way.

0:21:26.5 Mustafa Akyol: So there are deems like that in early Islam which people like me today refer to, saying, wow, liberty, including economic liberty, were not alien ideas to us, just maybe we lost some of them. And the reason we lost them was not really religion itself, but the historical context in which that religion unfolded, which is very much related to the political despotism that has a big impact on the region, the Muslim world since the 12th century.

0:21:58.3 Trevor Burrus: Well, so the thing you mentioned earlier, ’cause not only at the time of the Prophet, but even in the centuries after with Baghdad, say 13th, 14th, 15th century, you have an extremely thriving civilization, markets tolerant, science, literature. Many people have pointed this out that you would have picked… You would have picked either the Chinese or the Arab world around Iraq to be the one that would be the dominant civilization within 500 years. When we talk about that era of Baghdad, is there… Can we put our finger on… Was there like a… Some very, very open-​minded leader or a dynasty of leaders or something that we can point to, to say this is what happened that made it so different than so much of the Arab world today.

0:22:51.7 Mustafa Akyol: Sure, Trevor. And I should say that this is really a huge discussion, like why did the Islamic world stagnate or even begin to decline. Some people deny that such a stagnation or decline ever happened, they think until colonialism, the Islamic world was doing great, and it’s only because of colonialism we have the problems today, an argument which I don’t really fully agree with, and a few chapters in my book is about questioning that argument, and I do show that there were some internal problems. One thing is clear, though, a thousand years ago, Islamic world was more vibrant, creative, tolerant, cosmopolitan than Christendom.

0:23:34.4 Mustafa Akyol: The big inventions of science were coming from Muslims, right? That’s why algorithm comes from the name of Al-​Khwarizmi or algebra comes from Arabic, which is al-​jabr, but even just when you map the words in the English or the French languages, you see that there has been an influx of ideas from the Middle East, Muslim Middle East to Europe at the time, which is of course quite the contrary today. Today, the word Internet is invented in America, and everybody calls it Internet, because it was the Americans who invented it.

0:24:05.0 Mustafa Akyol: To me, that history to me shows that it is wrong to say, oh, inherently Islamic world, Islamic civilization now is illiberal or stagnant. No, it’s not inherent, but civilizations have better or worse times, and I think we believe we are in a very bad time in this world. To come to your question, were there some important people whose ideas are crucial from that time? Yes, definitely. One of them is Ibn Rushd, or Averroes as he’s known in the West, and very famed, actually, he’s in European history. He’s very famous in European history because he was the man who re-​introduced the philosophy of Aristotle after the denial of Aristotle and rejection of him for centuries through the Middle Ages.

0:25:01.8 Mustafa Akyol: He was one of the philosopher or philosophers of the early Islamic civilization, and by the way, the history of that philosophy in early Islam is fascinating, and I get into that and the meaning of that in my book. These philosophers, they were the product of an engagement in the early Islamic civilization with Greek philosophy, other traditions as well, but especially Greek philosophy. And it began in Baghdad when Muslims, the more open-​minded Muslims, I would say, began to realize that, yes, they have their religion, yes, they’re Muslims, they believe in revelation and the tradition of Prophet Muhammad, but human knowledge is endless.

0:25:48.2 Mustafa Akyol: And they discovered through Eastern Christians, actually, that there is something called Greek philosophy, which is fascinating. These people, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, they discovered so many things from medicine to cosmology and ethics and so on and so forth. And they began ultimately to translate these Greek ideas into Arabic, which was a world-​changing experience. It’s called the Greek translation movement, Graeco-​Arabic translation movement. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad was the epicenter of that, and ultimately, that survived all the way to Spain.

0:26:27.1 Mustafa Akyol: Ibn Rushd, the philosopher I’m speaking about, he was the last of those great medieval Islamic philosophers, and he has very interestings that are really little known in the Muslim world today, let alone in the East. He was a student of Aristotle, he translated and commented on Aristotle, and from those commentaries, as I said, Europeans discovered Aristotle. But one thing he says is that, he was also a judge and jurist, so his job was interpreting the Sharia, so he was an Islamic scholar too. And he says in one very interesting passage, that he says, there are written laws of societies of religious communities, and by that he refers to the Sharia, so Sharia is a written law, but he says no one can write a law that is valid in all places and in all societies.

0:27:27.2 Mustafa Akyol: So he understands that Sharia has to be sometimes reinterpreted. Then he says, then there are unwritten laws of humanity, which are in the nature of everybody, which is things like compassion, things like dignity. And he says, if there is a tension between the two, the law… Written laws can be reinterpreted, which means that if there are universal values, which we would call liberty today and human rights, and if there is a tension between the written laws, you should reinterpret the written laws, not deny the universal values, which is not what the fundamentalists believe today, for sure. If you ask the Iranian Republic of Iran, what do you think about human rights, they will say what a nonsense is that, you know, we just look at the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and Salafis will say the same thing to you.

0:28:15.8 Mustafa Akyol: So Ibn Rushd was a pioneer in many ways. His writings on women are fascinating. He was quite progressive in his views about the role of women in society. He thought that women are not intellectually deficient, as a lot of people believed at the time, and if they were given education, they would be as successful as men. He also has a very interesting approach. In one of his passages, he says, to… When you are criticizing an opponent, always quote their words in full. Not doing so is an implicit acceptance of the weakness of your own argument. In other words, he believed in a free discussion, where it says another person with a different idea, you should allow them to speak up their mind.

0:29:03.6 Mustafa Akyol: And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was a great religious thinker we lost last year, he has shown in one of his books that Ibn Rushd, that idea of free speech by Ibn Rushd influenced some Jewish philosophers, which influenced all the way to some European thinkers going all the way to John Stuart Mill. So I find some of the ideas of classical liberalism such as property rights, individual liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, I find them in the writings of Ibn Rushd, for example, or classical Islamic philosophers. They were not cultivated enough, they didn’t flourish enough, but that’s precisely we have to, today, rediscover them.

0:29:43.6 Trevor Burrus: What happened to Ibn Rushd, because maybe that’s part of the story, in terms of how we got to a less tolerant world.

0:29:51.3 Mustafa Akyol: Well, he was cancelled, in today’s terms. What happened was, Ibn Rushd, of course, was a philosopher, and there was a strain, which ultimately became the dominant strain in Sunni Islam, which really looked very suspiciously to philosophy. It began, well, it didn’t begin with, but one person that really take it to a very serious level was Al-​Ghazali. He’s known as the most influential theologian in classical Islam, and Al-​Ghazali, he was a nuanced figure, so he was not like a wild-​eyed fanatic, as some people thought he was, wrongly, but still, he has this book, Incoherence of the Philosophers, and he criticizes the philosophers that came before him.

0:30:43.9 Mustafa Akyol: Ibn Rushd was not at the time, of course, there, Ibn Rushd would come later, but Al-​Ghazali criticizes the philosophers before him, and these are Al-​Farabi, and Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, who are, I think, great thinkers, by the way. I mean, Al-​Farabi was a great political thinker, and he’s the first one who says in Islamic civilization that a city based on huria, which is freedom, would be a thriving city, which is very interesting. And Ibn Sina was a genius in many ways, but because Ibn Sina especially bought into the metaphysical ideas of Greek philosophers like there is no creation of the universe, but there’s emanation from God, so they tried to reconcile, they went really metaphorical in some of their interpretations of the Quran and Islamic beliefs.

0:31:31.9 Mustafa Akyol: Al-​Ghazali criticized them, which would be fine, but at the end, he said, because of this, they are… They fall into kufr, which is disbelief, which is, you know, lack of belief in God. And he says, because of this, they can be killed. So, in classical Islam, and today still, if you declare a Muslim a kafir, which is an unbeliever, it’s not just you’re criticizing the person, you are calling for them to be executed, which is the apostasy ban, you know, I was speaking about in Malaysia.

0:32:00.2 Mustafa Akyol: So Ghazali wrote this, and after that, this issue became really very sensitive to be a philosopher, it became dangerous to be a philosopher, and Ibn Rushd tried to very carefully work his way out of this, and he defended philosophy, he has a very important decisive treatise, where he actually says, “No, no philosophy isn’t against our religion, the Quran itself calls us to think and thinking means philosophy,” and he tries to advance that argument. But what happened, ultimately, Trevor, to come back to your question, in one of his… Some people in Cordoba, the Asharites, the strict theologians, they hated him for his free thinking, if you will.

0:32:41.7 Mustafa Akyol: And they found a pretext. He quoted a Greek philosopher who worshipped Venus, Greeks were obviously polytheists, and this was taken as he himself was a worshipper of Venus. And so he wasn’t a kufr, he was… Luckily, he wasn’t killed, but there has been a purge against him. He was brought to the mosque of Cordoba, the great mosque of Cordoba, now a cathedral, fascinating building, people spat on his face, crowds humiliated him, he was banished, he was exiled and put into a small city called Lucena, and then he was put on house arrest and his books on philosophy were publicly burned in the… Some of them were publicly burned in the marketplace of Cordoba.

0:33:27.5 Mustafa Akyol: That is why a few of his books on philosophy today are not available in Arabic, but they are available in, guess what, Latin and Hebrew, because Jews and Christians preserved those books and it really had a tectonic impact in Europe. So I have that passage in my book, which says, “While so sad that we Muslims denied one of our towering minds, whereas he had a better impact in Europe.” Which means today we have some rethinking and that’s why one reason I called my book Reopening Muslim Minds, because I think there was more open minds in the Muslim world way back, but there has been a wave of parochialism and dogmatism, and I show how that happened, actually, and how the impact of that has been. But the story of Ibn Rushd is a good example of that, is a sad example of that.

0:34:23.7 Aaron Powell: So then, was Al-​Ghazali the turning point that changed the kind of character of the Muslim world?

0:34:30.6 Mustafa Akyol: I wouldn’t say that. I think he had… I think he took a negative turn, that’s for sure. He took a negative turn by criminalizing thought, because before Al-​Ghazali… I mean, the idea that apostasy is a crime is there from the beginning, and I think it had political roots, it doesn’t come from the Quran, but it was not… Before Al-​Ghazali, still, if you are kafir, if you are a Muslim turned into an infidel, yes, you would be given the death penalty, it was there.

0:34:58.4 Mustafa Akyol: By the way, it was used to criticize… Sorry, it was used to kill the opponents of the Umayyad dynasty, as I show in my book. It was very political. But Al-​Ghazali brought the idea that people who are Muslims and who profess to be Muslims, can still be declared infidels, by saying that this idea of yours is a heretical idea. So Ibn Sina and Al-​Farabi, they were not non-​Muslims, they were proudly Muslims, but Al-​Ghazali brought the idea of takfir, which you can declare someone kafir and punish him. He was more nuanced than the fanatics that came later. He said, “Okay, Greeks have some good ideas, we can get some geometry from them,” he appreciated logic.

0:35:40.3 Mustafa Akyol: So he was nuanced, but once you take that turn, when you go a few generations after Ghazali, there came hardliners who say, “Why do we need mathematics too? This is all nonsense. Why do we need logic too?” So he is not maybe the one who put a nail in the coffin, but he took a turn which ultimately went bad. And I show in my book, for example, Ahmad Sirhindi, which is a big scholar, very revered one in the Sunni tradition, from India, in the 17th century, and he says, all these stupid sciences of the philosophers are useless. He says, “Geometry, what is that good for? It doesn’t bring any godly piety or something.”

0:36:22.2 Mustafa Akyol: Well, Muslims would soon realize why geometry is good for when they began to lose wars against the Europeans and the Ottomans realized they need modern techniques and industry and so on, so forth, but it was too late. And so, they tried to catch up, but that catching up has never fully come yet. So there’s a long debate over whether Ghazali was responsible or not. I think he was responsible for criminalization of thought, to some extent. He was nuanced, compared to the rigid dogmatists that later dominated the scene, but ultimately what happened is that Islamic civilization gave up on the idea that there are things to learn from the outside.

0:37:08.0 Mustafa Akyol: What made Ibn Rushd amazing, or Ibn Sina, was that they were pious Muslims grounded in the Quran, but they said, “We can discover everything, we can learn ethics and philosophy and everything from Aristotle,” and not everything Aristotle said was true, by the way, history moves on. But the idea that every wisdom we need is already in our tradition became a dominant idea, and when Muslims faced things like democracy or human rights or liberalism or libertarianism, a lot of people, dogmatists, will still say, “This is all nonsense. We don’t need any of it.” So that parochialism, I think, was the main problem.

0:37:46.0 Mustafa Akyol: And of course, that parochialism can exist in any civilization. I think nativists in the West today are not seeing something different. So I’m just… I’m not saying this is just a problem of Islam, but I show that it has been a main problem in Islamic civilization.

0:38:01.7 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting, because I don’t think I understood until reading your book, how much so many citizens of the Muslim world, Muslims, have kind of basically unified their moral thinking with, A, what the Quran says, and then B, what anyone… Hadis and the Imams interpret the Quran. So you had that part about asking anything like, “How should I shower, how should I do this?” But this kinda goes back to the question I asked earlier, where it’s like, given the Quran doesn’t tell you how to shower or any of these other things, or how to use the internet or anything like that, you’ve given an immense amount of power to political entities, when you have the people who basically supplicate themselves to the interpretation.

0:38:47.9 Trevor Burrus: And going back to Ibn Rushd saying, “You can’t write all the laws, no one can write all the laws that need to be followed, so someone has to interpret.” So where do these Imams come off with political power, telling you how to shower, because that’s certainly not in the Quran and a thousand other things, and it’s just… It’s a kind of weird supplication, and I guess Islam means submission, but it doesn’t mean to these political entities.

0:39:10.8 Mustafa Akyol: Surely it doesn’t mean submission to a tyrant, although somebody has unfortunately made that interpretation. I mean, there are some Islamic teachings which will say, obey the ruler because God tells you to obey the ruler. And I would say, God really… Does He really want me to obey this tyrant who’s just chopping off the heads of his critics? I don’t believe that and I don’t see that in the Quran. And you made a very good point, Trevor, one of the… And that is something I discuss in the book, to say that the Quran gives us, Muslims, all the wisdom they need is not Quranic itself.

0:39:51.6 Mustafa Akyol: The Quran tells Muslims very often to do what is just or to do what is fair without defining what it is. It’s just an ethical code, ethical code for Muslims. One thing very interesting is that the Quran tells Muslims to do maruf, which is in Arabic, which is generally translated as doing good. But maruf means in Arabic the known, it comes from arafa, to know. So it says, do the known good. How do you know that? Well, you may know that through custom, you may know that through philosophy, you may know that through conscience, you may know that through a liberal political philosophy, so it’s an open-​ended search for truth.

0:40:35.1 Mustafa Akyol: And the problem with ashʿarism, the theological paradigm that I’m criticizing in the book very often, is that it’s… It denied that humans can know anything besides, unless there’s a revelational basis for it. That is… That’s what I discuss as the Euthyphro dilemma in Islam because… May I explain that in one second. Like, one big debate that happened in Islam and in the theological realm was this question of whether God’s law, the Sharia, indicates right and wrong, or it establishes or constitutes what’s right and wrong.

0:41:19.0 Mustafa Akyol: According to the philosophers that I’m highlighting, and also another school called [0:41:24.1] ____, the Sharia, God’s law, was assigned to ethical values, which people would know even if there was no revelation. They said, even if God didn’t tell us, we would know that theft is wrong or murdering an innocent person is wrong. We would know that intuitively, humans could realize that. Whereas the opponents of them, the Asharites, and Al-​Ghazali was an Asharite, by the way, the one we talked about, they said no, right and wrong only comes from the commandments of God, so if God says theft is wrong, it’s wrong, but if he says it’s right, it will be right, there is no value outside of religion.

0:42:01.0 Mustafa Akyol: So that paradigm dominated the Islamic civilization after Ghazali, basically, I can say, gradually, and it happened, as you well suspect and pointed out, Trevor, it happened because it had very useful political implications. If all right and wrong is defined by religion, and if religion is defined by clerics who are employed by the Sultan, it’s a very good way to control society, and it was precisely used like that, the implications of which we still see in many parts of the Muslim world today.

0:42:35.6 Aaron Powell: Are there any roughly liberal Muslim countries that we might point to as like success in this direction?

0:42:45.0 Mustafa Akyol: Yes, certainly. There is a report I published with Cato, as a Cato Development Bulletin, last summer, titled Freedom in the Muslim World, and I show there that the Muslim world is actually pretty diverse, and there are some Muslim majority countries that are actually quite free, as free as Western European countries, which are these… Well, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the freest Muslim majority country, followed by Albania. In the Arab world, Tunisia has made some important progress, and Lebanon has not been too bad. Indonesia in Southeast Asia is generally good, with the exception of the Aceh province, which is run by a group that imposes the Sharia.

0:43:28.7 Mustafa Akyol: But I do know, there are brighter spots, and when you look into Central Asia, for example, a country like Kazakhstan, it’s not liberal, it’s politically authoritarian, but when you look at women’s rights, you wouldn’t have any problem regarding that issue. So it depends on what we mean by liberal as well. Some societies are politically authoritarian, but socially a bit more liberal, or it could be the other way around. But generally, there are some Muslim majority societies, yes, that are free. And when you look into Bosnia, for example, which I know well, because my wife is from Bosnia, there are pious Muslims in Bosnia, they have an institution called riazid, it’s kind of a church, in the Islamic civil society organization.

0:44:06.0 Mustafa Akyol: But the thing is, they’re not trying to establish a Sharia state, they’re happy with secular constitution. They are happy to preserve their faith as civil… As a civil organization and as individuals, and some women wear the hijab, others don’t, nobody questions, what should people do in their private lives, which is ideal. And growingly, more and more Muslims are seeing the benefit of that freedom. I think people living in the West, Muslims living in the West or people living in countries like Saudi Arabia aspire to free societies. They see the value of that, but how do we justify that from an Islamic point of view, how do we justify a liberal open society from an Islamic point of view remains a contested issue, and hence, my book is about that question.

0:44:58.2 Aaron Powell: Do these more liberal countries, are they more liberal because they have interpreted Islam in a more liberty-​promoting direction, or is it that, so that they have kind of a fundamentally different conception of Islam than, say, Saudi Arabia does, or is it more just that Islam has less political authority within these countries?

0:45:27.3 Mustafa Akyol: Very good question, and I would say it’s a combination of both. For example, why Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania are free societies, although they’re predominantly Muslim. Well, they come from secular history. Bosnia and Herzegovina became a part of the Austria-​Hungarian empire in 1876. Since then, they never had an Islamic state, quote unquote. After that, there was Yugoslavia, which was socialist, but secular for sure, and Bosnia became an independent country in 1990s. Again, it was… So the political history itself changed a lot, and I think that’s true.

0:46:10.4 Mustafa Akyol: In Turkey too, in my country, Turkey, which is very illiberal these days, if you want to criticize the president, but from an Islamic point of view, it’s still relatively doing better than most Arab countries, and that is because Turkey has that different political history. Atatürk brought secular laws and the secular republic in 1923. However, the interpretation of Islam also plays a role, because Bosnia is the heir of Ottoman Islam, which it was already by definition, more flexible and lenient than the Wahhabi version that was already there in Saudi Arabia.

0:46:50.2 Mustafa Akyol: So I think it’s a combination of the existing Islamic interpretation and the political history of a certain society. And the political history of Muslim societies are incredibly diverse, there is no doubt about that. Also, for example, in countries like Burkina Faso, you have very tolerant interpretations of Islam, because of the Sufi tradition there. So it is the… There you see the impact of doctrine as well. So it is… In Shiite Islam, Iran is obviously a tyrannical regime that justifies itself with Islam, with Shiite Islam, but if you look at the Iraqi Shiites, they are more open to democracy and a relatively more less, let’s say, theocratic state, because they differ from Khomeini’s interpretation of Velayat-​e Faqih, which gives the jurists the rule to… The right to rule the state.

0:47:38.7 Mustafa Akyol: So it is really complicated, just like Christianity is complicated. Today, Latin America is not the same thing with Poland, or Sweden is predominantly Christian, but it’s not the same thing with the Philippines.

0:47:57.1 Trevor Burrus: So 10 years ago, we had a bunch of protests and coups and different movements sweep across the Arab world in what became known as the Arab Spring and seemed like a pretty… A beginning, maybe optimistic time for more liberal reforms, but in the wake of that, it seems like most of the countries have retrenched into a more traditional mindset, which in a way, you can argue, mirrors some of the other kind of reactionary forces in, say, Hungary and America.

0:48:30.9 Trevor Burrus: In that entire aftermath of the Arab Spring, I think people might have become less optimistic about the future of Islam and freedom in the Muslim world. Do you think that’s a fair assessment, or is there something we can look forward to, that we were starting to see some minds opening, and maybe the backlash is just what’s expected from the purists, when minds start opening about the possibilities of freedom in these countries?

0:49:00.5 Mustafa Akyol: Well, I would say it’s too early to be pessimistic about the region. Just recall how things went after the French Revolution of 1879. Sorry, 1789. And there was the era of terror and the Jacobins and the Napoleon, and it took a long time for France to be really a liberal democracy after the French Revolution. And what happened in the Arab world, in the so-​called Arab Spring, I would call it Arab Spring, it was an Arab Spring, but it’s failed to a great extent. Two things happened, one, first of all, there is a success story coming out of that, we should not think that it’s all bad.

0:49:45.0 Mustafa Akyol: Tunisia, the country that initiated the Arab Spring, actually has done pretty well so far. Tunisia has big economic problems today, that’s another issue, but politically, it’s been able to make a liberal constitution, bringing the Islamists and secularists of Tunisia together on some basic national consensus, and it hasn’t… The democratic process has not been derailed, either towards radical Islam or a military coup, which has happened in elsewhere. So it’s not that it’s all bad.

0:50:17.9 Mustafa Akyol: Also, Sudan is an interesting example people forget. Sudan joined the bandwagon belatedly, but there is a Sudanese revolution against… There has been a Sudanese revolution against a long-​standing Islamist regime… It was overthrown peacefully, by protests and social movements, and today Sudan is a post-​Islamist country that is growingly becoming more open and progressive. So there are relatively bright spots, but two things happened.

0:50:51.6 Mustafa Akyol: First of all, in Syria, for example, the existing tyrannical, one-​party republic was just too stiff and was not willing to give power, and it had enough friends from the outside, such as Russia or Iran, to be able to just bomb its way out and to destroy half of its country, but still remain in power. So sometimes, regimes are there because… The Soviet Union survived quite for a long time, although it was a tyranny, it had enough nuclear power or Red Army power to stay. So there is that.

0:51:28.3 Mustafa Akyol: Second, is that the opposition to the regimes, existing regimes, included Islamist forces, especially in Egypt, in Syria too, and these Islamist forces, although they claimed in many cases, to come to mainstream and to be a bit more democratic, it was not really clear what they were willing to do. And that always brings a suspicion that, “Oh, Islamists will use democracy to come to power, but once they come to power, they will really establish a authoritarian system.” This was the same question about communists, throughout the Cold War. If Communists come to power through elections, will they really keep democracy or will it be…

0:52:10.8 Mustafa Akyol: I think this is a legitimate question, and sometimes this argument is used to crack down on Islamists who are actually really moderating, but also there are real legitimate questions. And even in my country, Turkey, having seen the Erdogan era, which is another experiment in political Islam, political Islam in the Turkish context, I see that, yes, there are some issues. You will be worried that some people might come to power with democracy, but they can make it a very illiberal democracy. That’s why these issues of religion and public life should be honestly discussed, and I think we should not assume that mere elections will bring wonders to societies.

0:52:52.7 Mustafa Akyol: It can turn into illiberal, authoritarian, majoritarian systems, like happening in India, against Muslims today. Democracy is important, democracy is a political process that we should support and we should not give up, but rights of the individuals, the bill of rights, limits of the government, these are also important, even more important.

0:53:21.0 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.