In Reopening Muslim Minds (St. Martin’s Essentials, Apr.), New York Times opinion writer Akyol argues for an Islamic universalism.
What inspired you to write this book now?
I have been working on these questions—how Islam can be compatible with liberalism, human rights, freedom of speech, and religion—for the past two decades, but the book begins with the story of me being arrested by the religious police in Malaysia in 2017, after a lecture in which I advocated religious freedom. That religious police force, I admit, was acting on a mainstream Islamic tradition which criminalizes apostasy, but I was making another Islamic argument. In the book, I dig into the theological bases of these different understandings of Islam. Theirs is the authoritarian understanding, which doesn’t fully accept freedom of speech, of thought, and of religion, but there were alternative views in Islamic history on all these matters. I also demonstrate in the book that the authoritarian understanding was not divinely mandated, but just a historical interpretation, which prevailed thanks to its political use. The liberal understanding I advocate is also an interpretation too, of course, but at least on a rational ground I can argue why it is better.
What do you most want readers to take away from the book?
It is true that the Islamic civilization is going through a crisis. We Muslims do not need to be defensive about that. There is a crisis and it is that Islamic teachings have not fully made peace with liberal values and, in particular, human rights. However, this was a problem in other civilizations as well. Christianity persecuted “infidels” or “heretics” for centuries, only to change with arguments from within. In Islam, too, change will come only when most Muslims realize that by giving up coercive power in the name of their faith they will not be betraying their faith, which is one of my key arguments in this book. They’ll even be better Muslims, out of their free conscience, not any political or social dictate. This is an argument for an Islamic Enlightenment—and I really mean an Islamic Enlight-enment. I’m not translating John Locke into a Muslim language; rather, I am showing that the ideas of such Western liberals can be found within Islamic sources.
How do you see your reasoning straddling Islamic and Western thinking?
One reason many conservative Muslims are resistant to liberal modernity is precisely because it’s coming from the West, the very civilization that has colonized and traumatized Muslim lands in the past two centuries. I want to defuse that tension first by showing that the Western Enlightenment borrowed some ideas from the Islamic civilization. I also argue that there are universal values, which the West might have cultivated better in the past few centuries, but which can also be cultivated by Muslims in our tradition as well.
