2013-05-18T07:43:44-04:00 Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=mustafa-akyol Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mustafa Akyol Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1421147 2012-04-14T06:30:32-04:00 2012-06-14T05:12:01-04:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/
However, a closer examination at the Muslim community in the United States reveals a different reality. And while that insight can come from various public surveys conducted over the years, my personal one comes from direct experience of these days: I am on a 20-day book tour, which covers 11 American cities and includes two dozen talks, and which gives me a lot of food for thought.

A part of my tour is organized by the Atlanta-based Istanbul Center, a dynamic institution created by Turkish immigrants to the United States. Its young director Mustafa Sahin, a pious Muslim who did his Ph.D. in Florida, is a far cry from anti-American Turks in his homeland who believe that almost all Turkish troubles stem from "American imperialism." Dr. Sahin rather keeps reminding that Turkey, in late 40s, had its transition from single party dictatorship to a multi-party democracy thanks to the encouragement by none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet what really seems to be popular among religious Turkish-Americans like Dr. Sahin is not America's foreign policy but its democracy: Here, they find a level of religious freedom that in Turkey they could only dream of.

One such Turkish Muslim is a 31-year-old doctoral candidate living here in Greenville, who preferred to remain anonymous out concerns about the Turkish academic establishment. (So I will just call him Mr. M.) He is an observant Muslim who prays five times a day, fasts for 30 days throughout the Ramadan, and has never tasted alcohol. Over dinner, he tells me how positively he is surprised by the religious tolerance in America. "This is a pre-dominantly Christian country, but everybody respects my Muslim practices," he says. "At school, I can do my prayers anywhere and anytime I want."

When Mr. M tells me where he is coming from, I can see why he is so thrilled with all this. He had his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Izmir's Aegean University, which has been a stronghold of Kemalism, the ultra-secular ideology created in the name of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's authoritarian founder. The professors there were not just secular, Mr. M explains, but also passionately secularist. In other words, they detested religion and religious people.

Hence Mr. M and his observant friends friends had a very time in the Aegean University, where students were simply not allowed to observe their religious practices. "We had found an empty room in the basement in which we began to do our daily prayers," he says, "but soon the administration locked the door." Then he and his friends began to go to a nearby mosque, by jumping over the wall of the campus. (In Turkey, some universities are like prisons; you can't get in or out without papers.) "But soon the administration noticed this and they raised the wall so high that we could not jump over."

In the holy month Ramadan, Mr. M adds, his professors checked whether students fasted, and encouraged them not to. "A professor or his assistant who would normally not even talk to you would come and invite you to lunch," he recalls. The ones who proved to be fasting would be discriminated against. "Secular students were always favored and promoted."

Mr. M also told me that things have changed for the better in Turkey gradually under the AKP government, but the United States is still better. "The most beautiful thing about America," he advised me, right before the final handshake, "is freedom."

In other words, America, which has been a safe heaven for persecuted believers since the Mayflower, keeps up with its heritage by welcoming Muslim believers as well. It just should not give into the fear-mongering of a handful of anti-Islamic propagandists, who represent not the best of America, but the worst of the hateful oppression from which some of the newly Americanized Muslims have just fled. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1374480 2012-03-28T17:49:15-04:00 2012-05-28T05:12:02-04:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/
As a response, first, let me condemn this barbarism against the French Jewish community -- and, before them, the three French soldiers of north African descent which are also believed to have been killed by Mohammed Merah. My condolences go for the families of all the victims.

Then let me focus on the inner life of the hunted terrorist. If he was indeed a follower of al Qaeda, as his recent trip to Kandahar also seems to suggest, then what should we conclude? Should we think that this young man was a very pious believer of Islam whose religious zeal made him a religiously-inspired terrorist?

Let's see. Reports note that, during his hours-long of negotiation with the French police, Merah said he was acting to "avenge Palestinian children" and protest against French military intervention in Afghanistan. Besides, in the video he apparently recorded before his crimes, he reportedly swore, "You kill my brothers, I kill you." His "brothers," apparently, were Palestinians and Afghans killed by Israeli or French forces. It is also reported that Merah was enraged by the French ban on the full veil as well.

Now, please note that none of these motivations are religious, in the proper sense of the term. Merah, for example, did not say, "if you disobey Allah, I will kill you," or "if you keep on sinning, I will slay you." Such statements would derive from a purely religious zeal, whose first and foremost goal would be to impose religion -- in this case, Islam -- on the infidels.

What we see is something else: Merah seems to be motivated by his reaction to the political traumas of the religious community that he subscribed to. His zeal seems to be against occupation and humiliation, not godlessness or impiety.

To me, this motivation is more nationalist then religious -- the nation being the ummah, the global Muslim community. It is not too different from a Kurdish terrorist (that of the PKK, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, for example) bombing civilians in the middle of Istanbul to avenge his "brothers" killed by Turkish security forces. An even better parallel would be secular terrorists bred by the Palestinian plight-- such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by the late George Habash, a secular Palestinian Christian.

Since al Qaeda represents such a militant Muslim nationalism, one does not have to be very pious, mosque-going Muslim to be inspired by the organization. Mohammed Atta, the apparent mastermind of 9/11, was a frequenter of nightclubs -- places that don't match too well with traditional Islamic piety. Interestingly enough, one of the friends of the Toulouse shooter, a young man named Samir, also said to BBC that he had seen the Merah "in a Toulouse night club only last week."

None of this means that al Qaeda's rhetoric is not filled with religious elements -- such as the duty of jihad and its rewards in paradise. However, these are not the core motivation, which is political, but mere catalysts for it. No wonder al Qaeda disregards all the traditional concerns for sparing non-combatants in jihad, and engages in a wanton killing that is quite unprecedented in mainstream Islam, as I have discussed in my book.

Which takes us to the bottom line: "The war on al Qaeda" should be carried out with the awareness that this more of a political trouble than a religious one. And like with all political troubles, the ultimate solution needs to be sought in politics. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1152478 2011-12-19T16:22:44-05:00 2012-02-18T05:12:02-05:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/ illiberal democracies rather than liberal ones. And while the threat of illiberal democracy is valid for any late-democratizing country -- just look at Mr. Putin's Russia -- the Middle East bears an additional and unique risk: Islamic law, or the shariah, which might imply corporal punishments for criminals, degradation of women, and persecution of perceived impiety, blasphemy or apostasy.

In the face of this risk, a remedy is often hoped in the power of pragmatism. For example, Egypt's triumphant Freedom and Justice Party, an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, will ruin the country's tourism industry if it bans alcohol. Incumbent Islamists who will have to deliver to their people will face such challenges, the hope goes, and be forced to soften some of their rigid standards.

Besides pragmatism, however, there is another source that the more progressive Islamists such as Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's Ennahda, seem willing to utilize for modernizing their future vision: simply a non-literalist approach to the sharia, which will focus on its "intents" rather than the medieval means that were used to serve those intents.

The basis for this non-literal approach goes back to Imam Shatibi, a scholar from the 14th century Muslim Spain. In his magnum opus, Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, Shatibi studied the whole shariah carefully, and concluded that all its decrees could be rendered to the protection of five fundamental values: Life, religion, property, progeny and reason.

If these intents (maqasid) of Islamic law are taken as its ever-valid content, but the means of these intents are allowed to vary according to time and milieu, as some theologians suggest, then there opens ample ground for reform. Corporal punishments, for example, can be explained as resulting from historical necessity. For instance, in 7th century Arabia, there were neither any correctional facilities nor any bureaucracy to run them. But now we live in a different world.

Or the seemingly misogynistic sayings of Prophet Muhammad, such as his advice that women should not travel alone, can be explained as reasonable precautions in his historical context: In 7th century Arabia, an unprotected woman wandering in the desert would easily fall prey to brigandage. In the modern world, however, both law enforcement and means of travel have improved immensely -- and therefore the Saudi ban on women's driving can be declared absurd.

Islamic history presents examples showing how this non-literalist understanding of the sharia allowed imported adaptations. One exemplary period that I focus on in my book is the late Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the last Islamic caliphate, that rendered most corporal punishments in shariah obsolete, replacing them with fines and prison terms. In the 19th century, Ottoman Islamic scholars explicitly acknowledged "laws should change as times change." They blessed important liberal reforms -- Jews and Christians acquired equal citizenship, laws that banned apostasy were abandoned, and an elected parliament was opened. In the works of Islamic liberals such as Namik Kemal (1840 -1888), whose ideas led the ground for the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, the shariah had turned into a doctrine of God-given "inalienable rights of men" -- a basis for liberty, not a threat to it.

However, the post-Ottoman Middle East was drawn into a political and cultural crisis, and Islamist movements emerged with a reactionary zeal. Ultra-literalist Salafis grew into a potent force, and instead of reforming the medieval sharia to adapt to the modern world, they forced the modern world to adapt to the medieval shariah.

These fundamentalists did not realize that their blind literalism could lead them to follow the letter of the law, but betray its intents. For example, the Qur'anic requirement to bring four witnesses to prove an accusation of adultery, whose explicit purpose is to protect women from libel, could turn into a protection for rapists in Pakistan. Or the obsession to separate the sexes could produce ridiculous fatwas in Egypt, such as that a man and woman can work in the same office space only if the woman, in order to establish a maternal relation, breast-feeds the man.

The Western civilization is familiar with a version of this problem from its own canon: The frequent criticism that Jesus brings in the New Testament to the Pharisees, a conservative and literalist Jewish sect of that time, is very relevant. The Pharisees, Jesus noted, were obsessing about the minute details of religious law but leaving undone "the weightier matters of law" such as "justice, and mercy, and faith." "The Sabbath was made for man," Jesus also proclaimed, turning the Pharisee mindset upside down, "and not man for the Sabbath."

The future of freedom in the Islamic civilization partly lies in a similar insight -- that the shariah was made for man, and not man for the shariah. Luckily, the sources that will help nurture that insight are more abundant in Islamic theology and jurisprudence than what is often thought. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1087902 2011-11-14T11:49:57-05:00 2012-01-14T05:12:02-05:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/ Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, recently became much more famous than it ever was. Early this month, it came out with a provocative issue whose cover presented a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, and the headline, "100 lashes if you don't die laughing." Shortly afterwards, the offices of the magazine were firebombed, and its website got hacked,

Luckily, no one died. But this incident underlined a recurrent conflict between European notions oreportedly, by a group of Turkish Muslims.f free speech and the Islamic notions of the sacred. The pro-Charlie Hebdo demonstrators that gathered outside Paris City Hall last Sunday were expressing one side of that dilemma by declaring their "right to blaspheme." Even mainstream Muslim organizations, however, have long been arguing for laws against blasphemy.

Do we have an irreconcilable gap, then, between Islam and free speech?

I am sure many, among both Muslims and Westerners, would readily say "yes" to this question, but I am not one of them. I rather propose a different answer by differentiating between the moral and the legal spheres.

Let me explain. The problem with some of Europeans who declare their "right to blasphemy" is that they are asking from Muslims to abandon their respect for the sacred. "Learning to take a joke is part of living in Western society," writes a commentator on the web. "Nothing is sacred here -- get used to it."

But, well, no. Neither Muslims nor other believers will "get used to" the idea that nothing is sacred. A sense of the sacred is the very thing that makes them believers. And, as Nietzsche once put it well, the sacred is whatever it is in a culture at which one cannot laugh.

However, having a sense of the sacred is one thing, forcing others to respect it, by law or brute force, is another. And while no Muslim worthy of his name would lose his respect for God, the Prophet Muhammad, and other symbols of Islam, he might well refrain from using legal prosecution or violent reaction to those who do not show the same respect.

My basis for this claim is nothing other than the holiest source of Islam, the Quran. The most relevant verse on this topic, the one that tells Muslims what to do in the face of mockery of their faith, reads as follows:

"When you hear God's revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them." (4:140)

As I explain in my book, in my chapter on "Freedom from Islam," what we see suggested here is a civilized form of disapproval: Muslims are not supposed to be a part of a discourse that mocks Islam. But all they have to do is to stay away from it. And even then, that is only until the discourse changes. Once mockery ends, dialogue can restart. (By the way, this verse is from a "Medinan" chapter. It, in other words, comes from a later phase in which Muslims had military power, and thus it can't be explained away as resulting from necessity.)

If we apply the spirit of this verse to the modern world, we can say that Muslims can boycott anti-Islamic rhetoric by refusing to join conversations, buying newspapers and magazines, or watching films and plays that mock the values of their faith. But that's it. Disapproving and boycotting is the Quranic thing to do, whereas violence and threats are not.

So, if I were a French Muslim, I would end my subscription to Charlie Hebdo, if I had one. I would also express that I found their cartoons about Prophet Muhammad disrespectful to the Muslim community. But that's it. The violent attack on the magazine cannot be justified or tolerated. And its "right to blasphemy" cannot be countered by anything other than a peaceful stance for the sacred. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1002586 2011-10-10T16:08:45-04:00 2011-12-10T05:12:02-05:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/
Although the Iranian court that has tried the long-imprisoned Mr. Nadarkhani lately brought up new accusations against him -- ranging from being a "Zionist agent" to rape -- his last trial on Sep 25-28 makes the problem clear. The judges repeatedly asked from Mr. Nadarkhani to renounce his Christian faith, which would save him from the shocking verdict that "Islamic law" dictates on apostates: capital punishment.

This verdict is not just shocking to modern ears, but also humiliating for all those Muslims who believe in human freedom. For how can a faith be noble if it dictates itself on people and kills those whose conscience dictates another faith? And how Muslims can be proud of their religion if is a community with a free entry but no free exit?

These were some of questions I had in my mind when I began to make research on the ban on apostasy in Islam, for my newly released book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. It was not too hard to see that, like most other coercive elements in classical Islamic law, this ban comes from not the Qur'an, the only divinely-mandated source of Islam, but the post-Qur'anic tradition, which carries the weight of medieval customs, practices and politics.

In fact, the Qur'an not only lacks any earthly punishment for someone who abandons Islam, it even includes verses that imply that such a change of heart should be a matter of free choice. "The truth is from your Lord," a verse reads, "so let him who please believe, and let him who please disbelieve." (18:29) Another verse speaks about "those who believe then disbelieve, again believe and again disbelieve, then increase in disbelief," implying that there were people who could go back and forth between Islam and disbelief during the time of revelation. (4:137)

However, the Qur'an defines only a small part of the Islamic law. The earthly punishment for apostasy comes from another source, namely the hadiths -- words and deeds attributed to Prophet Muhammad, but were canonized only two centuries after his death. "If somebody [among Muslims] discards his religion," reads a hadith in the collection titled Sahih Bukhari, "then kill him."

Yet hadiths are controversial sources, and, as many Muslim reformers have argued since the 19th century, some of them are apocryphal statements created long after the facts -- words put into the mouth of Prophet Muhammad according to later needs.

Many modern scholars think that this need was purely political: The early Muslim community often found itself at war with pagans or other groups, and "apostasy" in that context meant changing your side in battle. (That's why the Hanafi school of jurisprudence gave the death penalty to only males, assuming that they would become enemy combatants, whereas females were not expected to join any war effort.) Other scholars point out to the political uprisings that the Muslim leadership after Prophet Muhammad faced: "Apostasy" in that context really implied rebellion against the state.

In other words, whatever the true origin of the ban on apostasy, it was about political treason rather than a simple change of religion. But the two concepts got confused, and merged into one, and perhaps intentionally so. The despotic sultans of the Umayyad and later the Abbasid dynasties found the death sentence on apostasy very useful, for they could simply condemn their critics as heretics and got them executed.

Today, however, the Islamic world cannot afford to preserve this medieval notion of apostasy, which is at odds with not just the modern values of human rights, but also the very spirit of the Qur'an. Indeed, there are many fine scholars who argue for revising this rule and who affirm religious freedom, but more voices are needed. Instead of remaining silent in the face of executions such as the one that Yousef Nadarkhani faces, let alone condoning them, we Muslims should speak out against them forcefully.

If we are in doubt, we should then think how we would respond if, say, Christians ordered death sentences for their apostates who chose to become Muslims. What would we think, for example, if someone like Yusuf Islam--formerly Cat Stevens, who became a Muslim in 1977--had been put on trial in a British court and only given a chance to recant before being executed?

Finally, we should keep in mind that the power of any faith comes not from its coercion on critics and dissenters, but from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers. And we Muslims will be showing more of those virtues, when we, while rightly asking for freedom for Islam, also humbly respect the freedom from Islam.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.938560 2011-09-01T10:16:11-04:00 2011-11-01T05:12:01-04:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/ Gaddafi is his enemy!" So reads one of the popular mottos used by the Libyan rebels, who just put an end to Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year-long tyranny after a chaotic civil war. Similarly, most rebel fighters who captured Tripoli this week were chanting, "Allahu Akbar!," which means, "God is the greatest!" ("Allah" in Arabic simply means "God.")

Ironically, though, the now-dethroned Libyan colonel, too, had long been referring to God to justify his dictatorial rule. A mantra of his regime bluntly read: "Allah, Muammar, Libya -- that's all we need!"

The image of Allah, in other words, seems to have shifted in the minds of many Libyans from a pillar of authoritarian rule to a beacon of liberty.

A similar transformation seems to be ongoing in Syria as well, which used to have its own version of the authoritarian Arab trinity: "Allah, Syria, Bashar -- that's all we need!" But the peaceful Syrian protestors who have been raising their voice against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad and co., despite all the killing and torture they face, are now using a different motto: "Allah, Syria, Freedom -- that's all we need!"

It is perfectly understandable that such religious themes within the Arab Spring comes as confusing, if not worrying, to the Islamo-sceptic Westerners (and even some Arab secular liberals) who assume that all political manifestations of Islam will lead to tyranny. Moreover, they have in their mind the unpleasant case of the Iranian Revolution, which, after a brief "spring" in 1979, replaced the secular dictatorship of the Shah not with liberal democracy, but Islamic theocracy.

However, the history of the Muslim civilization shows that Islam has been understood in many different ways, and while it sometimes has been used to support tyrants, it more often than not challenged them. In fact, one of the very early theological splits in Islam was precisely on this issue. The successive caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750 AD) promoted a theory of divine predestination, which implied that the corrupt Umayyad rule was predestined, and thus willed by God. The opposing theologians, who defended humans' freewill, argued that rulers were responsible to both God and the people.

After a few centuries of debate, the Sunni view on this matter settled on a middle position, which valued strong rulers, but also expected them to be just and lawful. In other words, as historian Bernard Lewis notes, "Islamic tradition strongly disapprove[d] of arbitrary rule." In the Ottoman Empire, the ritualistic expression of this idea was a popular slogan that common people would say to the sultans after Friday prayers: "Don't be arrogant my sultan, God is greater than thou!"

In the modern age, however, traditional Islamic law, whose functions included constraining arbitrary power, failed to update itself, and was gradually rendered ineffective via "modernization." As Noah Feldman illustrated brilliantly, this process produced not the liberal democracy of the West, but various secular (and sometimes fiercely secularist) autocrats -- such as the Atatürk of Turkey, Reza Shah of Iran, or the Nasser of Egypt.

Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that aspires for an "Islamic state," was more of a reaction to this modern crisis, rather than a direct continuation of the Islamic tradition. It was also based on an export of the worst ideas of the West. One of the founders of the Islamist ideology, Pakistani thinker Sayyid Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi, had openly acknowledged that his "Islamic state" would "bear a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states," in the way it would dominate the whole society.

Now, here is the key question for today: If Mawdudi and his followers synthesized Islam with totalitarianism, can others synthesize it with liberal democracy?

The answer does not look as grim as some suspect, as I argue in more detail in my new book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. Not only the symbolic combination of "Allah" and "freedom" in the minds of the Arab masses, but also the ongoing discussions within more moderate Islamic parties show positive signs. Turkey's incumbent Justice and Development Party also seems to play an indirect role, by showing that pious Muslims can well be a part of the democratic game and gain from it. As covered in this very interesting report, at least the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood of Syria seems to have taken important lessons from the Turkish case, and got transformed from a militant and oppressive group to a moderate and relatively liberal one.

To be sure, a probable transformation of the Muslim mind from authoritarianism to liberalism would be a very challenging process, which would face many obstacles. But was the political evolution of Christianity any easier? It certainly took a lot effort to move from the Spanish Inquisition and the "divine right of kings" to the liberating motto of Benjamin Franklin: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Islam, I believe, is just no less capable of going the same distance.

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist, and the author of the just-released Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. (W.W. Norton)
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.923935 2011-08-11T07:00:16-04:00 2011-10-11T05:12:01-04:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/
First of all, as a Muslim, I should note that I agree with the Christian commentators who object to the depiction of the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, as a "Christian fundamentalist." This term implies a strong belief in the tenets of the Christian faith, but Breivik describes himself, in his manifesto, "2083: A European Declaration of Independence," as a shaky believer at best. "I'm not going to pretend I'm a very religious person as that would be a lie," he notes, and goes on to define himself mainly as a "cultural Christian."

Yet he is very obsessed about that particular culture to the level of seeing multi-culturalism -- the idea that different cultures can live together peacefully -- as treason to Europe. He believes that all Muslims will yearn for imposing the all-oppressive Islamic law everywhere they go, especially in Europe where they replenish and multiply, and this will lead to a thoroughly Islamized Europe. With long excerpts from various Islamo-sceptic writers, almost all pages of Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto reiterate the same theme: Europe is under a heinous attack by Islam.

As a final solution, Breivik wants to expel all Muslims from the old continent -- a bit like the Reconquista in medieval Spain, which he doesn't shy away from exemplifying: "Let us hope that the US (Democratic and Republican party) allows us, their European cultural and economical crown vassals," he even writes, in an Islamophobic passage with an anti-American subtext, "to liberate ourselves and deport the Muslims without them militarily intervening."

Now, here is a key point: The reason why the not-so-religious Brevick turns himself into a "Christian Knight" capable of committing unspeakable crimes is not any theology, but his analysis of the current affairs of the world. That analysis gives him a sense of siege, and that's why he digs deep in his culture to find elements that he can use to foster a counter-attack. The Crusades are the best thing he can find, and that's why he wants to revitalize them.

"Crusading is not just a right," he states, citing medieval texts, "but a duty according to Canon Law." He then rejects all the pacifism in the Christian tradition as naïveté, asserting: "The Church must be anti-pacifist in the manner that it actively preaches self-defense and even support preemptive strikes as a mechanic to safeguard either Christian minorities in Muslim dominated areas or even Europe itself."

Now, do you realize to whom all this sounds very similar?

To the late Osama bin Laden, of course. The Muslim terrorist leader was a more devout believer than Breivik, but his call for militant jihad was based on the very same premise with that of Breivik's call for militant crusade: An analysis of the current affairs of the world, which made bin Laden believe that his civilization was under a heinous attack, this time by the West. His famous call for jihad began with telling how Muslims have been humiliated, oppressed or killed by non-Muslims (led, supposedly, by the United States) in different parts of the world, and then reminded: "[Scholars] have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the Jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries."

Both camps in question share a sense of cultural siege as well. For the jihadists, Muslim women who embrace Western mores, and wear tight jeans or mini skirts, are hated symbols of corruption that need to be eradicated. For the ideological mentors of Breivik, a similar disturbance comes from the burqa, which is banned in France and Belgium, partly thanks to their efforts.

Similarly, Mohammad Atta, one of the culprits of 9/11, is known to have deplored how modern skyscrapers disrupted the traditional skyline of Islamic cities such as Aleppo. Likewise, the "anti-Islamization" groups in Europe are protesting the mega-mosque project in Cologne these days, saying that it will distort the German city's Cathedral-dominated skyline.

Of course, I am not saying that the groups and individuals within the "anti-Islamization" movement would condone Brevik's appalling terrorism, let alone repeat it. But the Breivik case shows how the fear they pump can have horrible consequences on the fringe. Jihadism, too, after all, is the violent edge of a non-violent, anti-Western ideology that has some appeal in Muslim societies.

A few lessons should be drawn from all this:

First, anti-Islamic fanaticism (aka "Islamophobia") should be taken seriously as a treat to global peace and security, as Islamic fanaticism is.

Secondly, we should focus more on the current events, and how they are interpreted in both civilizations, than what is written in medieval texts. What made al Qaeda retrieve the doctrine of militant jihad, and Breivik the ideas of crusade and reconquest, is a sense of siege. So, we should help both Westerners and Muslims get rid of that sense, by easing their political tensions and by fostering dialogue between them.

Finally, as I explain in my just-released book, "Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty," believers on both sides should claim their religion from those who embrace it only to find a basis for a seemingly holy war. Our traditions speak of not only jihad and crusade, but also similar values emanating from a common God. If we can put our loyalty to Him above the loyalty to our respective cultures, then not just multi-culturalism, but also all the hybrids it would breed, can flourish.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.898733 2011-07-16T13:16:15-04:00 2011-09-15T05:12:01-04:00

Mustafa Akyol http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-akyol/
One of the vanguards of this forgotten trend was an intellectual group in the late Ottoman Empire -- which then covered almost the whole Muslim Middle East -- called Young Ottomans. (Not to be confused with the later Young Turks, who were more secular and nationalist.) The Young Ottomans were both pious Muslims and committed liberals, who believed that the only cure to Muslim societies was to import the liberal democracy of the West and re-articulate it in Islamic terms.

The most prominent Young Ottoman was Namık Kemal, who saw liberty as the secret of the West's ascendance, but also believed that Islam had the same ideal in its core. "Being created free by Allah, man is naturally obliged to benefit from this divine gift," he wrote in his journal Hürriyet ("Freedom") in 1868. "[Thus] state authority should be realized in the way which will least limit the freedom of the individual."

Thanks to such idealistic calls, and also the pragmatic need to keep the multi-religious empire intact, the Ottoman State, the very seat of the Muslim Caliphate, realized very important reforms in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The powers of the sultan were limited by law, while citizen's rights were guaranteed. Non-Muslim peoples of the empire, who used to be "protected" but unequal according to classical Islamic law, gained the status of equal citizenship. The Ottomans accepted a liberal constitution in 1876, and then elected a parliament, which welcomed many Greek, Armenian or Jewish deputies, along with Turkish, Arab or Albanian ones.

In the same era, the Arab intelligentsia was also living what Arab historian Albert Hourani called "the liberal age." One of the prominent reformists, the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh, who traveled in Europe, famously said that in Paris he saw "Islam without Muslims," and on his return to Egypt he saw "Muslims without Islam." He felt, in other words, that all the good things Muslim societies should have were in the West but not in Islamdom. He and his followers were only proud that Islam did not share Europe's virulent anti-Semitism, which then was rampant in countries such as France.

Most of these late 19th or early 20th century Muslim liberals -- who are commonly known as "Islamic modernists" -- looked back at the formative centuries of Islam, and discovered some liberal themes buried under the weight of stagnant traditions. First of all, they found tolerant references in the Quran -- verses declaring, "there is no compulsion in religion." Besides, they noticed that some of the troubling hadiths (sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad) might not be authentic, and could be representing only the misogyny and the bigotry of some medieval men. They, therefore, wanted to re-read the Quran in the light of the modern age.

Quite notably, this was the dominant intellectual trend in the Muslim world a century ago. Yet, again quite notably, it failed. Instead, the authoritarian ideology called "Islamism" gradually dominated the scene, to establish reactionary political parties, tyrannical regimes and even some terrorist offshoots.

But why? Why Islamic modernism failed and gave floor to radical Islamism?

My short answer to that big question, which I explore more deeply in my book, is the change in political context: At the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire fell, giving rise to more than a dozen nation-states, almost all of which were colonized by European powers. Colonization inevitably led to anti-colonization, and replaced liberalism with a reactionary collectivism. The question, "How can we be like the West?" got replaced by "How can we resist the West?"

For worse, the post-colonial regimes in most Muslim nations turned out to be secular dictatorships, which oppressed the Islamic pious, only to push them further toward Islamism. In Iran, for example, the "modernist" Reza Shah, banned the veiling all women, ordered his police to patrol the streets to tear the chadors off, and executed the ayatollahs who protested his measures. As a response, the first modern Islamist terrorist movement, the Fadayan-e Islam (Devotees of Islam), was born, and it began assassinating the Shah's men. Secular violence had created its Islamic mirror image.

Unfortunately, these two extremes -- secular authoritarianism versus Islamic authoritarianism -- created a vicious cycle in the modern Middle East, whose latest byproducts even hit the West.
Fortunately, though, we might be at the dawn of a new era, in which the vicious cycle can be broken. The Arab Spring, at least in Tunis and Egypt, offers an important ground, whereas my country, Turkey of the new century, which defeated its own secular authoritarianism without falling prey to Islamic authoritarianism, offers an important example. If we are lucky, more democracies can soon emerge in the Middle East, and Islamic liberalism, which is actually not that much of an oxymoron, can be reborn.

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist, and the author of the just-released 'Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.']]>