Why, as a Muslim, I Defend Liberty

Mustafa Akyol

• Publisher: Libertarianism.org Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781952223181
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Islam, the second largest religion in the world, has several authoritarian interpretations today that defy human freedom—by executing "apostates" or "blasphemers, " imposing religious practices, or discriminating against women or minorities. In Why, as a Muslim, I Support Liberty, Mustafa Akyol offers a bold critique of this trouble, by frankly acknowledging its roots in the religious tradition. But Akyol also shows that Islam has "seeds of freedom" as well—in the Qur'an, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and the complex history of the Islamic civilization. It is past time, he argues, to grow those seeds into maturity, and reinterpret Islamic law and politics under the Qur'anic maxim, "No compulsion in religion."

Akyol shows that the major reinterpretation Islam needs now is similar to the transformation that began in Western Christianity back in the 17th century, with the groundbreaking ideas of classical liberal thinkers such as John Locke. The author goes back and forth between classical liberalism and the Islamic tradition, to excavate little-noticed parallels, first highlighted by the "Islamic liberals" of the late Ottoman Empire, unknown to many Muslims and non-Muslims today.

In short chapters, Akyol digs into big questions. Why do Muslims need to "reform" the Sharia? But is there something to "revive" in the Sharia as well? Should Muslims really glorify "conquest, " or rather believe in social contract? Is capitalism really alien to Islam, which has a rich heritage of free markets and civil society? Finally, he addresses a suspicion common among Muslims today: What if liberty is a mere cover used by Western powers to advance their imperialist schemes? With personal stories, historical anecdotes, theological insights, and a very accessible prose, this is the little big book on the intersection of Islam and liberty.

Is There Some Compulsion in Islam?

Now the truth has come from your Lord: let those who wish to believe in it do so, and let those who wish to reject it do so.

—Qur’an, 18:29⁷

The right to choose is not between religion and irreligion. If [people] choose wrongly, they will be punished.

—Ali Qaderi, Iranian diplomat⁸

In Islam, what really is the status of liberty—in the sense of “absence of coercive constraint”?

The right place to begin searching for an answer is the most fundamental source of Islam—the Qur’an, which we Muslims believe to be the word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, at different junctures in his 23-year-long Prophetic mission.

When you do that, and read the Qur’an from the beginning, you will probably not miss Verse 256 of the second sura (chapter). It reads as follows:

There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error, so whoever rejects false gods and believes in God has grasped the firmest hand-hold, one that will never break. God is all hearing and all knowing.⁹

The very first clause of this verse—“There is no compulsion in religion”—is quite a remarkable statement, especially when we recall that it was revealed at a time—the early 7th century—when the notion of “religious freedom” was not yet fashionable anywhere in the world, including the barren, harsh, and tribal Arabian Peninsula.

Things get even more remarkable when we look into what the verse may have meant in its original context. We are helped here by the Islamic literature on asbab-al nuzul (occasions of revelation), which informs us about the background of at least some of the Qur’anic verses. Regarding the verse in question, 2:256, the earliest “occasion” chronicler, al-Wahidi (d. 1075), reports two different narrations, both of which are placed in Medina—that is when early Muslims had the political power to exert compulsion, if they chose to. According to the first narration, the verse was revealed to the Prophet when some Arab women wanted to convert their children, who had grown up among the city’s Jews and naturally adopted Judaism, to Islam. According to the second narration, the verse was revealed when a Muslim man, who had sons who adopted Christianity before the emergence of Islam, wanted to convert those sons again to Islam.¹⁰

According to both narrations, in other words, the Qur’anic Verse 2:256 ruled out forced conversions into Islam. And that, we must note, is a remarkable point. Because while it is usual for religions to oppose compulsion when it works against them, it is less usual for them to oppose compulsion when it works for them.

It is also notable that this Qur’anic “seed of freedom” allowed securing some level of religious freedom for non-Muslims in the premodern Islamic world. Admittedly, Muslims conquered lands, imposed Islamic rule, and treated non-Muslims only as second-class citizens—a triumphalist legacy I will later question in Chapter 4. That “hierarchical tolerance” was quite short of full citizenship with equal rights found in the modern world, but it was still preferable to the common alternative in the premodern world: forced conversion.¹¹ That is why many Sephardic Jews—who had to choose between Catholicism or persecution in 15th-century Spain—fled to Muslim lands, especially the Ottoman Empire, where they found the freedom to live, worship, and even flourish as Jews.¹² Many Eastern Christians, too, some of them Arabs, preserved their faiths for centuries under Islamic rule.¹³

However, the same premodern Islamic world also dramatically minimized the scope of the freedom implied by the Qur’anic clause “There is no compulsion in religion.” This was once noted by Sheikh Abdur Rehman, a former chief justice of Pakistan, who praised the verse as “a charter of freedom of conscience unparalleled in the religious annals of mankind.” Yet “with regret,” he added, “one notices attempts made by Muslim scholars themselves to whittle down its broad humanistic meaning.”¹⁴

The scholars in question—those who developed the Sharia (Islamic law), through jurisprudence—did this “whittling down” by establishing two grim categories of compulsion in religion. Although actual practices in Muslim societies could be often more lenient, in principle,

• “Apostasy,” which is publicly abandoning Islam, was declared a crime punishable by death. In other words, while nobody was forced to enter Islam, once they entered it, even by birth, they would be forced to stay within it. If they tried to leave, they would be executed.¹⁵

• All the rules and practices of Islam—such as regular prayers, fasting during Ramadan, or abstaining from alcohol—were also imposed by force. In other words, nobody was forced to enter Islam; however, once they entered it, even by birth, they would be forced to observe all its requirements. Women would be forcefully covered, wine drinkers would be flogged, and even those who skipped their daily prayers would be beaten with sticks.¹⁶

Is Islam a Kind of State?

That is why, today, when the more liberal-minded Muslims quote the Qur’anic clause, “There is no compulsion in religion,” to argue that Islam must be based on freedom rather than coercion, the more conservative ones who are loyal to the traditional jurisprudence immediately object.

One such conservative Muslim is Ahmet Vanlioğlu, a retired Istanbul imam, who gave a passionate sermon in 2017 that was shared on some Turkish Islamic websites with a daring title: “There is compulsion in religion!” The popular scholar, who was at the time also the head of a religious foundation, said the following:

Now, let’s say there is someone who does not do his [five-times-a-day] regular prayers. Some say, “How can you force him, there is no compulsion in religion.” Well, yes, there is no compulsion to religion—but there is compulsion in religion. You cannot force a man who is not in the religion to accept it. But there is absolutely compulsion on a man who has entered the religion, who has accepted it.¹⁷

To justify his case, Vanlioğlu gave an example: Nobody could force you to become a Turkish citizen, if you weren’t already. But if you had become a Turkish citizen, then you would be obliged to obey all the laws and regulations of Turkey, and you would face certain punishments if you didn’t.

Did he make sense?

Not really, I think, for two reasons. First, most states (except totalitarian ones) would not execute you for “apostasy” when you revoke your citizenship. So if you don’t like a state, and you find a better alternative, you can leave it without fear.

Second, states do have coercive powers over you, but those are typically about your obligations to other people (such as you should not steal), not your obligations to God (such as you should pray). States demand lawful citizenship from you, so to speak, not pious worship. For the same reason, they do not care about your sincere intentions (your niyyah), which is a crucial Islamic value.

So if Islam was a kind of state, then ideal “Muslims” could even be atheists, as long as they performed all the requirements of Islam perfectly—from praying to fasting—despite having the slightest faith in them.

Yet, alas, the problem we have today is that some Muslims indeed perceive Islam, in part, as a state: a totalitarian one that interferes deeply in individual lives, and also a jealous one that does not let them go away.

Defenders of this view routinely oppose the Muslims who quote the verse “There is no compulsion in religion” to assert individual freedom. “Islam does not believe in this individual freedom,” one of them said, “but rather legislates for the individual in his private as in his public life.”¹⁸ With the same spirit, Iranian ideologues rebuke Muslims who reject religious policing by saying, “I’m a free person!,” “This has nothing to do with you!,” or “Don’t interfere.” Those are misguided Muslims, they say, “with their heads stuffed full of Western ideas.”¹⁹

Are they right about this? Are these yearnings for individual liberty “Western ideas”?

A View from John Locke

Coercive Muslims aren’t exactly right here, because individual liberty is not solely a Western idea—it has roots in most traditions, including Islam. But they do have a point: this idea has uniquely flourished in the West, in the past few centuries, with the impact of the Enlightenment. However, they are missing the fact that there was a good reason for it.

That reason was, before the Enlightenment, Europeans had seen the consequences of the fusion of religion and coercive power. Those included the torture chambers of the medieval Catholic Church, where sinners or heretics were tormented, supposedly for their own good. They included “infidels” killed by auto-da-fé, which is public execution by burning people alive at the stake. They also included the Crusades, which shed much blood in the Middle East, and sectarian wars between Catholics and Protestants, which shed even more blood in Europe itself.

As a reaction to all those horrors perpetrated in the name of religion, a certain strain within the Enlightenment developed hostility toward institutionalized religion known as “anti-clericalism,” which often mirrored the very oppressiveness it opposed. It was most influential in France, where the long hegemony of the Catholic Church was challenged by a strident secularism called laïcité, which still has aspects that curtail religious expressions.

Yet the Enlightenment also had a religion-friendly strain, most influential in Britain and later in the United States, which opposed not religion itself, but its fusion with coercive power.

The key thinker of the religion-friendly Enlightenment was the English philosopher John Locke, often called the Father of Liberalism. In his landmark essay, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he argued that states should not impose specific religious doctrines, but rather tolerate them, leaving religion to the realm of the personal conscience and voluntary organizations. And he made this argument thanks to “a radical reinterpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus”—not a rejection or trivialization of it.²⁰

For this reinterpretation, Locke first argued—despite the common view of his time—that Christianity itself does not require a Christian state: “There is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel,” he wrote, “as a Christian common-wealth.”²¹

Secondly, Locke explained, a Christian state would actually be bad for Christianity. He reasoned that if the state upheld a certain “church,” it would also be defining that as the right one. This view would lead to sectarian tyrannies everywhere, as “every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.”²² So if they dominated the state, Arminians and Calvinists, two different strains of Protestantism, would “deprive the members of the other of their estates and liberty,” merely be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Liberty Matters
• Chapter 1. Is There Some Compulsion in Islam?
• Chapter 2. Why We Need to Rethink the Sharia
• Chapter 3. What We Should Revive from the Sharia
• Chapter 4. Will Islam “Conquer” and “Prevail”?
• Chapter 5. Should Muslims “Obey”Anybody?
• Chapter 6. What to Do with Un-Islamic Speech
• Chapter 7. Islam’s Lost Heritage of Economic Liberty
• Chapter 8. Is Liberty a Western Conspiracy?
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• What to Read Next
• Notes
• About the Author
• Libertarianism.org
• Cato Institute