Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (32 page)

In May 2009, I flew to Kuala Lumpur, at the invitation of the Malaysia Think Tank, a liberal institution, to give a talk entitled “Islam and Religious Freedom.” To an audience of Muslim Malays and others, I argued that anyone who wants to convert from Islam to another religion should be free to do so, since “compulsion in religion” is against not just the Qur’an but also common sense.

While the reaction from the audience was mostly positive, albeit mixed, the other speaker, a prominent member of the PAS, the Islamic Party of Malaysia, could agree with me only silently. “I and other reformists in our party agree with what you said,” he whispered, “but the Erbakanist establishment in the party, who calls us Erdog˘anists, are not that open-minded.” Apparently, the philosophical rift between Erbakan and Erdog˘an—two iconic names in Turkish politics—had inspired a debate in a Muslim country five thousand miles away.

This is just one of the many examples of a larger phenomenon. The post-Kemalist Turkey of the twenty-first century has become much more significant for Muslims all around the world. In fact, “many Muslims have long considered Turkey’s break with its historical and cultural past to be so radical as to make its experience irrelevant to them,” as Fuller notes. But, “the new face of Turkish Islam, particularly within its evolving political context, is increasingly intriguing Muslims everywhere.”
⁶⁹

This new Turkey not only offers a successful synthesis of Islam and democratic capitalism. Under the visionary strategies devised by the AKP’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutog˘lu, it also plays constructive roles in the affairs of the Muslims of the Middle East and even beyond. In a few particular cases—such as Ankara’s refusal to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the U.S.-led UN sanctions vote on Iran in 2010—this new line of Turkish foreign policy differed from that of Washington, raising eyebrows in America and even leading to discussions about “who lost Turkey.” In those cases, however, the Turkish government was only acting pragmatically and in tune with public opinion, further enhancing the country’s prestige in the Middle East as a democracy.
⁷⁰
(“Democratic,” some might need to note, doesn’t mean “Washington’s yes-man.”)

This new “Turkish model” was very much in the air in the “Arab spring” of early 2011, during which longtime dictators of first Tunis and then Egypt were overthrown by public protests. As this book was going to print, similar protests were shaking other Arab autocracies, such as Libya and Bahrain, and a more democratic era was apparently at dawn in the Arab world.

And the “Turkish model” is there not because anybody imposed it, but because the success of the AKP’s post-Islamist liberalism inspired the more open-minded Islamic actors all across the region. In Tunisia, whose dictatorship very much resembled Kemalist Turkey, with bans on the veil and other Islamic practices, the leader of the Islamic movement, Rachid Ghannouchi, who is a liberal-minded thinker anyway, openly said his movement “admire[d] the Turkish case.”
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A few weeks later, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Ashraf Abdel Ghaffar, said that his organization considered “the AKP to be a model for Egypt after [Hosni] Mubarak.”
⁷²

The Muslim Brotherhood, the mother ship of the Islamist ideology, had gone through some interesting changes to come to that point—changes that were largely driven by economic change. As French scholar Olivier Roy, a foremost expert on political Islam, noted, in the 1980s the Brotherhood “claimed to defend the interests of the oppressed classes and called for state ownership of the economy and redistribution of wealth.” But then came an “embourgeoisement” period, which pushed the organization toward liberal economy, and, as a result, “towards reconciliation and compromise.” Ultimately, Roy suggested, the organization would have to “reckon with a demand for liberty that doesn’t stop with the right to elect a parliament.”
⁷³

According to Roy, what was really rising in the Middle East was a “post-Islamist generation,” which included many devout Muslims who understood the secular rules of the democratic game. Because, after many failed experiments, “the bulk of the former Islamists ha[d] come to the same conclusion of the generation that founded the Justice and Development Party in Turkey: There is no third way between democracy and dictatorship.”
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HE
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OAD
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HEAD

Of course, as pivotal as it may become, Turkey cannot alone shape the future of the Muslim world. But what it can and does do is present an example of a synthesis of Islam, democracy, and capitalism.

Turkey’s more conservative Muslim thinkers still express concern over the country’s unfolding destiny, which they call “the Protestantization of Islam,” and they foresee it eroding Islamic values. They do have a point. If Muslims can’t build a new middle-class culture that articulates and revitalizes Islamic values within the modern context, they indeed can become secularized. But the solution is not clinging to the old and the static, which is doomed to disappear, but rather embracing the new and the dynamic, and doing so as Muslims.

This vision is certainly different from that of the Islamists, who pursue a totalitarian dream of an Islamic state, and even global hegemony for Islam. But it is also different from that of the secularists, in Turkey or in the West, who wish to see a thoroughly de-Islamized world—and, really, a world without religious values of any kind.

Yet it is also the vision that is right—and promising. Walter Russell Mead, “America’s premier archeologist of ideas and their consequences,” is correct when he states:

In the end, when and if Islam makes its peace with the dynamic society, it will do so in the only way possible. It will not “secularize” itself into a mild form of atheism. It will not blend into a postconfessional unity religion that sees all religions as being fundamentally the same. Rather, pious Muslims of unimpeachable orthodoxy, conspicuous virtue, conservative principles, and great passion for their faith will show the world what dynamic Islam can be. Inspired by their example, vision, and teaching, Muslims all over the world will move more deeply into the world of their religion even as they find themselves increasingly at home in a dynamic, liberal, and capitalist world that is full of many faiths and many cultures.
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That is indeed the road ahead. If they want to help, Western powers should support economic progress and political liberalization in the Muslim world; both strengthen the social forces that push for positive change. But they should be careful to avoid political confrontations and especially military conflicts, which only strengthen the reactionary elements. The history of the past two centuries emphatically shows that while peaceful interactions between the West and Islamdom in cultural and economic arenas have helped further the cause of liberal Muslims, tensions, clashes, and invasions have always empowered radical ones.

But those liberal Muslims also have much work to do at home. The century-long dominance of the two opposing yet mutually enhancing ideologies—secularism and Islamism—has constrained the intellectual appeal of Islamic liberalism. That tradition needs to be revitalized. It needs to go beyond academic works and become popularized. Muslim societies need to hear more accessible arguments for liberty. They need—to borrow a term from Sayyid Qutb—some signposts for navigating this long and challenging road.

So, to do my humble part as an ordinary yet concerned Muslim, allow me to offer a few of these in the following chapters.

PART III

Signposts on the Liberal Road

The most important resource in Islamic thought for recognizing religious liberty lies in [its] basic doctrine: the very powerful Islamic insight into the greatness of Allah.

—Michael Novak, conservative thinker

CHAPTER NINE

Freedom from the State

Social engineers start on the outside, by first creating political and social systems, and then move inside, toward the individual. God starts on the inside, by first changing the individual.

—Vincent Cornell, professor of Islamic studies
¹

A
MONG THE MANY EPISODES
from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, two are exceptionally curious.

The first is a short discussion between the Prophet and one of his companions right before the famous Battle of Badr, which took place in 624, between Medinan Muslims and Meccan pagans. The night before the battle, the Muslim army had to camp nearby, and the Prophet, as commander in chief, suggested one location. Yet one of his men, al-Mundhir, felt that staying on higher ground would be preferable. So he walked up to the Prophet and asked, “O Messenger of God, is your opinion based on a revelation from God, or is it war tactics?”

“No revelation,” the Prophet replied. “Just war tactics.”

“Then this is not the most strategic place to camp,” al-Mundhir said. He gave advice that the Prophet liked and followed. It was advice, Muslim tradition holds, that helped win the battle.
²

What is interesting about this story is that it illustrates the distinction the early Muslim community made between God’s revelation and the Prophet’s personal judgment. The latter, apparently, you could dispute—provided there was a good reason.

The second episode underlines the same principle. Here, reportedly, the Prophet advised his fellow Muslims about date farming, but his suggestions proved unhelpful. So he declined to offer further advice, saying, “I am only human. If I ask you to do something concerning religion, then accept it. But if I ask you to do something on the basis of my personal opinion, then, [remember], I am only human.”
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From both of these anecdotes, which appear in harmony with the Qur’anic verses that emphasize the humanness of the Prophet, Muslims can derive two important lessons. First, only God is all-knowing and all-wise. All human beings, including the messengers of God, can err. Since they are most righteous and they receive God’s revelation, the messengers still have authority over believers, which is why the Qur’an orders Muslims to “obey God and His Messenger.”
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Yet even the messenger of God can be disputed, with all due respect, when he acts based on his personal judgment and not from direct communication with God.

Second, in a world in which even the Prophet cannot be regarded as an unquestionable authority, nobody can. The Prophet’s preeminence came from the revelations he received from God, but it is the Islamic consensus that his death marked the end of all revelation. In the post-Muhammad world, therefore, no one can be considered to be in direct communion with God, and thus an unquestionable authority for Muslims. In the post-Muhammad world, in other words, no one legitimately can claim to establish “rule by God,” or a theocracy.

T
HEOCRACY
? W
HAT
T
HEOCRACY
?

To Sunni Muslims, the assertion that there has been no divinely guided human being since the Prophet should not be news—it is part of their consensus. The Sunni tradition holds that only the first four successors of the Prophet, the Rightly Guided Caliphs, possessed special wisdom and piety. But their age is long gone. Moreover, the fact that the Muslim community was drawn into a civil war during this exemplary period suggests that too much idealization of it is unrealistic. Later caliphs were even less reassuring. Most were corrupt and impious men whose excesses could be kept in check only by the moral authority of the Shariah. Some of them appropriated pompous titles, such as “the Shadow of God on Earth,” but these were post-Qur’anic myths created for political motives.

In short, it is quite hard to create a theocracy based on the Sunni tradition. (The Sunni ideal is rather a “nomocracy”—i.e., a polity based on rule of law, the latter being the Shariah.)
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No wonder those who aspired for theocracy in the Sunni world have found a basis for it only in another post-Qur’anic myth—that of the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the Jewish Messiah. But Mahdi movements are rare exceptions in Islamic history, certainly not the norm.
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On the other hand, Shiites are more prone to theocracy, for they believe in an unbroken chain of divinely guided imams and the
ayatollahs
(tokens of God) who assume authority in the former’s absence. Even so, it took the doctrinal invention of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini to turn the
religious
authority of the ayatollahs into
political
authority. Consequently, the Islamic Republic of Iran he founded is partly theocratic because it accepts “a guardianship of the Islamic jurists” over elected politicians. But other Shiite authorities, such as the revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq, reject this Iranian invention, modestly limiting their “guardianship” to religious matters.